Sony Group’s Creative Center, responsible for the Group’s design initiatives, will participate in the Sapporo International Art Festival (SIAF) 2027 as an Initiative Partner. Together with SIAF, the team has created an installation titled OPTICAL DRIFT, which will debut at the festival.

* Initiative Partners are corporations that utilize their expertise to co-create exhibitions, programs, and other initiatives under the festival's theme with SIAF.

Centering on the theme of "PLANET SNOW — upas mintar / upas nociw," SIAF2027 brings artists and citizens together to rethink humanity, Earth, and the universe. Imagining Sapporo as a boundless, creative Planet Snow, the festival explores what we can do to shape the future. The vision at the heart of the event inspired Sony to create OPTICAL DRIFT, an immersive installation that draws on the power of design and technology to reimagine the natural wonders of our planet and render them in symbolic form.

Inspired by the ways snow and ice transform light, OPTICAL DRIFT invites visitors into a dreamlike, misty space of lenses, light, and sound where rays wander, bend, and continually change their character. As visitors move through the installation, light and sound respond, making each encounter uniquely personal. The experience illuminates the ties between nature and technology—and between ourselves and our surroundings. It also sparks the imagination, inviting visitors to see the beauty of our planet in connection to the future.

The power of design brings sensing and spatial sound technologies together into an installation where an array of lenses produce light in myriad forms, symbolically reflecting Sony’s years of experience and expertise in optics. Altogether, OPTICAL DRIFT turns natural optical phenomena into a new, immersive experience.