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Press Release

“We fear forgetting, losing memories, and want to store and archive everything, throwing nothing away. Do we have the courage to forget?”
— Matilde Crucitti, Losing the Backup

The Phreaking Collective invites you to Bit Rot, a group exhibition that explores the fragility, decay, and obsolescence of our digital age. Taking its name from the slow degradation of digital files over time, Bit Rot stages a post-human reflection on the technologies that once promised progress and the lives they now leave behind.

Visitors are invited into a world where bots are trained on the voices of forgotten users and inactive profiles, where decaying systems generate new poetics, and where digital forgetting becomes an act of care. Curated by a collective of computational artists born into the internet age, Bit Rot is both a mourning space and a speculative future archive.

Alongside the exhibition, the Phreaking Collective will host a weekend of free public programming, including hands-on workshops, artist talks, live performances, and community events. This will open access to new forms of digital literacy, storytelling, and cultural memory.

Keywords

ARTISTS

Yunzhi / Melissa Li

a computational artist, explores intangible systems and audience reflection through interactive installations and immersive 3D environments. Her work invites participants to question how digital and organic systems shape our understanding of self, community, and space.

Xach Hill

transmedia artist and creative technologist working with interactive installation, led panels and disruptive technologies threatening digital communities.

Rizq Yazed

Malaysian artist whose work ranges from film and installation to web-based experiences, question our perception of internet cultures and the inherent intimacy embedded in them.

Eryn English-Polch

a 3D and experimental digital media artist. Tampering with both dated and out-of-favour, and modern emerging technologies, his medium is found in the coalescence of the aesthetics of software and hardware from then and now.

Jack Jessé

explores relationships between fauna, flora and machines by investigating movement, land and digital culture through emerging technologies, interactive installations, and data visualisation. His work explores human-machine collaborations, shifting between macro and micro perspectives, both stepping back to observe broader geopolitical systems and zooming in to reveal the microscopic worlds of ecology and materiality.

Maisy Charlton

Hauntology, anachronistic technology, digital psychogeography and a fantasy of escape shape the atmosphere of my practice. I work to reveal the quiet strangeness embedded in everyday spaces and the emotional weight of ordinary objects, moments and landscapes. Storytelling is fundamental to my practice, providing a framework through which I can explore the layers of personal and collective experience, revealing the unseen connections between the past and present.

Keiran Cooper

aims to humorize lived experiences by telling stories that infiltrate realms uniquely human with elements uniquely digital. Inspired by cultural byproducts of our interactions with designed objects and concerned with the overwhelming amount of waste created by man’s industrial exploits, much of his work aims to comment on the politics of ownership, obsession, sprawl, and scale.

Lyra Robinson

is a transdisciplinary new media artist, whose work spans performance, installation, and video. She works primarily with ones and zeroes; manipulating experimental machine vision and deep learning processes.

Phoenix Isla Kea

Phoenix Isla Kea (b. 2003) is a London-born Polynesian artist working with computation, sound, and installation. With a background in photography and film, her current practice explores the psychological and emotional textures of online life, particularly the aesthetics of seduction, digital exploitation, and algorithmic control. Blending technical systems with embodied inquiry - Kea builds web environments, manipulates found media, and composes machinic forms shaped as much by emotional intensity - rage, longing, obsession, as by logic. Her research interrogates girlhood as a tactical identity, and the feedback loops between visibility, desire, and control in algorithmic culture.

Nikos Antonio Kourous Vázquez

My work stems from a desire to challenge and expand prevailing narratives around machine learning: what it is, how it functions, and how it might evolve. As ‘machine learning’ becomes the mythologized term ‘artificial intelligence,’ as user-machine relationships become engraved, and as companies scramble to innovate and incorporate it, I feel compelled to create space for the technology to define itself.

Louise Wan

creates kinetic sculptures and mechanical installations that perform futile, looping gestures. Rooted in absurdity, her machines blur the boundaries between bodies and automation, agency and exhaustion. Her work reflects on broken systems, digital remnants, and the poetics of malfunction—questioning what persists, what decays, and what is keeping in motion.

METAL_UPA

METAL_UPA is a designer, new media artist and creative technologist working with light, sound, and signal as sensory material. Influenced by digital new materialism and choreographic thinking, she explores immaterial bodies and invisible internet infrastructures through speculative interfaces and modular systems.

Charlotte Young

Charlotte Young (digital artist) and Phoebe Rayner (mezzo-soprano) are an ongoing collaborative duo exploring various forms of communication and dissonance. Combining their specialisms in web development and contemporary classic music, they explore the relationship between themselves and the computer.

