Agoria & Lescure, Atelier Σigma
Curated by Grida
{As Above, So Within}
 

{As Above, So Within} - A Breath Coded into Being
 

This exhibition marks the debut of Atelier Σigma, a collaboration between French artist and musician Agoria (Sébastien Devaud) and visual artist Johan Lescure. Together, they traverse the borders between music and visual art, between code and breath, between human perception and technological language. Through their new series {As Above, So Within}, they explore the resonances that connect the cosmic and the cellular, the simulated and the living.
 

Agoria has long pursued a dialogue between art and technology. At the Musée d’Orsay, his project Le Code d’Orsay and his collaboration with Johan Lescure on Σ Lumina transformed audience breath data into light and shadow, creating works that responded to human rhythm as if they were alive. He has performed at the Paris Olympic Games and at an AI Summit before the French President, where his compositions staged a coexistence between humans and machines. Johan Lescure, in contrast yet in harmony, works with the materiality of light and code. His installations blur the line between algorithm and organism, treating data not as abstraction but as matter that breathes.
 

{As Above, So Within} takes its title from the Hermetic axiom “As Above, So Below”—an ancient phrase from the Emerald Tablet describing the correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm. But here, the direction shifts. “Below” becomes “Within.” The artists turn their gaze inward, suggesting that the universe exists not only above us, but also inside us. The formation of galaxies and the division of cells, the expansion of the cosmos and the birth of a thought—these are not separate phenomena but echoes of the same rhythm. The exhibition materializes that rhythm: forms that flow and dissolve, patterns that emerge and fade, a continuous cycle of order and entropy.
 

In this world, the algorithm is not a system of calculation but a form of breathing matter, a memory that generates and forgets itself.

 

The space functions like a living organism. Light, sculpture, and the viewer’s own breath form a shared system. The structure first tested in Agoria and Lescure’s Orsay project—where a QR shadow could mint a new digital variant—reappears here in an expanded form. The movement of the viewer alters the version of the work; each breath shifts the balance of the whole. The viewer ceases to be an observer and becomes part of the circulation. In this reciprocal gaze, boundaries collapse: human and machine, subject and object, perception and creation merge into one field of co-existence.
 

The works call forth both the microscopic and the cosmic at once. Cellular networks, neural filaments, and slime molds mirror constellations, nebulae, and the web of galaxies. The vertical metaphor of “above and below” transforms into a horizontal vibration of “inside and outside.” Each piece becomes not an image, but an event—a moment where perception, computation, and memory overlap.

 

The debut of Atelier Σigma is not a declaration but a threshold. Between universe and cell, life and machine, chaos and form, they open a passage. And as we pass through it, we recognize that the world is not only beyond us—it is also within us, pulsing quietly in the darkness of our cells, in the light that trembles across our screens. To perceive that vibration, to give it shape before it disappears—that is what this exhibition calls art today.​