Does Cloud
Compute
(ever)
Precipitate?

The Phreaking Collective invites you to Does Cloud Compute (ever) Precipitate? - An exhibition that asks a question and tells a poem. If clouds in nature condense and return as rain, can the digital cloud ever give back what it takes? Can data come home to the people who made it?

Keywords

  • Data Storm
  • Hidden Infrastructures
  • Poetic Systems

Location

ANNEX By the Koppel Project

1 Tiverton Street, London,
SE1 6NT, UK

Dates

Private view:
9th Jan 2026, 18:00 - 21:00

Opens:
10th - 25th Jan 2026, 10:00 - 17:00

About

This show explores the hidden infrastructures that shape our lives, bringing materiality to the ethereal. It explores our relationship with the monoliths that are waking up, the environmental strain, the invisible human labour, and the worries of pooled resources in an unreturning atmosphere. Working across installations, sound works, generative systems and computational artwork, the exhibition examines the quiet romance in technological convenience.

The Cloud, an unseen network of servers, energy and labour - is made tangible, visible and audible.The works confront the vast systems that silently maintain our lives, datacenters that feed on our energy and attention and the dependent relationship we have, the systems behind each upload, generation and stream.

Running alongside the two week show is a series of talks, workshops, discussions, film screenings and performances where visitors are invited to look deeper into the unsung systems shaping our lives, and reflect on the strange romance and hidden dependencies that define our connection to the cloud.

As seen on: The Koppel Project


Events

Workshop

I Want to be a website!

HTML event artwork

Cranberry Lemonade @cranberry_lemonade presents ‘I want to be a website,” a hands-on, beginner-friendly personal web-making workshop. We will be exploring HTML, CSS and JavaScript, creating personalised and poetic webpages, to demystify web creation and tell your own digital stories and identities.

Peformance Lecture

Counter Modelling

Talk Poster

A web-based performance exploring climate modelling through digital aesthetics and architectural thinking. Moving between early numerical forecasting and contemporary synthetic intelligence, Counter-Modelling challenges the aesthetics of computational realism, presenting climate prediction as a site of tension between technological development and climate futures, shaped by power, uncertainty, and abstraction.

Workshop

Extremely Standardised Fun

mat hill workshop poster

Why are file formats? are they real? what??? Let's learn what file formats really are, where they came from, and why they make us suffer. We will start with an intro to Permacomputing, and how speculative art projects could save engineering! Then, we will learn just enough computer science to be dangerous. With these new skills, we can explore the surprisingly philosophical worlds of bytebeats, generative image-making, and Unicode-art. By the end, you will wonder why you ever relied on software to do things for you, and uninstall chatGPT forever!!!

Lecture

AI As Material

Talk Poster

By Artist/Researcher Terence Broad, the talk includes new ways of understanding and engaging critically with AI within creative practice.
This talk will show how practices that treat AI as a material, rather than a tool or creative agent, artists are able to make critical works that present new ways of understanding and making sense of these unfathomably complex computational systems.

Event

Open Projector

open projector event artwork

Join us on Saturday evening, the 17th, for our open projector night! Everyone is welcome to come and present their projects. Whether your project is finished, a work in progress, or already publicised, this is a great opportunity to share it and gather feedback from fellow artists and enthusiasts.
Just show up, no pre-registration is needed.

Talk

Cloud-Watching Through My Window

cloud-watching talk artwork

A flâneur's guide to mapping the new geographies of connection. Contemplating on internet and communications infrastructures, we will take a walk through the window piece from one side of the wall to the other. In so doing, we will pass through various forms of physical and digital infrastructures that mediate and feed on our data emissions, exploring the topography of the contemporary internet.

Workshop

Intro to Creative Coding for Artists

cable gl workshop poster

The aim of this workshop with Margot McEwen would be to teach the basics of using Cables.gl, a (free and open source) node-based live coding language for building things with WebGL. Participants will learn how to manipulate live and pre-recorded moving images, how to create and modify simple video effects, and how to interact with them through various I/O, then combine what they have learnt to make something unique

Event

Film screening night

open projector event artwork

An evening of computational, experimental, and artist-led short films that bend narrative, fracture reality, and play at the edges of code, image, and memory. These works push the medium through storytelling, inventive editing, and striking visual languages. Join us at ANNEX by The Koppel Project on Wednesday 21st January, 18:00–20:00, for a communal screening and conversation around contemporary computational film.

Event

Closing Event

closing event poster

Join us for the closing event of "Does Cloud Compute (ever) Precipitate?" with a panel discussion featuring participating artists and curators. Reflect on the themes explored throughout the exhibition, share insights, and engage in a lively conversation about the future of technology, art, and our relationship with the cloud.
Additionally from 6:00 PM onwards, enjoy a line up of live-coding performances by London Live Coding groups, finishing the exhibition programme with a bit of music and code!


Artists

Yunzhi / Melissa Li

A Chengdu-born, London-based computational artist whose practice spans interactive installations, web-based experiments and immersive 3D environments. She examines how images, code, and audience interaction shape our sense of identity, memory and place. At the heart of Li’s work is the translation of the intangible experiences, making the unseen visible.

Xach Hill

Xach Hill is British-Kiwi transmedia artist, curator and creative technologist working across sculpture, code, and poetry. He explores the entanglement of human memory and machine logic, often using AI, LED matrices, and hacked hardware to question what it means to be seen, remembered, or misinterpreted by a system. Rooted in both computational poetics and glitch aesthetics, his work invites audiences into spaces where identity, intimacy, and error co-exist.

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.

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.

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.

Jasmine Broadhurst

Jasmine Broadhurst is an interdisciplinary artist working across computational and physical systems and material processes. Her practice explores tension between lived human experience and technological structures. She graduated from Central Saint Martins with a degree in Fashion Design Knitwear. This education grounded her practice in material sensitivity, embodied making, and an understanding of machines as physical collaborators. She is drawn to systems and processes that operate imperfectly, where technology functions as a creative collaborator: transforming cold infrastructure into a means of questioning and reflection. Moments of friction are central to her practice, embracing uncertainty and tension as integral components of meaning.

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.

David Lazãr

My practice operates at the intersection of software engineering and artistic research, examining technology not as a neutral tool but as an infrastructure that shapes identity, behavior, and public space. Through installations, web-based works, and AI-driven experiments, I expose systems of automation, surveillance, and data extraction, translating invisible mechanisms into embodied experiences. Grounded in research, my process visualizes technological power structures and their ethical consequences. Shaped by my background in tech, I work with small-scale, sustainable computing informed by permacomputing principles, emphasizing transparency, care, and ecological responsibility. My work invites critical reflection on progress, efficiency, and the futures we imagine for technology.

Robin Leverton

Robin Leverton (b. 1995, UK) is a Croydon-based artist, curator, technologist, and researcher. His work explores the materiality and ontology of artificial intelligence, particularly in relation to identity, embodiment, and agency. His practice spans sculpture, painting, printmaking, and installation, integrating cutting edge technologies into traditional arts practices.

Dylan Morris

My name is Dylan Morris, I am a 27 year-old mixed media visual artist working out of South-East London. I use mostly found materials that have their own narrative in a wider cultural context and manipulate them to communicate something personal, attempting to create a harmony between the communal experience and my own. I'm interested in reflecting on the experience of growing up in an increasingly complex digital environment. I try to examine the contested terrain of contemporary media culture, understand the forces at play and eventually subvert the forces of commercialist cultural control.

© Phreaking Collective