What Is It Like? - exhibition

What Is It Like? — a group exhibition which explores the nature of subjective reality. Inspired by Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat? the exhibition celebrates how artists use digital tools and AI techniques to craft cultural meaning bridging creativity innovation and humanity into our rapidly evolving technological landscape.

Delving into language memory and the boundaries of consciousness it sheds light on why AI models currently remain incapable of true sentience emotion or self-awareness. Through artworks employing soundscapes VR game engines and the metaverse viewers are invited to navigate the layered complexities of perception experience and consciousness — mirroring with its interactive stage-crafting how AI technologies generate immersive yet illusory realities.

What Is It Like? is an exhibition presented in partnership with arebyte Gallery through funding by the British Council as part of the UK/Poland Season 2025 a diverse programme of over 100 multi-artform events in 40 cities in both countries. Featuring artists from around the world including the UK and Poland What Is It Like? ran at arebyte Gallery in the first half of the year before heading to Wroclaw Poland. Presented at the arebyte Gallery in London in the first half of this year it will be on view at the WRO Art Center from October 2 to November 16 2025.

Exhibiting artists: 
Anna Bunting-Branch
Damara Inglês
Choy Ka Fai
Katarzyna Krakowiak Balka
Lawrence Lek
Kira Xonorika.

Curated by Helen Starr this exhibition investigates the brain as a machine that constructs tailored realities. By incorporating insights from neuroscience it charts a course between the techbro hype and public hysteria that often inaccurately frames machine learning technologies as cryptic opaque or miraculous. Through the artworks presented What Is It Like?communicates an understanding that we ought to strive instead to demystify AI. AI will never approach human consciousness as it does not understand the embodied and sensory experience. Nor does it yet have the long-term embodied memory to develop deeper forms of self-awareness and consciousness.

Embodiment lies at the core – with all of the artists coming from different cultures and offering a glimpse into their specific embodied knowledge framework. The exhibition becomes a translation tool bringing forward experience from episodic – visual oral and sensory – memory translated in an embodied way. Episodic memory stores personal context-rich experiences allowing mental time travel and shaping individuality unlike semantic memory which handles general knowledge and fact-based concepts.

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