ForReal Zvika Markfeld & Saron Paz

ForReal is the collaborative practice of Zvika Markfeld and Saron Paz, based in South Tel Aviv. Since 2011 the duo has produced participatory installations, kinetic sculptures, public-space interventions and collective instruments that exist only in the moment an audience completes them. Their work has been commissioned and shown by Science Gallery Dublin, MadaTech — the Israel National Museum of Science, Technology and Space (where BitWeen is on permanent display), the Bloomfield Science Museum Jerusalem, Hansen House Centre for Design, Media and Technology, the Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Centre, Fresh Paint Art Fair, the MusraraMix Festival and the Sounds of the Old City Festival in Jerusalem, and at Google events in London, New York and Seoul.

Zvika Markfeld is a maker, robotics engineer and self-described coding poet working at the intersection of physical computing, robotics and interactive art. He has built robotic, kinetic and interactive works for artists, studios and institutions, taught interaction and physical computing at MiLab (Reichman University), Bezalel's Design and Technology master's track and the Musrara School of Art, and co-founded JerusaLab, the interaction lab at Musrara. He later served as Tech Lead of monday.com's Makers team, and today extends the practice into domestic connected objects — story boxes and talking clocks that keep families present to one another across distance.

Saron Paz is a new-media artist, experience designer and curator whose practice sits at the meeting point of technology, material and public space, turning passers-by into participants and animating everyday objects until they seem to feel. He has exhibited internationally and produced permanent public works across Israel, including HexagonShifters in Haifa and SimonSays in Kiryat Gat, and PointOfView, twin lighthouse sculptures linking San Francisco and Haifa in real time. As a curator he grew Jerusalem Design Week into Israel's largest annual design festival and curated the Jerusalem Mini Maker Faire and the MusraraMix Festival. He served as Chief Innovation Officer of MakeLab Network, helping found maker and innovation centres in Nigeria and Ghana, and as Team Lead of monday.com's Makers team.

We build machines that are incomplete by design. Each one waits — sometimes for a gesture, sometimes for a word, sometimes for a personal object to be surrendered — and only becomes the work when a stranger decides to take part.

Our material is not the motor, the laser or the line of code, though we build all of them by hand. Our material is the moment of participation: the hesitation before a passer-by texts seven letters onto a city billboard, the small grief of feeding a keepsake to a wrecking ball, the uncanny recognition of facing an army of robots that move as you move.

We borrow freely from the games, rituals and tools of everyday life — Pong and Space Invaders, the Rube Goldberg contraption, the vending machine, the lighthouse, Pollock's drip — and re-stage them as public experiences that put the body back into an increasingly screen-bound culture. The technology is never the subject. The subject is what people do with each other once the machine gives them permission.