If an immersive light show in the basement of an office block about the cosmos, nature and humanity sounds familiar, it should. We’ve been here before. This is London-based art collective United Visual Artists’ third appearance at 180 The Strand, following on from a solo show in 2019 and then an appearance in the ‘Future Shock’ group exhibition. But this time it’s bigger, flashier and louder.
But in the schtick is still the same (it’s even quite of few of the same works): dizzying light installations in pitch black rooms, dealing with topics like celestial bodies, the sounds of animals, psychoanalysis and information overload.
It starts with stuttering numbers and algorithmically generated headlines, then swinging pendulums of light that cut the room in half. There’s a circle of LEDs that chirp with the sounds of an African nature reserve, a throbbing, strobing light that spins and glitches like the world’s least useful desk lamp, orbs in clouds of smoke being circled by spotlights. That’s the good stuff. Other things here look like fancy desktop screensavers or awkward ’90s music videos. Those are less good.
But it’s still 180, so it’s all incredibly well produced, utterly beautiful, mind-bending, gorgeous and ultra-immersive. If that’s all you want out of an art experience, it’s genuinely and unsurprisingly excellent.
But don’t think too hard about any of it. Because what can the strobing desk lamp tell you about chaos theory? What do the orbs say about space and our place in it? What will the reordered passages of Freud and Jung texts tell you about psychoanalysis? Not much. It’s all surface, and it’s hard to get properly immersed when everything’s a bit shallow.
