Flipping a coin forever”, image courtesy of Noah Cohen

There’s few artists, who—literally—live and breathe the worlds their work creates. Noah Cohen is definitely one of them. It took just seconds upon entering the French artist’s studio at ISO Amsterdam for us to be fully submerged in his fantasy universe of cyborg creatures and metal-meets-feathers sculptures. In his dimly neon-lit art-space, Cohen’s fluid creations merged with the banging techno beats coming from ISO’s communal kitchen; a sense of urgent transformation and (SOPHIE voice) a WHOLE NEW WORLD took over us.

Withholding from any type of categorization, Cohen and his work exist in-between the familiar and the uncanny. Most of the artist’s objects are ever-shifting creatures that take on a life of their own. Growing and transforming as Cohen himself pushes the boundaries of his own practice, his work responds to both the inherent chaos of the world and the thrill from recognizing the beauty of perpetual change. “Fixing things means also having to destroy them… When you stay fluid, you’re always transforming and never really destroying,” he tells us. We simply had to know more, and so we sat down with the artist at his studio for a talk on harmonic contradictions, technology, and his vision on the future.

Noah, take us on a short trip through your artistic evolution.

When I first leaned into being an artist, it was more of an excuse to be creative, which I hoped at some point would be rewarded as something “professional”. In the beginning, I’d keep a lot of my creative expressions to myself, such as my haircuts or some clothes that I’d cut; they were not my “artistic” practice but something I just did for myself. I believed I had to be precise in my plan about what I wanted to make artistically. Now, however, it’s all intertwined. I understand that my practice is more about filling stuff for myself and keeping myself excited about the world, not so much about anything professional. Changing haircuts or always adapting my style is, after all, part of my creative process as a whole. I naturally never fix anything, and having just started a Master’s for which I’m expected to have a methodology, I kind of began to see my methodology as mess (in a good sense). [Laughs]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Noah Cohen (@no5ah0bot)

How does a project start for you?

Most of my projects are ongoing. They start intuitively, but also quite opportunistically, in the sense that I work a lot with objects, or situations, that I encounter randomly. Sometimes my objects can appear cyborg-like because of my cyber-punk fantasy, but that cyborg aesthetic can also emerge simply out of an interesting thing I find on the street. Weird to say, but I honestly don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. My objects and creatures know. And when I finish an object, I live to believe that, for the object, it is only the beginning.

So, you’re just the vessel?

Yes, it’s my fantasy world, but the objects build it up on their own, in a way.

It’s also a world full of harmonic contradictions. Is this some kind of fetish for balance?
This is something I still question myself about. I’ve always been attracted to horror and gory stuff, but also glitter, you know. I think that when you give yourself a huge range of things to identify with, you don’t need to fit in one aesthetic but can just fill up your own thing within this big spectrum of ideas and aesthetics. You’re simultaneously on one extreme and on the other, which then kind of presupposes you’re also filling up all the space in-between.

I also see the push and pull between destruction and renewal, would you agree?

Interesting... This makes me think about the moment when society switched from an oral culture to a written one, and how that was a way to fix knowledge. Fixing things means also having to destroy them. Cultures that are oral, we might think they’re losing knowledge since nothing is fixed, but in fact it’s those that try and fix things that are losing knowledge; the knowledge that’s always in-between and impossible to fix. When you stay fluid, you’re always transforming and never really destroying. I guess this is where my inclination towards destruction and renewal comes from...

Ceramic BDSM pearl in collaboration with GNDR404, images courtesy of Noah Cohen

Can we also talk a bit about your video work. The themes there are pretty much intertwined with all of your other work, right?
Indeed, I imagine most of the objects I make as characters in my videos too. Video is a way for me to build up on that fiction universe, because if I create an object and it’s in a video, but you can also see the object in other spaces or work too, it somehow creates a whole narrative. I was first considering myself more of a video artist since that was the medium I thought could closest embody the fiction I have in my head, but now I realize that actually the narrative in the video always comes from the objects themselves. This kind of goes back to your question about where a work starts, and for me the start is when an object begins a narrative. I leave the narrative quite abstract and let the objects speak for themselves... Most times when I film, I have no idea what the outcome will be and I leave myself the opportunity to change the result as much as I can. Most importantly, when the result is different than what I had imagined, it means I’ve done a good job.

Would you say that technology is natural? In the sense that technology is both part of nature, but also something we as natural beings have created and is thus natural.
I used to make this statement, that whatever we make is natural. With technology, we are indeed trying to reproduce nature quite literally. It’s a different kind of nature, but then again, aren’t there a lot of kinds of natures anyway? Also, to be natural is to always transform, adapt and evolve, and technology is precisely that, even though it has its strict rules and is mainly a tool. Technology for me is also a parallel way of experiencing life.

What’s your vision on the future of the world?

I don’t dare to have a vision on how the wold is going to be. I’m just an ever-adapting person and artist. I accept life as something I cannot control—I don’t mean society, but the very essence of life—and I’m at peace with this. For me, the main question is: How can I be most effective at adapting to the things I’m faced with at this moment in time? And by adapting, I also mean how to stay free in a world that tries so hard to control. In my eyes, the real nature of life is freedom.

And what makes you excited to keep on going?

I think the search for excitement in life is what’s keeping me going. Trying to find the beauty in life is so hard, especially now, but if you can excite yourself about trying to find it, you can keep going. Also, social interaction! I’ve been struggling a lot with my practice this last summer, but I’ve recently met some new people because of my Master’s, and this has been such an inspiring thing to me—other people. In the end, the only thing we truly have is each other.