When the present feels heavy, overwhelming, accelerated, or stuck, imagination can get blocked. SHAPESHIFT Festival 2025 offered something rare: space to breathe, reflect, and imagine otherwise. For three days in Sofia, lectures, exhibitions, workshops, screenings, and one unforgettable party came together under the theme “Radical Imaginations”—not as escapism, but as an act of active optimism.
Here, imagination was treated as pure potential—the future not as abstract fate, but as something shaped by what we choose to do today. It’s a conscious, stubborn refusal to settle for the world as it is.
Instead of spiraling into despair, we were invited to play: with ideas, with nature, with code, with policy, with myth. Turn dreams into prototypes. Use algorithms as collaborators. Think like artists, scientists, futurists, and ancestors. (Because let’s face it—doomscrolling only gets us so far.) The mood was curious, energized, and quietly radical: let’s try something different.
Radical Imaginations: The Exhibition
The festival opened with the group exhibition “Radical Imaginations,” spotlighting visionary pieces created by the speakers who would later take the stage.
Constantin Prozorov unveiled his signature digital dreamscapes, merging high fashion with surrealism. His visuals have appeared in campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Moncler, and BMW.
Iskra Velitchkova presented Psychedelic Chicken à la mode—a generative work that evolves through a graceful dialogue between artist and code, becoming one of the most intricate and poetic “birds” in her portfolio.
N O R M A L S showed INWARDS, a fictional vision of 2050s Europe where emotional excellence, material minimalism, and assisted introspection replace consumerism and control.
Dialogue with the Deep Space—an interactive installation by visual artist Petko Tanchev and Maraya Ivanova (Next DC), with a soundscape by Maksim Stoimenov and astrophysical guidance from ESA scientist Henk Hoekstra—translated raw data from the Euclid space telescope into a navigable star field. Visitors roamed just 0.001 percent of the sky yet encountered more than 50,000 galaxies, each a reminder of both our cosmic smallness and the boundless reach of radical imagination.
Imagination as Infrastructure
One idea echoed again and again: imagination isn’t fluff—it’s infrastructure. And it belongs to all of us.
Festival curator Magda Mojsiejuk opened with a call to resist passive futures and reclaim imagination as a tool of agency.
Iskra Velitchkova shared her process of working with generative systems, where intuition and often randomness, guide the algorithm.
N O R M A L S presented their latest project, New Future Archetypes—a playful, thoughtful way to design fictional worlds using stories, objects, and systems. Instead of reinventing the future every time, they asked: What if we treated futures like building blocks—things we can share, remix, and expand together?
Designer and architect Jorge Christie demonstrated regenerative materials that grow instead of being extracted—biocomposites that could one day replace concrete.
Constantin Prozorov took us on a surreal visual journey through digital opulence, decay, and re-enchanted aesthetics.
Marieke van Erp reminded us that AI must be more than smart—it must be culturally sensitive and emotionally aware.
Erica Bol shared speculative tools from the European Commission’s Policy Lab, reframing governance as an act of collective foresight.
Soyun Park explored how AI and ritual intersect, showing how art can reclaim agency in techno-dominated systems.
A Toolbox for Future-Builders
Inspired by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog—and with the documentary We Are As Gods featured in this year’s film program—SHAPESHIFT felt like stepping into a living version of it: a hands-on, hearts-open toolbox.
Soyun Park led a hands-on workshop using image-to-image AI tools—not to generate visuals from scratch, but to reimagine the discarded.
Jamshid Alamuti held an energizing session on leadership and imagination—how system change begins with internal transformation.
In a brilliantly insightful workshop, N O R M A L S invited participants to prototype radical futures using ASCII/ANSI text mode and large language models. The results?
→ The last jewelry for a world that voluntarily neutralizes beauty
→ “PRAYNING” mats and accessories for a spiritually administered AI society
→ AI psychedelics: programs that make models hallucinate beyond their data—to dream, not just remix.
The day ended with Petko Tanchev opening a gateway to real-time visuals with a TouchDesigner workshop, guiding participants through interactive projection-mapping, dynamic digital stagecraft, and the art of making light, space, and audience respond to one another in live performance.
Throughout the weekend, VR works, investigative documentaries, and speculative shorts stepped back from the human viewpoint, steering our attention instead toward the larger ecological and technological systems that shape—and outlast—us.
SHAPESHIFT became a lab for testing alternative realities. Not polished answers—but provocations. Not predictions—but rehearsals.
Until Next Year…
We didn’t “change the world” in 72 hours. But we left Toplocentrala with something more useful: better questions, new friends, and a renewed belief that radical imagination is a shared responsibility.
SHAPESHIFT 2025 reminded us that optimism can be radical. And that the future is not something we inherit—it’s something we build together.
