Friday Late - Phantom Constructs

This Halloween, Friday Late explores the eerie, the surreal, and the sinister in contemporary design and performance. With the lines blurred between reality and simulation, discover how artists and designers are using world-building and storytelling to play with our perceptions and our fears. Join us after dark for a night of haunting stagecraft, surreal screenings, and weird workshops that revel in the darker side of modern making. 

All events are free, and places are designated on a first-come, first-served basis unless stated otherwise. Filming and photography will take place at this event. 

Please note if the V&A or any of the activations reaches capacity, we will allow access on a one-in, one-out basis. 

Friday 30 October 

18.30 – 22.00  

#FridayLate  

 
A 

DJ set by Jacky-Oh Weinhaus 

The Grand Entrance, Cromwell Road  

18.30 – 21.30 

Performance at 20:30  

Berlin: Sexy, sass, glamour and dirt.  

Just like Jacky-Oh Weinhaus – the part-time girl from the German capital with a proper shaving difficulty. Through her work in nightlife and political art she will bring you disco, dazzle and the energy for a brighter tomorrow. J'adore Darling, Darling j'adore! 

@jackyohweinhaus 

 

B 

Hyper-Reality 

The Raphael Cartoons, Room 48a 
Drop in 18:30 – 21:30 

Keiichi Matsuda’s short film Hyper-Reality plunges viewers into a sensory-overloaded world where the physical and virtual have entirely merged. The film navigates a city layered with augmented-reality pop-ups, gamified gig-work, and relentless targeted ads. Blurring the boundary between reality and simulation, this piece of digital world-building illustrates an unsettling vision of a daily environment dictated by technology, where disconnecting is no longer an option. 

 
@keiichi.matsuda 

 

C 

Sorting Song 

V&A Café, Poynter Room, Room 15a 
Drop in 18:30 – 21:30 

Simone C. Niquille’s computer-generated film subverts the innocent format of a children's educational video to reveal how artificial intelligence interprets our lives. Through visualizing the training datasets used for machine vision, Niquille exposes the eerie reality of an environment rendered entirely machine-readable. When is a vase a bowl? Is a toilet a chair?  

 The work highlights the unsettling consequences of allowing algorithms to categorize our physical world. 

@technoflesh 

D 

geist.xyz 

Europe 1600-1815, Room 4 
Drop in 18:30 – 21:30 

Conceptual design studio ZEITGUISED present this haunting choreography of algorithmically generated amorphous textiles. These virtual fabrics writhe and morph across a digital void, a “ghost in the shell” blurring the boundary between the artificial and the organic. Stripping away any human elements, the resulting simulation constructs a strange digital reality where familiar, physical materials are rendered alien. 

@zeitguised 

 

E  

NVAP Screening: Berberian Sound Studio 

Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre, Level 2  

Drop in from 19:30 – 21:00 
Full screening time 1 hour 30 minutes 

Explore the mechanics of fear with a screening of Berberian Sound Studio, recorded live at London’s Donmar Warehouse in 2019, from the V&A’s National Video Archive of Performance. The play follows a 1970s sound engineer whose reality unravels while producing Foley effects for horror films. The play exposes the physical craft of audio design, demonstrating how auditory world-building can effectively distort our perception. 

F 

Out of the Box: Halloween 

Prints and Drawings Study Room 
Sessions at 19:00and 20:00 

Artists have long used the mediums of print, photography and drawing to challenge the lines between reality and imagination. Different techniques and approaches to explore the unfamiliar and mysterious, provide an otherworldly perspective that allows us to immerse ourselves in the enduring fascination of the strange and supernatural. Come and engage with a selection of works, not usually on display, that explore the themes of Halloween, the eerie and mystical, and the surreal. 
 

Credits 

V&A Curator: Kristian Volsing 

Producer: Faunsia Tucker and Katya Spiers 

Friday Lates are produced by the Contemporary Programme Team, with support from operation, design, audio-visual, and marketing teams at the V&A. 

Also on tonight: 

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art
The Sainsbury Gallery 

This exhibition has been created in collaboration with Schiaparelli 

 Discount for under 26s 

 

Keep In Touch  

vam.ac.uk/fridaylate  

Visit vam.ac.uk/signup and subscribe to our e-newsletters featuring exhibitions, events and special offers.  

instagram & tiktok:  @vamuseum  

facebook: victoriaandalbertmuseum  

View photos of tonight’s event on flickr.com/fridaylate/