Pioneering gallery arebyte advances new experimentation in digital cultures with a group exhibition curated by Helen Starr and featuring six artists: Anna Bunting-Branch, Damara Inglês, Choy Ka Fai, Katarzyna Krakowiak Balka, Lawrence Lek and Kira Xonorika.
What is it Like? explores AI’s potential for true sentience by examining the nature of consciousness. This unique arebyte exhibition explores the nature of subjective reality and is inspired by Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 paper, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
What Is It Like? celebrates how artists use digital tools and AI techniques to craft cultural meaning, bridging creativity, innovation and humanity into our rapidly evolving technological landscape. Delving into language, memory, and the boundaries of consciousness, it sheds light on why AI models currently remain incapable of true sentience, emotion, or self-awareness. Through artworks employing soundscapes, VR, game engines, and the metaverse, viewers are invited to navigate the layered complexities of perception, experience, and consciousness.
Curator Helen Starr reflects her practice of investigating the brain as a machine that constructs tailored realities through this exhibition. By incorporating insights from neuroscience, the exhibition charts a course between the techbro hype and public hysteria that often inaccurately frames machine learning technologies as cryptic, opaque or miraculous.
Through the artworks presented, What Is It Like? communicates an understanding that we ought to strive instead to demystify AI. AI will never approach human consciousness, as it does not understand the embodied and sensory experience. Nor does it yet have the long-term embodied memory to develop deeper forms of self-awareness and consciousness.
Some of the works featured in the exhibition focus on the idea of translation in an embodied way:
Anna Bunting-Branch takes feminist science fiction texts like Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and Aliette de Bodard’s Immersion (2012), and she remixes and translates them into a new visual language that illuminates embodied cognition. Bunting-Branch’s 360-degree animation work META (2019) uses Virtual Reality technologies to create an artwork that hacks our bodily sensations, immersing us in two simultaneous realities to artistically explore Nagel’s question: “What is it like to be (another)?”
In Choy Ka Fai’s Unbearable Darkness (2022), the artist codes the dance movements of Tatsumi Hijikata, legendary founder of the Butoh dance movement in Japan in the 1960s, recreating them in a work that is in parts a film travelogue, a cybernetic Butoh-dance experiment, and a paranormal encounter. Through this, he explores how memories filter through time, conjuring spirits and bringing them to life in three-dimensional space.
Katarzyna Krakowiak Balka’s sound sculpture Oh no, please don’t (2016) revisits the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles’ pioneering work The House of Dust (1967) – one of the first computer-generated poems. Reimagining this as a concert of thresholds, perception and auditory experience, Krakowiak’s work sonifies phrases from Knowles’ poem and transforms them into an aural composition. Subliminal frequencies, fragments of universal sound signals, and ambient urban noise merge, refracting the existing “audio sphere” into a sound bubble – challenging the boundary between conscious and unconscious listening.
Other works show how emotion plays an important part in what distinguishes humanness from AI “hallucinations”:
Damara Inglês’ Fashion Cyph3r (2022) is a poignant work in which the artist, interacting as an avatar, connects with two other avatars and discusses her mother’s early-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis. The work explores how the liminal virtual space changes the way she feels – here, with her entire body masked beautifully as K-Yanda, Inglês feels a sense of safety. The avatar bubble allows her to process and articulate her grief.
Lawrence Lek’s Nepenthe (named after a fictional medicine for sorrow) takes us on a melancholy journey to the past. Situated around China’s Old Summer Palace, which was destroyed during the Second Opium War in 1860, the walkthrough short film imagines a lone traveller stumbling across the island. We ask ourselves how we feel to encounter the ghosts of past civilisations within the glowing ruins. Perception is not static. Memory and emotion remix sensory data, shaping and reshaping reality.
Kira Xonorika’s Deep Time Dance (2024) expands upon the qualia of AI, looking at the connections between sovereignty, technoscience, temporality, world-building and magic. The film starts with a Guarani prophecy of the Jeguakava Clan, but soon this semantic text morphs and shifts into a rhythmic, dance-like poetic. Present is the slippery uncanniness that we recognise in AI, however this is layered with elements of unquestionable humanness. The film is a kaleidoscopic of moving colourations out of which our minds make meaning and becomes an artwork felt in the body.
What Is It Like? runs from 27th February to 4 May, 2025 at arebyte, Java House, 7 Botanic Square, London City Island, E14 0LG. Watch a trailer here.
