The NOVA BIENAL RIO is an autonomous and independent event that transcends the scope of a conventional international exhibition; it is a call to innovation and imagination. Under the theme “New Aesthetic and Supercreativity,” we invite you on a journey through the world of art driven by technology. Hosted by the city of Rio de Janeiro, it takes place at both the iconic Museu do Amanhã and Praça Mauá, reshaping the interaction of the public with art. As you enter the NOVA BIENAL, you will be invited to explore unique aesthetic expressions, looking towards the future through digital and technological lenses. Access NOVA.

The Right to Flight

A Londres, l’installation aérienne «The Right to Flight» de l’artiste britannique James Bridle explore la notion de surveillance depuis les airs et revient sur les utopies dévoyées des premiers aérostats.
Dans le ciel limpide de Londres flotte depuis le mois de juin un étrange ballon noir. Localisé dans le quartier populaire de Peckham, dans le sud de la ville, il est arrimé au niveau supérieur d’un parking désaffecté, vaisseau brutaliste dont les deux derniers étages hébergent depuis huit ans Bold Tendencies, un projet artistique estival, ainsi qu’un bar de plein air très couru avec une vue stupéfiante sur la skyline londonienne.Connu pour ses projets sur les drones ou son blog de recherche The New Aesthetic, James Bridle, né en 1980, a aussi posé sur le toit du parking une station de recherche expérimentale explorant l’histoire des aérostats, via des ateliers, des conférences et projections. Constituée de trois modules circulaires, fabriqués à partir de silos de grains lestés par des sacs de sable, l’architecture évoque tout à la fois les hangars des compagnies aériennes et la maison en kit Dymaxion de Buckminster Füller

TriangPaint

Holger Lippmann describes a part of his work as digital painting. What distinguishes digital painting from traditional painting on canvas or paper? We need to distinguish between two categories of digital painting. The first includes works created on the computer with ready-made graphic tools like virtual paint brushes or pens, in something like the way that non-digital pictures are created on paper or canvas. David Hockney’s painting of a sunflower on an i-pad is an example of this. The second category includes works using computer generation, in which programs coded by the artist continually produce new aesthetic concepts as images or animations. Every execution of the software creates new works within the pre-defined boundaries of the system. This process can be called generative painting.

אדוארדו סרור
Boat
Festival Serrinha

Eduardo Srur, from São Paulo, started painting, but stood out in urban interventions. His works use the public space to draw attention to environmental issues and daily life in the metropolises, always with the objective of expanding the presence of art in society and bringing it closer to people’s lives. The city is your research laboratory for the practice of artistic experiences; the public and governments are his target. Srur’s set of works serves as a guide for poorly managed spaces and urban errors. Above all, they are conceptual criticisms that awaken awareness and look at a new aesthetic and understanding of the visual arts.

黒川良一
Syn
2011 –
Audiovisual Concert
Diptych | 2.1ch sound
Duration: 30’00” – 45’00”
The Japanese artist Ryoichi Kurokawa has been a pioneer in audiovisual art in the past fifteen years, working with multiple media that bring together sound and image in a totally new language. Currently based in Berlin, Kurokawa continues to explore the symbiosis between technology and nature, order and chaos.Kurokawa stands as out as a new international reference in the field of digital art, a creator of trends and a pioneer in new aesthetics in artistic work.

New Tangible Interfaces TTI

Interactive surfaces makes everyday objects multi-functional and fun. Reactive technologies have now enabled normal interfaces with new functions and new possibilities. The role of the surface is changing radically, according to how it’s designed and incorporated with objects. My proposal was to re-define the role of the surface in future lifestyle, exploring how surfaces can be an integrated as part of a product or environment.

