Ronen Sharabani: Strings Attached

In his new work for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Sharabani goes a step further and integrates the viewer into the work, forging a relationship between them that moves between the digital and tangible spheres. The work invites the viewer to use their body and, with the help of a mobile phone, to “throw” strings onto the screen. The strings intertwine and become entangled, tying themselves to the chairs overturned on the table. With their help, the chairs can be lowered to the floor and stabilized. The chair, a recurring motif in the history of

art, appears frequently in Sharabani's works, representing the place of humans within the cultural order and their social presence. When the chair does not allow for sitting,

it alludes to the absence of humans (and even their exclusion), and to technology’s takeover of the environment.

The evolving relationship between viewer and screen shifts with the appearance of five robots who observe the interaction, helping to stabilize the chairs, but ultimately taking over the screen and diverting our attention. The robots, operated by AI, “steal the show” – creating a parallel relationship with the viewer and continuing the action in front of the screen, but ultimately severing the connection that has been forged between the viewer , the robots and the screen.

The work examines the connections between humans and machines in the digital age, probing how the active presence of technology in our world shapes these relations time and again – not only as relations based on use and benefit, but as a complex system involving dependency, creativity, and competition for our attention.

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The Welcome Screen project is an annual program comprising four artists, who will present their works consecutively. Each artist will introduce a different trajectory of generative digital art —art that continually renews itself beyond the artist’s direct control, displayed on the large-scale screen at the entrance to the Paul and Herta Amir Building.