What Is It Like? is a group exhibition that explores the nature of subjective reality, inspired by Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 paper, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?. Curated by Helen Starr, the exhibition reflects her practice of investigating the brain as a machine that constructs tailored realities.

The exhibition delves into language, memory, and the boundaries of consciousness, shedding 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, it invites viewers to navigate the layered complexities of perception, experience, and consciousness—mirroring with its interactive stage-crafting how AI technologies generate immersive yet illusory realities.

Featuring artworks by Anna Bunting-Branch, Choy Ka Fai, Damara Inglês, Katarzyna Krakowiak, Lawrence Lek and Kira Xonorika, the exhibition celebrates how artists use AI tools and techniques to craft cultural meaning, bridging creativity, innovation and humanity into our rapidly evolving technological landscape.

This exhibition is a playful way of engaging with media works through haptics - the sense of touch and motion, while speculating on the possibilities of futuristic technologies. By incorporating insights from neuroscience, it charts a course between the techbro hype and public hysteria that often inaccurately frames machine learning technologies as either miraculous or mysterious. Through its artworks and accompanying texts, the exhibition demystifies trending concepts such as Moral Circle Expansion—the idea of extending ethical consideration to AI as it approaches sentience—and Embodied AI, which explores the potential for AI systems with synthetic bodies and long-term memory to develop deeper forms of self-awareness and consciousness. 

Embodiment lies at the core of the exhibition What is it Like? Like the brain's ability to process the world, the large, latticed sliding panels reminiscent of gallery storage archives are pulled into place by visitors -  a metaphor for a computer’s code-driven mechanisms. Modeled after the archival nature of hard drive circuit boards, these panels transform the gallery into an interactive reflection on the parallels between human cognition and machine computation. By aligning the panels to precise points, participants trigger embedded screens that reveal hidden cinematic experiences, echoing the processes of memory retrieval in both organic and technological systems.

What Is It Like? is an exhibition in partnership with WRO Art Center, funded by the British Council as part of the UK/Poland Season 2025. The exhibition tours to WRO Art Center, Poland, from the18th September to the 31st of October 2025.

OPENING HOURS

Tue - Sun, 1 - 6 pm

EVENTS PROGRAMME

Opening Party
Thursday 27th February 2025, 6:30 - 9pm
Celebrate the opening of What is it Like? with us.

Exhibition Tour 1
Saturday 1st March 2025, 1:30 -2:30pm
Exhibition tour led by curator Helen Starr
artists Anna Bunting-Branch and Lawrence Lek

Exhibition Tour 2
Thursday 20th March 2025, 7 - 8pm
Exhibition tour led by curator Helen Starr

EXHIBITION CREDITS

Artists: Anna Bunting-Branch (UK), Choy Ka Fai (Germany/Singapore), Damara Inglês (UK), Katarzyna Krakowiak (Poland), Lawrence Lek (UK), Kira Xonorika (Paraguay)
Curator: Helen Starr, founder The Mechatronic Library

Exhibition Producer & Designer: Henrique Lázaro
Curatorial Assistant: Yewen Jin 
Technicians: Dmitry Timofeev, Ross Godman, Orsola Zane, Andrew Rayner
Consultant: Kitmapper
Graphic Designer: Camilla Hiscock
Audio Equipment Support: Timmpi

Anna Bunting-Branch is an artist and researcher based in London, UK. Moving between painting, writing, animation, and collaborative practice, her work explores spaces of future re-vision: from feminist collective action to speculative fiction and fan activity.

Choy Ka Fai is a Berlin-based Singaporean artist. His multidisciplinary art practice situates itself at the intersection of dance, media art and performance. At the heart of his research is a continuous exploration of the metaphysics of the human body. Through research expeditions, pseudo-scientific experiments and documentary performances, Ka Fai appropriates technologies and narratives to imagine new futures of the human body.

Damara Inglês is a Creative Technologist focusing on Digital Fashion and Immersive art, with expertise in Creative direction, 3D Design, AR and VR. Her practice follows the aesthetic of “Cyber-Kimbandism”, a space that blends Bantu Spirituality with Immersive Technologies. Born in Angola and an alumni of the London College of Fashion, her practice explores the intersectionality of identity, tech-innovation, and disruptive expression.

Katarzyna Krakowiak Balka is an artist who creates sculptures, performances, objects, compositions and sound installations that investigate languages used to describe architecture. Exploring the borders of architecture, Krakowiak builds large-scale installations based on existing structures to generate acoustic environments allowing viewers-listeners to blend in the artwork and encounter architecture through sound.

Lawrence Lek is a London-based Malaysian Chinese artist, filmmaker, and musician who unifies diverse practices—architecture, gaming, video, music and fiction—into a continuously expanding cinematic universe. He is known for advancing the concept of Sinofuturism with immersive installations that explore spiritual and existential themes through the lens of science fiction.

Kira Xonorika is an artist, author and futurist whose work explores connections between technoscience, sovereignty, temporality, world-building, and magic. She’s received awards, residencies and fellowships by Akademie der Künste, Hyundai Artlab, Dreaming Beyond AI, Momus and Eyebeam, the Salzburg Global Seminar, and Ars Electronica. Recent exhibitions include REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA), Honor Fraser Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) and arebyte gallery (London, UK).