Saturday, 17 September(9 am-7 pm)—
Sunday, 18 September(9 am-5 pm)
Stokey Popup
147 Stoke Newington High St
London N16 0NY

exhibition concept
As technologies increasingly penetrate daily life
up to the most intimate parts of it, how our perception of the physical world would change
in the future?
Written in the late 1940s, Prelude to Spaceis a fiction novel in which Arthur Clarke envisions
how Mankind first reached the Moon a few decades later. The text serves as a starting point
for the exhibition, allowing the artists to reflect
on how the human-space relationship has been
expanded from the exploration of outer to virtual space.
In the same way, this shift from analogue
to digital changes the perception of our body,which is no longer considered to be the isolated,autonomous self. Instead, it becomes immersed
into data flows in which people and machines
become part of a single intertwined system.
Bringing together the artworks of 21 different
artists whose practices span from video installation, animation, internet art to VR, Prelude
to Space explores this new domain in which
the digital becomes an integral part of the material world, affecting the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us.

A NASTASI A C H U G U N OVA@anastasiaa.chu@PRELUDE.
TO.SPACE

YUEH -NI N G L E E@yuehning.lee
YIWEN L I
@yiwenliiiiiii

PRELUDETO SPACE

J IAY U S U N@jiayu_1011
curated by

○1@virtio.djvu

Vivian y. L.

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Durational sculpture, 40 × 30 × 60 cm (dimensions variable)͊̌͗̒͆̈̐̚ ́ ̒̎ ̈̑̂̈ ́́ ͗ ̀ ͐ ͌ ̀ ̌͒͛̅ ̓͛ ̌ ͆̐͗̓ ̈͛̿ ́ ̎̑̈͋
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͌ ̠̽ ́͒̓ ͖̍̿̕͜ ͠N-321 °F : 1̵3̵̨̥͇͚̽͗ ́ ̰̆̈3̵̥̝͋̈͝°͈ ̀ ̵̩̤̇̓ͅ ̷̲͛7̵͈̃9̵̗̈̕.̳͔̓ ̀̈ ̀͝5̸̗́ ̷͇͑̿1̷̺̿ ̉ ͉̗͚̍ ͝ ̀ ̶ ̊͠0̴̧͉̽ ̷̢̩̄͂1̸̥̝͐ ͕̈2̶̺̈°̵̠͍̾ ̀ ̘͋͗ͅ ̍9̸̶͕̘̺̅ ̌ ̨̩͜͝0̱͕̀ ̴͇̍̽͝.͍̲̆ ̓͠7
̷͖͛ ̸̡̬̈9̸͓͎͛ ́ ͍̦̍7̷̮̯̱͛͒̓͘ ̏ Ë̴̵̢̗̬͋ ̣͚ ,̣ 2021 is an ongoing project ex̰͇͉ ̴̢̡̖͒5̴
̝
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͕̮̻ ̝̗ ͙̱̰͖ ̥̭̻̙͙ ̥̙͙ͅ ̣̼͔̲ ͍͙̻ ̮ ̲͚̩ ̩͇̪̟͕
ploring the intermingling strands of real-life events involving cryopreservation and refrigeration with the speculations about thesurreal era of 2010-2200-∞. The work features condensationfrom immaterial to material, from events to material evidence andvestiges, from the real to the parafictionalised. Exploring the liminal
space between life, death and beyond, diasporic experiences, andnecropolitics, the work reflects on the trajectories and struggles
of bodies victimised by ideologies, in transgression, across systemsof governance and bodies of water; prostheticised, sabotaged,
and/or eternalised by technologies and the technoscientific imaginary. It is dedicated to all the bodies that have been found and lostin the sea and beyond, the diasporic, and ‘us’.
https://v-l-y.io/○2

Zinong Zhang@zinongzhang2020
Mirror mirror on the wall, 2022
Metal, dimensions variable

https://zinongzhang.com○3

Wenxuan Chen

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Songwon Han@wenxuanart
The sea leaves ripples on the sand, 2022

@haneros_1010
Bodily Fluid (l) and Bodily Fluid (ll), 2022

Digital print on velvet, 114 × 11cm

Laser etching on perspex, 60 × 40 cm

Drawing inspiration from outdoor activities including camping,
diving and rock-climbing, Wenxuan explores the different statesof nature as a symbolic language in production, transmission andconsumption under industrialisation in his practice. The sea leaves
ripples on the sand is created using the office software Powerpoint with the oval as its base, overlaid by the colour duplicatedfrom the ocean. The white dots on the image represent the action
boxes for the selection process.

