I used to think art was something you stood in front of, hands clasped behind your back, nodding thoughtfully like you understood the symbolism.
Then I walked into a digital installation inspired by Neo Concrete principles at a gallery in São Paulo—honestly, I can’t remember the exact year, maybe 2016 or 2017—and within thirty seconds I was crouching on the floor, my shadow triggering ripples of color across projected geometric forms that seemed to breathe in response to my movements. The piece was based on Lygia Clark’s work, specifically her obsession with breaking down the barrier between artwork and participant, except now there were motion sensors and algorithmic responses doing what her hinged metal sculptures did in the 1960s: making you complicit in the art’s existence. It wasn’t passive observation anymore; it was more like a conversation where the art talked back, sometimes predictably, sometimes in ways that felt almost confrontational. I moved left, the forms contracted. I stepped back, they expanded and shifted from crimson to a bruised purple that made me uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t quite articulate. Here’s the thing: Neo Concrete artists like Clark and Hélio Oiticia rejected the cold rationality of Concrete art—they wanted warmth, organic experience, the messiness of human touch. Digital installations inherited that DNA, amplified it through technology that could track and respond to viewers in real time.
What struck me then, and still does, is how this technological layer didn’t distance us from the artwork—it collapsed the distance entirely. Traditional paintings demand contemplation from a respectful meter away. These installations demand presence, movement, sometimes even embarassment when you’re waving your arms around like a conductor and nothing’s happening because you’re standing in the wrong spot.
The Geometry of Getting Your Hands Dirty Without Actually Touching Anything Physical
Neo Concrete artists literally put art in people’s hands—Clark’s Bichos were metal sculptures you had to manipulate, fold, reconfigure. Oiticia’s Parangolés were capes you wore while dancing. The manifesto they published in 1959 rejected what they called the “dangerous exacerbation of rationalism” in mainstream Concrete art, arguing instead for sensory experience and subjective expression. Fast forward to contemporary digital installations and you see programmers and artists creating virtual equivalents: projection-mapped environments that morph based on biometric data, soundscapes that shift with crowd density, LED arrays that respond to gesture. I guess it makes sense that technology known for creating distance—screens, interfaces, mediation—could also dissolve it when deployed with intention. A 2019 installation at ZKM in Karlsruhe used eye-tracking to generate visual patterns unique to each viewer’s gaze path, essentially making every person’s experience unrepeatable. That’s Neo Concrete philosophy encoded in Python and openFrameworks: art as lived experience, not static object.
Anyway, there’s something almost exhausting about it.
You can’t just drift through these spaces passively. I’ve watched people in TeamLab exhibitions in Tokyo spend twenty minutes in a single room, initially delighted by the interactive flowers blooming under their feet, then gradually becoming—I don’t know—almost methodical about it, testing the system’s boundaries, finding its limits. Which is exactly what Lygia Clark wanted, I think: for people to become co-authors, to investigate and interrogate the work rather than receive it as finished pronouncement from on high. Digital sensors just make that investigation more legible, more immediate. When you touch a Bicho and it unfolds, there’s a one-to-one physical relationship. When you step into a projected light field and it fragments into a thousand responsive particles, the relationship is mediated by code, but the phenomenological result—the sensation of agency, of authorship, of the artwork existing *because* you’re there—remains fundamentally the same. Museums hate this, by the way. Traditional conservation strategies assume artworks are stable objects. These installations are temporal events that exist only in activation.
Turns Out Breaking the Fourth Wall Means Destroying the Frame Entirely and Handing the Audience the Remnants
Wait—maybe that’s too dramatic.
But there’s a real conceptual violence in what Neo Concrete digital installations do to traditional art hierarchies. The artist is still author, sure, but you’re more like an instrument the composition requires to be heard. I saw a piece in Berlin, probably 2018, where participants wore haptic vests that vibrated in response to other participants’ movements tracked through overhead cameras—you literally felt other people’s presence translated through algorithmic interpretation and mechanical actuators pressed against your ribs. It was intimate and alien simultaneously, and definately made me reconsider what “participation” means when mediated through multiple technological layers. The Neo Concrete artists wanted to activate the spectator’s body, to make art a durational experience rather than instant visual consumption. Digital technology gives contemporary artists an almost overwhelming toolkit for precisely that activation: motion tracking, facial recognition, galvanic skin response sensors, spatial audio that follows you through architectural space. Some installations even use machine learning to adapt to aggregate visitor behavior over weeks, evolving in response to cumulative interaction patterns. At that point, who’s the author? The artist who wrote the initial parameters? The algorithm optimizing for engagement? The thousands of visitors whose movements trained the system?
Honestly, I don’t think there’s a clean answer, which feels appropriately Neo Concrete—embracing ambiguity, rejecting rational certainty, prioritizing lived complexity over theoretical purity.
