Future Shock - Art meets Technology
- THE DVN
- Jul 14, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 22, 2022
Future Shock is the current exhibition at 180 Studios, featuring a series of audiovisual exhibitions by 14 international artists and collectives, available to see until 28 August 2022.
The exhibition has influences from music, in some of the rooms you will find that the work wouldn't be the same without the use of music, adding music to the installation gives the artists vision a whole other meaning. Future Shock’s sound swerves towards the club without ever quite getting there, what might be called gallery-techno.
The above video is an installation called Subconscious (2022) by Weirdcore. Featuring a soundtrack by Aphex Twin. It is a twisting corridor decorated with microchip style lit by strobing lights that repeatedly move the colours of the wall, while the techno music pulsated in the background causing a synchronised situation.
When entering this room you will find the work Subassemblies by Berlin-based Japanese musical and visual composer Ryoichi Kurokawa. You are in the center of two screens, sandwiched between opposite ceiling-high screens on which nature and abandoned building scenes are rendered with a soundtrack of adrenaline-pumping music and flashes of coloured light are shown.
Italian electronic composer Caterina Barbieri’s installation called Vigil (above) is filled with her serene music it also features a film of clouds and sunset while an ice block suspended from the ceiling melts in front of the screen. These works are said to generate timeless human, emotional responses. The ice block is changed twice and week.
One of the disorienting of all at the exhibition was Vicky by Actual Objects Los Angeles-based creative studio . Commissioned for the exhibition, it features virtual humans from a data-dominated future. Each figure is displayed on a phone-shaped LED screen. The figures are animated, yet lifelike at the same time. When you approach and present a virtual image to a scanner, they rant and rave. It feels like being encountered by someone you would not want to talk to get in the way of.
The Daydream V.6 (2021) by Nonotak features moving lines of light arranged in rows, with circles and grids and sounds by Hamill Industries’ Vortex (2016/22), sound-tracked by gallery-techno doyen Floating Points - British producer.
Lek’s film Theta (2020) by Lawrence, delivers film narrative.This short film features a police car’s AI system that has been in conversation with another voice who reveals that she (it) is another part of the car’s AI, as the car drives around a deserted city called SimBeijing it then comes across a fox. This “Sinofuturist” (a video essay combining elements of science fiction, documentary melodrama, social realism, and Chinese cosmologies) the animation has been done very well, from the graphics and mood to the internal conversation which shows exactly the kind of possibilities that AI is heading towards.
Interior designer Ben Kelly’s Columns (2022) features twirling mirrors and plinth like columns that aim to create a hypnotic effect. With the use of dramatic sound and the sculptures moving, it almost makes you feel like something is about to jump out.
Topologies by UVA (United Visual Artists) is a London based collective. The work features
Silent planes of light that move across the dark room over a sloping ramp, consisting of five kinetic sculptures that project planes of light stretching across the room, creating geometries that continuously divide and reconfigure the space.