Zepu Li

Zepu Li is a Chinese artist based in London. His work explores the subtle tensions between natural forces—such as wind, water, and stone—and urban structures like scaffolding and screws. He focuses on the “whispering gaps” that emerge between these materials: spaces where light drifts, gravity pauses, and time softens. Rooted in dérive, his process involves drifting through cities, collecting fragments—plants, debris, forgotten parts—and reassembling them into skeletal, shifting installations. Using materials like enamel, rice paper, and silk thread, Li creates works that respond to light, wind, and weight. In a fast-paced and dense reality, his practice unfolds through slowness and wandering as ongoing acts of perception and construction.

Yiding Zhang

Yiding Zhang was born in China and now active in Wuhan/London, he is a cross-media artist and independent musician specializing in sound installation and audiovisual performance. His art practice is deeply rooted in postmodern society, delves into human emotions through the lens of digital-age media. Currently, Yiding’s work is focused on exploring urban acoustic spaces, particularly through the prism of Brutalist architecture, employing techniques of musique concrète.

Paula Molina

Paula Molina is an artist, designer, and researcher whose practice merges the innovative world of biodesign with traditional printmaking techniques to create mixed media installations. She explores how multidisciplinary approaches can drive more sustainable futures, working with biomaterials, living systems, and alternative fabrication methods to challenge conventional material hierarchies and curatorial norms.

Lucy Ellis

Lucy Ellis is an experimental animator and creative coder based in London. Her work explores the digital and analogue through experimenting with process and materiality. She enjoys working with scrap and found materials repurposing them to form new identities and narratives differing from their original purpose or intention. The texture of materials is important to her practice, exploring how it evokes memory and time. More recently she has become interested in screen based installation work exploring animation as an expanded practice."

Jin Xie

“Jin Xie is a London-based multi-media artist working across spatial design, 3D digital media, and sonic installations. Her practice explores themes of cultural identity, displacement, and the complexities of navigating dual cultural landscapes. With a background in architecture from the Architectural Association and a Master’s in Design for Performance and Interaction from The Bartlett, UCL, Jin approaches art-making through a multidisciplinary lens that merges spatial thinking with interactive technologies. Her work is characterized by immersive, sensory-driven experiences that invite reflection on personal and collective identity. By integrating sound, space, and digital environments, Jin constructs evocative installations that engage both emotionally and conceptually. She has exhibited internationally, including at the London Festival of Architecture, Ars Electronica in Linz, and KIKK Festival in Belgium

Zhanlan (orangespy)

Zhanlan (orangespy) is a multimedia artist specializing in participatory art and audience engagement through digital media, live coding audio-visual performances, and interactive installations. Her practice explores the relationships between subjectivity, objectivity, and technology, integrating generative AI and algorithmic design to craft immersive, reflective experiences. Through a conceptual approach, she creates spaces that invite co-creation and introspection. In the upcoming BIT BOT exhibition, she will present a live coding performance that merges sound and visuals in real time, continuing her exploration of collaborative and computational aesthetics.

Location & Event

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SCHEDULE

Show opens: 8 - 10 August, 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Private View: 7 August, 6:00 - 9:00 PM

Performances 7th August:
6:30 pm: Zhanlan (OrangeSpy)
7:30 pm: Lagtime_Seedling
8:30 pm: Yiding Zhang

Panel Discussion: To be confirmed.

ABOUT US

The Phreaking Collective is a London-based group of emerging computational artists working across code, sculpture, sound, installation, and digital media. Formed in 2025, the collective takes its name from phreaking, a term initially used to describe the subversive practice of hacking telephone systems in the 1960s and 70s. Drawing from this lineage of creative mischief and network disruption, the Phreaking Collective reclaims the term as a gesture toward experimentation, resistance, and intimacy within digital systems.

Contact

For press, programming, and general inquiries, please get in touch with us:

info@phreaking.co.uk
Instagram: @phreaking_collective

About Copeland Gallery:

Located minutes from Peckham Rye Station at the heart of Copeland Park, Copeland Gallery is a landmark within Peckham's cultural quarter. Providing a supportive platform for emerging artists since 2013, the gallery has played a key role in the rise of Peckham’s art scene, housing hundreds of exhibitions, fashion shows, and workshops. Global brands, cutting edge artists, large filming productions as well as student exhibitions have all graced Copeland Gallery's walls.