The most unique part of the Sónar+D experience returns for a third edition in 2025. Our interactive exhibition space Project Area is where you’ll find state-of-the-art technology, innovative design, radical thinking, and cutting-edge research side-by-side in the heart of Sónar by Day. Whether you’re an artist or researcher, or just curious, Project Area 2025 offers the opportunity to encounter the most creative uses of technology first-hand, a space where you can test-drive, experiment with, and play with future technologies.

This year more than ever, Project Area takes the form of a hybrid landscape, where you’ll find biology alongside AI, sound tech next to exhibits that reflect on the side-effects of hyperconnectivity or the ongoing ecological crisis, and works that explore possible futures. That’s we’ve organised the 70+ projects into nine different themed spaces to help you navigate easily. You can explore the full lineup over at the Project Area mini-site, but here are some of the highlights from each category. 

* - indicates that the project was submitted via our Open Call, held in December 2024.

Saturation, fatigue, exploitation and destruction are the collateral damage of our faster-and-faster, ever-more digital world. In Exhaustion, depletion, burnout, you’ll find work that depicts this reality: from Rafa Roeder’s sculpture made of useless technology* to an installation by HsienYu Cheng* that generates fake identities using online data. Visitors can create hybrid beings using facial scans at Jean-Philippe Côté’s ‘Panégoptique’ installation*, or browse Simon Weckert’s t-shirts designed to counter AI-powered surveillance. This exhibit is presented in collaboration with local gallery Foto Colectania, who are also hosting Weckert’s work as part of their exhibition ‘THE ART OF NAVIGATION’ as part of Sónar Week 2025. Barcelona design and engineering school ELISAVA present two works that critique the exploitative side of digital consumption, which both generates significant carbon emissions and benefits from users’ unpaid labour, and design and visual arts school LCI have created an ‘interactive protest’ against the environmental impact of space travel. Finally, a pair of installations by IED Barcelona use design and visual arts to shine a light on forgotten cultural narratives and expose the social impact of industrialisation and extractive industries.

The reaction to our ‘burnout society’ can be seen in the development of technologies that help us care for ourselves, each other, and the wider world. Systems of care features renowned digital artist Lawrence Lek’s video game ‘Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot’, which explores the life of a cyborg therapist created to save AIs from self-destruction. la cuarta piel’s ‘Skincare’* installs a symbiotic spa in Project Area, offering visitors the opportunity to receive a facial peeling accompanied by a guided meditation. The sweat extracted during this process helps support a pool that hosts a colony of microorganisms that thrive in salty environments. In the same line, Kieran Feechan and Domenico Di Paolo’s Aurora* leads the user in a guided meditation and prayer ceremony, featuring calming soundscapes generated in response to hand movements. BAU, the Barcelona School of Design and Fine Arts, will invite visitors to trial and provide feedback on prototypes of wearable technology designed to enhance the Sónar experience for those with specific sensitivities. Kexin Hao reimagines dance simulators with choreography inspired by pre-industrial manual labour, and work songs transformed into club tracks, with an installation jointly presented by Maarje Baalman’s Instrument Inventor’s Initiative (iii) and AI & Music powered by S+T+ARTS. And another (iii) alumni, Yolanda Uriz, invites us to communicate via smell with the plant world with her installation ‘Chemical Calls of Care’, presented by New Art Foundation and Fundación Ernesto Ventós.

Quantum thought and computing are already starting to ripple through the creative technology sector, which is why this year Project Area includes Quantum Echoes, a space dedicated to projects that make the invisible and the inconceivable into reality. Researcher and designer Vanessa Lorenzo is currently working to combine Basque folklore, weather forecasts and principles of quantum computing as part of a residency organised by Tabakalera and Sónar+D. She’ll exhibit the results at Project Area, supported by Instituto Etxepare. Moth Quantum also return to Project Area to offer live interactive demos of quantum technologies designed for artists, developers and members of the public. 

Natural Networks is where you’ll find urgent, compelling works that challenge the imaginary border we’ve erected between the natural world and technology. Roots entangle with coding languages and cells merge with algorithms, revealing astounding parallels and symbiotic relationships between our technology and Gaia’s own designs. Highlights include winner of the Lumen Prize for Digital Art’s impact award Lukas Truniger, whose installation repurposes obsolete crypto mining technology, and an installation by local design group Materfad and artisan consortium CCAM. Toni Aranda’s artistic investigations with particle microscopy* have been honed during his residency at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB), while María Castellanos & Alberto Valverde* explores the secret language of plants using network technology and AI.

