Biennale.no 2026

Impossible worlds - Symposium and show

Introduction

The 4th Biennale.no will be an online symposium and show about impossible worlds.
The word 'symposium' might be misleading, it is simply meant as an unpretentious interchange online around the notion of 'impossible worlds'. The word is used more in the irreverent context of Fluxus, embracing absurdity, spontaneity, and not requiring particular artistic or academic skill.
The event is a grassroots DIY initiative organised on a small budget (not secured yet).
The biennale will take place in Dec 1 - 31, 2026.
Noemata is the organizer, a Norwegian production site for net based art since 2000. Contact: mail@noemata.net
We're looking for collaborators and participants.

Participation

Since the theme can spark interest both in theoretical fields and artistic practices, it makes sense for the biennale to reflect this, combining a symposium and an exhibition.
We're interested in contributions as The biennale is also a distributed event. The contributions can either be hosted on our site or be distributed externally, online or offline with partners.

Interested?

If you're interested in collaboration or participating, please use our collaborative working sheet and add yourself to the list. If possible add points of interest or the approach/issues that you would like to focus on.

Alternatively, if you prefer email send a message to mail@noemata.net

Points of interest (but not limited to)

Impossible worlds aren't just a fantasy; in philosophy and logic, it serves as a tool to define the boundaries of what we consider real or meaningful.
Different types of impossibilities: Logical (where contradictions co-exist), physical (laws are broken), epistemic (outside our knowledge, speculative), ontological.
Relation to AI/LLM. Could we say they represent the possible combinations of latent space? What about hallucinations? Blank spots, what makes the model collapse?
In logic, a world is impossible if it contains a contradiction. But in art, contradiction is a feature, not a bug. It exists as a "world" the moment someone engages with it.
What lies outside the possible worlds of quantum mechanics, outside of representation. An image that can't possibly be an image (not 'six fingers' type). Then we get into framing and ways of understanding. Impossibility is a relation to something that can't be, so how come we can relate to it? It seems the relation itself is impossible, a fiction. So then we retract and think the idea of the impossible is in fact impossible. So how come we seem to have the idea?
The collapse of the apparatus of representation, the trauma of the frame (something that it cannot contain).
A non-state, with no position, no time, no existence, yet exerting a 'pressure' on the system.
Art not representing a thing but the absence of the conditions required.
Impossibility as a relational scar. Does it resist being understood?
Latent dead zones, whiteout, or spatial disorientation.
Symposium as failure of discourse? The world before or after human consciousness, no observer, outside our interface. Poke hole in that interface?
The impossible not as a property of an object but as a limitation of the subject.
Technology and politics of the impossible. Climate change and dystopia; technology, futurology and utopia.
Psychology, theory of mind, AI - is consciousness anything at all, or its own impossibility and illusion?
Heterotopia, a place that exists outside of normal (social) space, that mirrors, distorts, or upsets the rest of space and society.

Example of a typology sketch for the show (Claude AI)

Self-Negating Art:
Works that actively destroy their own conditions of existence
Art that can only exist by failing to exist as art
Pieces that are complete only when incomplete, but this completion makes them incomplete
Works that are authentic only through their own inauthenticity
Ontological Contradictions:
Art that exists precisely by proving its own impossibility
Works that require mutually exclusive conditions to be simultaneously true
Pieces that become art only by failing to achieve the conditions that would make them art
Objects that must be both created and uncreated to fulfill their artistic function
Temporal Impossibilities:
Works that must be finished before they're begun
Art that exists only in the moment before its creation
Pieces that require their own future to create their past
Works that must be experienced before they exist
Categorical Violations:
Art that must be simultaneously object and non-object
Works that are defined by their resistance to all definition
Pieces that must be both inside and outside their own frame/context
Art that becomes non-art precisely through its perfect achievement as art
Observer-Dependent Impossibilities:
Works that exist only when unobserved, but require observation to exist
Art that must be simultaneously interpreted and uninterpreted
Pieces that are completed by the viewer's inability to complete them
Works that become impossible precisely through their successful perception