TTI, (standing for Tangible Textural Interface) is a new sound system that embeds a tactile surface. TTI has flexibility that enables people to physically touch and feel the response through the controls and physical morph of the surface. TTI delivers new aesthetics through integrated flexible surfaces as interface material unlike adapting conventional materials for interfaces such as plastic or glass. Unlike existing 2D interfaces, TTI has a curved 3D surface opening up new possibilities in making flexible forms and shapes within the interface.

TTI consists of 3 main functions, backwards and forwards, volume control and equaliser, having a physical feedback and control interface within one surface. As you control the functions, the left surface physically responds to the controls. Tactile surface also responds to the beat of the music.

diagonal section
With a recognisably minimal aesthetic, Galan employs abstract geometry to delineate the political and social implications of his chosen environments, deconstructing the codes of objects established through everyday use.

FILE SAO PAULO 2017
LES DISCIPLINES DU RECTANGLE
Inspired by Michel Foucault’s work, Les disciplines du rectangle is a videogame proposition about the nature of rules and norms at the digital age. If society provides models of accomplishment we are supposed to fit inside, then the rectangle is the pure abstraction of this idea. The geometrical shape works as a symbol of the very nature of normativity, blind to individual differences. The rectangle, existing only on the screen, reveals how digital technologies can in some ways become the new location for this normativity and the ambivalent results of their intangible and invisible nature. Besides, the installation offers an occasion to think about the way games can become manipulation tools. The fact that in the end, players act as if they were piloted by the rectangle (an inversion of the traditional relationship between player and avatar) gives an aesthetical highlight to this.

.

Inspirado en el trabajo de Michel Foucault, Les disciplines du rectangle es una propuesta de videojuego sobre la naturaleza de las reglas y normas en la era digital. Si la sociedad proporciona modelos de realización en los que se supone que encajamos, entonces el rectángulo es la pura abstracción de esta idea. La forma geométrica funciona como símbolo de la naturaleza misma de la normatividad, ciega a las diferencias individuales. El rectángulo, que existe solo en la pantalla, revela cómo las tecnologías digitales pueden convertirse de alguna manera en la nueva ubicación de esta normatividad y los resultados ambivalentes de su naturaleza intangible e invisible. Además, la instalación ofrece la oportunidad de pensar en cómo los juegos pueden convertirse en herramientas de manipulación. El hecho de que, al final, los jugadores actúen como si fueran piloteados por el rectángulo (una inversión de la relación tradicional entre jugador y avatar) le da un toque estético a esto.

Princess of Parallelograms
What will happen when our imagination itself is externalized in machines? Artificial intelligence constructs its own world-truth that is beyond our sensory perception. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) use algorithms to synthesize and generate images in a completely new way. These images have almost uncanny aesthetic characteristics, seeming to emerge from an ocean of data, a kind of pixel soup. Rather as if we were observing the emergence of artificial “thought.” The machine learns to understand the “essence” of a thing, be it an animal, the face of a celebrity or a body of text. It is then able to generate new images of this thing, including faces of celebrities who do not exist, mutant animals, or new texts. Eventually, AI will be capable of instantaneously and dynamically emulating all representations. The era of the optical machine and the capture of reality will then be at an end, supplanted by the era of machines that generate their own reality.

Quantum memories
Quantum Memories is Refik Anadol Studio’s epic scale investigation of the intersection between Google AI Quantum Supremacy experiments, machine learning, and aesthetics of probability. Technological and digital advancements of the past century could as well be defined by the humanity’s eagerness to make machines go to places that humans could not go, including the spaces inside our minds and the non-spaces of our un- or sub-conscious acts. Quantum Memories utilizes the most cutting-edge, Google AI’s publicly available quantum computation research data and algorithms to explore the possibility of a parallel world by processing approximately 200 million nature and landscape images through artificial intelligence. These algorithms allow us to speculate alternative modalities inside the most sophisticated computer available, and create new quantum noise-generated datasets as building blocks of these modalities. The 3D visual piece is accompanied by an audio experience that is also based on quantum noise–generated data, offering an immersive experience that further challenges the notion of mutual exclusivity. The project is both inspired by and a speculation of the Many-Worlds Interpretation in quantum physics – a theory that holds that there are many parallel worlds that exist at the same space and time as our own.

