Hybridity, Teleportation and the iterative curatorial process.
I’ve curated an exhibition at the The Wrong Biennale for the platform Polygon Palm. It includes a selection of artists working through ideas of teleportation, transmittance and translation through technology. The artists involved have utilised AI as a critical lens to demonstrate how this technology infers and mistranslates - rendering these computational glitches as material. It’s all explored through a set of mobile-only online artworks that will be translated again into physical form in a IRL exhibition in March 2026.
I'm particularly interested in the hybridity of the 'transmat'; something I've been trying to work through in my curatorial and artistic practice for several years. The existence of data, imagery and matter in digital systems and what we consider real. I feel hybrid forms of practice are underdeveloped and there are opportunities to explore more virtual/physical exhibition formats - or virtual/physical publishing, performance and other media experiences for that matter. So it will be interesting to see how these currently online, mobile-only artworks become realised in real life. I have done this previously with Rolodex Propaganda - working with the artists individually to help develop a process of making work take on a physical form (in it's looses sense). The way we engage with work online (or through technology generally) and how we engage with physical exhibition is very different, so careful thought needs to be applied to showing work created for digital contexts in a gallery space. In Rolodex Propaganda, it meant I would have a series of conversation as a curator with the artists about the development of the concept of their work, discussions about the context (and how this may change in a physical space by how people interact with it), but also a more hand-on curatorial approach in the offer to help technically and iteratively with critical feedback. This varied quite a bit between artists but with some I took on a technical role in recoding and programming digital works. Like with Marc Blazel works, I helped code some AR works of existing 3D models he'd collected from Active Worlds ( a obsolete virtual online world much like Second Life) and had been the basis of his work for several years. Through the discussions we both worked at re-representing his work by taking them away from the original context (Active World) and thinking about how a physical audience would engage with it. Marc started creating murals of some characters on the wall, as well as creating a fascinating generative world of his own that constantly evolved over time. This was very different to the process with Helene Kazan, which involved conversation about how to create a sensitive yet impactful environment for her film work "Engineering Shelter". We took elements of this film (the morrison/table shelter) to create a mesh bench for viewers to sit on, as well as a sub-woofer sounds system for people to 'feel' the power and destruction of the captured sound of the shelter smashing. This iterative process of developing digital works is important.
For Time. Space. Transmat, the idea is that an iterative process will occur from the start of the launch of the online exhibition - developing work to be "transmitted" or "teleported" to the gallery space. This may happen through various technological processes but could include 3D printed, live-streaming, and perhaps pen plotting. The point being that we rarely think about these day-to-day technologies as forms of transmittance or teleportation, but the context of the exhibition will emphasise this aspect of our regular technological lives.
I wrote a short text about the exhibition below. I will post again soon about my particular artwork within the show called Slow Internet. It’s brand new and quite different from other works I’ve been doing recently so check it out.
Time. Space. Transmat is an experimental online exhibition that explores the unstable territories of translation, transportation, and remote control in a networked age. The title is borrowed from Juan Atkins’ 1980s techno project Model 500, referencing teleportation and transmission through time and space.
Curated for the Wrong Biennale, the project speculates on the ways AI, digital systems, and machine mediation fracture and reshape communication. The participating artists – Yichu Li, Kimberly Lyle, David Lisser, Joseph Farbrook, Mark O'Knee, and Tom Milnes – respond to these themes through online works generated and assembled with artificial intelligence, each presented as a unique web environment within the Polygon Palm site.
The exhibition questions what it means to transmit ideas, objects, and selves across uncertain thresholds: from code to image, from screen to object, from immaterial networks to physical artefacts. Works emerge in states of mistranslation and remote manipulation, exploring the poetics of systems that are never fully under human control.
Time. Space. Transmat. examines contemporary concepts of movement and transformation—how we relocate ideas, identities, and matter across different realities and media. The artists exhibiting respond to the fluid boundaries between virtual and physical spaces, exploring how teleportation (instantaneous movement), transportation (physical and metaphorical journeys), and translation (interpreting and transposing meaning) are reshaped through technology and our understanding of presence and experience - particularly through computation and artificial intelligence systems. L.M. Harris, also known as Clare Winger Harris, was a pioneering science fiction author known for her early contributions to the genre, particularly in the 1920s and 30s. She is noted as the first to introduce the term 'transmat' in the Future Science Fiction publication, 1959 she wrote "One of these days.., they'll invent a Transmat that'll set you down anywhere." (Harris, 1959)
Time. Space. Transmat runs online from November 2025 – March 2026, hosted on the Wrong Biennale platform and through Polygon Palm. In March 2026, the project will take a further leap through transformation: the digital works will be materially re-imagined as physical objects via pen plotting and 3D printing for an exhibition at UNDER, KARST, Plymouth (UK).
As part of the Wrong Biennale’s distributed and decentralised ethos, Time. Space. Transmat inhabits a liminal zone between the digital and the physical, the controlled and the glitching, the transmitted and the mistranslated.
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