Edouard Cabay

Edouard Cabay is a Brussels-born artist and architect living and working in Barcelona, where he also teaches. His practice focuses on the meeting point of art, architecture, and technology, exploring how structured systems and open-ended processes can work together. In 2016 he began Machinic Protocols, a long-term research project that uses drawing as a common ground for collaboration between people, machines, computers, and even natural forces.

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The work is guided by protocols, algorithms, and automation, yet each process is designed to leave space for chance, allowing forms to emerge that could not be planned in advance.

Through Machinic Protocols, Cabay works with contributors from computational drawing, architecture, design, and the visual arts. The results take many shapes: large-scale installations, collective public interventions, woven interpretations of drawings, or works generated by robotic arms, computer programs, or environmental conditions. Each project tests the limits of human and machine roles in creative work, asking how technology can expand artistic practice beyond pure efficiency.

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His work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Kanal – Centre Pompidou in Brussels, Mysk Art Center in Riyadh, Arte Laguna in Venice, the Biennale of Architecture in Venice, Paris, and Tallinn, Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona, Expo Dubai, and Barcelona Gallery Weekend. Whether shown in a museum, biennale, or public space, Cabay’s projects maintain a clear link between method and outcome, making the process as integral to the work as the final piece.