Northeastern University has three projects on display at the 2025 Venice Biennale, which tell a story about our changing relationship to data and information.
The Biennale Architettura is the largest festival of its kind — kind of like a World’s Fair, but built around architectural and design projects showcasing revolutionary thinking.
Three separate projects from Northeastern University are represented this year, all of them, in some way, telling a story about our changing relationship to data and information, from water-based computers to self-distorting photographs.
For the past 130 years, the Venice Biennale has welcomed some of the most renowned thinkers in the art world, occurring every other year. In 1980, they began hosting the architectural Biennale in alternate years.
The event is “supposed to bring together the best projects in their domain,” says Albert-László Barabási, a university distinguished professor of physics and network science at Northeastern University.
Constructing the Biennale
The Central Pavilion, which welcomes guests to the event — guests that will number in the hundreds of thousands — is currently under renovation. But instead of letting this stand as an eyesore, Barabási and Paolo Ciuccarelli, professor of design and director of the Center for Design at Northeastern, have designed a large, overarching project called Constructing the Biennale.
Ciuccarelli says they wanted to “use data as part of the process” to “use data to shape the form of the building.”
Their installation covers the history and curatorial process of the Biennale Architettura, with Barabási and Ciuccarelli each focusing on different elements.
Barabási’s contribution focused on “mapping out the 12,000 architects that were exhibited,” he says, “their 3,800 projects and identifying the network that connects them all.”
He describes this as “a massive data science project,” involving poring through records to determine “who was there every year, who helped the project and in what capacity.”
All the architects who have participated over the past 40 years are represented in the Barabási Lab’s monumental design, which stretches 30 meters by 8 meters (about 98 by 26 feet).
While Barabási and his team focused on the curatorial process, Ciuccarelli’s team focused on the present, this year’s curatorial efforts.
“Data is my material,” says Ciuccarelli. “In our visualization, you see how all the applications that made it have been processed by the curators.”
“It’s a representation of the curatorial team,” he continues, “the interaction between all these people, and how this produced the selection that you see.
“We call it synapses of intelligence. If you look at it, it looks like the current representations of neural networks,” Ciuccarelli says.
Crucially, both parts of the design work together — along with a third, designed by Albena Yaneva of the Politecnico di Torino, who is providing a qualitative experience of the curatorial effort — “like a gate” before you enter the Biennale, Ciuccarelli says.
Dietmar Offenhuber, professor and chair of the department of art and design at Northeastern, has a project that aims to turn Venice itself into a computer.
Offenhuber studies “the materiality of information and of data,” he says. For the 2025 Venice Biennale, Offenhuber and his team built what’s called a physical reservoir computer to display information about the waters in and around Venice.
“‘Reservoir’ doesn’t necessarily have something to do with water,” he says, but could refer to any kind of dynamic physical system, like light, sound — or the tides.
“What we have done here,” he continues, “is that we used these principles of physical reservoir computing to think of the city as a computer, as an environment that processes information.”
But what does this look like in practice? What kind of information can a city actually process?
Offenhuber and his team designed a group of columns that mimic changes in the Venetian canals. The columns receive “live video feeds from the water services around the city” and then simulate the “reservoir” part of the system.
The system “learns to interpret these patterns that it observes in this reservoir” and outputs light to a series of RGB cubes. The system can then “make a very simple prediction. It just says, ‘Oh, this is a typical morning on the canals of Venice. Oh, this is a typical afternoon, this is a typical evening.’ So it kind of makes this temporal prediction.”
But the implications, he says, are much larger: “We can look at environmental processes in a much broader scale.”
In the case of Offenhuber’s water computer, slow changes are made more visible — and Venice is the perfect setting.
While the city has been sinking for decades, the threat of sea level rise from climate change has magnified the issue. But “if you look at these slow changes, you can’t really perceive them,” Offenhuber says, but “we can harness environmental systems to make those changes more apparent.”
Offenhuber hopes this project will make viewers more cognizant of their own environment. When a general computer — like the laptop or desktops we’re all familiar with — receives any old input and outputs a result, it suggests that “the information that surrounds us does not represent anything, it’s just there,” he says.
“It’s very important, this idea that we are in this informational environment, and we are part of it.”
Sebastian Gonzalez Quintero is a Ph.D. student in interdisciplinary design and media. His project started because of his interest in tropical glaciers in his home country of Colombia.
Between 2014 and 2018, he says, he had the opportunity — what now feels “more like the privilege” — of visiting the high-altitude glaciers in the Colombian mountains. Across several trips, he began to “collect this archive of images and document all my visits to the glaciers.”
A few years later, he continues, “it was very shocking to learn that, since the 19th century, Colombia has lost 90% of its glaciers.”
This realization led to his project now on display at the Venice Biennale. Called The 10%, it seeks to destabilize our perceptions of photography while calling attention to Colombia’s vanishing glaciers.
The 10% is a video installation that uses two inputs to generate its imagery: A spreadsheet tracking changes to glaciers worldwide and the photos that Gonzalez has collected over the years.
The installation uses software written by Gonzalez to distort and disintegrate the photograph of a glacier. “The software only has two instructions,” he says. “Remove the brightest areas of this image” and “distort the pixels in three-dimensional space.”
“Of course, in pictures of glaciers, it turns out that those brightest pixels are the glaciers.”
“Out of those two instructions, what you see is a distortion and erasure of the information in the image,” he says, “and at the end you see something that doesn’t look like a landscape at all.”
While the concept for the installation may seem simple, Gonzalez hopes that is part of where its impact will emerge.
Most people don’t even know that Colombia, a country in the tropics, has glaciers. Raising awareness remains part of Gonzalez’s goal. “The importance of these glaciers as environmental indicators is another important takeaway.”
“That was the shocking feeling that I had,” he says. “I went to these amazing places and my first instinct was to make a very beautiful picture of this space. But later I was like, this image, yeah, is very pleasant, but it doesn’t really reflect the problem.”
“My argument,” he concludes, is “that aesthetic experiences could appeal to other parts of your reasoning process. They could also appeal to your emotions.
“And somehow that’s something that we [don’t] always address in science communication, or when we are communicating about climate change.”