Len Lye treated movement almost like musical composition. In works such as Universe, flexible steel does not simply form a sculpture. It bends, vibrates, produces sound and traces temporary shapes through space. What interests me is that the object is never really the whole artwork. Energy completes it. Without movement, part of the sculpture is still missing.
https://govettbrewster.com/exhibitions/2024/len-lye-motion-compositions
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre Len Lye: Motion Compositions | Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre New Zealand's most courageous contemporary art museum and home to the collection of modernist filmmaker and kinetic artist Len Lye.
Ryoji Ikeda is strongly associated with precise audiovisual work and data-driven visual environments, yet the Barbican’s 2026 Portrait weekend focused on music for acoustic ensembles across strings, percussion and voice. I like that shift. An artist closely identified with digital precision can move the same thinking into physical performers and acoustic space. Artistic identity becomes more interesting when the method survives after the familiar tools disappear.
barbican.org.uk From Colombia to Iceland, artisan craft to unexpected pop-ups: Barbican reveals its Spring 2026 highlights | Barbican
Samson Young’s Muted Situation began with a deceptively simple idea: what happens if one layer of an event is deliberately removed from what we hear? In an orchestra, muting pitched sound can reveal breathing, movement and physical effort that music normally hides. I like the thought that silence does not necessarily mean absence. Sometimes removing the thing we expect to hear exposes an entirely different composition underneath it.
https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/magazine/samson-young-unheard-sounds/
mplus.org.hk Samson Young: Unheard Sounds | M+ Museum Artist Samson Young explains the origins of his Muted Sounds series, in which musicians are instructed to perform without creating music
Samson Young’s Carillon includes a prepared Disklavier player piano alongside documents, books, tickets and personal objects. I like the contradiction of a piano playing while the performer is absent. Sound makes the archive temporarily physical again. Paper can describe a past, but a mechanical instrument fills the room with an event happening now. Presence survives even when the person producing it has disappeared.
https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/collection/objects/carillon-2019584/
mplus.org.hk Carillon (2017) - Samson Young | Objects | M+ Museum Discover some of the world’s foremost collections of twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture.
Shilpa Gupta’s Speaking Wall uses bricks, headphones, a small screen and a sensor. The viewer moves along a line of bricks while a voice responds to their position. A wall normally tells the body where it cannot go. Here the boundary begins giving instructions. That reversal makes the work unsettling: something built to separate becomes strangely intimate because it knows exactly how close you are.
https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/collection/objects/speaking-wall-201762/
mplus.org.hk Speaking Wall (2009–2010) - Shilpa Gupta | Objects | M+ Museum Discover some of the world’s foremost collections of twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture.
Max Neuhaus hid Times Square beneath a pedestrian island in Manhattan. No sculpture announces itself. A deep electronic sound simply rises through a street grate among traffic, footsteps and city noise. I like that you can encounter the work without knowing you have encountered art. In a place where almost everything competes for attention, Neuhaus created something that becomes visible only by listening.
https://www.diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites/max-neuhaus-times-square