From toothbrushes to toasters, we are surrounded in our everyday lives by electricity as a base utility, powering the objects we rely on so routinely that they recede into the background. But every so often, an electrified object becomes something more. Thoughtful in design and inventive in its engineering, it reminds us that technology can be more than useful. It can make us look at something familiar in an entirely new way.  

Lexus set out with a simple question: what if electricity could make us feel the way art makes us feel? 

That question became the starting point for MOTOMORPHOSIS, a collaborative exhibition between Lexus and Brooklyn-based conceptual collective MSCHF during New York’s Armory Week. For the sculptures, Lexus handed over the keys to two of its electrified vehicles and invited MSCHF to treat them less like finished automobiles and more like raw material. 

The result was a pair of sculptures that felt instantly recognizable, yet completely impossible. Twisted and stretched, the vehicles blurred the lines between consumer luxury and sculptural form. The RZ 450e was transformed into a continuous loop to become Circle Car, a vehicle caught in perpetual motion. While Twisted Car took the RX 450h+ and pulled it into a dramatic spiral, seemingly caught in the middle of a digital transformation. 

Lexus sat down with MSCHF’s Chief Creative Officer Kevin Wiesner to talk through the mechanics, philosophy, and practical challenges behind turning his digital transformations into tangible automotive art for MOTOMORPHOSIS: 

Distortions are a recurring motif in MSCHF’s work, which often translates digital transformations into the physical world — producing a feeling of impossibility. What draws you to distortion as a creative language, and what does turning it into a physical object allow you to explore that you couldn’t achieve through a screen?
Physically realizing the formal vernacular of shapes and transformations that are native to digital processes sits at the intersection of imagery that feels very natural to us (saturated as we are in the digital) and at the same time seems impossibly unfamiliar when we see it in the world. We see this tension even in the photos of the cars being installed or transported – they appear oddly ‘fake’ to us, because their shapes are so instantly recognizable as “computer” forms; seeing them on a real NYC street creates a moment of confusion between the real and the imaginary.

Tell us a bit about how Twisted Car and Circle Car came to be. What ideas or questions were you exploring through the work, and how did those ideas evolve into the sculptures we see today?
Within the automotive industry you have a recognizable format of the Concept Car—sometimes quite far from reality—as futurecasting or exploration. Early on, we had this idea of inverting the idea of a Concept Car and taking a purely Formalist approach to the object. The existence of the Concept Car implies the existence of the Form Car!

Why were Lexus electrified vehicles the right objects to explore those ideas through?
Lexus’s approach to EVs shares themes of defamiliarization and reinvention. I think it speaks volumes that Lexus was specifically pursuing an artistic commission and partnership in this way. There’s a shared philosophical relationship to object-making and what it means to push something beyond the bounds of our expected association with its category; this is process by which we create the sublime.

There’s a big difference between imagining an impossible form digitally and bringing it into the physical world. What were some of the challenges you faced along the way?
While the shapes are unorthodox, there is a lot of expertise around doing car customs, and so the finishing, paint, overcoat on the sculptures follows a similar pattern to what happens in most autobody shops. 

The shape of the sculpture of course diverges heavily from a standard car. Starting from a steel armature, there are then thousands of individual pieces joined together to form the skin.

As with so many things MSCHF does, we’re consciously trying to use existing processes—but to make a different type of object than the industry norm. The biggest challenge comes in joining these processes together at scale and making the final sculptures transportable for installation.  

The MOTOMORPHOSIS exhibition placed the transformed vehicles alongside their original forms. What did that juxtaposition add to the work?
We can see the process of sampling and reinterpretation at work! MSCHF’s work uses pre-existing cultural elements as building blocks—in this case literally as objects, but sometimes brands or imagery or ideas. The format of the show puts this thought process on display, and also creates a dialogue between the sculptures and the cars. We understand the cars as the result of creative process as well! And we understand the sculptures as coming from the disruption of our familiarity with car-ness.

We’re living in a moment when audiences are used to seeing impossible images and assuming they were generated by AI. Were you anticipating this type of reaction when images of Twisted Car and Circle Car first appeared online?
We are at a strange moment for this particular distinction between ‘digital’ and ‘real’  images. There’s a consistent logic to the kind of transformation deployed in Motomorphosis that comes from 3d software. AI imagery doesn’t have this logic – it’s all surface. Across the internet the bounds between real and unreal are blurrier than they have ever been. It’s possible that this increases the power of constructing such fantastic forms in real life.  

How has the audience’s reaction changed the way you think about Twisted Car and Circle Car?
I think the most striking reaction was how sincerely people kept trying to open the doors on the sculptures – if these could have driven away, they would have.