Composer and saxophonist Eric Sleichims is the founder and artistic director of BL!NDMAN. Apart from being a contemporary music ensemble, BL!NDMAN is also the name of a lab in which an ongoing working process has been happening since its creation in 1988. The name is derived from Marcel Duchamp's journal The Blind Man, started in 1917: that title refers to the Dadaist idea of a blind guide who leads visitors around an exhibition. The collective, headed by Sleichim, aims to translate artistic concepts underlying the work of visual artists such as Duchamp and Beuys into a musical language. Using the classical saxophone quartet line-up as a starting point, BL!NDMAN focuses on the development of unconventional playing techniques, traversing different artistic disciplines and expanding the repertoire for the instrument in idiosyncratic ways. With its multidisciplinary approach, BL!NDMAN has now gained international fame. From the outset, the ensemble has received commissions from the dance and theatre world, elaborated multimedia performances and provided live music for a number of silent films. 

BL!NDMAN has in the past collaborated with artists such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Collegium Vocale Gent, Filmfabriek, Gerry Hemmingway, Guy Cassiers, Heiner Goebbels, Ictus ensemble, Ivo Van Hove, Jan Fabre, Josse De Pauw, Paul Van Nevel, Peter Verhelst, Steve Lacy and Terry Riley. In 2008, Sleichim expanded BL!NDMAN into a collective in which the twenty years of stage experience of the original quartet BL!NDMAN [sax] is shared with the young quartets BL!NDMAN [drums] and BL!NDMAN [vox]. In addition, an educational touch was added to BL!NDMAN's palette in the form of the young string quartet BL!NDMAN [new strings].