Like Oppenheimer and the bomb, you've got to wonder if the originators of immersive art ever look at the thing they helped usher into the world and think ‘good god, what have we done?’
Did Gustav Metzger, Yayoi Kusama, Anthony McCall, et al have any inkling that in their wake would come a universe of half-baked Klimt experiences and grimy London warehouses filled with smoke and flashing lights?
Nonotak – the duo of Noemi Schipfer and Takami Nakamoto – deal in the latter, and do it well. Their three installations here in a grimy Bermondsey warehouse (of course) are bright, loud, dizzying technological collisions of throbbing bass and strobing light.
But it doesn’t start off all that well. The opening piece – meant to look like endless cars speeding past on an eye melting LED highway – has had a bar built around it, so it doesn’t feel like art, it feels like a fancy cocktail bar. Which it is.
The next piece is countless spotlights creating wave after wave of stuttering light; the last work is a video of lines and circles intersecting.
It all looks good, it all sounds good, but none of it means anything. They say this is about ‘sculpting with light’ or ‘transforming perception’ but this is designed to be pretty, it has no ideas or concepts beyond that. But that’s what a lot of people want from art these days, this is what sells tickets. And maybe that’s ok. There are people who like LARPing and having cornflakes with water. If what you’re looking for from an art experience is to spend £26 to see some flashing lights and not have to think, then this will be blinding enough to just about do.