Two Seas and Vinorun: NEW IMMERSIVE EXHIBITION LAUNCHES at Nxt Museum during ADE Arts & Culture 2026
Two new touring immersive installations directed by Observatory founder and visual artist Ben Sheppee will premiere at Nxt Museum in Amsterdam on 22 October as part of ADE Arts & Culture 2026.
Presented together as an immersive exhibition across Nxt Museum’s 360-square-metre screens, Two Seas and Vinorun bring together electronic music, field recordings, environmental research, film and creative technology to tell two very different stories about ourTWOrelationship with a changing planet.
One connects a rapidly melting frozen sea in Finland with the dried remains of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. The other travels into Sabah, where generations of ecological knowledge are held through plants, rinait chants, landscape and cultural practice.
What connects them is EarthSonic’s approach: bringing musicians, artists, researchers and local communities together to tell urgent environmental stories through music. Our role was to give those stories an immersive visual form.
Starting with the material
The projects arrived at Observatory with two hard drives containing hundreds of hours of 360-degree and 4K footage, alongside photography, field recordings, archive material, drawings and environmental research gathered across Finland, Uzbekistan and Sabah.
Rather than starting with a predetermined visual aesthetic, Ben began by mapping what was there and looking for the relationships within it: between landscapes, cultures, music, imagery and environmental data. Those discoveries became the basis for two very different visual worlds.
"You can tell people what to think, or you can show them a situation so that they can come to that conclusion themselves. People are more intelligent than people take them for."
— Ben Sheppee, Founder, Observatory
Two Seas: finding connection between two opposing climate realities
Two Seas connects the Bothnian Bay in Oulu, Finland, with the dried remains of the Aral Sea in Muynak, Uzbekistan: two climate-threatened bodies of water experiencing environmental change in radically different ways.
EarthSonic brought together collaborators including Paranoid London, Matt Black of Coldcut and artists from Finland and Uzbekistan, with electronic music and field recordings gathered across both locations forming the sonic foundation of the work.
Visually, their differences are immediate. Frozen surfaces meet exposed earth. Snow meets sand. Water is present in one landscape and remembered through its absence in the other.
But Ben’s direction became less about emphasising those opposites and more about finding what connects them. Even something as simple as asking what a footprint looks like in both places begins to reveal what Ben describes as their shared fate.
Rather than explaining the climate story through conventional documentary, the installation creates space for audiences to observe those relationships and reach their own conclusions.
"lot of climate change stuff is all doom and gloom. It’s about how you frame the problem. If you want a positive response from people, you need to give them something they feel like they can achieve."
— Ben Sheppee, Founder, Observatory
Vinorun: making the plants the heroes
Vinorun begins with a very different relationship between people and the natural world.
The project explores traditional ecological knowledge in Sabah through rinait chants and the relationships between people, plants, landscape and cultural practice.
For Ben, one question became central to the direction of the installation:
“How do we make the plants the heroes of this story?”
That question began shaping both the narrative and its visual identity. Plant forms became source material for the design language, including typography developed from leaves significant within the community.
The plants themselves also contribute directly to the work. Joey Dean of Natural Symphony travelled into Sabah’s rainforest and recorded electrical activity from plants using electrodes. That data is being brought into Unreal Engine to generate visual material, allowing signals captured from living plants to become part of how their story is experienced.
Music remains central. Field recordings, environmental data and rinait chanting contribute to music developed through the project by Paul Hartnoll of Orbital and Rungus musician Razif Ajip.
Ben has worked alongside photographer and videographer Alastair Lomas to translate the wider body of material into the immersive installation.
Where Two Seas is deliberately stark and graphic, Vinorun celebrates the richness of the landscape, its traditions and the ecological knowledge held within them.
“Design is there to help enable the story and make it easier to digest.”
— Ben Sheppee
Building a new visual dimension for EarthSonic
EarthSonic tells stories of climate change through music, bringing together Indigenous communities, musicians, researchers, filmmakers and visual artists around each project.
Our collaboration began with Flow and has since grown across Two Seas and Vinorun, with immersive installations opening another way for EarthSonic’s stories to reach audiences.
“Ben and Observatory have brought a huge amount to the creative development of these projects. They’ve given each one its own identity, a distinct look and feel, weaving data and fact through beautiful visuals and stories set against the backdrop of newly composed music.”
— Ruth Daniel, CEO and Artistic Director, In Place of War / EarthSonic
For Ruth, that immersive dimension is about creating an emotional connection that information alone cannot.
“Music, film and immersive installation speak to people’s emotions in a way that science and data alone cannot.Placing audiences inside these different contexts gives them a real sense of the beauty of the world and what we’re fighting to protect.”
For us, that is what makes these projects exciting: using immersive storytelling and creative technology not as spectacle, but as a way of helping people get closer to complex environmental and cultural stories.
From Amsterdam to an international tour
Two Seas and Vinorun premiere at Nxt Museum in Amsterdam on Thursday 22 October 2026, as part of ADE Arts & Culture. Both installations have been created to tour internationally and will continue to new spaces and audiences in 2027.
