Amasonic is a 30 min XR experience where the user can experience different human and non-human perspectives on the Amazon River gathered by local communities and scientists, while exploring the installation users compose a sonification, translating their interaction and co-existence to the Amazon River.

A river has a voice. As a body of water, it moves through the landscape, producing all kinds of

sounds. As tiny droplets of moisture in the rainforest merge to become a stream, the voice of the river is heard in the forest and talks to other lifeforms. If we follow the water from the moment it spawns into existence born from etheric nebulas in the mountains through the narrow cracks of rock and underground river sections, its journey through the rainforest passing human settlements and cities till it ends up into the sea, we can feel and understand the river as a complex entity with its own voice, personality, relationships and memories. 

Not only does the body of water have a voice but so does all the lifeforms that use the river as their habitat. The fish, river crabs, water plants and even bacteria produce sounds in resonance with each other and with the human activity connected to the river. All together they produce an unheard symphony. A poetic datafication of interdependencies and interrelationships echoing the river as a living entity.  

With AMASONIC, the goal is to invent new sensorial modes for understanding the river’s life and political and environmental transformations. The project seeks to echo the reality and many tales of the river by utilizing and reverberating the sounds of human, non-human, and mythical entities. The axis of the project is to converge and create communal knowledge, embedding scientific research in an aesthetic form that reinforces the web of relationships and the life of the river itself. AMASONIC aims to create river songs, making tangible that all life is interdependent with the river and nature.

AMASONIC functions as both a scientific project—collecting voices and data from humans and non-humans—and an XR Art project, providing local and remote access points to the generated river songs. It is a community-based project that invites Amazonian communities and scientists to collaboratively collect tales and data, creating a living sound archive that will grow over a five-year span.

In the XR installation, the user can both compose with and access this archive by preselecting a Human or Non-Human lifeform perspective (e.g., a dolphin, a fisherman, an ancestor, or the waterbody). By physically moving and interacting with sound data points plotted on a 3D model of the river, the user intuitively spawns the voices of other lifeforms, creating a highly personal and unique sound experience. Since the installation is multiuser (accommodating up to 8 persons), these interactions create a collective sound design. This collective river song can be ported as a live audio feed to remote locations, acting as a user-generated, adaptive, and ever-ongoing audio documentary on the Amazon River.

You can read the full pitch deck here.

Production details:
A Studio Biarritz and Polymorf production
Created by Maria Cecilia Oliveira & Marcel van Brakel
Country: The Netherlands, Germany and Brazil
Running time: 15-30 mins
Status: in development, expected release in 2026/2027

In scientific collaboration with RIFS: Research Institute for Sustainability at GFZ with Cecilia Oliveira, Head of the Tran- disciplinary Research Group: “Ecopolitics and Just Transformations”. And researchers from Mamiraua Institute for sustainable development, focussing on ecosystem conversation through the involvement of local communities, with bio-acoustic specialist Jorge Menezes and anthropologist Patricia Carvalho Rosa.

Supported by Netherlands Film Fund and Creative Industries Fund NL.

Amasonic will be presented at IDFA Forum 2025 and MABE (Museu de Arte de Belém) as part of their VAZIOsobre Terra exhibition in November 2025.