Re-Wired / Re-Mixed: Event for Dismembered Body
“Re-Wired / Re-Mixed: Event for Dismembered Body” was a five-day, six-hour a day internet enabled performance, that explores the physiological and aesthetic experience of a fragmented, distributed, de-synchronized, distracted and involuntary body – wired and under surveillance. The artist wears a HUD (head up display) that enables him to see with the “eyes” of someone in London, whilst hearing with the “ears” of someone in New York. The body is also augmented by an 8 degrees-of-freedom exoskeleton so that anyone anywhere can generate involuntary movement of his right arm, using an online interface. The artist becomes optically and acoustically de-synchronized and performs partly involuntarily.

poster sky3

Deja’s work is so effective because it engages with the aesthetics of new technologies in order to critique their sociological, psychological, and physical impact on our embodied selves. At times idealistic and others damning, Deja avoids sorting technology into a
good-bad binary, but instead allows both ends of that spectrum to proliferate, allowing visitors to her supersensory exhibitions come to their own conclusion. She just asks “Technology enhances
and simplifies communication, but are we really more connected?”

Avatar of the artist
Taiwan in Venice 2019
“For those who don’t know her, Shu Lea Cheang is a figure of Net art and the cyberfeminist movement that emerged in the 1990s. Living in New York at the time, she was also an active member of the activist video collective Paper Tiger Television (as was French filmmaker Nathalie Magnan). Since then, Cheang’s work has dealt with “concerns including sex, futures, gender, ecology, money, media, and food [to] encompass film, installation, online work, social processes, and direct intervention in the sociopolitical, technical and aesthetic systems, and the imaginaries which co-compose them,” writes Matthew Fuller

Black and White
Dedicated to the design and distribution of live shows combining the arts in all its forms, Compagnie Hybride offers a fusion of aesthetics. It is positioned at the crossroads of creativity where the bodies and new technology meet. Land on which confronts, body language and visual arts, in order to promote a work interdisciplinary research, choreography and artistic innovation. Through its creations, productions, performances, films, exhibitions, installations, educational workshops and event services, Compagnie Hybride, carried primarily by a desire to exchange, sharing, research and development, has a mandate to create and disseminate its designs in the artistic and cultural networks nationally and internationally.

Angelika Loderers work is refering to the basic research of form and space. She uses fragile, everyday materials that are derived from the vocabulary of domesticity and combine them with sort of traditional sculptural techniques. In the process the play between chance and control defines the aesthetics of her work. The experimenting with attidudes – via a very specific amalgam of materials, shapes and objects- brings forth a new, metaphysical result. “In transience, fragility and decline, I see the formal expressions to which I refer in my designs, and which to some extent provide the framework conditions for my processoriented work. From the abundance on offer, however fragile and vulnerable in composition, the elements fall into place, becoming worthless once again when dismantled.”

池田亮司
이케다 료지
РЕДЗИ ИКЕДА
Data-verse
Ryoji Ikeda’s new trilogy data-verse, commissioned by Audemars Piguet, is an audiovisual symphonic suite that attempts to encompass the tiniest (elementary particles) to the greatest (Universe) scale in Nature.Data-verse is the ultimate chapter of Ikeda’s audiovisual series that first began in 2000, which focuses on his own data-driven research and aesthetics.Through his mathematical composition and aesthetics, massive scientific data set will be processed, transcribed, converted, transformed, de/re/meta-constructed and orchestrated to visualize and sonify the different dimensions that co-exist in our world between the visible and the invisible.

