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.

A few years ago, Google applied its image-identification software, trained on enormous datasets, to interpret visual noise: it ‘read’ the most commonly photographed objects into random pixels, creating ‘dream images’ in which for example the eyes and fur of a billion pet pictures were generated across surreal landscapes. Some of the lux displays use ai processing to pursue this new form of the data sublime: one of calculation or computation. Machine-generated works are nothing new, of course: we may think of Harold Cohen who from the early 1970s wrote programmes that allowed computers to draw their own creations, and showed the process operating live, using plotting machines. What is new here, and undeniably impressive, is the scale and speed of this processing, the vast datasets on which it draws, and the hypnotic vision of an inhuman intelligence playing with human cultural techniques and material. While it would be fascinating to see such processes live, what we are actually presented with in lux is short-looped videos of already rendered and edited sequences.

For instance, Cao Yuxi in a work called Shan Shui Paintings by ai renders on a dramatic installation of curved screens in a once-more mirrored space a mesmerizing liquid flow in which East Asian ink-painting landscapes are continually evoked and erased, never reaching a fully realized form. Each tiny pixel appears as part of a radiant dust carried in the ever-restless fluid. This dynamic and computational sublime, drawing from online image data, gives an oneiric vision of painterly creation and its transient life.

In a very different display, Refik Anadol applies ai processes to a dataset of Italian Renaissance art to create projections in a tall, narrow room, once again mirrored on wall and ceiling, into which the viewer can wander. This work cycles through distorted and rapidly changing buildings, landscapes and especially portraits which do briefly resolve into familiar-looking images. Yet the monstrous is only ever a step away as faces erupt into bulbous forms that appear as tumours, or are overloaded with cobweb lines, amid the continual ebb and flow of bright spheres that look like broken-up polystyrene. The whole gives the impression of an endlessly looping fever dream of a Renaissance connoisseur. If the effect is once again hypnotic—the viewer is held in the sublime of a vision of a superior generator of painterly form—it is because the work opens up a glimpse of a future in which the traces or indeed ruins of human creation are reworked forever by inhuman intelligences.