Noa Ry - Switzerland

Born in 1979 in Aargau, Switzerland, Noa Ry grew up in a commune and now lives in Zurich, Switzerland. Her stepfather’s work with computers in the 1980s sparked her early interest in the relationship between humans and technology. 

After attending art school at the age of 16, she earned a BA in Art and at the age of 27 an MA in Cultural and Gender Studies at ZHdK in Zurich.

Living with schizoaffective disorder, Noa Ry moves through realities layered beyond the visible. She hears voices, sees what others do not, and experiences the world through distortions — colliding, splintering, and dissolving into a thousand fragments, much like identity itself. 
What may appear as rupture holds, at the same time, a hidden potential. Through persistence, she has come to recognise this multiplicity as a source — both fragile and powerful — of artistic creation.

Noa Ry is drawn to breaking boundaries and making the invisible interfaces between worlds visible. Her practice moves freely between robotic art, sculpture, sculptural painting, digital drawing, animation, video, and installation. For her, there are no fixed boundaries between analogue and digital, material and virtual. Circuit boards meet clay and silicone; hand-shaped forms merge with iPad drawings and digital software. She chooses no single medium but follows the work wherever it leads — combining, transforming, and allowing one form to flow into another.

For example, she uses face mapping technology to project her facial expressions onto sculptural paintings, bringing previously static works to life and transforming them into video art. Through this process, she merges with her work once again. Her approach seeks to dissolve boundaries between formats, media, people, and society, while allowing herself to surrender to the process.

For more than thirty years, Noa Ry has explored the space where the analogue meets the digital and technology merges with the human. At the age of 27, she developed the concept of the “DIVORG” — a dividing organism. It evolves from the idea of the “cyborg”, explored by Donna Haraway in *A Cyborg Manifesto* (1985): a cybernetic organism merged with the human, yet still an extension of the subject. For the artist, this concept no longer reflects the 21st century. The DIVORG goes further — an organism in constant motion, dividing, transforming, and adapting to survive in a fast-moving, information-driven world.

For her, there are no mistakes — what emerges from the subconscious is the soul of storytelling. 

She embraces technology as an opportunity to approach the future with curiosity rather than fear. For Noa Ry, art is the means through which she chooses to confront this future. 

Noa Ry repeatedly asks herself: Who created whom? Where will our merging with technology take us? Is technology already becoming a new religion? Are we drowning in machines, or are we being reborn through them? What does the term “nature” mean today?

Her art questions how technology shapes humanity, and in doing so, her creations become a mirror of the 21st century.

Contact: noa.rys7@gmail.com

Website: www.noa-ry.com

Vote for Noa in the Sakura Art Prize