جانين أنتوني
珍妮安东尼
ג’נין אנטוני
재닌 안토니
Жанин Антони
Mortar and Pestle
“The eye and tongue in “Mortar and pestle” could become the tongue and eye of any advanced intimate partnership.”
Since the 1990s, New York–based artist Janine Antoni has established an international reputation with labor-intensive projects in a wide range of media. She incorporates both art history and personal exploration, investigating the ways in which contemporary definitions of aesthetics and art making are connected to issues of gender identity and sexuality. Inspired by the feminist artists of the 1970s, she reframes and subverts art-historical and societal conventions surrounding women and beauty.

Silver
Robotics, cybernetics and developments in the field of artificial intelligence put the equally fascinating as disquieting idea of artificial life within our grasp. Nanine Linning’s new production SILVER addresses the intimate – and increasingly intrusive – relationship between the human and the technological, showing the beauty of its aesthetics, but also questioning its promise of ever increasing progress and self-improvement.

바트 헤스
巴特·赫斯
בארט הס
БАРТА ХЕССА
SIlVERNanine Linning
Nothing has changed as radically in the last few decades as the technology we surround ourselves with on a daily basis. Modern means of communication let the world shrink to a pocket size Global Village. Medical technology promises life beyond its natural limits. Robotics, cybernetics and developments in the field of artificial intelligence put the equally fascinating as disquieting idea of artificial life within our grasp. Nanine Linning’s new production SILVER addresses the intimate – and increasingly intrusive – relationship between the human and the technological, showing the beauty of its aesthetics, but also questioning its promise of ever increasing progress and self-improvement.

Academia Somaesthetica envisions a new perception of interior and exterior through the human body. It elevates outdoor fitness to a new, urban dimension: The Copacabana beach promenade, known as the largest outdoor sports field in the world and situated in the heart of Rio de Janeiro, gets extended into the building.

МЯО СЯОЧУНЬ
缪晓春
مياو شياو تشون
The large-scale nine-panel installation, Microcosm, is based on Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th century masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Microcosm is an imaginative reinvention of the sumptuous landscape of sin, salvation, and tawdry visions of those who never made it to paradise. The structure and narrative pattern of Bosch’s triptych, such as the architecture of heaven, earth and hell, as well as the basic forms of Bosch’s pictures, have been preserved in Miao Xiaochun’s work. But new digital means and computer technologies have allowed Miao Xiaochun to explore a contemporary visual vocabulary. He abolishes the traditional fixed single-point perspective aesthetic, instead favoring the Chinese tradition of multiple points of view in a single landscape.

Айрис Ван Эрпен
イリス ヴァン ヘルペン
Iris van Herpen is a Dutch fashion designer who is widely recognized as one of fashion’s most talented and forward-thinking creators who continuously pushes the boundaries of fashion design. Since her first show in 2007 van Herpen has been preoccupied with inventing new forms and methods of sartorial expression by combining the most traditional and the most radical materials and garment construction methods into her unique aesthetic vision.

Fan Bing Bing
Now residing in New York, David has earned a reputation for his clean aesthetic, refined color palette and sophisticated approach to composition and is in high demand both from his A–list subjects and brands including Barneys, Burberry, Zegna, L’Oreal, Rimmel, Swarovski, Tommy Hilfiger, YSL Homme and Calvin Klein. He understands the beauty industry inside out, and has developed a rare gift for exploring the parameters of his art.

جانين أنتوني
珍妮安东尼
ג’נין אנטוני
재닌 안토니
Жанин Антони
INGROWN
Since the 1990s, New York–based artist Janine Antoni has established an international reputation with labor-intensive projects in a wide range of media. She incorporates both art history and personal exploration, investigating the ways in which contemporary definitions of aesthetics and art making are connected to issues of gender identity and sexuality. Inspired by the feminist artists of the 1970s, she reframes and subverts art-historical and societal conventions surrounding women and beauty.

