THE SIGNAL. THE NOISE.

EVENT DETAILS:
OPENING NIGHT: Thursday, August 7, 6 — 9 pm
SOUND PERFORMANCE: 7th August, 7 pm

EXHIBITION DATES: August 7 – 10, 2025
LOCATION: Greatorex, 10 Greatorex Street, E1 5NF, London, United Kingdom

“We came looking for meaning. We found distortion instead.”

EXHIBITION CONCEPT: 
In an age of endless messages, blurred truths, and constant noise, how do we really connect? THE SIGNAL. THE NOISE. is an exhibition exploring the chaotic, fragmented landscape of communication in the digital era. It reflects on what happens when clarity collapses, when messages glitch, and when interference becomes the message itself.

The title draws inspiration from Nate Silver’s influential book, The Signal and the Noise, which explores our struggle to make accurate predictions in a world overflowing with data. Silver writes,

“The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.”
But in today’s culture, the boundary between the two has blurred—what once distracted us now defines us. We are no longer decoding meaning—we are submerged in an environment where meaning itself is unstable, fleeting, or simulated.

As Jean Baudrillard observed in Simulacra and Simulation,

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
In this climate, THE SIGNAL. THE NOISE. asks: What if distortion is not an obstacle to understanding, but the only way we can truly feel anything at all?

We live in a condition of hyperconnectivity—scrolling, streaming, and swiping through constant signals—but find ourselves more fragmented, more disembodied than ever. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes this as the “digital swarm,” where information flows without pause, but deep understanding disappears:

“Communication is no longer dialogic, but viral.”
— Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm

FEATURED ARTISTS:
Hudson Cooke @Hudson.Cooke , Ana Ionescu @anaionscu , Rafael Soto Acebal @nyzuz_ , Yiwen Ma @ma.yi.wen , Yuri Hwang @yurithepasta , Youwei Luo @brightoff , Jennifer Cha @kyykyay , Yibo Wan @yibo.wn , Giacomo Layet @giacomolayet , Zepu Li @ze_puli , Pei @pppppphhhh6759 , Maria Helena Toscano @m.h.toscano , Anya Mokhova @anya_mokhova_ , Xiao Zhang @11xiao.z , Jan Mioduchowski @janmioduchowski

Photo by @plus1ap 

Hudson Cooke
Strapped Up (2025)
Dyed upholstery foam, sewn plastic sheet, 100 x 60 x 30 cm
The artist’s interest in foam as a sculptural material stems from its porosity. Every point on its surface offers entry to its interior, making foam a material without a clearly defined exterior—always revealing its insides. By wrapping foam in form-fitting plastic, the artist attempts to give it an artificial skin, a protective boundary that defines its surface and shields what lies beneath. However, this protective layer becomes a double-edged sword. While it guards the foam from external elements, it also constrains it—suffocating the material and twisting it into an uncomfortable, cocoon-like enclosure.

Ana Ionescu
Untitled (self-portrait), 2024
Silicone, aluminium, oil paint, 15 x 18 x 4 cm
Having an interest in textures and the relationship between the inside and the outside of our bodies, the work examines the skin as an interface. As it stretches, wrinkles and models itself in order to offer protection, it acts as a witness of our physical experience. However, the relationship with it has changed in the digital era. The exploration is guided by the contrast between the flatness of the screen and a rawness of flesh, questioning how does skin feel and react when touch is lost. This personal series acts as a self-portrait of the artist encouraging its audience to re-evaluate the intimate relationship they have with their body, but also with the technological world.

Rafael Soto Acebal
Phoretic, 2025
Sculptural installation with mixed media, 220 x 30 x 30 cm
Phoretic is a suspended zoomorphic sculpture composed of ten articulated modules combining aluminum, TPU, SLA resin, and polarising filters.
Through a cross-polarization system, the work reveals the stress patterns within the TPU—unfolding a play of light and material tension that generates ephemeral chromatic patterns of photoelasticity.
Hovering between myriapod and synthetic organism, the piece inhabits the exhibition space as a transient body in motion. Sensitive to air currents and the presence of viewers, it subtly responds to its environment, reflecting on noise, tension, and fragility.

