FACT'S latest exhibition is for the meeple

An interactive exhibition which investigates the relationship between humanity and intelligent technologies is being staged at FACT this spring.

Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria?, which is in the first-floor gallery at the Wood Street venue until April 26, aims to explore the ways in which connections evolve and develop between co-existing humans and machines – and how intelligent technology influences decision-making and shapes our sense of ourselves.

Meeple is the term for small game pieces which are used to represent a real person during gameplay, and which move through a ‘reality’ which is influenced by AI and machine learning/adaptive algorithms.

Curator Milia Xin Bi explains: “Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria emerges from my ongoing observation of the shifting entanglements between humans and intelligent technologies, both through my work and within my own life.

“Developed in dialogue with the practices of Vytas, Joseph and Jan, the exhibition explores how this complex entanglement – a relationship that is never static – constantly transforms not only over time or through iterations of the mediated environment, but also through different bodies, minds and actions.

“The exhibition’s quasi-gaming structure encourages audiences to take on an interactive role, co-authoring the narrative, stepping into the recursive feedback loop between machines and us, and sensing how agency within this interplay is continuously negotiated, reshaped and cast into new forms.”

There are four interactive works from three artists to explore.

CripShip

Artist and programmer Joseph Wilk ‘uses the digital to explore disability and disability to explore the digital’.

CripShip (2024) is a tabletop roleplaying game that transforms lived experiences of disability into a space for resistance, collaboration and news ways of thinking.

Wilk invites visitors to roleplay as ‘Slop Mopper’ employees of a fictional government agency called the Ministry of AI Spills in an imagined world where unrestricted AI policies create biases, misinformation and harmful ideas which spread through society.

People can browse cases under investigation, hear from the Ministry’s head of department and prepare to join the resistance by creating ‘Slop Mopper’ characters.

Life Forever

Media artist, designer and educator Vytas Jankauskas’ newly commissioned interactive work (pictured top) is inspired by the thermodynamic research of American physicist Jeremy England who proposes that life emerges from an organism’s capacity to expel heat.

Life Forever is designed as an absurd ‘jellyfish wellness spa’ where the translucent gelatinous marine animals float inside a tank warmed by machines creating cryptocurrency, and where visitors are welcomed by Lola, the spa’s host and spiritual healer whose ‘good intentions are distorted and shaped by her consumerist desires and technological faith.’

Coffee Machine

Jan Zuilderveld’s Coffee Machine (2023) transforms an ordinary interaction with an appliance into a philosophical inquiry about existence.

To retrieve a cup of coffee, visitors must motivate the AI-driven machine and prove themselves worthy of its service.

The performative installation imitates sentience and behaves like a conscious being, listening to the user, reacting to tone and questioning its own repetitive existence.

Zuiderveld is an artist, researcher and technologist who explores how technology and everyday life connect by making small changes to familiar objects to help humans feel the presence of AI.

Life on Fact

Zuiderveld’s second performative installation, new for 2026, transforms a vintage broadcast camera into a real-time nature-documentary narrator, using neural networks - computer systems that learn by spotting patterns and processing data in a way loosely inspired by the human brain.

In Life on FACT, the networks are trained to produce a voice similar to that of Sir David Attenborough, subverting visitors into objects to be observed and exhibited rather than the artwork.

Directing the camera at a new subject provokes real-time-commentary, treating human activity in a way usually reserved for other species.

Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria? is in the first-floor gallery at FACT until April 26.