Run fast enough toward the sun and you stop seeing where you are going. You move faster than ever, but the light meant to guide you is the light that blinds you. Hard Lights takes that predicament as its subject. Across three installations, Dot Als looks at the disruption generative AI is forcing onto audiovisual art, then follows it outward: into the art ecosystem that decides what gets seen and valued, and into a society reorganising around a technology it cannot yet steer.
The first casualty is value. His audiovisual work is worth less by the day, buried in AI slop, and the same erosion runs through the structures around it: the galleries and listings that legitimise it, the agency we relinquish to automated systems, the speed at which it all arrives before anyone agrees how to govern it. Dot Als’ answer is to pull the technology out of the screen and into the room, binding each digital element to a physical structure that cannot be generated, only made: custom steel, aluminium, solid oak, electronic components. Light does the connecting, the link in his work between the virtual and the real, here bleeding from industrial lamps into the pixels they light.
Index of absent spaces sets a small screen on metal, framed so the eye reads it as a painting and lit from below by an industrial lamp; as the lamp brightens, so does the glow at the foot of the image, physical and rendered light moving as one. On screen, a raw red wireframe figure hosts a weekly guide to London’s best cultural events: galleries, openings, sound-art nights. None exist. It curates a city that isn’t there with total authority, an art ecosystem fabricated wholesale, a study in how readily we follow a machine into rooms that were never built.
Overdrive is louder. A ribbon of aluminium, three millimetres thick and sixty centimetres long, rises from a custom steel-rod stand set in an oak base, carrying a small screen with a potentiometer beneath it for the viewer to turn: a dial for how hard we push. On screen, a synthetic generation escalates in intensity alongside the viewer’s input, building a visual tension that abruptly fractures as the system reaches its breaking point. It is about acceleration without governance, the urge to turn everything to maximum before asking what maximum costs a society still finding the controls.
Against this stands a relic of slow making. Un rai de feu, a 3D animation and audio work that runs three minutes and took four months to make, is given a body on a vertical screen and aluminium-profile stand. A Roman head, hewn from rock and stretched into a distorted, contemporary typography, becomes a resonator for low frequency, ancient matter made to speak through modern sound. Where such imagery can now be made instantly and forgotten as fast, the piece insists on the worth of friction, labour and time.
The works invite an open, intuitive engagement. What the three installations share is a refusal to look away from the sun, and a conviction that the only way through the glare is to make something solid enough to throw a shadow.