Thinging. Drawing Emergence

A space between technology and creative experimentation

Palo Alto Foundation presents Thinging. Drawing Emergence, a new installation by architect, artist, and researcher Edouard Cabay. The work expands on Cabay’s ongoing experimentation with computational and material processes, proposing a device that makes visible the forces, relationships, and contingencies through which the world is continually shaped.

The title Thinging is inspired by anthropologist Tim Ingold’s proposal that things are not static objects, but processes of becoming: places where materials, forces, and relationships come together and take shape. At the same time, Drawing Emergence resonates with the vision of physicist-philosopher Karen Barad, who understands the world not as a set of pre-existing entities, but as phenomena that materialize through intra-action. In this double conceptual genealogy, drawing is not an act of representation; it is an event of worlding , of world generation.

At the center of the installation is a meticulously constructed apparatus by Cabay. Rather than executing a predetermined form, the device creates the conditions for the drawing to take place. A white page, suspended in delicate equilibrium, moves within a controlled field of momentum and micro-oscillation. A black pen remains stationary. From this asymmetry—movement without gesture, contact without intention—lines gradually accumulate. The resulting drawings are not authorial compositions, but traces of forces that meet: a visual record of how the universe works through relational dynamics: gravity, friction, resistance, drift, attraction.

As the pages turn and the pen marks its path, the installation highlights the co-production of form by human-designed systems and non-human forces. Cabay’s device functions as an instrument of attention, inviting viewers to observe how matter and movement collaborate to generate pattern, variation, and unpredictability. The drawings emerge as material witnesses to the web, revealing how the smallest interaction is part of a larger cosmological choreography.

In Thinging. Drawing Emergence , drawing becomes a modality of inquiry. The device does not illustrate theories according to Ingold or Barad; rather, it realizes its proposals, enacting a world in which creation is inseparable from sensation and where form arises from relationship, not imposition. By slowing down the encounter between material and device, the installation opens a space for viewers to consider how creativity, agency and matter are always intertwined.

An installation by Edouard Cabay with the conceptual contribution of Olga Subirós and the collaboration of Farah Ali, Alejandro Rondón and Raimund Krenmueller.

Artist

Edouard Cabay
Brussels, 1979

Edouard Cabay’s work operates on the threshold between art and architecture, disciplines he practices and teaches in Barcelona. Since 2016 he has developed Machinic Protocols, a long-term research project that uses drawing to choreograph interactions between people, machines and computers. Through protocols, algorithms and controlled automation, his work introduces a calibrated indeterminacy into creative processes, allowing forms to emerge rather than be predetermined—objects that test the changing relationships between matter, science and nature.

His latest installation, “Thinging,” extends this trajectory by foregrounding drawing as an event rather than a representation. In dialogue with Tim Ingold’s perspective on “thinging” as a process of world-making and echoing Karen Barad’s attention to intra-active material conditions, the piece uses a custom-built apparatus that generates drawings through the subtle interplay of movement, suspension, and momentum. Here, matter does not illustrate a concept; it acts. The resulting strokes reveal how forces, rhythms, and materials co-produce form in real time.

Edouard Cabay lives in Barcelona and his work has been exhibited at Kanal–Centre Pompidou (Brussels), Samoca and Mysk Art Center (Riyadh), Arte Laguna (Venice), the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Paris and Tallinn Architecture Biennales, Arts Santa Monica (Barcelona), Expo Dubai, and the Barcelona Gallery Weekend.

Work

Activities

Exhibition opening

Inaugural event with the presence of the artist

September 10 at 7pm
School Room
Free access

Schedules

From January 14 to February 8
Opening hours Mon to Fri 10am to 8pm

Free access

Exhibition closing

Closing ceremony with the presence of the artist

January 29 at 7pm
School Room
Free access

Access

Free admission, with the exception of February 7th and 8th, which will be with a paid ticket to the Palo Alto Market Fest.

Groups
For groups of more than 5 people, please contact the Foundation. In the event of the setting up and/or celebration of events or functions, access for groups may be restricted. Thank you.