الكسندر ماكوين
亚历山大·麦昆
알렉산더 맥퀸
אלכסנדר מקווין
アレキサンダーマックイーン
Александра Маккуина
Android Couture
Presented on the cusp of the new millennium, Alexander McQueen’s Autumn/Winter 1999 collection for famed French fashion house Givenchy captured the new fascination with personalized digital technology in popular culture. At the culmination of the show, two models appeared outfitted in molded Perspex bodices studded with flashing LED lights and glowing leggings patterned like computer chips. The creation of a digital aesthetic and its intimate application to the body—an android-like amalgamation of the physical and digital—anticipated the “wearables” trend and the formation of the digital self. Known for his exquisite tailoring, meticulous detailing, and ambitious collections, McQueen also represented one of the remaining visionaries of haute couture extravagance.

阿克塞尔利伯
Axel Lieber uses everyday items as objects of reference and alienates their materiality by coring them semantically and then filling thus evolving empty spaces with new content. In this way, new synthetic-aesthetic crossovers and oppositions arise that enliven the sculptures and guide the viewer into an intimate sphere at the same time.

Playground Structure (Steps)
In his recent channels of work, Przemek Pyszczek has painted with concrete and ripped apart playgrounds. As hardcore as this sounds, his bright studio in Schöneweide features friendly knots of primary-colored pipes resting in one corner, and opposite, a canvas with waves of sherbet hues leans against the wall. Pyszczek’s use of a variety of aesthetics and materials is the outcome of his recent focus on the contemporary urban landscape of Poland, where he was born.

The Wife of the Alchemist
British sculptor Thom Puckey creates work that interestingly treads between old aesthetic sensibilities and materials and new content. Not unlike Renaissance sculptors, Puckey’s pieces are large, constructed out of marble, and often involve female nudes. Yet at the same time the objects presented in the sculptures are fiercely contemporary[…]

THE MIND CUPOLA
Affective Environment
Brigitta Zics is an artist, interaction designer and media philosopher who investigates the creative and affective potential of emerging technologies to develop new ways of communication between human and machine. Mind Cupola explores the creative potential of eye-movement and applies the philosophical concept of the cognitive-feedback loop to trigger novel aesthetic experiences of the participant.

罗斯·洛夫格罗夫
רוס לאבגרוב
ロス·ラブグローブ
로스 러브그로브
Liquid Crystal
Inspired by the logic and beauty of nature his design possess a trinity between technology, materials science and intelligent organic form, creating what many industrial leaders see as the new aesthetic expression for the 21st Century.

袖岡由英
13-compositions #10
gif
Yoshi Sodeoka is an artist based in New York for over two decades, whose work is characterised by his neo-psychedelic aesthetic and exploration of multiple media and platforms. Primarily comprising of video, GIFs and print his practice also simultaneously inhabits the world of fine art, music, publications, and advertising.more…

crocheted membrane

‘Crocheted Membrane’ experiments with creating a momentary fiction through fashion artifacts. Starting with the physical needs of one individual human body in an outdoor temperature of 10 degrees Celsius, seven hand-crocheted body forms were produced. The clothing’s texture got thinner or opened up completely on areas of the body that needed less warmth and were thicker where warmth was lacking. In this way, a fundamental change in the aesthetic and function of clothes was displayed. Fixed forms, such as trousers, were recreated into new, unique body forms. Instead of one uniform surface, the textures became alive and inimitable. “Her concept of clothing does not derive in the same way as most fashion design, from shape or historically patterned form with embedded social hierarchy and material richness, but is instead determined by the needs and sensations of the human body – performing in the same way that bacteria populations individually respond.” (Villeré 2014) The resulting fictional artifacts illustrate how we could use knowledge about our unique bacteria population to create a novel layer.

Les Paroles

According to Jan Vercruysse, art no longer has a place in this world. As a result, he seeks, through his work, a new place for art and new conditions in which to work. His earliest photographic works recreated historical subjects, such as self-portraits, still lifes and mythological scenes. Gradually, he evolved a sculptural vocabulary of narrow rooms, empty frames and bases without objects. The sacred spaces created by Vercruysse in these works are known as Chambres or Tombeaux and represent the artist’s last-ditched attempts to create art that refers only to itself. His later works, such as plaster pianos, blue Murano glass musical instruments and bronze and ceramic turtles, achieve a perfect equilibrium between conceptual conviction and aesthetic concerns, and also reflect a real pleasure of making.

