Reverse Intake

During London Design Festival 2026, Nota Gallery presents Reverse Intake, a contemporary art exhibition spanning sound, video, painting, and live practice, exploring the increasingly complex entanglement between technological systems, ecological perception, and the age of artificial intelligence. The exhibition brings together forward-thinking artists, curators, and practitioners to collectively consider a continuously shifting present: when technology, ecology, and non-human forces persistently intervene in our lives, how might art and design rethink the relationship between humans and these systems?

Reverse Intake departs from a reconceptualization of the act of "input." We typically understand technology as a tool to be used: we input information, data, actions, and intentions into systems and expect them to generate responses. Yet as technological systems continue to expand, this relationship is undergoing a reversal. Systems do not merely receive our inputs; they continuously absorb our behaviours, traces, attention, and perception, reshaping in the process how we understand the world.

Therefore, the exhibition does not simply mean inverting an existing system but rather points toward a repositioning of relational structures. We are beginning to recognize that we are not merely users or inputters of systems, but simultaneously participants who are absorbed, extracted, and transformed by them. Art and design, in this context, cease to be understood as fixed media or categories, and instead become practices through which we renegotiate our relationships with technology and otherness.

Claire Zakiewicz's painting Reverse Intake borrows from both painting and live practice to further dissolve the ostensibly clear boundaries between subject and environment, human and non-human; Enzo's Sound Performance Kagura 004 transforms what is ordinarily invisible like diffusion, circulation, and systemic operations into perceptible phenomena; Mark Farid's At a Crossroads reconstructs through images how we observe society and the environment; Greg's Valves installation exposes and amplifies the piping systems ordinarily submerged in daily flows, a collection of metal valves and hoses that materialize "transference" itself, the constant passage of matter, energy, and information through our bodies and environments.

Rather than proposing singular answers to technological futures, these works translate systematized processes ordinarily hidden within everyday life into moments that can be watched, listened to, experienced, and discussed. The exhibition invites viewers into a suspended state, one in which we are no longer simply subjects of system inputs, but beings who are absorbed, extracted, and transformed, while simultaneously retaining the capacity to respond to and reshape these relationships.

Curators: Lorry (Rui) Lu, Caron (Ran) Cao Artists: Claire Zakiewicz, Enzo, Mark Farid, Greg