What Is It Like?, Arebyte Gallery, exhibition review: ‘Fascinating and unsettling’

What Is It Like? is a fascinating new exhibition that has opened at digital arts gallery Arebyte on City Island.

The theme of this group show is human consciousness. Diving deep into philosophy, the six artists whose work is on display each draw on digital art forms to explore the subjective reality we experience.

As you listen to Damara Inglês’s very analogue story of remembered family bonds in Crypto Fashion Week: Fashion Cyph3r, you can interact with a dazzling ‘mirror’ that transforms your persona with masks, accessories and the trappings of other-worldly fashion.

Lawrence Lek’s Nepenthe is based on a walking simulation video game that you’ll activate to explore themes of identity, memory and perception inside a serene ‘Chinese garden’ that plays with your sense of time and place.

Choy Ka Fai’s Unbearable Darkness is a dance-based video that brings together dreamscapes and Butoh artistic traditions in a mesmerising display of dance and colour.

Works by Anna Bunting-Branch, Katarzyna Krakowiak and Kira Xonorika use sound, colour and motion to probe the parameters of the memory-based worlds we create and those which are increasingly created for us by digital tools.

You may walk out of the exhibition with the unsettling suspicion that your thought processes are not quite what they used to be prior to the advent of the algorithmic universe.

But the works collected here also remind us that our minds are steeped in very human cultures. Do you like what it is now like?

What Is It Like? runs until 4 May 2025 at Arebyte Gallery, 7 Botanic Square, City Island, E14 0LG.