Yiwen Ma
The Signal of Nonhumans, 2025
Persimmons, sunlight, rainwater, trees, mould, insects, cotton and linen, 91.44 x 111.76 cm
Yiwen Ma’s artistic practice explores the entangled relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. She works with materials such as persimmons, sunlight, rainwater, trees, insects, linen, and cotton, inviting them into a process of co-creation where outcomes are never fully controlled. In her artwork, persimmon-dyed fabrics are exposed to weather and chance, and they gradually darken under sunlight over hours or even months. The resulting works hold environmental imprints and delicate traces such as scents, residues, and textures, unveiling a quiet presence hidden within the digital era.

Yuri Hwang
Screen (Diptych), 2025
Backlit film, UV print on acrylic, plywood, steel, chalk, LED strip bars, 80 x 60 cm
Screen (Diptych) explores the performance of intimacy online, where images are always on display. Referencing Architectural Digest’s Open Door series, the work both conceals and reveals a posed figure through pixelated window frames. Reflections expose the artist behind the camera and household clutter edited out of view. LED strip lights and UV prints on acrylic let the image glow through its pixels, while emphasizing its digital nature. Though it appears vibrant and intimate, the image remains a carefully constructed facade—just as curated and controlled as the glossy, gridded cover it sits behind.

Youwei Luo
Grid, Grain, Growth, 2024
The Grid, Grain, Growth is an interactive audio-visual installation that explores the relationship between sound, visual, movement and materiality. The signal from the ambient sound and frictions between sands would drive the movement from the particles on screen to move harmoniously yet remain chaotic.Grids of vectors respond dynamically to the sound of grains, flowing in patterns reminiscent of waves and sand dunes. It translates interactions and sound signals into sprouting-fluid forms on screen. This interplay between the material and visuals, contracts between the physical deserted grains and digital sprouting forms, symbolises growth and resilience in between realities.

Jennifer Cha
Running002, 2023
Video, 1920×1080
Running002 is part of a series of looping videos that attempt to extract the motion of running as something experienced and represented by the images we see in our minds while in action. Instead of seeing the whole body at once, smaller fragments seen in our mind’s eye are collaged together in an attempt to define the action into something that is felt and processed internally, exploring what representation looks like when it is embodied.

Yibo Wan
Almost Sentient, 2025
Digital, 38 x 27 cm
Almost Sentient is a speculative visual fiction exploring the blurred boundary between signal and noise in the feedback loop between AI and human perception. Drawing from computer vision theory—specifically attention maps in Vision Transformers—it imagines how machine-generated outputs, though patterned and associative, evoke emotional responses in humans. These works reflect recursive distortions where meaning is misread, projected, and amplified. A tree grows bandages like fruit; metallic terrain glows at wound-like centers. These are not AI’s emotions, but our own, refracted through noise. Almost Sentient asks: what if the future of intelligence lies not in clarity, but in beautiful confusion?

Giacomo Layet
Grounding Attempt, 2024
Crab Shell, concrete, radio antennas, Dimensions variable
Grounding Attempt—composed of a found spider crab shell, concrete, and radio antennas—evokes a narrative of forced adaptation and uneasy coexistence. This hybrid organism appears to have evolved within a heavily urbanized environment, its biological form altered and augmented by artificial components. The replacement of natural limbs with metallic antennas suggests a survival strategy born out of necessity, where technology becomes a substitute for lost or damaged parts of the natural self. The work explores the tension and interdependence between the organic and the synthetic, offering a speculative glimpse into how living beings might adapt to a world increasingly shaped—and disrupted—by human activity. It prompts reflection on resilience, transformation, and the blurring boundaries between nature and machine.

