LONDON.- arebyte began the presentation of Futures Past, a group exhibition taking the viewer on an immersive journey through the excavated ruins of the future, as part of arebyte's 2022/23 programme Sci-Fi which looks at fictioning and alternative futures through a series of exhibitions, live performances, online experiences and educational activities. With a mix of digital and sculptural works, interactive and static content, as well as AI-generated narratives, the gallery becomes a site for discovering the concept of futurity through the past. The exhibition will continue until January 28th, 2023.
Unlike the Western notion of time, with its linear view of history to the left and future to the right, Futures Past asks us to reconsider this by looking at our present from the eyes of the future – in essence, to walk backwards into the future with our eyes fixed on the past. Examining time and embracing its non-linearity allows for more spiritual and progressive views on how to inhabit a time where future, present, and past coexist.
The gallery takes on a new purpose as a site for archiving and preservation, becoming a mediator for concepts of futurity by displaying digital and physical artefacts of the 21st century. Monitors, projections, video walls and LED panels lie on the exposed floor of the gallery seeking renewed attention and allowing visitors to develop a deeper understanding of the hereafter.
Like a puzzle to be pieced together, the works blend different histories, cultures and temporalities, inviting us to reimagine the way we view artefacts, denouncing colonial pasts, and unpacking the multiple crises confronting us today. This “de-inventing” of the future returns us to a present that is a “fraught and fragmentary site of struggle.”
The five key concepts that Patricia Waugh and Marc Botha examined in their book “Future Theory” - boundaries, organisation, rupture, novelty, and futurity – function as a framework for Futures Past. The artworks in the exhibition, in fact, revolve around these five categories and are a demonstration of how theory can be applied to a constantly shifting world.
Works by Dominique Cro, Entangled Others (a duo of Sofia Crespo and Feileacan McCormick), Shinji Toya and Matteo Zamagni explore rupture and futurity by addressing climate change, extractivism and the Anthropocene. Their works use machine sentience and data remixing to provide insights into organic and electronic evolutionary processes.
Morehshin Allahyari and Juan Covelli explore boundaries and organisation, addressing colonial practices and ownership of relics and artefacts. Their 3D-printed and video works critique representation as a technology of colonial domination over nature. This is exemplified in the open-source method of creation and dissemination of their works, as well as in the cultures for which the work speaks, exposing the in-between, empowering the powerless, and questioning the presupposed. Further exploration into the dissemination of data and cultural property is the incorporation of 3D printed objects from the open-source collection Three D Scans, a project initiated in 2012 by Oliver Laric.
Kumbirai Makumbe and Abi Sheng, as well as Ryan Vautier and Sarah Blome convey novelty and futurity, while addressing post-human and cyborgian threads. These works interrogate the body as a site for emotional emancipation together with the notion of reaching a technological singularity.
The work of Lawrence Lek and Sandrine Deumier deals with novelty and boundaries, focusing on world-building within the realm of future thinking. Their works gamify altered states of presence and memory that exist in the digital space, questioning our capacity to perceive the living world as a complex entity.
In addition to the many “unearthed”, floor-based pieces, fragments of selected artists' works are presented on display walls like those often found in museums. But unlike with traditional display cases, the assets (which include untethered CGI models, 3D printed objects, and gifs) are preserved within the digital realm and mostly bound to the medium of the screen. By separating out individual elements of artists’ works, the display wall questions collection, archiving, and conservation of digital art, highlighting the importance of treating it in the same way as more traditional and ephemeral practices: holistically and with attention to lineage and provenance.
Excavating these digital finds, reanimating them, and replaying them serves to safeguard their vitality and integrity. This stands in direct opposition to standardised museum archives and displays that fetishise fragments, fragility, and decay. Here, cultural material and ephemera pile up and become fodder for the Earth as decades go by… What do we choose to keep and what is discarded to be compressed by layers of time and lives lived?
The show is accompanied by a booklet featuring texts by media theorist Jussi Parikka, artists Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke, and curator Corinna Gardner.
arebyte leads a pioneering digital art programme at the intersection of new technologies and contemporary culture. From net art’s inception in the 90s to more recent innovations in computer technology from VR to AI, the programme invites multiple voices to create multimedia installations at
arebyte Gallery (London) and online experiences for arebyte on Screen. Alongside the art programme, arebyte Skills shares knowledge on creative media technologies with audiences of all ages, through workshops, artist development programmes, university residencies and panel discussions on digital art practices. arebyte also supports a vibrant community of artists, designers and creative technologists through arebyte Studios, an initiative that provides affordable workspaces to 150 creative professionals across London.
Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: اﻟﻠﮭﯾﺎری ﺷﯾن ﻣوره), is a NY based Iranian-Kurdish artist using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. Through archival practices and storytelling, her work weaves together complex counternarratives in opposition to the lasting influence of Western technological colonialism in the context of SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa). Morehshin has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world including Venice Biennale di Architettura, New Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Pompidou Center, Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, Tate Modern, Queens Museum, Pori Museum, Powerhouse Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, and Museum für Angewandte Kunst. She has been an artist in residence at BANFF Centre, Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Autodesk Pier9 Workshop in San Francisco, the Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research in association with Transmediale, Berlin, Eyebeam’s one year Research Residency, Pioneer Works, and Harvest Works. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Huffington Post, Wired, National Public Radio, Parkett Art Magazine, Frieze, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, and Al Jazeera, among others.
Juan Covelli is an artist and independent curator who lives and works in Bogotá. He has an MA in Philosophy and contemporary photography practices from Central Saint Martins, London. Covelli is a researcher and university professor and founding member of the digital platform Nmenos1. His practice focuses on the new materialities generated by the digital age, emphasizing the dynamics of the physical within this ethereal space. Covelli explores the technological potentials of the archive, 3D technologies, as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence, as a radical tool of creation, seeking to transgress and redefine entrenched arguments and concepts about repatriation and colonial stories, investigating the relationship between technology, heritage, archaeology and de-colonial practices in the digital age. He uses video, modelling, databases, and code to create installations that collapse historical practices with current models of visualization and digital aesthetics.
Dominique Cro is a new media artist living and working in London. Cro utilises the concept of time travel to observe two major hyperobjects that continue to change the course of humankind – digitisation and the capitalocene. Cro works in moving image, CGI animation, installation, photography and digital design. Her practice combines documentary of the current socio-ecological environment with speculative fiction. She applies feminist worldbuilding as a tool to explore alternative realities, with a focus on more-than-human and post-human perspectives.
Sandrine Deumier is a pluridisciplinary artist working in the field of performance, poetry and video art whose work investigates post-futurist themes through the development of aesthetic forms related to digital imaginaries. With her dual philosophical and artistic training, she constructed multifaceted poetry focused on the issue of technological change and the performative place of poetry conceived through new technologies. Using material from the word as image and the image as a word vector, she also works at the junction of video and sound poetry considering them as sensitive devices to express a form of unconscious material itself. The process of writing and the mobile material of the image function as underlying meanings of reflux which refer to the real flickering and to their reality transfers via unconscious thought structures. Her work consists mainly of texts, digital poetry, multimedia installations and audiovisual performances in collaboration with composers.
Lawrence Lek lives and works in London. Lek uses computer-generated imagery and advancing technologies such as VR to develop digital environments described by the artist as ‘three-dimensional collages of found objects and situations’. He creates site-specific virtual worlds using gaming software, 3D animation, installation and performance. By rendering real places within fictional scenarios, his digital environments reflect the impact of the virtual on our perception of reality.
Kumbirai Makumbe is a Zimbabwean new media artist based in London. Using sculpture, audio-visual digital installation, image and video, they continually interrogate the multi-dimensionality of blackness, queerness, transcendence and ‘inbetweeness’. Through worldbuilding and the use of speculative science fiction narratives, they place significant efforts into exploring alternative modes of being and thinking that could negate ideologies inhibiting a ‘needed’ future. They repeatedly bring elements from the digital worlds they’ve forged into IRL spaces, through 3D printing, as a crucial practice akin to terraforming. They’re enticed by the materiality and malleability of digital matter and the infinite possibilities of its employability. Their work has so far taken shape in the form digital audiovisual installations, Interactive works, installations, moving image works, sound works and more recently sculptures.
Entangled Others is the shared studio practice of artists Feileacan McCormick and Sofia Crespo. Their work focuses on ecology, nature, and generative arts, with an emphasis on giving the more-than-human new forms a presence and life in digital space. This involves exploring questions of relationship, biodiversity, and awareness through biology-inspired technologies. In turn, they highlight how through conscious efforts, new technology can be used to bring attention and awareness to the unseen that we are tightly interwoven with. Entanglement is a complex state one where no single entity can be said to be separate, or somehow unaffected, by any other present entangled, we cannot consider ourselves without others, act without interacting, speak without being heard.
Abi Sheng is a body engineer whose work is devoted to rebuilding the identity system and constructing a utopia for equality by offering a system for customizable, transformative physical appearances. Her digital work is a visual reflection of the evolving present, an artist’s approach to encoding realities. She is developing a healing process to expand consciousness through recreating psychedelic experiences and meditation in the virtual world. Since graduating in engineering in Guangzhou, China and receiving an MA from the Royal College of Art, Sheng has been exhibited in London, Nuremberg, Vancouver and Zurich as well as instrumental in performances at Shoreditch House and the V&A Museum. Her work has been featured by BBC, Vogue, I-D, Mission statement magazine, NME and Metal magazine.
