Codes of Tides Multimedia Exhibition

From June 9 to 13, 2025, during London Tech Week, a multimedia exhibition intertwining data, technology, and visual poetics—Codes of Tides—will unfold along the banks of the Thames. Co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai (MoCA), Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Shanghai International Culture Association, the exhibition is a flagship project of the 2025 “Tides: Urban Humanistic Dialogues from Shanghai to the World” series, and marks a significant milestone in celebration of MoCA’s 20th anniversary. Since its founding in 2005, MoCA has remained committed to contemporary art practices in a global context, continually expanding creative ecologies through boundary-dissolving artistic experiments. In the face of an AI-driven cultural shift, the museum continues to champion interdisciplinary collaboration between science and art while amplifying the global presence of Chinese artists.

The exhibition brings together ten artists active in both Shanghai and London. Their practices span video, multimedia, sculpture, installation, painting, and photography—navigating across mediums and perspectives in a state of continuous flux. Artificial intelligence, immersive technologies, and algorithmic systems are not merely referenced as supplementary concepts but serve as extensions of each artist’s creative logic. Through their acute engagement with data, emotion, and the textures of urban life, they produce installations and moving images that invite audiences to re-sense how technology permeates and reshapes contemporary rhythms through nonlinear narratives. The exhibition also expands into forums, live dialogues, and collaborative creation initiatives, opening multiple avenues for imagining the intersections of urbanism and art.

The curatorial team consists of Miriam Sun, Executive Director of MoCA; William Latham, professor in the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths and a pioneering figure in evolutionary art; and artist and performance scholar Zheng Yue. Drawing from their respective expertise in art, technology, and performance, the three curators have co-constructed a dynamic curatorial framework that challenges conventional structures and broadens public understandings of what an exhibition can be. The gallery is transformed from a passive display site into a living network of ideas—one that connects audiences and cultures across two cities.

The exhibition’s conceptual foundation centers on the metaphor of the “tide,” converging flows of information, technological shifts, emotional migrations, and geopolitical changes into a unified, synchronic expression. In a time when technological incursions are redrawing the boundaries of reality, how might art respond, translate, or even reconfigure the experiences these shifts provoke? British artist William Latham, one of the curators, is a key figure bridging the early history of digital art with contemporary practice. Since the 1980s, he has experimented with evolutionary art, merging algorithmic logic and lifeform models into bio-fantastical expressions. In this exhibition, his VR installation invites viewers to journey through a vortex of artificial life.

Italian-born artist Fabio Lattanzi Antinori and UK-based artist Andy Lomas, both known for their use of technological languages, offer perspectives rooted in financial systems and biological science respectively. Their works establish an invisible bridge between seemingly disparate logics—juxtaposing capital flows with biological evolution to reveal an aesthetic tension that defies conventional boundaries.

Against this backdrop, British artist David Cotterrell’s holographic installation appears especially restrained. Known for his long-standing engagement with human conditions, Cotterrell draws inspiration from river systems to introduce ecological consciousness into the visual field, prompting a contemplative, far-reaching inquiry into the environment. Young artist Redblack D. Lawrence treats painting as a vehicle for expelling trauma and enacting self-transformation, weaving images and texts in a semi-automated process to generate sensory fields charged with emotional flow.

Artists based in China respond to the exhibition’s theme from within the context of Chinese cultural heritage. Yang Yongliang continues his internationally acclaimed “contemporary shanshui” series, reconstructing the spirit of literati painting through digital imagery. Chen Ruofan offers a slow-paced counterpoint to the digital age’s overload, attempting to stitch personal emotions into geo-memories and ecological narratives that hover between the virtual and the real.

Cao Yuxi deploys generative technologies to craft a dynamic vision of urban plant life, articulating his ecological concerns for both London and Shanghai.

Lu Sisi and Zheng Yue explore the edges of perception through sound, performance, and video. Lu’s work revives the echoes of looms to express cycles and reconstructions in a contemporary key. Zheng transforms the exhibition space into a riverside recitation theater, where light and poetic sound intermingle, and the human body measures the emotional tidal shift between the Suzhou Creek and the Thames—making the viewer an active participant in the spontaneous generation of the work itself.

Codes of Tides dismantles the cold rationality often associated with technology, transforming it into circuits of sensation. The artists transcend generational and geographical boundaries, producing works that are acutely responsive to the present moment while retaining deeply personal warmth. In an era where artificial intelligence and data logic dominate, these works embrace uncertainty, attuning themselves to rhythms yet to be fully captured by human language—like a river, or a temporality flowing without order, shimmering with the traces of capital flows, ecological turns, and collective memory.