M Moser joins Amsterdam Light Festival 2025 with Interactive Installation ‘Rhapsōidia’
Rhapsōidia, a new interactive public artwork by global design and architecture firm M Moser Associates, is now live at the Amsterdam Light Festival. Installed on the façade of the telecommunications exchange on Herengracht, this large-scale installation explores the festival’s 2025 theme, ‘Legacy’, by inviting visitors to shape a live tapestry of light and sound.
The artwork can be experienced from 27 November 2025 to 18 January 2026.
Now in its fourteenth edition, the Amsterdam Light Festival is one of Europe’s leading light art events, transforming the city’s canals and historic streets into an open-air gallery each winter. Each year, artists from around the world respond to a central theme, with only a small number of new works selected from nearly a thousand proposals.
In 2025, M Moser is one of twenty artists featured in the festival’s curated programme.
At M Moser Associates, they design, engineer and deliver workplace environments that bring out the best in people. Their health, happiness and ability to do great work enables organisations to transform in an ever-challenging world.
Rhapsōidia: light, sound and memory in motion
The 2025 festival theme led M Moser to consider several things: ‘What are our hopes for the future? What are the monuments of the past? What do we leave behind and what do we want to carry forward with us, individually and collectively?‘ The artwork responds by making legacy tangible and immediate. Rather than a distant idea, legacy is expressed as an accumulation of everyday thoughts and wishes, made visible to the city.
Rhapsōidia, ancient Greek for “stitched song”, reimagines the age-old art of weaving stories as a living, generative audio-visual sculpture. The artwork breathes new life into the old telephone exchange, now left largely empty due to advancements in technology and the move to fibre optics.
Through a custom-built website, visitors write messages of their hopes for the future. These reflections are gathered into a living dataset that guides the artwork’s generative patterns and soundscape, letting the building’s evolving purpose resonate once more with the voices it carries.
The 8x9m sculpture, consisting of nearly 800m of individually addressable LED lights, is globally synchronised. This means whether someone is standing in front of the façade on Herengracht or engaging online, everyone sees the composition in realtime, creating a shared experience across physical and digital worlds.
The melodies and light compositions are generated based on the messages people submit. Ali Ucer, Senior Associate, Digital Brand Experience explains:
“The tone, frequency and repetition of each composition are algorithmically tied to the content of the message itself. Each contribution carries a distinct set of creative instructions that the system expands into a unique musical and visual response, showing how individual voices come together in a polylogue. A collective discussion around legacy and our hopes for the future, reflected back in light and sound.”
Building expertise through experimentation
M Moser continues to explore new ideas, emerging technologies and creative expression through its global network of living labs. The Rhapsōidia installation advances this work, enabling hands-on experimentation with data driven, interactive artwork and new tools and techniques that can be translated into meaningful solutions for clients.
Jess Adkins, Brand Experience Design Lead, EMEA, M Moser Associates shares:
“As organisations collect more data and as technology accelerates, clients are seeking richer, more engaging environments. Artwork like Rhapsōidia supports this ambition by exploring impactful experiences that connect people, place and information.”
“Rhapsōidia continues our exploration into how data, architecture and brand storytelling can create memorable user experiences. We wanted to create a piece that is joyful, contemplative and accessible, yet rooted in the history of its site. By inviting people to contribute their own words, the artwork becomes a collective act of writing the future together.”
Designed by M Moser’s Brand Experience team, the installation brings together interactive design, engineering and spatial storytelling to demonstrate the firm’s multidisciplinary approach beyond the workplace.
Visitor information
Festival dates: 27 November 2025 to 18 January 2026
Location of Rhapsōidia: Herengracht 295, near M Moser’s Amsterdam studio
How to experience it: On foot, by bike or from one of the boats that follow the Amsterdam Light Festival route
All photography: Janus van den Eijnden