Media Wall

Transforming the window of arebyte Digital Art Centre into an evolving exhibition space, the Media Wall Programme presents digital works that can be viewed from the pavement outside the building on Camden Road. Each month, we invite an artist whose work responds to our 2026–2028 theme, REBOOT: Recoding Reality, which turns away from dystopian visions of the future to imagine more equitable worlds where people have agency over technology and care for their environments.

Running for around three minutes, each work is a fleeting moment of art in the middle of the everyday. If you’re passing by, catch it at the top of the hour.

Daily display | Mon-Sun, On the hour

LONDON KNOWLEDGE (2020) is an excerpt from Max Colson’s 11-minute film exploring the ‘Knowledge of London’, the (in)famously demanding test every aspiring black cab driver must pass to earn their licence by memorising over 300 street routes and thousands of places of interest. In the film, a taxi driver reflects on the prospect of self-driving cars, alongside animated 3D scans of the city’s streets made with Lidar, the laser-based mapping technology autonomous vehicles use to see and navigate. The film’s initial development was supported by the SPACE Art and Technology Residency.

Max Colson is a British artist documenting architecture and landscapes that illustrate Britain or notions of Britishness through photography, 3D imaging and film. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Royal Institute of British Architects and arebyte, with screenings and group shows across the UK and Europe. His work has won awards including the Tenderflix Artist Video Prize and is archived by the BFI.

THE VOID IN A PERFECT WORLD (2024) is the third phase of Lingyi Zhang’s series THE VOID BEYOND FLAWLESSNESS, which examines the place of AI within ocularcentrism, the cultural tendency to privilege sight over the other senses. Zhang ran personal photographs through AI tools trained on vast corporate datasets, transforming them again and again into standardised, “perfect” images until raw memory erodes into algorithmic kitsch. The result is a turbulent ocean of images in which private experience fuses with machine aesthetics, reflecting our alienation in a world increasingly mediated by technology. The work invites viewers to navigate this perceptual experiment in search of an exit from the digital void.

Lingyi Zhang is a speculative media artist working across photography, film, animation, installation and experimental theatre. Drawing on spatial and embodied experiences, she explores the entanglements between perception, technology and narrative. Through recurring explorations of adaptation, recursion and reproduction, she considers how technological environments reorganise the body as lived geography and increasingly operate as self-reproducing systems.

Borrowing the aesthetics and language of internet ‘Girl Power’ and ‘Girl Boss’ culture, FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT (2022) uses a custom-coded algorithm to generate an endless stream of Instagram-style graphics. Through these shifting affirmations, Maya Man examines the rhetoric of online wellness, self-care, confidence and success, exposing how identity and aspiration are packaged and consumed online.

Screened on arebyte’s Media Wall alongside Ambie Drew’s solo exhibition Soft Bodies, Cold Machines, the work is accompanied by an online artist talk in which Maya discusses her research and practice.

Maya Man is an artist exploring identity culture on the internet. Through websites, generative series and installations, she examines dominant narratives around femininity, authenticity and the performance of self online. She has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and bitforms, New York; SOOT, Tokyo; Verse, London; HeK, Basel; and Feral File, and has given talks at the New Museum, the V&A and Tate Britain. She also runs the curatorial project HEART.