Future Body

A stiff cyborg, fixed with a glazed and expressionless stare, dips her fingers into an alien-like amniotic fluid. Gravity shifts as droplets reverse upwards, forming a pulsing headpiece that encases her smooth, almost porcelain skull. ‘Future Body’, a new film by Nirma Madhoo, uses CGI and animated 3D modelling to explore technological embodiment, enacting it in a character that transgresses expected gender roles in a newly mechanised system of digital-infused aesthetics.
Set in the clinical, segmented interiors of a simulated hyper-real space, Madhoo’s cyborg is found dressed for battle, in pieces forming exoskeletons, a spinal scorpion’s tail and mantis-like shoes, designed by Iris van Herpen. A collision between her human and technological self is physicalised as she undergoes mitosis, splitting into two and performing a combative dance with her duplicate.
Currently showing in Melbourne in an exhibition titled ‘Fashion Performance: Materiality, Meaning, Media’, alongside work from Hussein Chalayan, BOUDICCA and POSTmatter collaborator Bart Hess, it offers a glimpse into the collapse of gender, species and machine into one another, in turn reimagining the future for fashion design and communication.

lumiére
a complete new version, the result of performing Lumière for more than one year, condensed into a more sophisticated, more complex, more fragile, more massive synaesthetic experience! photos and more info online in early February.Based on self written software, this work on the edge of concert and site specific installation finds previously unseen beauty and minimalistic elegance in a commonly underrated medium. High power lasers draw complex morphing shapes and connect points in space. Lumière combines precise geometric figures with floating organic structures, presenting the archaic sign language of an alien culture communicating via emerging and disappearing traces of extremely bright light.Percussive and textural sonic events provide a counterpoint to the visual rhythm, resulting in a multi sensorial experience which at times is fragile and quiet, at others massive and overwhelming. Each Lumière performance is a unique and site specific real time exploration of synchronicity and divergence, of light and darkness at the limits of perception.

Circles II
Doris Chase has achieved international stature as a pioneer in the field of video art since she moved from Seattle to New York City in 1972. An artist of remarkable and continuous creativity, Chase now divides her time between her video headquarters in New York and a Seattle studio where she works on new projects in painting and sculpture.Beginning as an innovative painter and sculptor in Seattle in the 1950s, Chase created sculpture that was meant to be touched and manipulated by the viewer. Chase then developed large-scale kinetic sculptures in collaboration with choreographers, and her art was set in motion by dancers. In New York, her majors contribution to the evolution of artists’ video has been her work in videodance. On videotape, dancers and sculpture evolve into luminous abstract forms which represent some of the most sophisticated employments of video technology by an artist of the 1970s. In the 1980s, Chase began working in the nascent genre of video theater. In these productions, she uses the imtimacy of the video screen to achieve a new synthesis of visual and dramatic art. Her video theatre compositions present multicultural and social commentary, utilizing scripts by writers such as Lee Breuer, Thulani Davis, and Jessica Hagedorn in the “Concepts” series. Collaborating with actresses Geralding Page, Ann Jackson, Roberta Wallach, Joan Plowright, and Luise Riner in the “By Herself” series, she focuses on the viewpoints and experiences of older women. Today, coming full circle, Doris Chase in Seattle is exploring a renewed interest in painting and sculpture as well as in the modernist aesthetic she never really ceased pursuing, even during her most adventuresome multimedia years.

