We live in a world where what we think of as our reality is constantly shifting, being contested and reimagined. Versions of narratives are increasingly shaped by data through our smartphones, AI and social media. The April Friday Late ‘Is This For Real?’ interrogates technology-influenced truths, emotions and identities through a spectrum of realities, parallel universes and alternate spaces.
The Late marks the opening of the V&A Performance Festival 2025. Ahead of the night, Contemporary Programme Curator Carrie Chan offers a sneak peek on how the participating artists and musicians navigate layers of truths in the AI-driven world. Encounter sensorial performances, films and interactive installations inspired by the contested, fluid boundaries between fact and fiction.
The Emotion Industry by Bon Music Vision
The Raphael Cartoons, Room 48a
Immerse yourself in the artist duo’s sensorial, audio-visual exploration of how AI, social media algorithms, and deepfake technology blur the boundaries of realities and identities. Through experimental soundscapes, volumetric AI visuals, and analogue synthesis, the artists invite us to question our digital existence and emotional authenticity in the age of technological acceleration, with music drawing from diverse influences such as Afro-Futurism, sound system culture and Dub traditions. As mixed-heritage artists navigating layered cultural identities, the artists reflect on how digital fragmentation mirrors the complexities of self-perception and belonging.
Deviation Game by Tomo Kihara and Playfool
Photography Centre, Room 98, The Kusuma Gallery
If AI can easily imitate, how will we deviate?
‘Deviation Game’ is a game-based experiment exploring human creativity beyond AI’s capacity. Players draw prompts in a way that humans can recognise, but AI cannot. Reversing Alan Turing’s Imitation Game, the game challenges us to move away from existing patterns and realities, rethinking how we can collaborate with AI to enrich human creativity.
The work, first commissioned by Civic Creative Base Tokyo, was inspired by the fact that people have found ways to deviate and create unique forms of expression that cannot be replicated by that technology. This pattern of imitation and deviation has been a driving force in the evolution of both technology and expression.
Remnants of Selves by Anthromorph, Costas Kanzantzis and Oliver Torr
Europe 1600 – 1815, Room 4, The Globe
Join artists Anthromorph and Oliver Torr in a divination ceremony exploring the unboundedness of selves and complexity of human identities. Drawing references from ancient Greek ceremonies, the ritual offers a message of hope and freedom.
Navigate the Hellenistic-style, virtual ‘Trans Temple’ created as a space for worship and reflection, in collaboration with Costas Kanzantzis. The temple houses sacred relics illustrating Anthromorph’s multiple identities transcending time and dimensions. It highlights the fluidity of identity, gender and transformation through technology such as 3D scanning, photogrammetry and gaming softwares.
@anthr0morph
@costaskazantzis
@oliver_torr
Critically Extant by Sofia Crespo
National Art Library staircase, Room 25
Explore the unknown in the natural world through Sofia Crespo’s ‘Critically Extant’ film series. These animated representations of critically endangered species were generated by AI algorithms trained on open-source images of nature. With limited visual data available, these animations bear little or no resemblance to that they are meant to depict. The images were originally presented as an Instagram exhibition, an experiment with ways of re-introducing these species into our lives through the digital world.
Leymusoom Garden by Heesoo Kwon
Prince Consort Gallery, Room 110
Through manipulated family photographs and 3D animation, Heesoo Kwon creates alternate realities where her female ancestors from South Korea are liberated from patriarchal constraints. Callenging the perception of what’s real in both memory and technology, the photographic series ‘Premolt’ and the film ‘Leymusoom Garden: New Sun’ explores digital embodiment and feminist mythology. Kwon’s practice queers familial relations and envisions decentralised communities through the self-referential, feminist religion Leymusoom. She abstracts concepts of time and memory, transcending the legacies of sacrifice, trauma and patriarchal violence to offer instead transformative modes of existence, liberation and community.
Uninvited by Nye Thompson and UBERMORGEN
Tapestries, Room 94
The World’s First AI Horror Film for Machines. The film explores a hostile world from the perspective of networks and machines rather than humans. It imagines an emergent network organism, like a monster, that scans and breathes in the world for the first time through millions of virally abused CCTV cameras. Zoom. Enhance. Fear. Nothing makes sense. Hallucinogenic and locked down, vulnerable and oscillating between instability, lust, and aggression, the ‘Monster’ strains to define its own existence and distributed agency.
The film was previously awarded the Lumen Prize Gold Award.
Other participating artists and collectives include Compiler, James Irwin, Off Site Project, DJ Sybil, Jennifer Tang and dmstfctn.
For the full programme, please visit the Friday Late page
