MuArts for Hotels and Artist Residencies

MuArts · for hotels and artist residencies

The guest is not an audience.

Installations that read the person in the room, a spa programme that measures what it claims, and a residency that keeps making the next piece. One layer, built into the building.

14 built installations 2012 first piece 4 hotel rooms delivered 1 studio, end to end

What a hotel with a residency actually is

Three businesses, one building.

A place to stay. A place to be looked after. A place where work is made. Most hotels run the three as strangers: the art is decoration bought once, the spa sells a feeling it cannot evidence, and the residency, if it exists at all, happens behind a closed door.

We build the layer that joins them. The same sensors that drive an installation in the lobby drive the reading a guest receives after a session, and the artist in residence makes next season’s piece out of both.

01

It cannot be faked

The image exists because that person is in the room. Nobody else generates the same one, and they know it while it happens.

02

It teaches without a lesson

Breathe out slowly and the room softens. No instruction needed. The guest learns the link by playing with it.

03

It leaves a record

The same signal that made the image is read back afterwards, in plain language, as something the guest keeps.

04

It is ours end to end

Sensors, pipeline, patches, structures and crew are in-house, so a piece changes on site rather than being ordered again.

2012
The first piece: light thrown across bodies in a dark room. The cube is the fourth generation of that idea.
14
Installations built and run, each a format rather than a one-off.
90s
A baseline at arrival. Not a diagnosis — a starting point the guest can see.
3 days
Continuous public use on a London show floor, September 2026, with the Brain Mirror running all day.

The catalogue

Fourteen pieces, built and run.

Each one is a format, not a one-off: the content, the scale and the surface change with the room it goes into. Every photograph here is of the piece itself.

The Voxel Cube, a walk-in structure projected on four faces

Signature piece

The Voxel Cube

A walk-in structure projected on four faces, where a guest’s own brain, heart and movement data become the volume of light around them.

Lobby, terrace, event floor See the post →

An immersive room mapped wall to ceiling

Permanent or touring

Immersive rooms

Walls and ceiling mapped with generative content that reads heart rate, breathing and the energy of the room. Built into existing architecture.

Relaxation room, studio, suite See the post →

A visitor rendered live by the Brain Mirror

The mirrors · one

Brain Mirror

An EEG headband drives a live reflection of the guest, and the session ends on a results screen and a QR code they scan to keep it. Built for continuous public use.

Arrival, spa landing, conference stand On our feed →

A visitor mirrored as a generated figure

The mirrors · two

Magic Mirror

Camera, movement and a spoken prompt: say the transformation and watch yourself become it, through diffusion models tuned on the house’s own visual world.

Bar, gallery, event night On our feed →

Sound-reactive lasers through foliage

Atmosphere

Laser Sky

Sound-reactive lasers through foliage, a canopy that shifts with the music and the room. Spectacular outdoors, quiet enough indoors to sit under.

Garden, pool, dinner, night programme See the post →

A custom light installation above people lying down

Atmosphere

Custom light systems

LED behind wooden slats or diffused through fabric, controlled from a touchpad: colour, dimming, direction, and effects driven by music or by the people present.

Session rooms, corridors, sauna, bar See the post →

Dodagon, an interactive structure of light rings

Structure

Dodagon

An interactive structure built on the idea that vibration shapes matter: patterns that grow and reorganise with frequency, as a sculpture people stand inside.

Courtyard, atrium, ceremony See the post →

A bespoke geodesic build in wood

Structure

Domes and bespoke builds

Carpentry and code together: geodesic domes, sculptural frames, pieces made for one site out of wood, stone and embedded light.

Garden, pool deck, ceremony space See the post →

A dancer painting the room with movement

Performance

Unveil Dance

A depth sensor reads a dancer’s movement and turns it into living projection, so the air around the body appears to answer every gesture.

Opening night, seasonal programme See the post →

Face Off, a sculpture wearing a visitor's face

Performance

Face Off

A recognition camera maps the visitor’s features onto a sculpture, while an EEG interface shifts its colour and texture with their state. Identity, handed over for a minute.

Gallery, lobby sculpture, exhibition See the post →

Fractal geometry projected in a dome

Performance

The Eye of Horus

Sacred geometry that grows more intricate as the tempo rises and shifts colour with tone. Built for long dwell and late hours.

Night programme, dome, chill space See the post →

A guest tasting while EEG draws the response

The senses

Taste Discovery

Guests taste wine, food or essential oils while EEG turns their response into a visual in real time. A tasting becomes a portrait of the person tasting.

Restaurant, cellar, chef’s table Watch the film →

Immersive breathwork with generative visuals

The senses

Immersive breathwork

Guided breathwork built on CO₂ retention cycles, with EEG capturing the shift and the visuals built from it, live, around the group.

Studio, dome, morning and sunset See the post →

A live avatar morphing with heart rate and breath

The senses

Digital Twin & BioNFT

A live avatar that morphs with heart rate, breath and emotional shift — and, if the house wants it, a collectible artwork minted from a guest’s own brainwaves.

Suite, membership, retail See the post →

Built, not rendered

Four rooms we already made.

Designed, built, programmed and run by us. Films of each one are available on request.

A light room inside WheelHouse, Lisboa WheelHouse · Lisboa

A light room inside a working venue

Designed, built and programmed for the house, running every day inside a wellness venue — not an event piece.

