Expanded Realities

This year’s Expanded Realities exhibition, A Sense of Space, brings together projects which explore the relationship between our senses and the environments around us using a range of media including VR, audio, installation and video games.

Constantinopoliad and Peace of Mind make use of audio to untangle the ways in which the creative process is shaped by the people and events around us. Friends, lovers and family members become inspirations and collaborators, be it the poetry of Cavafy or a first cut of a song. Both projects make the case for the process of making art being porous, always evolving in response to the people and places in which it is taking place.

Alice Bucknell’s projects, Earth Engine and Ground Truthing, and Kris Hofmann’s Out of Nowhere explore how our rapidly-changing climate is shaping the ways in which we make sense of our environments. The works call attention to what we notice and how we notice it when interacting with the landscapes around us. Whether it is recreating memories of objects destroyed in a flood or the development of AI, satellite and digital modelling, Bucknell, Knowles and Sowerwine’s works ask us to consider if the transformations in our ecology may need us to transform how we understand our relationships with the planet.

Exhibition

The exhibition is free and unticketed, however a timed ticket must be booked to experience Constantinopoliad. The exhibition is based at Rich Mix (The Mix), on the fourth floor.

Opening times are:

Wednesday 15 April 2pm – 7pm (opening drinks from 4.30pm – 7pm)

Thursday 16 April 12pm – 7pm

Friday 17 April 12pm – 7pm

Saturday 18 April 12pm – 7pm

Sunday 19 April 12pm – 5pm

Combining audio, bespoke hand-bound books and installation, Constantinopoliad is an homage to queer archives and their absences. The project takes as its starting point the archive of the poet Constantine Cavafy and the gaps and fragments found within it. Specifically, the artists delve into Cavafy’s teenage journal, Constantinopoliad, an epic, written as the poet and his family were fleeing Alexandria for Constantinople. Sat together around a table, audiences are guided through an exploration of Cavafy’s teenage journal, and the absences that reveal the historic and erotic encounters which continued to the haunt the poet throughout his life.

Please note: This project runs at set intervals during the exhibition’s opening hours and booking is required.

Rejecting traditional conflict-driven video game mechanics of Player-vs-Environment and Player-vs-Player, Earth Engine instead makes the player a passive figure, responding to their environment’s changes and noticing them. Each level, presented here as a playtest is a “digital Earth” consisting of a combination of satellite imagery and climate data that adapts to the player’s style of play and asks them to slow down and notice, inviting a new way of envisaging our relationship to our environment and the technologies through which we experience it.

Intended as a companion to Earth Engine, also presented in this exhibition, Ground Truthing serves as a cinematic prelude to the video game. Across four chapters, landscapes which engage with remote sensing technologies – GPS, satellites, climate modelling – are created in video game engines and explored to interrogate the interactions between technology and ecology. The resulting project is self-reflexive, highlighting the absences that emerge when landscapes are understood through such sensory technologies.

Peace of Mind
Shadé Joseph | 2026 | UK | 60’ | Audio | English spoken

As the artist sets out to write a song, she records the conversations, hesitations, and experiments that unfold along the way, creating an archive of the collaborative network that influences and inspires the final track. The resulting diaristic document is an intimate and generous testament to creativity and the people who make it possible, emphasising the importance of the process as much as the finished work.

Combining personal testimony and ecological research, Out of Nowhere gently explores how preserving alluvial forests, marshes and wetlands can help us face the challenges of an increasingly unpredictable climate. Centring the experience of Anna, a resident of the Austrian Alpine town of Hallein as she experienced flooding in 2021, the project reveals how reconnecting with nature may be key to protecting ourselves going forward.

UCL Student Showcase

The Expanded Realities exhibition also includes a selection of immersive and audio work produced by current students and recent graduates of postgraduate programmes in UCL’s Public Anthropology section. A range of audio works are available to experience, with work produced on the Audio Storytelling for Radio and Podcast MA programme using documentary techniques to capture, personal histories and experiences whilst student projects created on the Designing Audio Experiences: Art, Science and Production MA use binaural, spatial audio to create rich, experimental sonic environments. Virtual reality experiences created by recent alumni from the Immersive Factual Storytelling MA programme are also presented. More details on individual projects are available here.

Work made by students on UCL Public Anthropology’s filmmaking programmes will be presented separately at the Festival as a screening. Please see the full schedule for details.