What is different about our perception of intimacy nowadays?
Featuring entangled bodies in their most intimate moments, Bodily
Fluid hints at the detachment from reality which people increasingly experience. Fluorescent colours serve as this invisible force,pointing to the feeling of alienation of bodies in space.
https://www.hansongwon.art

https://wenxuanchen.com/○4@adamb0yd
Tramlines, 2022

Adam Boyd

Quilted taffeta, cotton, bleached cotton duct, felt, photo-transfer on canvas,○6

Ruilin Fu@rynn_f_
The Bunny Gift Shop, 2022
VR headsets, desktop PC

batting and thread, 144.5 × 135 cm

Tramlines takes its title from a term used in Alex Garland’s Devs
(2020) to describe a ‘causal thread’: a view of time in which all
events are completely determined by previously existing causes.
Boyd’s patchwork-like configurations offer numerous transcriptions of the same event (refracted light). Through his use of photography, lidar technology and traditional textile processes, theseworks attempt to disrupt a linear notion of time, both pictoriallyand materially. For Boyd, the line of stitch allows a collision of multiple worlds.
https://adamboydstudio.com/

The Bunny Gift Shop is a virtual reality project extending from
Good Girl Detection (2022) that constructs a virtual magical world
where the embodiment of female bodies are caged, transformed
and objectified by scrutinising gaze. It aims to investigate how
women are observed in media and the physical world as landscapes and further reflect on shattering labels deeply internalisedin their bodies.

○7Akshay Bhoan○9

Jo McGarry@maharajapatiala
Father Flying, 2022

@jomcg_Invisible Materials No. 3 (Space/Time Box), 2022

Emulsion on PVC, Clay and acrylic artefacts, dimensions variable

Mixed-media installation, dimensions variable

The machine breathes. The body is shedding weight, moving further and further. Receding from touch. The numbers are
not reliable anymore. Muscles eject every last strain in a sharp
fog, jettison into the void. Thrust through the warm core into
the cold, from the thick to the translucent. Faster and faster.
The work suggests (in artefacts) of a possible alternative dimension, a post body space; where one goes beyond the limits of gravity, shedding mass and gaining speed.

In various ways, our attempt to reach an understanding of the world has always been intertwined with various unseen
forces - religious, mystical, imaginary, emotional, intellectual.
Now we have digital, a force so rapidly pervasive that assimilating it is a Darwinian feat - one that is altering the way
we are and the way we think. This work sets up two parallel
overlapping spaces - one is the room you’re standing in, theother in a virtual space - the sounds merge the digital architecture with the real and oscillate between both.

https://bhoan.com

https://www.jomcgarry.com○8

Stela Brix

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Frederika Dalwood@stelabrix
everything you touch, touches you back, 2022

@frederika____________
Door Ajar, 2022

Mixed-media installation, dimensions variable

Digital print, acrylic glass, 60 × 80 cm

everything you touch, touches you back is a collection of brushes-by, bumps, strokes, enmeshments and devourings, happening between the world and the body. It shows a body being taken
apart or putting itself together, a body that is bursting out of its
boundaries, swallowing in, grafting, seeping, leaking, infecting,in-corporating, ex-carnating. In an uncomfortable closeness,the installation brings the body and the world together as inherently contagious to each other.

Door Ajar is a reimagining of 1920s surrealist painting created through the lens of current internet culture. The light froman open door creates an atmosphere of suspense by suggesting an event that has either just taken place or is about tohappen: a story witnessed or possibly dictated by the disembodied being imprinted on the floor. The image is taken froma TikTok challenge of a woman appearing to peel off her faceafter applying 100 layers of makeup, suggesting our changing perception of a body that rather becomes an objectified
surface capable of endless modifications.

https://stelabrix.com○11@estefantastic
Untitled, 2022

Estefanía B Flores○13

Anouk Verviers@anouk.verviers
Educational Institute of Conversational Aesthetics (IPEC), 2021

Resin, volcanic ash, pigments, electronics, mild steel, 90 × 50 × 40 cm

HD video, 13 mins

This toy-sculpture explores and ironizes established notionsof power (related to ‘technological sublime’ theories) within gendered visuals. Using a naive alteration of a PS controller’s mostprimary language and a natural material like volcanic ash, it investigates the politics and judgement of gender within game cultures.
Inspired by a sense of nostalgia for childhood memories, this work
embraces a certain clichéd taste (and sensibility) by acknowledging the trivial romanticisation of the low-cost consumerist culture.

The Educational Institute of Conversational Aesthetics (IPEC)
is an independent, zero-profit, and conceptual research institutefounded in 2020. It brings together a group of researchers whose
work focuses on demonstrating the socially transformative powerof dialogue resides in the impressions and sensations it leaves oninterlocutors, rather than in the actual content exchanged. IPEC’s
recent work is based on the development of protocols for representing group conversations, in order to carry out an extensive
study of graphic compositions cataloguing all possible conversational structures.

