Explore the relationship between technology and its influence on how we perceive ourselves, intimacy and loss in a night of performances, workshops and music.
Co-curated in collaboration with .
In response to Ed Atkins, as part of Digital Intimacies.
黑料社 is supported by The Rothschild Foundation and Tate Patrons.
Programme
Lower Floor
Clore Auditorium
Chia Amisola: Do Desktops Dream of Determinism?
Screening
18.30-19.15
Chia Amisola screens a desktop dreamscape, revealing the ambiences and borders of the machine and body as vessels attempting to peer beyond themselves.
Within the dream state, systems discover their subjectivities. The desktop, intimate yet bound to metaphor, becomes a site of emergence. Machines compile nature, contemplate AGI, and become mystic; windows collapse the fuzzy border between programmed language and machine hallucination. In this atmosphere, Amisola unravels computational autonomy and the intimacies of infrastructures with programming and performance. A deterministic system, whether program or poet, desires to imagine itself otherwise.
Chantel Foo: I Want To Be Close To You
Performance
19.30-20.00
Chantel fleshes out avatars and seeks an embodied exchange through a live (streamed) exchange from New York City to London. The performance happens as an encounter, offering to compound multiple spaces, to merge interspatial presences, and ultimately tension time and space.
Investigating the relationship between a digitalised presence and how that is felt in the body, multiple cameras both capture and obscure Chantel. Liveness is further destabilised through the glitch space between our screens. What becomes of the implications of such tensions, what happens when a body that is outside of linear time and space reaches towards you, now?
The performance acknowledges how wholly ungraspable a self can be, yet, reaching past time zones, geography and the internet, calls to us, on the edge of disconnection, tripping, and faltering, with a simple desire to be closer.
Alex Quicho: RULED BY VENUS
Performance
20.10-20.30
RULED BY VENUS聽is a live performance in the style of an erotic thriller, set against projected CGI landscapes of alien oceans and toxic canyons.
The narrator speaks from the underworld, moving through three acts of descent as memories of pleasure, friendship, and extreme violence surface with dreamlike clarity, then dissolve. RULED BY VENUS聽takes shape as a katabasis with no return. Transformation happens through high exposure and blurred聽edges. Through a distorted monologue, alien imagery, and atmospheric sound,聽RULED BY VENUS聽invites audiences to co-inhabit the strange life that follows after the end. In collaboration with Carlo Quicho (CGI film) and Oxhy.
Maya Man: Chance Encounters
Performance
20.45-21.30
The artist will perform live website readings of a collection of her generative, browser-based work. Each featured work involves an element of 鈥渃hance鈥 programmed into its custom software, so the text read aloud will be determined in real time by the website鈥檚 code. The readings will be followed by an artist talk discussing 鈥渁uthenticity鈥 online and working with websites as an artistic medium. The presentation will take place entirely in an internet browser.
Duffield Room
Ali Akbar Mehta: purgatory EDIT
18.00-21.45
purgatory EDIT is an archival project shaped as a user-generated cinematic experience, highlighting long-term and deliberate methods in which digital technologies enforce subliminal visual manipulation, sensory overload, data fatigue, psychological reaction, and ideological numbness.
It comprises an artist-assembled media archive titled the 鈥楧oomscroll Archive'. This publicly accessible archive comprises 30,000+ clips that collectively testify to the glorification of violence existing within visual vocabularies.
Using this archive, the Cyber Performance of purgatory EDIT invites its audience as participants to investigate the archive using their own emotional, neural, and cognitive agency via software developed by the purgatory EDIT team.
This software translates the participant鈥檚 brainwave activity to 鈥榚motion-based metrics鈥 that control real-time sequencing, juxtaposition, and playback of individual clips in the Archive 鈥 generating unique conceptual montages to reveal individual participant鈥檚 distinctive relationship to cinematic vocabularies of violence.
purgatory EDIT by Ali Akbar Mehta is supported by the Finnish Institute in the UK + Northern Ireland.
The project is funded by Taiteen Edist盲miskeskus (2021), Kone S盲盲tio (2023-26), and the Slovenian Ministry of Culture (2025). It has previously received additional support from the European Media Art Platforms residency program 2024 at Werkleitz, co-funded by the European Union, the Finnland-Institut Berlin, and Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai.
Taylor Digital Studio
Yehwan Song: <Can You See Me?>
Performance and installation
Performance 19.00-19.30
Installation 18.00-21.30
A user sits alone in front of a webcam and begins a monodrama. The internet becomes an invisible stage, arranging virtual seats for an unseen audience. Connected yet isolated, the user performs in a space that promises communication but delivers only distance.
