Changing Perceptions

Halina Kliem is a visual artist, photographer, and experimental filmmaker whose work explores the intersection of technology, nature, and sensory perception. Her central project, Inside Ballona/Waachnga, is a long-term photographic and moving image survey of Los Angeles’ last urban wetland. Being allowed to film and live-stream through a special permission of the City of Los Angeles, the project earned international recognition through exhibitions in Berlin, Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as awards such as the Checkpoint Charlie Foundation Grant (2023), Puffin Foundation Grant (2022), Bruce Geller Memorial Prize (2022), and the NEUSTART Kultur Fellowship (2022) from the Kunstfonds Foundation and the German federal government. Her audio-visual installations have been presented around the world.

Inside Ballona/Waachnga imagines the fluidity of time through the lens of both, human and non-human experiences, and establishes site-specific relationships between watery ecologies. Installations were shown at the Fulcrum Festival in Santa Monica, Floating University Berlin, and the Miracle Theater in Inglewood. In 2024, she presented How to See Like a Dragonfly at Chapman University, discussing optical sensors and dragonfly time perception for the Southern California Academy of Sciences. Most recently, Inside Ballona/Waachnga and Warm Bodies are distributed by Labocine and featured in its April 2025 edition, Ethnobotanica.

Sarah Mackenzie (she/her) is a cultural strategist, documentary filmmaker, and media arts curator based in Montreal, working at the intersection of art, technology, and social good. She is currently the Director of MUTEK Forum, MUTEK’s platform dedicated to exploring, developing, and showcasing creative technologies for artistic research, creation, and interdisciplinary collaboration. In this role, she leads the AI Ecologies Lab and oversees programming for the annual arts and technology symposium. Over the past decade, she has spearheaded cultural projects for cultural institutions, creative studios, brands, and media companies, including Barbican Centre, Red Bull Music Academy, CHANEL, Coach, the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Asahi, CBC, and many others. As an expert in culture, technology, and digital art, Sarah is a regular international speaker, most recently presenting at SXSW, AVA London, Future of Festivals Berlin, Art Basel, C2 Montreal, and Water & Music’s Wavelength Summit. She is also a documentary filmmaker, currently co-directing her first feature film, which explores how we shape our sense of identity in the digital era. The project is produced by EyeSteel Film.

Rosario Talevi works as an architect, curator, editor, and educator at the intersection of critical spatial practices, site-based pedagogy, and ethics of care. Her practice is grounded in fieldwork, informal gatherings, and small-scale spatial gestures that emerge in dialogue with places and the people who inhabit them. Much of it unfolds collectively, through shared processes and in response to specific contexts.She is a founding member of Floating University and Soft Agency. She currently holds the post of Associate Professor for Architecture/Urban Practice at the Bergen School of Architecture in Norway. Raised in Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin and is the single mother of Florentina Talevi (born 2003).

• Rosario Talevi, Website
• Floating Berlin