Zepu Li
Two mountains, 2025
3D print on rice paper, Aluminium tube, Enamelled copper, Steel, 3D print screw. 120(L)X40W) cm
Two Mountains is inspired by a scaffold structure in London and fragments of mountains and stones encountered in and beyond the city. These scattered terrains are gathered, translated, and layered to form the work’s twin structures—“two mountains”. Rather than depicting a specific place, Two Mountains offers a psychogeographic composite—where stones, scaffolds, landscapes, and mapping systems interweave into a layered perceptual network, one that invites orientation not through position, but through relational association.

Pei
Sound performance ​N013e M4NiF3ST0 by Bunny Dog, 2025
Performance, 200×300 cm, Unknown
N013e M4NiF3ST0 aims to rip apart the lie of ultra-processed music as an act of resistance against capitalism. Here you will see DIY instruments, unpolished sound and bizarre performance…of a BunnyDog representing the neurodivergent identity. The rule is not to behave.

Maria Helena Toscano
Antenna, 2025
Stainless Steel, wire, resonance speakers, glass beads
Antenna is a work that explores paralinguistic forms of communication—those that exist beyond or beneath language. When words are no longer heard, alternative ways of expressing dissent begin to emerge. The piece is inspired by the cacerolazo—a form of protest common in various Latin American countries, where pots and pans are struck to create a collective sonic outcry. Traces of Dissent and sonic mark-making become central gestures in this work, transforming noise into resistance, and sound into memory. The sculptural set up can be integrated with sound or video.

Anya Mokhova
Pink Cosmos II, 2023
Beeswax, gelatin, lingerie, tallow, lipstick, 25 x 13 x 11 cm
In the Pink Cosmos series, Anya explores the tactile qualities of the material to develop shapes around a simple personal object. The work explores the presence of the body in sculpture. Driven by research into classical marble drapes, the forms evolve from mundane materials, such as candle beeswax, beef tallow, lingerie, gelatine and lipstick. The form they create merges abstraction and figuration, inviting the viewers’ imagination to complete the narrative.

Xiao Zhang
POST-CONTACT GYM, 2025
3D printed resin, spray paint, metal, PU foam, yoga bricks, video, 200 x 200 x 150 cm
What is the future of loneliness? In an era where connection has multiplied into an endless stream of the unreal, Post-Contact Gym imagines what happens when the body itself becomes an unreadable, untouchable container.
Set in a future oversaturated with virtual presence, where Generation Z has grown old and the next generations have forgotten even the simplest gestures of physical contact, this project proposes a training gym to relearn what was once instinctive.
Devices transform familiar contact into retraining exercises in the gym—handshakes, waves, hugs performed as if for the first time. Each action becomes a glitch: a ritual both sincere and absurd, a rehearsal of intimacy long displaced by screens.
Post-Contact Gym asks whether, in the digital swarm of perfect communication, physical touch itself is reduced to distortion—an echo of presence that can no longer be trusted, yet still lingers as the last fragile proof we were ever here.

Jan Mioduchowski
No Title, 2025
Acrylic paint, photo collage on canvas, 120 x 120 cm
The artist’s work explores themes of chaos, excess, multiplicity, and the destruction of meaning, focusing on the fragility of memory in an age oversaturated with information. Beginning with expressive, automatic gestures in black and white paint, the artist creates a chaotic visual foundation. From there, they engage in a reflective process, selecting personal and found images that act as memory triggers or conceptual cues. These elements are layered into dense, open-ended compositions. Influenced by Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, Nate Silver’s signal/noise dynamic, and Taleb’s Black Swan, the work embraces unpredictability, hyperreality, and the viewer’s role in making meaning.

OPENING NIGHT:
Thursday, August 7, 6 — 9 pm
Exhibition Dates:
August 7 – 10, 2025

LOCATION: Greatorex,
10 Greatorex Street, E1 5NF, London, United Kingdom