entropy

by Steffen Klaue and Giulia Manfredi

Entropy is a collaborative, mixed-media installation by artist Giulia Manfredi and creative coder and artist Steffen Klaue, first presented at Event Horizon, a dual exhibition curated by Lorenzo Madaro at Redlab Gallery in Milan. It is a speculative landscape—a suspended micro-ecosystem—that proposes a fragile, post-natural future in which biological and digital systems converge into new forms of being, sensing, and decay. A miniature forest is suspended above a marble slab carved with geometric patterns. The forest’s branches stretch outward like neural networks, animated by an algorithmic green laser that glides in cyclical movements. This rotating beam—resembling a photosynthetic pulse—reads the organic veins of the wood as if scanning the memory of a living archive. Mist continuously drifts across the installation. resulting in a meditative image: an artificial biosphere in dialogue with ancient materials and contemporary technologies. Though still and sculptural, Entropy operates as a dynamic system. It does not simulate nature but re-constructs it in a hybridized vocabulary—marble and laser, crystal and code. The installation draws on concepts of systems aesthetics and entropy in both the thermodynamic and philosophical sense: the inevitability of disorder, the beauty of transience, and the tension between control and collapse. The work thus becomes a vessel for imagining ecological futures where the boundaries between machine and organism, organic memory and digital recursion, are no longer distinct but entangled. The installation reflects on the paradox we live in—a time where unprecedented technological advancement coexists with accelerating ecological fragility. Curator Lorenzo Madaro describes Entropy as a “magical ritual,” he writes: This work becomes a microcosm that seems to tell the story of a reality far removed from us, but which instead foretells a possible surreal world that, in fact, is right beside us—and probably, in part, already within us." the idea of a future already embedded within the present is connected to the open calls vision : A decade into the future, we may find ourselves inhabiting realities where environments are no longer strictly natural or artificial but layered, recursive, and precariously sustained. As such, Entropy is not static—it evolves, decays, and reveals different facets under shifting conditions. In essence, Entropy offers no solutions, but rather a space to think, feel, and reimagine what it means to coexist—with nature, with technology, and with the irreversibility of time.