Producers, musicians, and sound designers will want to explore the Music Tech booths in June. Internationally-recognised Spanish and Catalan modular synthesiser manufacturers, including Befaco, Mutan Monkey and Nano Modules share space with innovative, next-gen products from Bela. Hex Haus’ minimalist, intuitive gadgets* have won design prizes, alongside them you’ll find George Moraitis’ beautiful, intricate, and interactive circuitry diagrams Schematics*. Leading DJ equipment producer AlphaTheta demo their latest equipment along with their TRIBE XR virtual reality DJ suite, while gold-standard music software company Ableton showcase their Push and Move controllers. And from Japan, music2.0 and Japanese Synthesizer Professional Arts (JSPA) bring a special collection of legendary Japanese synthesisers for visitors to discover, with legendary composer and Yellow Magic Orchestra associate Hideki Matsutake on hand to explain more. 

For the second year running, Project Area hosts a series of AI & Music tools. Here, you can test drive state-of-the-art technologies and innovative artist tools from leading developers like Google DeepMind. A number of the projects on display are part of AI & Music powered by S+T+ARTS, including renowned Parisian research community IRCAM Forum (who’ll be demoing tools like RAVE and ASAP, as used by artists around the world) and Sonic Charge (the developer behind popular plugin Synplant2). They’re joined by cutting-edge audio plugins from the likes of Japanese developer Neutone* and an adaptive audio processing model created by Reset Networks. Here is also where you’ll find A.MusicBox*, an AI-powered music box that’s been assembled by a group of local developers, designers and technologists: Lúa Coderch, Julia Múgica, Lluís Nacenta, Iván Paz, and Huaqian Zhang. 

Also returning are Arts Korea Lab. Once again we’ve teamed up with them to bring works from the most creative artists, designers and technologists in Korea to Project Area: highlights include Women Open Tech Lab’s vibration-triggered sequencer, Earthtopia’s imaginative interactive instrument system ‘LUMA: the Algaecoon’, and Tae Eun’s immersive AI-generated installation ‘META FARMING’. Another partner from last year, Fabbula and Octobre Numérique - Faire Monde also returns with a new edition of Realities+D, featuring three specially curated and independently created VR and videogame experiences from May Abdulla & Barry Gene Murphy; Veronica Graham, Julia Kim, Holly Newlands, & Sharleen Chen; and Mélanie Courtinat.

As part of this year’s focus on AI + Creativity a series of exhibits at Project Area 2025 will explore creative, unconventional, and plain weird applications of AI. Jessica Tucker’s ‘Interfaciality’* generates chaotic images based on facial scans of visitors, challenging Western beauty paradigms. Exhibited in parallel with their panel discussion at SonarÀgora, Julieta Wibel and Mike Fernandez’s interactive installation is a concrete representation of their aesthetic concept MAT(H)RASH, while a pair of immersive, interactive installations from students from LaSalle’s Digital Arts and Creative Technologies MA programme - ‘Servitor Nexus’ and ‘Nocturnal Listening Garden’ - explore chaos magic and nocturnal ecosystems. Longtime Sónar+D collaborators, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) present ‘Expanded voices’, their collaboration with Catalan vocalist Maria Arnal, and artist duo mots return with a new work that explores the invisible influence of technology, ‘Indirect Messages’, following the success of ‘AI & Me’ at Project Area 2024. 

If you’re curious about the human genome, neurohacking, or robots that serve tea, then make your way to the Worlds to come section. Accompanying her lecture at Stage+D, Xin Liu has created an installation based on her work A Book of Mine, presented by New Art Foundation, where her complete genome is printed out continuously during the exhibition. Umanesimo Artificiale* use EEG technology to generate an artificial personality in real-time. And designer and researcher ::vtol:: contributes three of his eccentric and futuristic installations, including a robotic tea ceremony.

All Sónar by Day ticketholders will be able to visit Project Area, as well as other actvitities (including conferences and concerts) that make up the the public programme of Sónar+D 2025, the conference that thinks like a concert.

For more information on this year’s Sónar+D programme, head to the Sónar+D microsite. 

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