Launching Travelling Gallery’s 2026 programme is the group exhibition real-time friction. The exhibition brings together work by five artists who all explore our relationship with technology and the internet and how, as a medium or material, its slippery nature creates spaces of inauthenticity where curated versions of ourselves blur and distort reality, and algorithms and applications construct fictional narratives or environments to play with or react against.

Spanning performance, moving image, sculpture and drawing each artist creates a user experience that highlights the friction existing between our physical body and its digital counterpart, with authorship and representation disrupted or rendered through computer generation.

Rooted in performance, MV Brown’s practice uses the human body and new technologies to explore the tensions that exist for the body within a digital realm. Using avatars, prototypes, and ‘false-self’ hoods, MV extends and replicates their body to question how technological advances – often framed as enhancing cognitive and bodily capacities – mediate emotion, interaction, and the construction of identity as beings-in-the-world both online and ‘IRL’ (In Real Life).

Nina Davies’ artistic practice is heavily influenced by her former training and career as a professional dancer. Her work looks at how dance is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed within popular culture with a particular focus on social media, and the dances derived from trends and films made for present-day digital platforms. Much like MV her work touches upon how bodies are evolving in a world dominated by synthetic media.

Multi-disciplinary artist and designer Gavin Gayagoy uses game design elements to explore how digital environments influence perception, truth, and identity as well as highlight the compulsive consumption of digital content and its impact on us. Visitors are invited to interact with his work in the exhibition and explore a range of both familiar looking and futuristic landscapes. Through these fragmented 3D environments and limited game mechanics, Gavin questions the authenticity of our digital lives and the contradictory nature that being online can bring.

Hardeep Pandhal has also used the visual aesthetics of gaming in his work as a means to comment on cultural production, capitalism and racial stereotypes as perpetuated through everyday popular culture and categorization. Whilst conservative opinions of gaming often focus on its contribution to societal ills, here the bleed between games and reality could be seen to provide a space where varying forms of alienation can be addressed and co-opted, creating a form of empowerment and a means to comment on societal inequalities in a transformative way.

Also included in the exhibition are a number of works by Gregor Wright. Predominantly a painter, Gregor has created a body of work that looks at current modes of image consumption as mediated by algorithms and advancing technology. Presented together are a selection of Gregor’s recent drawings made using marker pens, oil pastels & highlighters and one of his digital ‘screen-based paintings’. With the rise of AI-generated artwork Gregor highlights the tensions that lie between traditional painting and the virtual digital representations that increasingly dominate our lives.

real-time friction will be appearing at the following venues on selected dates

Travelling Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in a bus. Since 1978 it has been bringing exhibitions to communities throughout Scotland. We recognise that art can be beneficial to people’s lives and aim to create fair conditions and remove barriers to allow access and engagement to audiences in their own familiar surroundings. The gallery offers an open and welcoming environment for people of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities to discover and enjoy contemporary art. Over the past forty years, Travelling Gallery has brought innovative exhibitions to every part of Scotland reaching hundreds of thousands of visitors and school pupils. Travelling Gallery is a ‘not for profit’ organisation, regularly funded by Creative Scotland and supported by the City of Edinburgh Council.

For more information, please see: www.travellinggallery.com/current-exhibition/            

Image – Gregor Wright, Automatic Self, 2022, Screen work, 5 minutes loop, 4K screen Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow, Photo: Patrick Jameson