The opening room of lux: New Wave of Contemporary Art, an exhibition of technological wonders curated by Jiyoon Lee with the collaboration of the new-media arts organization fact, is symptomatic of much of what follows. Suspended from the ceiling are a group of digital flowers by iart Studio, the petals of which are carried on curved widescreen monitors of the kind often used by gamers. They rapidly change colour to suggest budding, blooming, decay and death. The labyrinthine exhibition space—the basement levels of 180 The Strand, a brutalist office complex—plunges the viewer into a profound darkness out of which loom naked concrete walls. The heavy blood-red curtains that must be lifted to access most of the works lend the exhibition promenade a faintly Grand Guignol air, and indeed various of the curtains are pushed aside to reveal bodily hybrids which teeter between fascinating attraction and horror.footnote1
One signature work (used on the exhibition posters, and picked up in its title) is a’strict’s Starry Beach, an impressive projection which convincingly animates breaking waves as seen under a night sky. The projection spills from the wall to the carpeted floor as the waves wash over the viewer’s feet. While the room is small and narrow, since its side walls are mirrored the waves seem to stretch to infinity, and the viewers are multiplied along the greatly elongated shore. As in the exhibition as a whole, the interplay of light and dark is a theme of this work, the waves made up of tiny points of glistening light which provide the only illumination; viewers can step into them, so that these points dance across their bodies. 
The mirrored illusion of vastness contributes to what is a textbook example of the Burkean sublime: the wide, stormy beach at night is experienced safely boxed into an indoor space without any of the inconveniences or dangers of exposure to the elements. At the same time, the mirrors pitch viewers into a heightened state of imagistic self-awareness (if, since so many of them wield phones, they weren’t already there), and open up opportunities for playing with selfies and other forms of social-media display. It is part of a by now familiar effect in which works of art are made, more or less openly, as honey-traps for social-media users, and in which the use of mirrors is the most obvious move. It has helped to boost a few veteran artists who have long used mirrors—such as Yayoi Kusama and Michelangelo Pistoletto—to new heights of fame. It also suggests that the sublime may not bear only on grand and potentially dangerous natural forces but also on what are for the user the incalculable manipulations of the social-media monopolies.
This double mirror trick is used again and again throughout lux, multiplying the effect of large-screen displays and projections, while shrinking the viewer. Elsewhere I have written about the effects of the data sublime, for instance as seen in large-scale museum photography by Andreas Gursky, Jeff Wall and many others that immerse the viewer in more points of information than they can make sense of, in an aesthetic of disorientation and loss of cognitive mapping. This sublime effect—loosely, of the mathematical in Kant’s terms—is accompanied in other works by a dynamic sublime in which the rapidity of data flows, rather than—or as well as—their extent, is also meant to overwhelm the viewer.