Slip.Stream.Slip (Part 2) blurs the lines between real-world and virtual reality

A new exhibition at Manchester School of Digital Arts’ stunning Modal Gallery explores the connection between lived experiences and simulated environments.

Slip.Stream.Slip (Part 2) follows on from Modal’s inaugural exhibition over summer, delving in to game engine culture and the shift toward gamification as a model for understanding real-world experiences.

The exhibition explores the tensions and contested spaces that open up when the micro-politics of everyday living meet complex, simulated worlds.

Seven artists feature in the new collection. Dara Birnbaum’s Pop-Pop Video deconstructs the idiomatic meaning of TV’s structural codes and conventions, via fast-paced repeated images and a soundtrack of tension-laden crescendos of guitars and gunshots.

Joseph Delappe explores the complexities and consequences of drone warfare in Killbox, an interactive installation and downloadable computer game, while Mishka Henner’s Influenzer utilises AI to animate old photographs, creating twisted images as the technology turns on itself, becoming infected by the algorithms of social networks.

In Human Mask, Pierre Huyghe follows a servant monkey, in the desolate landscape of Fukushima, aimlessly carrying out the tasks it had been trained to do. Trevor Paglen’s CLOUD #211 Region Adjacency Graph overlays various cloud formations with strokes and lines depicting what computer vision algorithms are ‘seeing’ in the images.

Quayola’s Storms is a series of video works that take the tradition of landscape painting, exploring the form’s pictorial substance through advanced technologies, such as ultra-high-definition footage of Cornwall’s stormy seas serving as a dataset to generate new computational paintings.

Finally, Hito Steyerl’s The Tower combines renderings of Soviet-era simulations with her own 3D scans of Kharkhiv’s cityscapes to investigate the interlinking of creative tech industries and current military scenarios within Ukraine and Iraq.

Slip.Stream.Slip (Part 2) is open now until Fri 16 Dec. For more information, visit the gallery website.