HS82 x Steinway & Sons

Initiated by the studio as a way to further “celebrate time” Humans since 1982 has collaborated with Steinway & Sons piano makers and revered Swedish pianist Mathias Algotsson to create an ephemeral, cross-disciplinary performance inspired by their signature kinetic artwork A million Times.

Algotsson performs an entirely improvised piano recital on a Steinway Spirio, an innovative grand piano with the ability to self-play that is placed directly in front of a 504 clock face A million Times artwork. Throughout the 15-minute performance, the pianist is responding in real-time to the movements the analogue clock hands perform on the wall-filling artwork currently showcased at Humans since 1982’s studio.

The clock hands themselves are programmed through the studio’s custom combination of bespoke hardware and software resulting in precise cyclical and cumulative patterns, before falling into place once each minute to tell the accurate time in a digital format. The choreographies are inspired by and draw upon natural, artistic, and mathematical pattern formations to create an artwork that is in a constant state of change. This ebb and flow is translated by Algotsson through the unrivaled sound of the Steinway piano, in which the interaction of movement and music becomes a transcendent moment, with the audience immersed in this unique passage of time.

‘Celebrating Time - with Mathias Algotsson’ is a performance that resists the static or predictable. This is craftsmanship and creativity at its most ephemeral, a unique and fleeting performance realised in-the-moment to be experienced live only once. Every pianist, location, and rendition offers the audience a different interpretation and composition of movement as music.