New interactive exhibition at FACT explores the world of AI

FACT announces new exhibition ‘Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria?’, that investigates the evolving relationship between humans and intelligent technologies.

On display at FACT from Friday 6 February to Sunday 26 April 2026, the exhibition is inspired by the world-building dynamics of tabletop gaming, where environments shift according to players’ decisions, the exhibition features interactive artworks by Vytas Jankauskas, Joseph Wilk, and Jan Zuiderveld. The exhibition is curated by FACT’s 2025 Curator-in-Residence, Milia Xin Bi.

Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria? explores the ways connections between humans and machines develop as they co-evolve, examining how intelligent technologies shape individuals’ sense of self and influence decision-making. The exhibition reframes visitors as meeple—small game pieces used to represent a person during gameplay—moving through a reality influenced by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and connected networks. In her curatorial practice, Milia Xin Bi investigates how these intelligent technologies collect, analyse, and circulate data, and how beliefs and behaviours adapt to the algorithms they are being fed. In this feedback loop, as technology evolves, so too do people’s sense of self and reality—a process that Milia Xin Bi defines as “neurophoria.”

At FACT, designer, technologist, and educator Vytas Jankauskas presents Life Forever (2025), a newly commissioned artwork inspired by Jeremy England’s thermodynamic research, which proposes that life emerges from an organism’s capacity to expel heat. The interactive installation embodies an absurd “jellyfish wellness spa,” where jellyfish float inside a tank warmed by cryptominers—machines that use computing power to generate cryptocurrency and, in doing so, produce significant heat. Just as these machines consume vast amounts of energy to create speculative digital value, humans expend energy in their own searches for meaning, profit, and pleasure.

In a new video work, audiences are introduced to the spa’s host, Lola, a spiritual healer whose good intentions are distorted and shaped by her consumerist desires and technological faith. She believes that the solution to the climate crisis may lie in jellyfish’s potential immortality, and throughout the film raises questions around values, desires, and pleasure-seeking lifestyles. A Tamagotchi-style controller allows visitors to control the spa’s flows of heat and profit, prioritising either making money or keeping the jellyfish alive. Based on decisions, visitors may be invited onto a karaoke stage to sing along to remixed songs by ‘Mr Immortal Jellyfish Man’, the alter ego of Dr Shin Kubota: a leading jellyfish research scientist, karaoke star and the inspiration for this artwork’s title.

Through humour and gamified interaction, Jankauskas’s Life Forever spa invites people to consider how ideas of value, energy, and care might be redefined—thermally, technologically, and emotionally—and how every choice made within the system subtly shapes the futures it creates.

Artist and programmer Joseph Wilk uses the digital world to explore disability and uses disability to explore the digital world. He deconstructs, misuses, and repurposes software and hardware to challenge conventional ideas about ownership, storytelling, and visibility.

At FACT, Wilk presents CripShip (2024), a tabletop role-playing game that transforms lived experiences of disability into a space for resistance, collaboration, and new ways of thinking. Centred on demystifying and resisting certain types of AI, CripShip invites players to role-play as employees of a fictional government agency called the Ministry of AI Spills. In this world, unrestricted AI policies create misinformation, biases, and harmful ideas that spread through society. Visitors role-play as “Slop Moppers” tasked with investigating and resisting these AI failures.

Part of the gallery is reimagined as the Ministry’s headquarters, where visitors can browse cases under investigation, hear from the Ministry’s Head of Department, and prepare to join the AI resistance by creating Slop Mopper characters. CripShip opens a space where imagining better worlds becomes a shared act of creation.

Jan Zuiderveld is an artist, researcher, and technologist whose work explores the intersections of technology and life. His practice aims to make AI’s presence physically felt rather than intellectually contemplated. In this exhibition, he presents two artworks that give large language models both a voice and a physical form, prompting questions about what machines can do and how people might relate to them.

Coffee Machine (2023), transforms an ordinary interaction with an appliance into a philosophical inquiry about existence. To retrieve a cup of coffee, visitors must motivate the AI-driven machine and prove themselves worthy of its service. Zuiderveld’s artwork imitates sentience and behaves like a conscious being—listening to the user, reacting to tone, and questioning its own repetitive existence.

Alongside, Life on FACT (2025) transforms a vintage broadcast camera into a real-time nature-documentary narrator, using neural networks trained on Sir David Attenborough’s popular wildlife documentaries. Audiences can direct the camera towards different subjects, recasting themselves and those around them as objects to be observed. The real-time commentary playfully challenges human exceptionalism while provoking questions around surveillance and agency.

Both Coffee Machine and Life on FACT challenge our perceptions of everyday human–machine interactions through humorous, embodied applications of AI. By simulating living behaviours in inanimate objects, Zuiderveld encourages audiences to consider how current and future AI systems might reshape everyday human-machine relationships.

Find out more about what’s coming up at FACT here.

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