The challenge here would be to move beyond metaphorical impossibility into actual ontological impossibility. This might involve:
Creating conditions where the work's existence contradicts its own necessary conditions
Establishing frameworks where completion makes completion impossible
Developing pieces that must violate their own defining characteristics to be what they are

Philosophical issues

It may come as something of a surprise to learn that just about every major philosophical theory of content and meaning is unable to account for impossible thoughts. --Mark Jago

Graham Priest argues that impossible worlds must be treated in the same way as possible worlds, and if we don't accept impossible worlds we can't accept possible worlds either.

Takashi Yagisawa argues: There are other ways of the world than the way the world actually is. Call them possible worlds. And there are other ways of the world than the ways the world could be. Call them impossible worlds.

Extended genuine modal realism accepts concrete possible and impossible worlds. Whatever is impossible holds in some concrete impossible world.

We might wonder whether there is a logic which impossible worlds are closed under. One such candidate is paraconsistent logic(s). Its proponents argue that, impossibly, there are worlds at which inconsistent events happen.

Can we actually think about the impossible? Can we have mental representations - intentional states of the mind - directed to impossible contents? A venerable philosophical tradition denies this. Hume is the most quoted authority: "Tis an establish’d maxim in metaphysics, that whatever the mind clearly conceives includes the idea of possible existence, or in other words, that nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible." This seems to be wrong. Imagination seems to have a logic, albeit one which is hyperintensional and sensitive to context. 'Imagining' is highly ambiguous. We use the word for such different mental activities as daydreaming, hallucinating, supposing, planning, make-believing. Imagination is close to art-making and creativity. We simulate alternatives to reality in our mind, in order to explore what would and would not happen if they were realized.

Hyperintensionality can be characterized as a feature of concepts. An intentional operator X is hyperintensional if when XA and XB have different truth values even when A and B are equivalent. Works on the logic of imagination typically resort to a possible worlds framework, modelling imagination as a restricted quantifier over possible worlds. But imagination, qua intentional mental state, is hyperintensional. Impossible worlds are thus natural candidates for modelling imagination as mental simulation. But imagination, so understood, seems to have further features with which an acceptable model must comply. One feature of imagination as mental simulation is that it can be voluntary in ways belief cannot. One can imagine that all of one's hometown has been painted yellow but, having overwhelming evidence of the contrary, one cannot easily make oneself believe it.

Quine argues that contradictions can be meaningful. Moreover, the doctrine of meaninglessness of contradictions has the severe methodological drawback that it makes it impossible, in principle, ever to devise an effective test of what is meaningful and what is not. It would be forever impossible for us to devise systematic ways of deciding whether a string of signs made sense - even to us individually, let alone other people - or not. For it follows from a discovery in mathematical logic, due to Church, that there can be no generally applicable test of contradictoriness. If we say contradictions are meaningful, aren't we also saying that the impossible is meaningful?

If we say that possible worlds have such-and-such natures, then we seem committed to that claim being necessarily true. After all, if it were possibly false, then it would be false at some possible world, which seems to make little sense.

What difference follows from logical impossibility if Hobbes had (secretly) squared the circle, sick children in the mountains of South America at the time would have cared, or if Hobbes had (secretly) squared the circle, sick children in the mountains of South America at the time would not have cared.

Sylvan's box was absolutely empty, but also had something in it.

Exactly when did Holmes begin to exist? What to do with 'Mr. Pickwick does not exist' is 'a very complicated question'.

The Strangeness of Impossibility Condition. Thinking in terms of closeness between worlds, the condition says that any possible world is closer to a possible world than any impossible world is. Impossible worlds are kept at a distance for as long as they can be: they’re strange.

Most theists hold not only that God exists, but that God exists of necessity: he couldn't have failed to exist.

