Playmodes is a Barcelona audiovisual research studio that has been building its own tools and impossible environments since 2006. Eloi Maduell is a computer engineer; Santi Vilanova is a graphic designer and musician. Between them, the studio sits where art, science, music, and technology overlap, and their exhibits do one thing especially well: they make light and sound feel like the same material. Walk through a Playmodes tunnel and you cannot tell where the visual ends and the sonic begins. That is the research, not a side effect. They build the software and hardware themselves, then publish those tools on GitHub for other artists to use.
Light and sound as the same raw material.
They have shown at Sonar+D and MUTEK in Barcelona, Signal Festival in Prague, Luz Madrid, Lyon's Fete des Lumieres, and Pittsburgh's International Festival of Firsts, where Beyond, a 35-meter tunnel with 16 speakers, ran for two months in 2018. Horizon, at Signal Festival in 2023, stretched 25 meters with more than 50 light reflectors and 30 speakers. In Las Vegas they built Cluster for Museum Fiasco at Area15, alongside Meow Wolf.
At Hopscotch, in both San Antonio and Portland, their exhibit is VJ Yourself!, and the premise is a duet with your own past. An HD camera captures you, and a projector throws you back onto a screen a beat later, under two 1kW spotlights, so you are dancing with a version of yourself from a moment ago. People laugh, test it, try to catch their earlier selves. Groups choreograph increasingly elaborate routines. Kids are fearless with it; adults need about a minute to let go and then cannot stop. The studio calls it a 21st-century magic mirror, or video dance karaoke, and neither quite covers the odd thrill of watching yourself move through a timeline you have already left.
The idea descends from Eadweard Muybridge, the photographer whose 1870s and 1880s motion studies laid the groundwork for cinema. Muybridge could only freeze movement in still frames. Playmodes built the live version.
