Beams: Thin Air

This large-scale temporary exhibition in east London explores the hidden complexities that shape our world with digital technology and impressive, immersive installations.

Beams ‘Thin Air’ brings together a leading group of international artists. The exhibition presents a set of New Media installations on a striking scale. All the works on show are temporary and site-specific; their form is the result of a complex arrangement of space, audience and technology.

The artists use materials from the events and entertainment world at 'counter purpose, to reveal the unseen rather than create pure spectacle.

From network technologies to the black box algorithms that reflect and shape our desires, we find ourselves simultaneously surrounded by more information than ever before and yet experiencing a reality built upon increasingly invisible structures.

The works presented expand the range of our perception through immaterial architectures, impossible images and intangible sculptures, helping us see that, when prompted, our vision extends beyond its common field.

James Clar – Cleanse/Mantra

In this installation, laser light travels down a corridor at 110Hz per second, which is a wavelength of just under 3 metres. As visitors pass through the installation, their viewing distance is sliced into even sections This creates a visual mantra, a repeated series of waves, which increase in amplitude. 110Hz is known as the ‘human pitch’, Stimulating the right side of the brain, where art, spirituality and emotion are centred.

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James Clar is an artist who works with light and technology. He is interested in how new media technologies shape human behaviour. Many of his works play with perception using sculptural elements that appear to warp between dimensions, using a wide range of materials and systems, such as multi-channel video installations, lasers, LEDs, and 3D printed elements. He combines these elements to create complex narratives referencing mythology and global history while questioning our engagement with digital culture.

Clar’s work has been included in exhibitions at Glucksman Museum, Dublin, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Pera Museum, Istanbul, Sam Francis Museum and MACBA, Barcelona and SeMA, Seoul, and the Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London.

404.Zero - 3.24

Like architecture in motion, 3.24 shuffles through a series of existential experiences by redrawing the space through light. An immersive sound element underlines the shifting multisensory environment, creating synaesthetic perceptions of infinite space, silence and death.

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404.zero is a collaboration between the artists Kristina Karpysheva and Alexandr Letsius. The duo specialises in real-time, generative, and code-based art, presented in large-scale installations, performances and music. They combine noise with randomised algorithms to stimulate visceral and awe-inspiring reactions. Through digital technology, they question the power structures of the Anthropocene and global politics, revealing them as invisible yet impregnable environments of the contemporary condition.

The duo’s work has been shown at venues worldwide, including Prague, Mexico City, Seoul, Lima, San Francisco and in New York’s Times Square. They have been shown in festivals and exhibitions, including MUTEK, Gamma Festival, Electric Castle, Japan Media Arts Festival and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

SETUP - Lines

Composed of 1100 metres of LED cable, this complex light architecture sculpts ever-shifting boundaries in light and shadow. Designed as a comment on the increasing polarisation of our world, the changing environments expose the unreality of the borders and differences that separate us.

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S E T U P is an acclaimed international studio merging the lines between multimedia art, lighting & stage design, and performance programming. The studio was founded by Znamensky Dmitry, Novikov Stepan, Zmunchila Pavel and Kochnev Anton in 2018. The team is driven by their mission to explore the expressive opportunities provided by new digital technologies. Working with light, programming and sculpture, the group creates installations that sharpen physical perception. They are especially interested in image and spatial distortion, using high-tech media to transform the spaces they work in.

S E T U P works at the intersection between contemporary art and lighting design. Their multimedia practice has seen them work with musicians, including Skrillex and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

Robert Henke - Phosphor

In this installation, an ultraviolet laser paints temporary traces, algorithmically and randomly produced, on a layer of phosphorus. Retained for just a moment, the lines are ever-evolving, combining into marks that evoke natural patterns of erosion.

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Robert Henke is a digital artist who works with algorithmically generated images, laser installations and early personal computer hardware. A co-creator of the cult music software Ableton Live, Henke has redefined the way we create and experience electronic music. Inspired by radical club culture, his own electronic music project Monolake was at the heart of the new electronic music scene emerging in Berlin after the fall of the Wall in 1989.

Henke’s installations, performances and concerts have been presented at Tate Modern, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, MoMA PS1, New York, MUDAM, Luxembourg, MAK. Vienna, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, STRP Biennale in Eindhoven, and at festivals including Unsound, CTM, MUTEK, Sonar and New Forms Festival.

Matthew Schreiber - Banshee 2023

A site-specific light sculpture, Banshee 2023 responds to the volume of the room it inhabits. The precise placement of lasers produces a series of geometric patterns frozen in space. Evoking the tools of the entertainment industry and its production of spectacle, visitors are invited to move within a static light show, seeing it change as we shift our position in the room.

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Schreiber is a multi-disciplinary artist best known for his large-scale laser light sculptures. Visitors are often invited to enter the environments he creates, and interact physically with his work. Interested in how physics, technology and perception can alter our experience of the world, he reimagines light and space to explore unseen forces. Recurring subjects within Schreiber's work include novelty, the occult, and spectacle.

Schreiber has exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at Cornell University and the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale. His work has been included in group exhibitions at MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA, the Perez Art Museum in Miami, and Galerie Almine Rech in Paris.