Impossible worlds are not worlds which themselves could not exist. Rather, they are worlds which represent impossible states of affairs as obtaining.

There are beings which lack existence.

Impossible worlds are worlds according to which impossible things happen. If a world represents that such-and-such and it is impossible that such-and-such, then that is an impossible world.

According to Socrates, art merely reproduces empirical reality and is illusory because it does not take us to the (platonic) transcendental World of Ideas, where we can allegedly grasp the essence of all entities. The unnatural is only antimimetic in the sense of Plato because it does not primarily try to imitate or reproduce the world as we know it; rather it involves the representation of scenarios or events that are physically, logically, or humanly impossible.

Sämi Ludwig argues that representations of the impossible (ie. the unnatural) are "digital rather than analogic." That is to say, they offer particular types of information, namely processed information (meaning) rather than mimesis of the outside (imitation).

In the words of Lisa Zunshine, represented impossibilities have a hitherto neglected narrative potential because they open up new conceptual spaces that make possible, and perhaps even necessary, narratives that explore such spaces.

What Keats calls "Negative Capability" can be resorted to as a way of thinking about the attitudes that many unnatural phenomena invite us to adopt: the state of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.

References

Priest, Graham - Sylvan's Box ( Journal of Formal Logic, Volume 38, Number 4, Fall 1997)
Impossible Worlds (Franz Berto Mark Jago, Oxford Univ. Press, 2019)
The Impossible An Essay on Hyperintensionality (Mark Jago, Oxford Univ. Press, 2014)
Reality And Its Structure Essays In Fundamentality (Ricki Bliss, Oxford Univ. Press, 2018)
Unnatural Narrative Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama (Jan Alber, Univ. Nebraska, 2016)
Counterfactuals (David Lewis. Basil Blackwell, 1973)
The Law of Non-Contradiction (Graham Priest, J. C. Beall, Bradley Armour-Garb. Oxford Univ. Press, 2004)
J Johnson: Janky Materiality: Artifice & Interface - https://punctumbooks.com/titles/janky-materiality-artifice-interface/
Curt Cloninger: Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art - https://punctumbooks.com/titles/some-ways-of-making-nothing-apophatic-apparatuses-in-contemporary-art/
Brian Willems: Speculative Realism and Science Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2017)
Brian Willems: Sham Ruins: A User's Guide (Routledge, 2022)
Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023. Eds. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262549813/output/
Andrea Moro: Impossible Languages - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262549233/impossible-languages/
Barber, Bruce: Littoral Art & Communicative Action edited by Marc James Leger with essays by Maryam Rashidi and Greg Sholette Common. Ground Press Art & Society Series Illinois 2010

Policy

This is an inclusive biennale where every contribution is accepted as long as it relates to the theme, is accessible for free, and has a way for people to interact/comment/chat directly with public.
We intend to give contributor fees to all. 60-70% of the project funding will be allocated to contributors. We can help you ask for your own funding by supplying project information and an invitation to the biennale.
To be inclusive (no rejections), and pay fees with limited funds: A curatorial team will select an amount of contributions in each contribution category to be "featured", which then get a fixed fee (200-500€, to be settled). Other contributions, which might run into hundred, will have to split the rest of the cake. The curatorial team will set clear selection criteria (among them: "original research", "complexity", "amusement", "alignment with theme").

Budget

Proposal: We'll start applying for funding January '26.

Organizer

Noemata is the organizer, a Norwegian production site for net based art since 2000. https://noemata.net.
Our field of interest is the phenomenology of the digital, netbased, and virtual, and its place inside or outside the art discourse, with special focus on technology and precarity, hybrid platforms virtual/physical, the formless - cryptographical - vestigial, psychogeography, drunken trolling, spam, chatbots, artistic AI.
We have for many years worked with open and inclusive group exhibitions and festivals on precarious art, the limits of representatation, including negational forms, often together with international partners. The following are perhaps most akin to the biennale.no project:






About Biennale.no (to be updated)