Exhibition: What Is It Like?

What Is It Like? — a group exhibition which explores the nature of subjective reality. Inspired by Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 paper, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, the exhibition 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 — mirroring with its interactive stage-crafting how AI technologies generate immersive yet illusory realities.

This exhibition investigates the brain as a machine that constructs tailored realities. By incorporating insights from neuroscience, it 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.

Embodiment lies at the core – with all of the artists coming from different cultures and offering a glimpse into their specific embodied knowledge framework. The exhibition becomes a translation tool, bringing forward experience from episodic – visual, oral and sensory – memory, translated in an embodied way. Episodic memory stores personal, context-rich experiences, allowing mental time travel and shaping individuality, unlike semantic memory, which handles general knowledge and fact-based concepts.

Several of the works powerfully address this notion of translation. In the work of Anna Bunting-Branch, feminist science fiction texts like Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and Aliette de Bodard’s Immersion (2012) are remixed and translated 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, like a waking dream.

And in another form of translation, Katarzyna Krakowiak’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 and inviting audiences to reflect on the act of hearing itself.

As informational beings, we continually synthesize and resynthesize ourselves, creating a reality of mind as we navigate interconnected “bubble worlds” that stick, fuse, and burst against one another. What is it Like? invites visitors to explore these interwoven layers of memory, imagination, and emotion, asking what it truly means to experience the world — our own and the Other’s. Emotion plays an important part in what distinguishes humanness from AI “hallucinations.”

Fashion Cyph3r (2022) is a poignant work in which artist Damara Inglês, 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, and to connect deeply with her experiences, her identity, and the memory of her mother.

Similarly, 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.

Finally, 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 — everything pulses in relationality, resonating with a quantum soul.

Throughout the exhibition What Is It Like?, stage crafting becomes a mechanical metaphor for how information such as data and memories is retrieved. AI is exposed as just one of the mechanisms through which to access an archive – and a limited, inherently flawed one. Moreover, the structure of the space is intentional, designed to mimic the way collections are put together. Large, latticed sliding panels reminiscent of gallery storage archives are pulled into place by visitors – 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.

Interrogating the interaction between collections and their audiences, this act of engagement invites visitors to curate personal, bespoke encounters, mirroring the synthesis of diverse artistic perspectives across genders, races, and realities. It echoes the idea of multiple Dasein — intersecting ways of being in the world. However, as Thomas Nagel noted in What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, imagining another’s existence often reveals only our human interpretation of their experience, not their true consciousness. This inability to fully embody the Other reminds us of the subjectivity of perspective.

What Is It Like? is an exhibition presented in partnership with arebyte Gallery through funding by the British Council as part of the UK/Poland Season 2025, a diverse programme of over 100 multi-artform events in 40 cities in both countries. Featuring artists from around the world, including the UK and Poland, What Is It Like? ran at arebyte Gallery, London, 27 February – 4 May 2025, before heading to Wroclaw, Poland. In May, part of the exhibition was shown at the 21st Media Art Biennale WRO, which has the theme Qualia – following which the full exhibition will be presented at WRO Art Center 2 October – 16 November 2025.