Future Shock: Weirdcore @180fact

Uploaded July 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

Weirdcore is a visual artist whose work has been inextricably linked with electronic music since he began experimenting with Max/MSP in the ’90s, drawing inspiration from the early rave scene to create lysergic visual collages. In 2004, he began to work frequently with Warp Records and its artists, which led to a long-running collaboration with Aphex Twin that continues to this day.

Weirdcore’s latest work is Subconscious, an immersive experience currently installed at Fact and 180 Studios’ new exhibition Future Shock that creates the sense of stepping inside one of his creations. Its three distinct rooms are designed to evoke the feeling of going deep within the inner mind, where high-resolution prints are brought to life with RBG lights and a sparse soundtrack provided by Aphex Twin.

In this film, Weirdcore talks about the evolution of Subconscious, and how its strange visual effect has its roots in his early video work and classic rave videos. “A lot of it is inspired by infinity GIFs that I used to do, like stuff I did for M.I.A. where just by inverting the colours you can have this sense of things coming towards you to infinity,” he says.

Subconscious is showing now at Future Shock, at 180 the Strand, London until 28 August, 2022.

For tickets and information on opening times, visit the 180 The Strand website: 180thestrand.com/future-shock

Weirdcore: weirdcore.tv

$spalarnia - Rozkosz As spalarnia, performance artist Wojciech Kosma makes experimental pop music with an explicitly queer, secular and anti-nationalist flavour. Seeking to dismantle outdated notions of division between eastern and western Europe, Kosma interpolates Polish folk music as the foundation of his sound, using trap percussion, drill bass, eurodance synthesis and an ear for irresistibly melancholy hooks to craft a singular take on traditional musical forms. On his second album, USTA, spalarnia addresses love in its various refractions, exploring lust, desire, sensuality and intimacy through evocative lyricism and exploratory sonics. “I wrote these songs thinking what would happen if I didn’t look for love, but sang as if it was already here,” explains Kosma. “I felt that it’s not true that love is supposed to be missing, that you have to wait for it. It’s been always here, it’s happening, in insane amounts, and it makes the world, at least my world.” On ‘Rozkosz,’ a slow and sensual highlight from the album, Kosma groans through an electronic dirge charged with longing, a quivering homage to overwhelming and all-consuming moments of pleasure and delight. Mixed by James Whipple, better known as M.E.S.H, Hesaitix and now EEA, ‘Rozkosz’ finds erotic tension in the interplay between throbbing low-end, sparse percussion, synthetic strings and primal flutes, coaxing lip-biting melodies out of negative space while Kosma’s foundation shaking baritone pins the track back down to earth with visceral heft. For the ethereal visual artist Ewelina Węgiel worked alongside movement artists Luisa Mateo Dupleich Rozo and Monika Błaszczak to collaborate with Kosma, illuminated against the dramatic backdrop of Kletno Bear Cave, the longest cave formation in the Śnieżnik Mountains. Filmed using both digital and 16mm film, the film uses pale light and expressive movement to collapse the wet walls of the cave into the same texture as glistening skin and soaking fabric, a portrait of lovers slick with sweat and rock worn smooth by condensation. Perspiring stone protrusions are viewed with the same amorous gaze as necks upturned in ecstasy and fingers grazing outstretched arms. Milky stalactites drip onto expectant faces, calcium deposits formed over hundreds of years take on the sensual form of smooth bodies, while craggy rock faces layered against each other in photographic assemblage suggest biological mutations, organic matter bursting at the seams, desperate to spill over into new, more expansive, forms. This desirous overflow reflects the yearning of Kosma’s lyrics, who follows a churning repeated refrain of “too much” with the assertion, “there’s never too much,” begging the question, “why see with eyes if you can see with delight?” Just as centuries transform cave formations, hewn through mountain ranges with crushing patience, so too does the pressure of spalarnia’s desire have radically transformative potential, as he sings: “under the cover of delight, delight / I want to be your husband and wife.” ‘Rozkosz’ is taken from USTA, which is out now. For more information about Wojciech Kosma and his work as spalarnia, you can follow him on Instagram. ‘Rozkosz’ Credits: Directors – Ewelina Węgiel, Luisa Mateo Dupleich Rozo, Monika Błaszczak & Wojciech Kosma Performance – Luisa Mateo Dupleich Rozo, Monika Błaszczak and Wojciech Kosma Camera – Ewelina Węgiel Editing – Ewelina Węgiel and Wojciech Kosma Color Grading – Igor Kawecki ‘Rozkosz’ Lyrics: too much too much too much too much of you there’s never too much too much too much too much too much never too much of our delight delight delight covers me right fine fine i can see fine sky sky sky sky sky through the thin veil of delight why see with eyes if you can see with delight under the cover of delight delight i want to be your husband and wife please please take my hand our beauty might make me break take me take me as husband as wife for you i’m alight yet i’m not at all alight i am a happy oasis of green no other place like you and me why see with eyes if you can see with delight – dosyć dosyć dosyć dosyć nigdy nie mam ciebie ciebie dosyć dosyć dosyć dosyć dosyć nigdy nie mam dosyć naszej rozkoszy rozkosz rozkosz całkiem mnie przykrywa dobrze dobrze dobrze dobrze widać niebo niebo niebo niebo niebo przez rozkoszy cienki welon po co patrzeć przez oczy jak można patrzeć z rozkoszy pod rozkoszy rozkoszy zasłoną chcę zostać twoim mężem i żoną weź proszę moją moją rękę z naszego piękna piękna zaraz pęknę weź mnie weź mnie za męża za żonę dla ciebie płonę chociaż wcale nie płonę jestem zieloną zieloną oazą szczęścia oprócz nas nie ma takiego miejsca po co patrzeć przez oczy jak można patrzeć z rozkoszy$