Shinji Toya is an artist from Japan, based in London for over 15 years. His practice is process-driven and uses computer programming, the Internet, Artificial Intelligence, participation, video, image manipulation and painting.
Toya works in the domain of critical digital art and his work is based on the image-based visual art practice that utilises data and algorithms. The topics that his previous projects dealt with include the data economy of the post-digital era, digital memory, surveillance and the materiality of media. The artist’s recent work focuses on the creative repurposing of the Internet in order to generatively create visual prototypes and interfaces that reflect the materiality of media, often through networked participation. It aims to make visible the muddy materiality of media on the substrates of code and images. Whereas ordinarily the materiality of media is hidden behind shiny devices, pristine interfaces and the metaphor of the “could”.
Ryan Vautier is a CGI artist and designer based in London who creates animated worlds exploring the fractures between digital and physical. Focusing on the concept that we currently have access to two separate planes of existence, he seeks to explore information of evolution from the digital realm, whilst simultaneously developing works inside the digital realm inspired by physical existence. Recent projects include a residency with Keiken, Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth (2020), Digital Spar, Dazed Beauty Wellness Week, Sex Quiz results and Which Crystal are you with Rifke Sadleir, Dazed Beauty (2019), Axel Arigato Socials (2019) and video for Rhumba Club (2020). He has worked on projects for 1975, Ms Banks, Grimes, Ben Ditto and Lucy Hardcastle. Vautier also exhibited work at Future Late, Tate Modern, London (2016).
Sarah Blome is a CGI Artist and 3D Generalist based in London, UK. Her work explores the possibilities of artificial growth; how digital tools can replicate and build on organic processes. Taking inspiration from the creatures found in extreme environments, she explores where evolution can lead when combined with a future hybrid digital world. Recent projects include editorials for Hunger Magazine (2022) and Gay Times (2021), animations for Warner Music (2022), Salvatore Ferragamo (2022) and Steven Ma (2021) and work for artists such as Jon Emmony (2022), Lawrence Lek (2021) and Gregory Herbert (2021-22).
Matteo Zamagni is an artist working across distinct and intersecting creative forays: visual arts, multimedia installations, film production, and electronic music. Through his endeavours, he tries to connect an array of contemporary technologies, science and esoteric topics in order to critically and emotionally explore the complexity of the constant “state of emergency”- the epoch of planetary-scale environmental, economic, and social disarray.
Background of contributors
Dr Jussi Parikka is Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark. He is also visiting professor of at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague where he leads the project Operational Images and Visual Culture (2019-2023, funded by the Czech Science Foundation). In 2021 he was elected as a member of Academia Europaea. His published books include Insect Media (2010), Digital Contagions (2007/2016) and A Geology of Media (2015), and A Slow, Contemporary Violence (2016). Recently, he co-edited Photography Off the Scale (2021) and is the co-author of The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (2022). His book Operational Images is forthcoming in 2023.
Corinna Gardner is Senior Curator of Design and Digital at the V&A. Corinna leads the museum’s Rapid Response Collecting programme and her research focuses on product and digital design. Current projects include the new Design 1900—Now gallery at the V&A in London and the development and delivery of a digital design collecting strategy for the museum. Corinna is also working towards an exhibition about the problem and promise of plastic in today’s world at V&A Dundee in autumn 2022. In 2015, Corinna co-curated All of This Belongs to You, a show about the design of public life and the role of institutions in the 21st century. Before joining the V&A, Corinna worked at Barbican Art Gallery on exhibitions, including OMA: Progress, Bauhaus: Art as Life, Random International’s Rain Room and Cory Arcangel’s Beat the Champ.
Morehshin Allahyari(Persian: اﻟﻠﮭﯾﺎری ﺷﯾن ﻣوره), is a NY based Iranian-Kurdish artist using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. Through archival practices and storytelling, her work weaves together complex counternarratives in opposition to the lasting influence of Western technological colonialism in the context of SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa). Morehshin has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world including Venice Biennale di Architettura, New Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Pompidou Center, Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, Tate Modern, Queens Museum, Pori Museum, Powerhouse Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, and Museum für Angewandte Kunst.
Dr. Daniel Rourke is a writer, artist and academic originally from Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and now lives and works in London. In his work, Daniel creates collaborative frameworks and theoretical toolsets for exploring the intersections of digital materiality, the arts, and (critical) post-humanism. His writing, lecturing, and artistic profile is extensive, including work with Aksioma (Ljubljana, 2021), Arebyte Gallery (London + online, 2018), PICNIC Brasil (Rio, 2018), Photographer’s Gallery (London 2018), Walk&Talk Azores (São Miguel, 2018), AND Festival (Peak District, 2017), The V&A (London, 2017), FACT (Liverpool, 2017), as well as HOLO Magazine, Media-N, Alluvium, and AfterImage Journals. Daniel is also a contributor to Rhizome.org and Furtherfield.org.
