“What does it mean in art that the world is not as we perceive it? » ask Daniel van der Velden (54 years old) and Vinca Kruk (45 years old), the Dutch artists who make up the duo Metahaven. “It may mean that there are worlds that cannot be told and that we need to break that limit,” they respond. And to do this, they have built an aesthetic where digital, poetry, philosophy and science coexist.
They founded Metahaven in 2007 and over time have produced audiovisual works, books, textiles and graphic projects for brands such as Balenciaga. In 2010, they collaborated with WikiLeaks, a relationship born out of Black transparencytheir investigation into opacity, leaks and geopolitics on the Internet. This project resulted in a series of graphic materials designed to help the organization after its financial blockade.
Metahaven’s work is difficult to place in a single territory. “We are the inhabitants of all these spaces,” says Van der Velden, visiting Madrid to present the exhibition. Collapse of the Weave function (collapse of tissue function), at the slaughterhouse. Living, they say, also involves letting ourselves be affected by everyday life, by what we read, by the devices we use to communicate, by the words we exchange.
Both studied graphic design, although in different years, at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, and have long articulated a discourse linked to power, technological opacity and disinformation. Moving image and sound have been the tools they have used to explore the structural tensions of our times, but they now say they have moved towards a more lyrical and existential production. “About ten years ago, the interest in power was central to our work. How to analyze politics and how power operates through technology. In the last eight, however, we have focused on poetry, lyricism and cognition,” details Daniel.
“I wonder if we can talk about art without technology,” he asks. They want to look at AI as another aesthetic territory. “Generative artificial intelligence starts from limited inputs to produce sentences without really knowing what a language is. It does not work with symbolic rules as traditional linguistics understands, but with a mathematical description,” explains Van der Velden. For him, this opens up new metadiscourses on art. “In the medium and long term, the question is what implications this new awareness of language will have on art itself,” he emphasizes.
To enter the AI, they compared its interior with Finnegans alarm clockthe book in which James Joyce took language to the brink of its own combustion: neologisms, words composed in more than 60 languages, cramps, dreamlike sentences. “Joyce wrote this book in 1939 and it’s full of words that didn’t exist. It’s a bit like GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks) inventing a language,” explains Van der Velden. A linguistic madness which for them is not a detail to be overlooked: “Language is both technological and biological. You give the AI 5 billion Internet pages to produce sentences, like children learn from a few words.” This fascination, they say, came from everyday childish chatter.
“We started reading poetry to our daughter when she was four years old and playing with language through the way she spoke,” remembers Vinca Kruk. “His first word was…” Van der Velden continues. “Book,” she finishes.
They read Slavic poems with abrupt changes and sentences that assert and renounce themselves: “It’s saying one thing and saying it again. Playing with language,” says the artist. It was a kind of absurdist poetry about things that cannot exist in reality, things upside down, worlds upside down. “Children do it, they have the gift of fantasy, but it’s also a way of finding new expressions for what is difficult to name in our time,” says Daniel, for whom poetry is a decisive way of thinking about the present. He warns, however: “Not all poetry, but some of it continues to be undervalued. » What moves him is his ability to address “the things that exist within us” without having to fully explain them, in the same way that some writers “manage to enter our minds and our hearts in an astonishing way”.
They say they are interested in the way literature can anticipate experiences not yet lived. “Sometimes we can understand things that we have not yet experienced, of which we do not even have an image,” emphasizes Daniel. They cite names like Etel Adnan, Benjamin Labatut, Clarice Lispector and Eugene Ostashevsky.
The exhibition they presented in Matadero was a journey into a hyperconnected and luminous night. Four rooms coexisted in space: Hometown (2018), video; Without center (2025), embroidery on plastic bags; Collapse of the Weave function (2025), a garland jacquard 30 meters long with Schrödinger’s cats, and Vortex (2025), two tapestries suspended in the air.
A combination of fragments of light that escape from the screen due to lack of limits. Plastic, pixels, wires. Orange, yellow, green, purple, phosphorescent blue. Bright, noisy, tense. A sensation similar to that of inhabiting an electric poem. “We think it’s interesting that art takes you to other spaces,” says Van der Velden. What type of spaces? “Those in which new questions arise for experience.”
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