A mapped corridor at Hotel Hotel, Lisboa Hotel Hotel · Lisboa

Then it becomes a place

A corridor, a session room, a dome, a pool. Once the core is in, the form it takes is a design decision.

Immersive rooms at Quinta da Marinha, Cascais Quinta da Marinha · Cascais

Three immersive rooms in a hotel

Fabric-screen projection rooms and an LED-wall room, video-mapped and streamed live for a leadership conference.

The Voxel Cube inside the Design Hotels Further programme Design Hotels · Further

The cube, in a hotel programme

Installation and live performance inside the Design Hotels Further programme in Lisbon, written up by the house itself.

The spa

The industry sells transformation and measures nothing.

Every spa makes a claim about the nervous system. Almost none can evidence it. The guest leaves relaxed, forgets by Tuesday, and has no reason to believe the room did anything a quiet afternoon would not have done.

01

Arrival

A short baseline at the Brain Mirror in the spa landing. The guest meets the idea by playing with it, not by reading a sign.

02

The session

Light, sound and image in the room follow their breathing and heart rate. The practitioner’s work is unchanged; the environment stops being wallpaper.

03

The practice

Breathwork, sound or neurofeedback as a scheduled session — the part of the programme that teaches something repeatable.

04

The readback

One screen, one QR: the image they made and what the session did, to keep and to show someone.

The take-home

The guest leaves with evidence.

At the end of a session the screen stops reflecting and reports: deepest calm and sharpest focus with the minute each happened, the whole session as one line, and a QR code to carry it away.

  • No jargon and no diagnosis — a plain reading of what the sensors saw.
  • The image they generated, exported with their name on it.
  • A page built for the house, carrying the house’s own look.
  • Something to show someone, which is how a spa gets talked about.

We are not claiming a clinical effect and we do not frame this as medicine. The claim is narrower and harder: what the guest is shown is genuinely their own signal, and we can explain exactly how it got there.

The readback screen a guest receives at the end of a session

The residency

A studio inside the hotel.

An installation ages. A residency does not: it is the machine that keeps making the next piece, in the building, in front of the guests.

We run a research and art studio with Muro and 204.ai — exhibitions, residencies, workshops and commissioned work, with artists, scientists and engineers in the same room. Moved into a hotel, that model gives the building a second life as a production house.

  • Artists in residence for a season, making work that uses the installed layer.
  • Open studio hours, so guests watch the work being made and sometimes end up inside it.
  • Commissions — each cycle leaves one piece behind, and the collection grows without a purchase.
  • Exhibitions that give press a new reason to write about a hotel that already opened.

We have run this before, not only hosted it: in January 2023 MuLabs co-curated a residency at Cultivamos Cultura in Odemira, built around the Voxel Cube, with our own team and invited artists on site for the week.

The studio, with artists and engineers working together

Our own formats

We do not only install. We programme the night.

Two events we run ourselves, which is where the formats are tested before a house ever sees them.

A performer wearing a sensor headband at TRANS-LATE TRANS-LATE · 28 September 2019

Our own festival, Village Underground, Lisboa

“A platform where technology and interactivity guide you to self-knowledge.” Talks, an immersive sound journey, interactive yoga, a tasting and a neurofeedback room in one night. The performers wore sensors, and their readings ran on the wall behind them.

Watch the film →

The hall at UNVEIL, the booth under projected panels UNVEIL · 22 February 2025

The club night, Beato, Lisboa

Made with Vallechi and Artur Caleres. Thermal cameras read the room, the Voxel Cube turned the DJ sets into a live heat map, and the floor’s own movement was projected across the club wall. The debut sold out both ticket releases, and the account drew 116,000 impressions in the ten weeks before the night.

On the feed →

How we work with a house

Install, operate, or hand over.

01

We install

Design, build, programme and commission the piece. Structures, projection, sensors and the software that drives them, fitted to the architecture and documented.

02

We operate

Our crew runs the experience during a season, an opening or a programme — and trains the house team to run the daily version.

03

We hand over

Touchpad control, preset libraries, a maintenance plan and remote support. The house runs its own building without calling us every week.

The content does not have to stay still. Because the pieces are generative and the pipeline is ours, a room can be re-dressed for a season, an event or a brand partnership without new hardware. That is the difference between buying art and installing a layer: one is finished on the day it arrives, the other keeps earning.

Three ways to start

Small, seasonal, or the whole layer.

One piece

Put one thing in the building

A single installation — most often the Brain Mirror at the spa entrance, because it explains everything else in ninety seconds. Low commitment, and it tells you how guests react.

Weeks, not months

A season

A programme with a beginning and an end

Installations plus a scheduled practice and one residency cycle, run for a season. Enough to measure what it does to occupancy, spa revenue and press.

One season, reviewed at the end

The layer

Build it into the house

The full fit-out: rooms, spa journey, take-home readback and a standing residency, designed with your architects while the building is still being drawn.

Designed with the build

We would rather start with one piece in a real room than a masterplan on paper. The building teaches us what it wants.

Let’s begin

Let’s start with one room.

Send us the floor plan and what the room is for. We come back with what fits it, what it costs to build and what it costs to run.

Francisco Marques-Teixeira · Founder · +351 968 277 501
Full portfolio, reference films and technical riders per installation on request.