Featuring games, performances and interactive installations, Friday Late: Wild Digits reimagines what digital technology can bring into our lives. The flagship live programme marks the finale of the V&A’s inaugural Digital Art Season.
Ahead of the Late on 29 November, Contemporary Programme Curator Carrie Chan sheds light on the work of six of the participating artists of diverse backgrounds. They represent an emerging network actively shaping the UK contemporary digital art scene. Their practices often span across creative fields – from illustration, gaming, performance, textile design, augmented reality to science.
As the UK community of digital art practices grows, technology and computation are more than just tools of creativity. More artists are desiring to disrupt the impact of internet culture, artificial intelligence, surveillance and algorithms in radical ways. Their work is a playful response to our entangled relationship with digits, network and devices in everyday lives. These practices unveil how the digital world has shaped our thinking, movement, relationships and geo-politics.
The six artists are asking critical questions about our technology-led future. As digital technology has become part of us, how do we define human-made and machine-made? If digital systems can become ‘wild’ like nature, can we find fluid categories in them? If humans and other species can connect in games, can we gain new levels of consciousness? Can gaming be used to rewrite colonial histories and foster empathy? The key message is: We can take back agency to redesign digital futures.
Here are six to look out for on the night:
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
BLACKTRANSSEA.COM/Pirating Blackness
Prince Consort Gallery, Room 110
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s practice archives and centres the Black trans experience through game worlds and mixed media. The artist often references the aesthetics of pre-rendered videogames.
Experience the computer game BLACKTRANSSEA.COM/Pirating Blackness which reclaims the forgotten history of Black trans communities in Atlantic crossings. Dive into this sea of re-imagined history and meet the ancestors in this alternative world. You can move through multiple spaces and create your own outcome based on your experience and identity.
The Late will also showcase a recent illustrated character series Uncomfortable Honesty which responds to the current global issues and invites us to confront our values.
@Ladydangfua
Sougwen 愫君 Chung
ECOLOGIES OF BECOMING-WITH
Raphael Cartoons, Room 48a
Sougwen 愫君 Chung is an artist who uses hand and technologically reproduced marks to explore communication between people and machines. In response to the burgeoning impact of AI, the artist asks: What will the human hand become in our future? Where does AI end and ‘we’ begin?
The meditative live performance ECOLOGIES OF BECOMING-WITH activates a collaboration between artist and their bespoke robotic system. Linked through their bio data, the ritualistic improvisation explores how human senses are affected by machine feedback. The work interweaves gestures of traditional drawing and the movement of a machine.
@sougwen
Libby Heaney
Wild Data
Tapestries gallery in Room 94
Originally trained in quantum information science, Libby Heaney explores inherently magical, queer, non-local and hybrid concepts from quantum science to disrupt binary categories and hierarchies and foster radical interconnectedness. Reality can be infinitely more complex than what we see in commodified digital experiences.
‘What if digital systems were wild like nature?’ Wild Data is a playable sci-fi experience which reimagines the commodified digital experience and resists fixed categories in patriarchal capitalism. Explore the multiverse of lush data-landscapes with dying oaks, ghostly habitats and swarms of glitches. This work is presented for the first time in a UK institution.
@libby_heaney_
Aziza Kadyri
Suzani Reimagined
The Globe, Europe 1600 – 1815, Room 4
Aziza Kadyri is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on extended reality (AR/VR), live/digital performance, experimental costume, and textiles. She is interested in the intricate dynamics between artists, craftspeople and AI. She represented Uzbekistan at the 60th Venice Art Biennale.
Kadyri will be hosting a workshop to explore the visual language of suzani embroidery and patterns through the lens of AI. While we learn about the rich history of traditional handmade embroidery from Central Asia, we also experience the biases within AI. Patterns created by the audience will be transformed through AI, resulting in patterns which merge personal memories with unexpected digital interpretations.
@aziza.kadyri
Keiken
Morphogenic Angels
The Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre, Level 3
Keiken is an artist collective of mixed diasporic backgrounds (Mexican, Japanese, European, Jewish) co-founded by Tanya Cruz, Hana Omori and Isabel Ramos. Together they imagine speculative futures to simulate new structures and ways of existing. Disrupting the logic of videogames, their work often has a strong focus on the idea of empathy and co-existence.
Set in an ever-evolving universe 1,000 years from now, the game Morphogenic Angels explores the nature and future of consciousness. Unfolding in a radically different time and space that transcends our current realities, the work illustrates a future where we can gain new capabilities through organic re-engineering of cells. We are now seen as ‘angels’, with consciousness from ancestors, extraterrestrial beings, nature and the cosmos.
On a first-come, first-served basis, the audience can interact with the artists in game play sessions on the night.
@_keiken_
Zein Majali
DOOMSCROLL III by Zein Majali
Medieval & Renaissance, Room 64b, The Simon Sainsbury Gallery
Formerly an engineer and data analyst, Zein Majali turned to the arts out of an urgency to archive and examine accelerated cultural shifts in the Arab world. While her work touches on a post-colonial and globalized Middle East, her primary area of interest is the internet and its effects on both geopolitics and community. Her practice includes video, sound, sculpture and AI.
Through sampling torrents of data, the live performance DOOMSCROLL III reflects on our entangled relationship with technology and the collective spiritual crisis it evokes. This new version responds to the rapidly evolving online space, and how it shapes our relationship to language, politics and community. It consists of original music, archived internet content and generated footage.
@zeinxmajali
The Friday Late features over 10 artists. Other artists include Morehshin Allahyari, Nina Davies, Sian Fan and Shinji Toya. For full details, see our Friday Late page.
See you there!
