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Event / Conversations With AI / Part 02


 PHILIP SPEAKMAN
THE ROAD THAT EATS THOUGHTS


Live Role Play Performance
7 - 9pm, 21st February 2025
(Doors close promptly at 7:15pm)


Conversations with AI is an ongoing series exploring how artificial intelligence is reshaping artistic workflows and thought processes.

Curated by Rebecca Edwards and Chemist
A cold February night in 1998. Four friends on holiday in the English countryside are driving back to their accommodation after witnessing a catastrophe at an English village where a ritual tradition, successfully performed yearly since the Civil War, ended this year in disaster. Haunted by what they have seen, the friends set off into the night, navigating dark country roads. But as dense, monotonous forests scroll past their windows, a road to elsewhere starts to emerge.

The Road That Eats Thoughts is a live role play performance that invites the audience to watch as these four “players” surreal narrative unfolds. Drawing upon the elements of magical thinking endemic to popular understandings of artificial intelligence, the event confronts themes of agency, user choice, and uncanny digital doubles.
Philip Speakman is an artist based in London interested in fiction as a technology of transformation. Through moving image, performance, audio, writing and collaborative means, his practice explores the anomalous fictions which shape and arise from our contemporary networked lives; those narratives which creep from the imaginary into reality through the media and communication technologies via which they are told.
In 2024 he presented projects including the audio work ‘Reality Break’ for Future Artefacts FM, and ‘Katabasing’, a mixed reality performance for Gossamer Fog’s Alt_R virtual reality studio. Previously he has presented work in a variety of contexts, including Flat Earth Film Festival (Iceland), BBC Radio 6 Music’s ‘Introducing Arts’, and with Grizadale Arts (The Lake District), and presented and discussed research at events such as ‘Myth and Memetics’ at Arebyte Gallery (London) and ‘A Self-Induced Hallucination’ at The Lethally Gallery (London). His essay '“It May Start Out As A Game But It Ends Up A Whole World”; Creepypasta, QAnon, and the Anomalous Tales of the Internet' is to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Contemporary Legend. He graduated from MA Fine Art at The Slade in 2023.
https://www.philipspeakman.com/

Rebecca Edwards is a London based curator, writer and producer. Her interests include cultivating experimental curatorial methods, interweaving fluid approaches to production, dissemination and representation of artwork, and exploring the nested fields of technology, digital aesthetics and internet culture. Rebecca was the curator at arebyte from 2017 - 2024. She is currently a co-host of Future Artefacts Podcast and access worker for artist Petra Szemán. https://rebeccaedwards.xyz/ 
 
Exhibition Hours
Fri-Sat 12:00-18:00
Sun 12:00-16:00