Matija wanted to create garments that drew upon historical types without relying on traditional techniques of construction. He consciously abstained from knitting, sewing, or adhesion to develop an experimental system of fabrication: 3D scans of the body are manipulated using modelling software, transposed into 2D laser-cut patterns, and then rationalised through scripts into shapes that can be interlocked like puzzle pieces. The resultant object is a complex polyhedron without any seams. More significantly, the process that creates it is an entirely original variation of weaving with unlimited possibilities for novel design and new construction. Manually interlocking hundreds of unique laser-cut pieces with techno-couture craftsmanship, he makes ambitious and integrated thought tangible. Matija’s work aestheticises curiosity by striving constantly to authenticate the possibility of genuine innovation in contemporary fashion.

Silent Percussion
File Festival
The “Silent Percussion Project” (SPP) consists in building a set of computer musical instruments that use human gestures to control sounds, composing and performing with them in an attempt to re-incorporate the body in music performance practice. The “SPP” is a response to the question: what kinds of musical instruments does live computer music performance need? To answer this question it researches the aesthetic qualities and language of non-live electronic music, action-perception systems and new media theory to experiment new ways of bridging between gesture and sound. In that sense, the “SPP” looks to address the problem of sound control by introducing new sensing techniques that take advantage of our sensorimotor capabilities. The Silent Drum and MANO instruments analyze shapes made by hands and transform them into multiple streams of continuous data. These streams, or variables, are directly applied to sound control, avoiding the key paradigm. Continuous data is analyzed to extract discrete features of the signals. The variables resulting from analysis are interdependent, that is, changes in one result in changes in the others, creating complex systems that the performer learns by experimentation.

Vivisector

o what extent does the quality of movement of the virtual world influence real sequences of human movement? Will the real world of the 21st century assume via nanotechnology attributes of the virtual world? Are there still significant differences between a body that is made of synthetic material and warmed artificially and the deep glow of trillions of living cells? VIVISECTOR is an examination of the different speeds of people/nature and technology/information society and of their acceleration; an experiment to overcome the space-time continuum in the real world. It breaks the linearity of movement and in doing so shows the absurdity of momentum. Based on the video-technological concept of the moving body-projection that made D.A.V.E. an international hit, VIVISECTOR now goes one step further: the exclusive concentration on video light and video projection produces a new stage aesthetic in which light, body, video and acoustic space form an unprecedented unity.

The Splits (Rehearsal)

The Splits begins with the bisecting of various string instruments into two halves, cutting them along their length, creating two separate instruments. The two halves must then be played together to complete a tune and are, thus, for duets (or quartets, octets or dectets) only—pieces which she is creating in collaboration with musicians and composers. The act of splitting at once destroys the integrity of the instrument as an object, and disrupts the conventional process of aesthetic creation that the instrument traditionally permits. Splitting is not merely an act of destruction, however. Instead, it opens graceful passages for imagined evolution: the split instrument becomes a newly creative instrument, permitting the creation not only of new music, but new communities (visual artist, the composer, the musicians, and the audience). Ms. Benson has “split” two violins, a viola, cello and double bass: all, cheap, mass-produced string instruments made in China.

“Hannes Van Severen makes the connection between reality and imagination in his work. The artist starts with an existing, everyday object, usually a piece of furniture, which he then transforms and changes. In this way, he deprives the object of its original functionality and allows its aesthetic value to prevail. As a result, the original usefulness of the everyday object no longer predominates, but his work nevertheless continues to be a visual reference to the original. With this paradoxical construction, Hannes Van Severen creates a fictitious world of images with alternative, intrinsic meanings and potential. The observer has to let go of the explanatory and allow his or her imagination to take flight. In combination with the personal experience of the observer, a richer dimension of the reality experienced will emerge with the new reading and interpretation of things that are apparently obvious. With this transformation, Van Severen wants to break down our recognition, to question the obviousness of our reality, and to show us the absurdity that surrounds us. Like the cubists and the surrealists, the artist divides into pieces and rearranges  an existing reality, which means that he can be described as a saboteur of the obvious.” Stef Van Bellingen