Phantasmagoria exhibition guide

Nina Davies is a Canadian-British choreographer, sculptor and video artist. In Image Syncers 2025, a project spanning video, sculpture and performance, Davies considers how digital technologies are changing the way we move. The central video features a fictional podcast from the near future called What’s Sizzlin’ which discusses a break-in at a seed bank. The group responsible, called Plot Corps, reportedly mimicked AI-generated movement to avoid detection by surveillance systems.

The podcast’s discussion then expands into a conversation about ‘perception-collapse’, the inseparability of real and artificially generated movement, and the evolution of language and images in a projected future dominated by synthetic media. Sculptural elements in conversation with the video bring the world of Plot Corps, their clothing and props to life.

Throughout her work Davies offers new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices that now proliferate on social media and gaming platforms, questioning how the current digitisation of the human body will develop into the future.

In other projects such as Becoming the Edit 2024 and Precursing 2023, Davies has speculatively reframed TikTok dances and video-game choreography as the folk dances of the future. This interest in speculative futures is also shared by artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Joey Holder.

Isaac Lythgoe’s four unsettling works in Phantasmagoria consider how sculpture can adopt ideas from narrative and storytelling traditions. As if lifted out of a corrupted fairytale, his fawns and goats embody an uncomfortable hybridisation of animals, humans and technology.

Lythgoe draws inspiration from folklore such as the tales of the Brothers Grimm, science fiction such as the work of Philip K. Dick, as well as more recent popular culture. He deploys a wide variety of materials: fibreglass, car paint, 3D printed plastics, welded metal, cow stomach leather and oak and cherry wood. Computer modelling is an essential stage in the creation of these objects. They appear in uncanny states of transition, with the handmade and machine-made in continual flux.

With Why can’t we remember the future 2023 Lythgoe set out to convey the precarity of the knowledge and technical systems that construct contemporary society. The sculpture unravels the complex components and processes that combine to create the humble croissant. The pastoral, bucolic myth of commercial farming is turned inside out as the sculpture assumes a monstrous form, part beast, part humanoid walker. It is winged and horned like a nightmarish apparition from a hunger buried in our collective subconscious.

A similar eerie threat is posed by Cherish Curious Cats 2023, in which an eyeless head of a hound thrusts forward, its tongue of uranium glass illuminated by UV light. It is umbrellaed by a toadstool form which conjures contrasting associations of the twee fairyland imaginaries of Victorian children’s stories and the hellish visions of nuclear apocalypse that haunt our post-1945 world.

Most Dismal Swamp is a project emerging from the curatorial, artistic and research practice of Dane Sutherland. In Scraper 2023, Sutherland and his collaborators – including Nina Davies, Plastique Fantastique, Missouri Williams and many others – reflect on the digital systems accelerating the disintegration and disorder of the highly evolved social structures that shape contemporary life.

Across its six chapters, the first three of which are presented here, Scraper layers a combination of performance, sculpture, computer-generated imaging, AI processes and text all combined through video. A dark, dank ‘acid pessimism’ animates the work. Its cryptic traces of information lead the viewer down a rabbit hole into ritualistic spaces where hallucinatory lifeworlds and game protocols constitute what Sutherland calls the ‘folkless lore’ of digital culture.

Reality itself is constructed and deconstructed in Scraper through a 3D scan of a sixteenth-century clandestine chapel in Aberdeen. Such spaces are aligned with multi-user shared hallucinations – or ‘MUSH’, the title of an earlier work by Most Dismal Swamp – a term borrowed from online, text-based role-playing games in which a shared set of highly specific rules help construct an immersive fictional and sometimes quasi-sacred world.

Sutherland’s writing weaves together a lexicon of online subcultures and regional vernaculars, including his own Aberdeenshire dialect of Doric. A guiding metaphor of the swamp animates the texts: a noxious, verdant and moss-ridden ecological parallel to our oversaturated digital information systems. Fetid and dangerously fertile, this so-called ‘semiotic slurry’ washes over the viewers, forming flashes of association. Through its maximalist surfeit of information, the text reflects the phenomenon of ‘model collapse’, in which Large Language Models and other machine-learning platforms become poisoned by their own projection of reality.

Jürgen Baumann is a Swiss artist based in Winterthur. He works predominantly with casting and relief in resins, plaster and polystyrene glazing. Saugott, oder die lernäische Schlange (Piggod, or the Lernean serpent) is one of a series of ‘portals’ Baumann has made in recent years which emulate architectural features, in this case a trio of gothic arches. The manipulation of light to create an ethereal partial presence reflects his interest in screens and flat planes as spaces to be animated and punctured, or thresholds to be transgressed.

Baumann’s portals are inseparable from our contemporary experience of screens and gaming, which blurs the boundary between fantasy and reality. He remembers spending time in his father’s TV repair shop as a child, and the ‘magical’ quality of the monitors coming to life. The ‘Piggod’ looming through this work is a monstrous deity entangled with the tentacle forms of the Hydra from Greek mythology.

Baumann is here in dialogue with the godfather of weird literature, H.P. Lovecraft, who in his tale ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ describes an unsettling relief sculpture representing “a pulpy, tentacled head surmounted by a grotesque and scaly body”. Later, this horrifying sculptural image emerges as an actual creature arriving through a “monstrously carven portal … this fantasy of prismatic distortion”.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is an artist and archivist whose video games, performances and installations use the audience themselves as the main medium.

You are encouraged to interact through Brathwaite-Shirley’s installation, to collectively confront difficult questions, reframe shared histories and reveal possible futures. Her work often adopts lo-fi 3D graphics reminiscent of the 1990s, when computer games, PCs and the internet became widespread.

In PIRATING BLACKNESS 2021, also known as BLACKTRANSSEA.COM, you are invited to board a boat from which you can control the game on screen. The game invites players to confront their personal relationship with the history of slavery and colonisation, as it intertwines lived experience with the fictional gamespace.

The artist notes that this work was prompted by a question: if water had memory, what would it say? The sea takes ultimate agency over the events of the game, drawing from nautical afrofuturism such as the 1990s Detroit techno duo Drexciya’s myth of an underwater country populated by the unborn children of enslaved Africans.

It also resonates with wider readings of the Black Atlantic and Saidiya Hartman’s notion of ‘fabulation’, in which gaps in archives or the historical record can be filled creatively. The work twists or ‘pirates’ authorised historical narratives to develop an alternative, mythic and folkloric engagement with the Middle Passage in which audiences imaginatively reflect on and construct their own relationship to the past.