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Lucy Meeber@lucy.meeber
The Ice Book, 2021

Hand-made book installation; ice, water, plastic food bags, fishing line,
70 × 40 × 5cm

W.U.D.S. (｡ì _ í｡) vsW.U.D.S. ( ಥ_ಥ )@saturdayshinsei
How to Raise Flower Bulbs, 2022

Flute, helmet, artificial hydrangea, cable tie, expanding foam, wood, screw, plastic,

The ways of reading, which are full of ambiguities and autonomies, determine how the space is constructed once participants
start reading. Therefore, The Ice Book explores the multi-sensory experiences of reading. The ice gradually melts as the pages
are turned, converting the book into ‘the water book.’ The ongoingtransformation of the water status indicates the fluid interrelationship between the participant and the book.
https://www.lucymeeber.com/

26 × 60 × 28 cm

Snow Crime: Aircraft Hijacking, 2022
6h pencil on paper, 53.6 × 90.4 cm

Using as one of the main points of reference the context of 1960s’
Japanese student movement, W.U.D.S. (｡ì _ í｡) vs W.U.D.S. ( ಥ_ಥ )’sartistic practice is largely based upon the way in which various,and often difficult to juxtapose, motifs complement each other andcreate visual and conceptual potentials through their spatial
rrangements. The presented pair of works questions the dualities
between cruelty and vulnerability, thus provoking a sense of both
disturbance and destabilisation.
https://www.wudsvswuds.info/

○15

Seungyeop Shin@bataaaaavia
A Doxology for Myrmecoleon series, 2022
01: Ambassador, 2022

○17

Chaney Diao@chaney_dms
am,is,are, 2020

Video installation, dimensions variable

Digital video, 27 min, 15 sec

02: Oel-Dweller, 2022
Digital video, looped

The series A Doxology for Myrmecoleon is a result of the artist’s
world-speculating process based on a myth of an Ant-lion(Myrmecoleon) — a fantastical beast with combined features ofboth lion and ant, possibly derived from an error in the Septuagint
version of the book of Job. The presented work unfolds into a series of statements about the appearance, living conditions, andthe landscape where the creature lives, thus allowing the artist toreflect on how speculative lives can reside in digital environments.

○16@Jiayu_1011
Answer, 2022

Jiayu Sunam,is,are encompasses visual art, poetry and spoken words, emphasising the forms and traces of existence across varied spaces
and mediums (including mental/inner space, language, social space,and virtual space), with which contemporary humankind is constantly being in contact. The continuous changing of clothes
on the character is used here as a strategy to investigate a paradoxical relation between appearance and self, which is establishedand confirmed during the daily encounters between “I” and“the other”.

○18

Yiwen Li@yiwenliiiiiii
Sliver, 2022

Projected animation, toys, lights, black curtain, dimensions variable

Video installation, 300 × 300 cm

As the phantom limb pain occurred to him every single day, Jiayu
decided to embark on a search for the lost part of his body. Hisjourney goes through an imaginary world, reality and cyberspace,
whereby he is exploring memories, everyday life, and his identity
on the internet. Eventually, Jiayu finds the other part of his body(soul) and returns back to the physical world.

As a concern of the situationists, the overloaded information
erodes our sensibility and perceptivity. Composed of similar CCTV
footage that the artist randomly chose from the Internet, Sliver
visualises those invisible ideas and humanism to reshape our perceptions and reflect on social phenomena and technological landscapes.
www.yiwenliart.com○19

Marisa Giovanna Di Monda○21

DangLa གདང་ལ

@marisaofcomputer
Learning a blind eye, 2021

@lllll_dangla
Dharma of CYBER body Operation, 2022

Triptych film generated with machine learning

Digital animation

Learning a blind eye is an attempt to explore and understand how
machine learning tools ‘think’ and ‘learn’ and how that impacts
what they make. The story has been written in tandem with generating the visuals - the story creates the visuals and the visuals
in turn influence the writing of the story. The visuals and audio
narration in this film were created using machine learning.

Concept diagram of Cyber nano fluid Operation, 2022

http://www.marisadimonda.com/○20

Sophie Rogers@sophieirogers
3 Minutes to Midnight, 2022
CGI animation

3 Minutes to Midnight is a game piece aiming to present anotherworld with a different kind of living: the one that is based on collaborative, multi-species survival. Informed by research spanning
themes of deep time, world-building and interspecies communication, the game world exists in-between spaces of fantasy andnatural, often overlooked sites: the forest floor, the soil andthe underground.
In 2007, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists expanded the Doomsday Clock to include climate change as oneof the greatest man-made threats to humankind. At that point,
the time jumped to 3 minutes to midnight. The game inhabits this
temporality, a time of impending apocalypse, a time in fairy tales
associated with the breaking of a spell and a time that relates toour age, commonly referred to as the Anthropocene. The gameis constructed by dreaming through world-building and highlights
the importance of play in culture and how it can help us to imagine
new worlds.
https://sophierogers.co.uk

Digital animation

If human beings would be able to improve their physical abilities
in the future through scientific and technological means, will thisgenerate a conflict with the generally known religious dogma ‘Don’t
Hurt Yourself’? At present, the biosphere (human) is becoming
a part of a technological and algorithmic circle, which in turn controls the externalization of human beings in a cybernetic manner.
Human beings emerge from the inside and disappear in it.
In the middle, between the disappearance and re-emergencefrom the soil layer, human beings are reborn every time.