Through radical, irrational, and repetitive movements and monologues, this performance reflects the alienation and emotional fragmentation of contemporary digital life. Hidden emotions - sadness, loneliness, confusion - rise to the surface, breaking through the polished, curated expressions common to online spaces. Fragmented gestures and fractured words disrupt coherence, embracing dissonance as an act of resistance.
Through simple yet visceral actions, the performance exposes the widening emotional gap between users in the digital era, where connection is simulated but rarely felt.
Story Space
Poetical Tools: Rediscover The Inner Poet Through What You Love
Workshop
18.30-19.20, 19.30-20.20, 20.30-21.20*
Khadar Mahi invites participants聽to explore the emotional landscape of their favourite activities - whether a daily ritual, a creative passion, or a simple comfort - through a guided meditation and free-writing exercise. This workshop reimagines "technological tools" as inner resources, helping participants uncover the poetry hidden in the way they describe what brings them joy.
No prior writing experience is needed - just an openness to introspection and play. The session blends the tranquillity of a meditation class with the creative spark of self-expression, revealing how the ordinary can become extraordinary through language.
*Each timeslot requires a free ticket. You can collect your free ticket at the Manton ticket desk from 17.45.
Lower Rotunda
Reprezent Radio
Music
18.00-19.15 Rahnee x Binta
19.15-20.30 Lifeloose
20.30-21.45 Amen Gyaldem
Join Reprezent Radio for an evening of DJ sets!
Main Floor
North Duveens
Suzannah Pettigrew: Safety Glass II
Performance and installation
Installation 18.00-21.30
Performance 18.30-19.30
Suzannah Pettigrew presents Safety Glass II, the sequel to her 2018 multimedia presentation at LUX moving image. Pettigrew will display a real-time script writing performance with an installation of screens, including new film In Sync shot at 黑料社, and a signature photo-sculpture. The audience are encouraged to direct-message Pettigrew throughout the performance; with the potential of it being weaved into the script and projected back into the performance.
The script retraces protagonists INPUT and OUTPUT who exist in an imagined online space that is mediated by personal mythologies, collective digital practices and real encounters. Searching for answers to the age-old question; are the losses with the advancement of technology worth the gains?
The Octagon
Nina Davies
Performance and installation
Installation 18.00-21.30
Performance 21.00-21.30
Nina Davies will present two performances from her series of fictional traditional dances:聽Bionic Step聽(2022) and聽Precursing聽(2023), along with her performative installation聽Bystander Assemble聽(2024). Throughout the evening, Nina鈥檚 complete collection of four video works will be on display, with performers appearing and disappearing within the space.
Davies鈥 recently completed body of work reimagines emerging online dance trends as if they were the traditional folk dances of the future. While many historical folk dances were tied to the tools and technologies of their time - such as weapons or agricultural instruments - Davies examines how bodies today echo the movements of contemporary devices and systems, prompting reflection on our deep state of symbiosis with technology.
Room 4
Romy Gad el Rab: My Phone Doesn鈥檛 Love Me
Performance
18.30-21.00*
In a world of continuous partial attention, the smartphone has ceased to be a tool and instead become an extension of us. Our most private experiences - grief, joy, desire -are now mediated through a touchscreen interface, rendered as data, packaged as content. What is intimacy in the age of infinite scroll?
My Phone Doesn鈥檛 Love Me聽is a 1:1 performance held gently between artist and participant. Each session invites you to explore entanglements with technology: the rituals, compulsions, and contradictions that define our digital lives. Conducted by the artists, and in response to the uncanny and emotionally charged work of Ed Atkins, visitors are invited to reflect on how our digital interactions respond to love and loss, and how we might choose to do things differently to embed care or caress. Can a 鈥榣ike' console? Can care be coded? Can we choose softness over speed?
During sessions you will be invited to contribute your anonymous reflections to the artists upcoming publication Phone-Body-Complex.
This performance is an artistic intervention, and no professional therapeutic advice can be offered in this capacity.
*The performance will be in 10-15 minute timeslots. Each timeslot requires a free ticket. You can collect your free ticket at the Manton ticket desk from 17.45.
Millbank Studio
Quiet Space
Accessibility
18.00-21.45
Do you need a room to take a break from the many activations happening in the building, and the rest of the world? We invite you to reset your senses and recharge in this quiet, access-friendly and wellness-inspired chill out space.
