Half Winged
Half Winged is an immersive musical and visual installation built around a single, devastating question. Are we truly free?
Created by longtime collaborators, composer Shara Nova and visual artist Matthew Ritchie, Half Winged is a choral cantata — part song cycle, part ritual, part elegy — that maps humanity’s oldest pattern: the drive to build something new, something bigger, something more beautiful, only to question it, destroy it and begin again.
This ambitious yet accessible work is anchored in a magnificent 70 minute recursive musical score recorded using a spatialized Atmos sound system and featuring an extraordinary ensemble of singers, live and recorded instruments.
AI is a new form that combines old questions with new hazards, not only allowing us to envision multiple futures, but to rediscover and reimagine lost histories, blurring ‘what-might-have-beens’ with myths of creation, choice and crisis repeated across every age.
Addressing pressing contemporary issues of choice and the impact of technology by drawing on and remixing fragments of texts ranging from the Enuma Elish to Paradise Lost, W.E.B. Du Bois, Princess Steel, Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, and Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook; Half Winged gives this pattern a structure through a cast of characters in a feature-length multi-screen AI-generated video, named after the programs used in Large Language Models.
The Discriminator, entropy’s angel forever facing backward, ; the Generator, the wind of change pressing blindly forward; the Transformer, the Composer, the Gardener, the Weaver, and finally the Child — a character voiced entirely by artificial intelligence — who returns, across every act, to the same unanswered question: “Are we truly free?”
The artists’ own prior collaborations were used as the primary prompts for the Large Language Model. Sora was used to generate multiple alternate versions of each scene. Sora closed on April 26, 2026. It was the most expensive failure in AI history.
The work features singers Daniel Bubeck (the Discriminator), Robert Wesley Mason (the Gardner), Mikaela Bennett (the Weaver), Hanna Benn (The Composer), Sam Amidon (the Transformer), and Shara Nova (the Generator). CJ Camerieri and Dave Nelson are the army of brass, along with drums by one and only - James McAlister. Choirs hail from the University of North Texas directed by Dr. Kristina McMullen.
The installation is accompanied by a series of watercolors and the music will be released as a double album later this year.
Learn more about the exhibition and artists here. Entrance is free!
The Artists
Shara Nova is a composer, vocalist, and interdisciplinary artist whose work moves fluidly between indie rock, contemporary classical music, opera, and large-scale participatory performance. She has released six albums under the moniker My Brightest Diamond and has built an expansive career writing for professional ensembles, community choirs, and orchestras while maintaining an active international performing life.
Her choral and vocal compositions have been performed by The Crossing, Conspirare, Cantus Domus, Roomful of Teeth, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Detroit Opera’s Touring Company, and numerous university and community choirs. Nova has composed orchestral and chamber works for yMusic, Brooklyn Rider, Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, and the BBC Concert Orchestra, among others.
Her honors include fellowships and awards from Kresge Arts, Carolina Performing Arts Creative Futures, Knight Foundation, United States Artists, New Music USA, and Opera America. Recordings featuring her work with Conspirare and The Crossing received multiple Grammy nominations in 2023.
Matthew Ritchie’s environmental installations of paintings, wall drawings, light boxes, games, sculpture, films and performance works are a continuous investigation of the idea of embodied information, explored through a shared universe of interconnected stories and images that draw from art, architecture, science, fiction, history and the dynamics of culture, all unified by a unique, shared visual language.
In 2001, Time magazine listed Ritchie as one of 100 innovators for the new millennium, for exploring “the unthinkable or the not-yet-thought.” His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and museums worldwide including the Whitney Biennial, the Sydney Biennial, the Sao Paulo Bienal, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Seville Biennale and the Havana Biennale. Solo exhibitions include; Dallas Museum of Art, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Mass MoCA, Moody Center for the Arts, Portikus, St Louis Museum of Art and ZKM, His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright Knox Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and numerous other institutions worldwide.
Ritchie was born in 1964 in London, graduated from Camberwell College of Art (BFA) in 1986 and emigrated to the United States in 1987. He is currently a Mentor Professor in the Graduate Visual Arts Program at Columbia University, New York and the Dasha Zhukova Distinguished visiting Artist in Residence at MIT. Awards include the Baloise Art Prize, a National Association of Art Critics award, an ID design award, the Federal Art In Architecture National Honor Award and an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts.
Matthew Ritchie + Shara Nova’s Half-Winged
opens Saturday, May 16, from 5-8pm.
The exhibition will be on view May 16 - August 15, 2026
