Text by CLOT Magazine
Schemata is an online and offline arts platform based out of the South London nightclub Corsica Studios that promotes boundary-pushing work in sound and vision. Since creating virtual worlds, the digital has been recognised as a versatile and accessible tool for world-building practices.
With this in mind, Schemata present their latest virtual group exhibition, Exquisite World, a showcase of artists and curators working with sound and technology whose work comes together to speculate on the potential of virtual space to imagine future worlds. Presented on the New Art City platform, Exquisite World is divided into Antithesis, Exquisite World: a collaborative exhibition and Warning: Explosive Material. Please Enter.
The space Antithesis features various visceral and hypnotic electronic sound works by the highly innovative and influential audio-kinetic art project Disinformation. Musical pieces based on electrical interference produced by the National Grid are exhibited alongside VLF band radio recordings of electromagnetic noise from the London Underground, lightning strikes and electric storms, and EEG recordings are taken directly from the mind of Disinformation producer Joe Banks. In addition, Antithesis features the National Grid video installation, created in collaboration with filmmaker Barry Hale; alongside Untitled_Eye, Postsynaptic and Scintillating Scotoma – new video works that explore the notion of electricity as the physiological basis of human visual perception.
Curated by Alice Hoffmann-Fuller and Charlotte Clark with Guest curators Output Field and Underground Flower, the Exquisite World: a collaborative exhibition space maps out visions and dreams for a future world; it is a cartographic tool to consider what aspects of contemporary living could continue to be important moving forward: ecology, sex, technology, culture, history, and data are all recurring themes in public conversation right now.
How will they be embodied in future worlding practices? What should change, and what should remain the same? Artists participating are Gerard Carson, A.n0nE, Kumbirai Makumbe, Samuel Capp, Hannah Corrie, Aerside, clxo, Nicholas Delap, and Oscar Nearly.
And finally, the third space is Warning: Explosive Material. Please Enter, an audiovisual exploration of world-building in context with subversion, subculture, and queerness. This room makes digital the formative potential behind destruction and errata. These actions break old spaces while creating new ones. With this lens, Alejandro Junyao Zhang explores space through glitched sculpture and distorted sound. The space features quotes from writers Legacy Russell, Jack Halberstam, Frederico Campagna, and Alejandro Junyao Zhang himself. His sculpture moves with motion capture data from IOR50’s queer motion capture library inside this room.
