FACT launched the same year as MySpace. It was a time when new media art would be genuinely useful for people to understand what was changing in the world. We got used to social media in the years that followed and, generally speaking, everyone became comfortable with what the internet did to our lives.
In 2026, AI is one of the most concerning, and exciting, developments in the world. It could destroy us, or save us. I’m no expert, and I’m not going to predict one way or the other, but we do need saving.
FACT are one of the few art galleries on the planet genuinely capable of occupying those questions, and supporting artists to ask them.
Can Meeple Escape The Neurophoria, a new exhibition by Milia Xin Bi, brings together new work by Vytas Jankauskas, Jan Zuiderveld, and Joseph Wilk.
Meeple, a millennial contraction of “my people” – playable characters in board games, now used widely to talk about strategic pawn characters in gaming.
The exhibition places the viewer in a series of challenges, each focussed on creative expression in some way. We are meeple; pawns. The Neurophoria? Not a gaming term. Coined by the curator specifically to convey euphoria linked with AI. You win a game, you’re euphoric.
So what are the implications here at FACT? What are we being tasking with winning? Or escaping? Or rejecting?
The euphoria of digital gratification? No. Not necessarily.
The escape here isn’t so much escape as change. The euphoria isn’t an outcome, it’s a state. So the question isn’t so much “can we escape gratification?” as “can we influence our world?”
Yes.
We can change the world we live in. We pawns can collectively influence the world we want to see. The World Wide Web was designed to democratise information, not control it. And as its primary users, we can influence how algorithms impact us, and how the world appears to us. Not instantly, but through conscious decision making.
FACT, with this exhibition are beginning to do what they did in 2003; teaching us how to navigate a new world. It’s just that that new world has changed again, and we need to relearn the power we have over our own decisions.
Annoyed with bots on social media? Ignore them. It’s the most rapid way to influence their impact. If you engage, it instantly boosts their visibility. If you disengage, it slowly negates it.
Vytas Jankauskas’s LIFE FOREVER is an interactive spa experience designed to encourage understanding of how human experience and tech can either ignore each other to the detriment of the climate, or understand each other support it.
Jan Zuiderveld and Joseph Wilks both consider how your own encounters with digital worlds can influence algorithm, and by extension, politics, opinion, and positivity.
It’s a clever exhibition that defines what FACT was always meant to be – a tool for the public to understand an evolving world; just as suitable for Gen Z and Boomers.
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Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria is open at FACT until 26th April 2026
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith
