NEW YORK, NY.- CUE Art presents Datos Helados | Soft Tidal, an exhibition by Federico Bolagno-Romero and Mathías Chumino, curated by Will Rubenstein. The exhibition is on view at CUE's gallery space at 137 W. 25th Street until June 27th, 2026. Attendance during gallery hours (Wed–Sat, 12–6 pm) is free; no reservations are required.
Datos Helados | Soft Tidal is an extension of the artists’ broader Datos Helados project, which conceives data as liquid, malleable matter. Developed in chapters across Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Tokyo, and Berlin, the project treats data as a force with agency: capable of settling, eroding, and transforming.
In this installment of the series, the relationship between New York and Montevideo traces a psychogeographic vector between two estuaries. Twice a day, the Hudson River reverses direction: fresh water descending from the north meets the Atlantic´s salt water, refusing a single course. Further south, those same Atlantic waters enter the Río de la Plata. From this shared condition of irreversible mixing, Bolagno-Romero and Chumino construct a new system, shaped by opposing streams, invisible infrastructures, and unstable circuits of distribution. As in an estuary, data flows overrun the structures designed to contain them: they mix, drag residues, blur boundaries, and acquire unforeseen meanings.
The title holds its own paradox. Datos Helados (“frozen data”) enacts the central tension of the work: that which is supposed to be cold, fixed, and archivable is in fact thawing, drifting and decomposing. Rather than producing clarity, an excess of information intensifies opacity. The digital archive reveals itself as technological ruin
In Soft Tidal, data appears as soma: a materiality that breathes, contracts, mutates, and loses definition at its edges. This displaces data from the regime of the factual and situates it in a zone where language, media, memory, identity, affect, and perception contaminate and modulate one another. If language can operate as a virus, data too circulates, infiltrates, and transforms its host. Beneath its apparent immateriality lies a latent physical infrastructure: submarine cables, server routes, ports, interfaces, technical residues, bridges, architectures of circulation that sustain its movement and that are themselves subject to corrosion and drift.
Through sculpture and media, Soft Tidal renders perceptible the instability of data, its material density, and its displacement across bodies of water, geographies, technologies, languages, and subjectivities. It opens a poetic space from which to navigate intersecting currents, trace their margins, and perceive how information and matter move in more than one direction at the same time.
Mathías Chumino / C03RA (Montevideo, Uruguay) is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice explores territories where the human, the non-human, and the machinic intertwine within an accelerated present shaped by technology. Through a critical, experimental, and poetic approach, his work creates immersive and conceptual spaces that expand forms of perception and question the hierarchies between matter, information, and agency. His trajectory includes exhibitions, residencies, and live performances in museums, biennials, and international festivals such as Ars Electronica, MUTEK, and Mapping Festival, as well as presentations in Argentina, Chile, Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, the United States, and beyond.
Federico Bolagno-Romero (Montevideo & New York) is a sound and media artist whose work explores acoustic space, electronic synthesis, and the somatic dimensions of frequency. His practice extends into sculpture, where infrasonic and ultrasonic audio lives as physical material. Through the real-time integration of multiple sound sources and live urban data, his work moves between composition, performance, and object-making; tracing the threshold between designed and lived acoustic experience. For the last fifteen years, Bolagno-Romero has been embedded in New York’s audio culture, working across institutional and underground contexts alike. His work has been presented at Fundación Andreani, Buenos Aires; Subte, Montevideo; Ochiai Soup, Tokyo; and at numerous venues and galleries throughout New York.
