The Phreaking Collective invited visitors 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?
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 was a series of talks, workshops, discussions, film screenings and performances where visitors were 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.
The inaugural issue of Phreak Mag launched alongside this exhibition, extending its themes in print and publishing new writing around art, networks and digital culture. Click here for more about Phreak Mag
As seen on: The Koppel Project
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Kat Macdonald's for a workshop explored technology as it relates to collective sound making, taking participants through a history of London’s experimental collective performance scene of the 1970’s and how those methods can be adapted and applied to our current art culture.
Cranberry Lemonade @cranberry_lemonade presents ‘I want to be a website,” a hands-on, beginner-friendly
personal web-making workshop. Participants explored HTML, CSS and JavaScript, creating personalised and
poetic webpages to demystify web creation and tell their own digital stories and identities.
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.
Why are file formats? are they real? what??? This workshop explored what file formats really are, where they came from, and why they make us suffer. It started with an intro to Permacomputing, and how speculative art projects could save engineering! Then, participants learned just enough computer science to be dangerous. With these new skills, they explored the surprisingly philosophical worlds of bytebeats, generative image-making, and Unicode-art. By the end, participants were wondering why they ever relied on software to do things for them, and uninstall chatGPT forever!!!
By Artist/Researcher Terence Broad, the talk includes new ways of understanding and engaging critically
with AI within creative practice.
This talk showed how practices that treat AI as a material, rather than a tool or creative agent,
artists were able to make critical works that presented new ways of understanding and making sense of these
unfathomably complex computational systems.
On Saturday evening, the 17th, we hosted our open projector night. Everyone was welcome to come and
present their projects. Whether a project was finished, a work in progress, or already publicised, this
was a great opportunity to share it and gather feedback from fellow artists and enthusiasts.
Just show up, no pre-registration is needed.
A flâneur's guide to mapping the new geographies of connection. Contemplating on internet and communications infrastructures, participants took a walk through the window piece from one side of the wall to the other. In so doing, they passed through various forms of physical and digital infrastructures that mediate and feed on our data emissions, exploring the topography of the contemporary internet.
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 learned 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 had learnt to make something unique
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. The screening took place at ANNEX by The Koppel Project on Wednesday 21st January, 18:00–20:00, with a communal conversation around contemporary computational film.
The closing event of "Does Cloud Compute (ever) Precipitate?" featured a panel discussion
with participating artists and curators. Attendees reflected on the themes explored throughout the exhibition,
shared insights, and engaged in a lively conversation about the future of technology, art, and our
relationship with the cloud.
Additionally from 6:00 PM onwards, there was a line-up of live-coding performances by London Live Coding
groups, finishing the exhibition programme with music and code.