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$Lyra Valenza - Joy Divided Lyra Valenza are back for the first time since their 2020 EP, Nightshade Edition, with ‘Joy Divided’, the first single from their debut album, Low Gear No Pressure. Working in collaboration with artist Signe Dige, the Danish duo bring the intricate club construction to life with a video exploring abandoned urban spaces using janky 3D scans. “I love ‘poor’ 3D scans,” explains Dige. “They have a sensitivity and vulnerability that you often don’t see in digital media. Everything can be adjusted and controlled when working digitally, so I truly adore these fractured copies of real places, as it maintains a kind of soul within its flaws.” “In big cities, we are surrounded by people, causing these urban places to exist in their function for us, Dige continues. “But when abandoned and taken out of their context, these places become a physical space of memories and time.” Winding our way through neglected streets, all crumbling concrete and lurid graffiti, Signe Dige patchworks together a glitched-out assemblage of 3D scans and CGI, following a suspended thread of fluid, as though the track’s glistening synths have manifested as material in virtual space. “Each space shares their abandonment and connection,” adds Dige, “while we follow a lead all the way up to the top of town, to a line of people waiting to enter a new beginning.” In this way, her patchwork of scans merges domestic environments – bedrooms with doors left ajar, the transient hallways of apartment buildings – into public space, with street-level entrances to subways twisting out into open-plan living rooms and tiled pavements. The result is part collapsing dreamscape, part broken metaverse, a breakbeat-assisted study of digital space and the ways we can inhabit it. ‘Joy Divided’ is taken from the debut album from Lyra Valenza, Low Gear No Pressure, which arrives later this year on their label, Petrola 80. You can find Lyra Valenza on Instagram.$ $Louis-Jack & Jăk Skŏt - Tondal (Screen Test) Artists and directors Louis-Jack and Jăk Skŏt hold up a kaleidoscopic lens to contemporary club culture, queer communities and collective celebration in Tondal, a film project that transplants the medieval morality narrative Les Visions Du Chevalier Tondal, which narrates the tale of a rich and wayward knight whose soul is lead through heaven and hell by a guiding angel, into the chaotic hedonism of a London nightclub. Drawing particular inspiration from French artist Simon Marmion’s 1475 illumination of David Aubert’s manuscript, as well as Hieronymus Bosch’s 1479 hellscape, Tondal’s Vision, the artists have assembled an incredible cast of talent, including movement artist Magnus Westwell, CGI artist Enes Güç, designer AGF Hydra and producer and sound artist IVVVO, to capture a lone revellers hallucinogenic journey, untethered from reality and enveloped by a nocturnal fantasy. “The global pandemic has made us all critically attuned to the importance of shared communion,” the directors assert. “In its wake, Tondal presents an urgent reflection on how our sites of collective revelry, once radical spaces of communal liberation, are being pervaded by hyper-individualism and commercialisation. Often lost and alone, but longing to find his place in the night, Tondal’s journey champions the idea that collectivity is actually still achingly proximate; a personal and socially transformative spectre haunting even the most de-socialised spaces.” In a gesture of narrative subversion, Louis-Jack and Jăk Skŏt queer the moral drive of Les Visions Du Chevalier Tondal, exploring the libidinal charge of club environments and positing communal celebration as a powerful strategy for navigating the relentless seeping of neoliberal economic interest into contemporary club culture, a collective retaliation against corporate osmosis. In the screen test presented above, a forerunner for a larger work in the making, this is achieved via a prolonged study of the body in complimentary states of disorientation and bliss, Magnus Westwell’s choreography perfectly capturing the overstimulation and dissociation of a lone dancer lost in the rave. Caught between the visceral physicality of instinctive movement and the sudden addled expansion of internal emotional landscapes, the frenetic intimacy of our protagonist enacts a heightened empathetic mode driving outward and inward simultaneously. The sheen of AGF Hydra’s apparel, picked out in neon lights, translates the lysergic illustrations of Marmion’s manuscript into a modern aesthetic language of sexual expression. Stroboscopic flashes reflecting off sweat speckled skin and latex shimmer lend the cinematic vision of director of photography Matthew J. Smith a hyper-saturated, computer-generated aesthetic, blurring the lines between media in a multidisciplinary homage to the director’s germinal act of literary adaptation. Bodies entwined, faces turned heavenward and mouths open in ecstasy, Enes Güç envisions a sudden opening up, an intimate revelation of the inner complexity of our protagonist’s experience, rendered as a tangled mass of bodies, flesh cast as CGI statues, writhing together in an infinitely repeating somatic fractal, movement captured in stasis. The echoing cries of IVVVO’s eerie industrial score reverberate around this impossible structure, as weapons grade bass and percussive barrage melt into elongated vocal drones, a instant of surreal time dilation presenting a ravers eye view of the club as it might be depicted by Hieronymus Bosch, a frame of chaos exquisitely captured. Emerging transformed, blinking under purple spotlights, it’s clear that our protagonist has been exposed to some deeper understanding, the original allegory of the Tondal narrative reconstructed as the fleeting potential for political and sexual liberation. Quoting Frederic Jameson in his 2009 book Valences of the Dialectic, Louis-Jack and Jăk Skŏt leave us on a note of optimism: “From time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived, or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays of light from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces are possible.” Tondal (Screen Test) Credits: Directors – Louis-Jack & Jăk Skŏt Director Of Photography – Matthew J Smith CGI Artist – Enes Güç Choreographer – Magnus Westwell Composer – IVVVO Stylist & Costume Designer – AGF Hydra Editor – James Stubbs Curator – Charlie Mills Story & Script Consultant – Walter Donohue Dancers – Oscar Li, Kibrea Carmichael and Max Cookward$