Felicity Hammond
Latent Spaces

Exhibition
1 April–30 April 2026
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Opening
WED, 1 April at 8 PM

Part of tactics&practice #17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

In November 2025, the first orbital data centre was launched, marking a bold shift: by relocating computation to space, we leave behind the ecological limits of Earth. The current terrestrial system is on the brink of collapse; natural resources are depleting and the grid will soon no longer support the power needed for the reckless race towards AGI. AI data centres in space therefore offer a potential new frontier for machine learning infrastructures, leaving the failed model behind.

In this newly commissioned installation titled Latent Space, Felicity Hammond offers a speculative glimpse into a not-too-distant future where this new approach to space-based computation has become the dominant position in the AI industry. However, the system continues to battle with the effects of model collapse – a process by which generative models are trained on data generated by previous AI models, causing data loss, degradation, and abstraction from the experience and representation of the phenomenal world. In an attempt to recalibrate the system, performers have been employed to restage original data. Data-performers absorb this image material and attempt to re-imagine a set of average images, an amalgam of the originals. On-board surveillance captures these gestures in photographic form and feeds them back into the system. This recalibration process is tested via the online image archive of Aksioma, scraped from Flickr for the purposes of this pilot test.

Meanwhile, the orbital data centres themselves inhabit their determined optimal trajectory: a path along the day/night boundary where the spacecraft remains in near-continuous solar illumination. As they bathe in this eternal sunlight – a condition engineered for efficiency, not comfort – the data-performers begin to long for the planet below.

THE AUTHOR

Felicity Hammond (Birmingham UK, 1988) works with installation and world building to explore digital materialities. Her recent practice-based research seeks to understand extraction as a process that binds the geological with the digital realm, creating evolving generative installation works that expose this relationship. Re-staging is a key method in Hammond’s work, where the re-production of digital events draws attention to their flaws. Hammond was the recipient of the Ampersand Photoworks fellowship (2023) and has exhibited her work at The Photographers’ Gallery, C/O Berlin, Fotomuseum Winterthur, VOX Centre de l’image Contemporaine Montreal and Transmediale/HKW, among others. 

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

ARTIST TALK

Felicity Hammond
Variations
Tue, 31 March 2026 at 7:30 PM
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

WORKSHOP

Felicity Hammond
Model Collapse
Wed, 1 April 2026 at 4 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana