A collateral event of the 53rd Venice Biennale. Curated by James Putnam. Presenting new works by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Gavin Turk, Jamie Shovlin, Matt Collishaw, Oliver Clegg, Alastair Mackie, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.
The project is intended in part to celebrate the tradition of the great 16th century Venetian painters, like Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594) who used distortion to achieve dramatic effect.

Distortion affects the perception of an image and depends upon the changes that the thing undergoes in the process of becoming an aesthetic object. It can combine elements of both the comic and grotesque in stylistic distortions of the human form - strangely disproportioned figures and the expressive deformation of particular features.

Rather than making an image 'worse' it merely represents a change in the original image's information. This alteration can be more pleasing to human perception than if the image was 'perfectly' regular.

In the genre of rock music much of its' appreciation relies on 'beauty' of guitar distortion achieved by overdriven valve amps and fuzz pedals.