Veils of Impermanence

Elli Antoniou  /  Szilvia Bolla  /  Christina Cushing  /  Xavier Robles De Medina  /  Elinor Haynes  /  Eve Stotesbury  /  Viktor Timofeev

11th October - 10th November 2024

Tracing the outlines of an intangible interference of immaterial potentia, a deep state of liminality suspends a phantasmagoric cipher. That which is known to exist in the elusive grey areas, the Backrooms of human understanding; nebulous entities of impermanence, blurring the edges of perception. Light has beauty in darkness, its radiance fleeting, purely evanescent, fading to a fugacious delicate veil of shadows, disintegrating before it can be grasped. Vapour as a vessel of perception, diffuses in turbulent whisps, rippling and converging, intermingling with air in an ethereal dance of decay. Incorporeal performance of diffusion and abstraction, light catching curlicue caustics as they shimmer and melt from view. A layering of dissociative states, the outlines of objects become unstable… representation destabilising…We grasp at the barely visible, spiralling into the miasmic void, like a moth drawn to artificial light.

HEX#16161D, your one time passcode for the brain's grey, dark light you see. Observed with closed eyes in an absence of light, you see Eigengrau. Anti-existential realisation in the mind's eye - the image presented is not always the truth, as the psychological effect of screen time becomes a derealization of an online aura. This reverie spawns hypnagogic states manifested by an afterimage burnt onto retinas from a shining static. Overstimulation of the optic nerve conjures digital phosphenes - light born without light, flickering behind closed eyes, a luminous echo with no source. Streams of data undulate as perspectival shifts alter the surface, their flickering projections held within a temporal threshold, oscillating between potential optical states. Chromatic ruptures unravel into birefringence; the phenomenon of double refraction, scattering polarised and iridescent trails that dissolve into the ether as each fleeting ocular trace fades to the infinite.

Ghostly matter forms and deforms, neither here nor there; a penumbral spectre whose ubiquitous presence is felt yet unknown. An eerie fissure expanding in ephemeral space, triggering activation functions at our synaptic nodes, conjuring autonomous emotional response. An allusion to illusion of the technological spirit, the haunting of our eyes in the perception of reality. Transcendental disorientation created by sensorial dissonance, a directionless unknown, surrounded by clouds…which way is up? Alternate realities washing over you, enigmatic elements teasing the senses in flows of encrypted dreamlike transmission. Virtual hallucinations of the approximate inbetween; rubbed eyes blur at the sight of computer vision, unstable diffusion obfuscates original representation.

Media interfaces between translucent overlays displaying crystalised liquids, shiny surfaces punctured by binary light, the image distorted by artifacted corruptions, as a darkless digital intimacy sticks to the skin like a wet mist. Phenomenological evaporation through computational heat pressed against moist biological bodies. Witness the hallucinatory Resonance Cascade within vacuum interminus, greyscale ambiguity permeates the ungoverned dark pool’s liquidity gradually evaporating to reveal conflicting states of existence—between positive and negative, presence and absence….Dark energy hazing, reflected through dimensionless impermeable systems of an obscured logic. To absorb into the negative of the image, the antimatter of the aesthetic, something which sits outside of us, on the periphery of the perceptual. That which drifts amidst an unbounded pareidolic horizon.


Funded by Arts Council England