SpY‘s CYCLES N2 keeps the name of the artist’s 2025 Cycles sculpture but drops its entire mechanism, trading nine rotating steel rings for fifteen that rise and fall vertically instead. Commissioned for Kazan’s NUR International Media Art Festival, the installation is suspended above a hall lined with red-lit concrete ramps, its rings moving independently rather than as a single rotating mass. The sequel title suggests continuity; the physics inside it suggest SpY started over.
The original Cycles rotated nine steel rings of different diameters on a fixed axis, spinning fast enough that a circle could read as an ellipse depending on the viewer’s angle — an illusion built entirely from rotation in place. CYCLES N2 abandons that premise, trading spin for a fully vertical kinetic system where fifteen rings travel up and down independently rather than turning in place, each one operating as what the artist’s team describes as an autonomous unit within a larger choreographed system.
Kazan’s NUR Festival turns the city into a temporary map of media art installations, spreading works by international artists across more than ten locations for a few days each year. CYCLES N2 is one of those temporary interventions rather than a permanent commission, built to run on the festival’s choreography of light and sound rather than to occupy Kazan indefinitely.
Each of the fifteen rings contributes to a superposition effect: as the circles rise, fall, and overlap at different speeds, scale, and depth, the installation’s apparent geometry keeps reorganizing itself depending on where a viewer stands. Light travels across the circumferences in timed sequences, so kinetic light installation is a more accurate description than static sculpture — the piece has no single silhouette, only a sequence of temporary ones.
When the original Cycles debuted in Madrid, “Cycles” invites us to reconsider sculptural form not as static, but as a dynamic consequence of motion, SpY told urdesign at the time — a statement that already left room for the mechanism itself to change. CYCLES N2 takes that idea further than rotation could: motion through vertical space produces a far wider range of overlapping configurations than nine rings spinning on the spot ever could.
An original soundtrack by Omar Tenany and Komatsu runs alongside the rings’ movement, timed to the same sound and light choreography that governs the piece — sound, light, and motion operating as one coordinated system rather than three separate elements layered on top of each other. The venue itself, a hall of curved concrete surfaces lit entirely in red, turns the rings into the only source of contrasting color in the room.
Photographer Ruben P. Bescós documented the installation on-site, the same collaborator who shot SpY’s original Cycles sculpture in Madrid — a visual continuity between predecessor and sequel that mirrors the shared title even as the underlying mechanism changed. His images capture the rings mid-transition rather than at rest, which matters for a piece whose spatial installation never holds a single configuration long enough to be considered its default state.
Red recurs across SpY’s practice well beyond this single installation — from a monolithic red projection in Barcelona to red smoke released from an abandoned industrial chimney in Germany, and closer to CYCLES N2, the artist’s Divided sphere installation that lit Xi’an entirely in red. The color isn’t a one-off styling choice for this piece; it’s closer to a recurring material in SpY’s urban art installations, used to strip a space down to a single register before the kinetic element does its work.
CYCLES N2’s real achievement isn’t the fifteen rings themselves — SpY has suspended more rings than that before — but the decision to keep a title implying continuation while rebuilding the underlying mechanism from nothing. A sequel that changes its own physics isn’t really a sequel; it’s closer to the artist testing whether the concept of Cycles survives the removal of the one thing that made the original work.
CYCLES N2 by SpY | Where: Kazan, Russia — When: 2026, NUR International Media Art Festival