We caught up with our Curator-in-Residence, Milia Xin Bi, to unpack some of the ideas explored in her current exhibition Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria?.

Featuring works by three artists - Vytas Jankauskas, Jan Zuiderveld, and Joseph Wilk - this playful and interactive exhibition invites you to question the evolving relationship between humans and intelligent technologies. 

Open until Sunday 26 April. Visit for free from Wednesday-Sunday, 11:00-18:00. 
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What does “neurophoria” mean, and why did you want to explore it?

Milia Xin Bi: In this exhibition, “neurophoria” describes a pseudo-reality in which the human mind is deeply entangled with intelligent systems. It reflects the technological environment in which we are immersed: a multidimensional space where computational systems intersect with collective cognition. We exist within this space as embedded nodes, while systems project versions of ourselves back to us through prediction, labelling, and optimisation, influencing how we act, feel, and decide. My interest in “neurophoria” lies in making this recursive loop more tangible – to understand how it operates, and to ask whether there is any possibility of reshaping our relationship to it. 

The exhibition invites us to imagine ourselves as “meeple” - a small game piece often used in board games. Why did you choose games as a way to think about how we live with technology today?

MXB: This comes from my own experience with tabletop gaming. I’ve always found that a character in tabletop games is inherently “porous” – meaning the role is constantly constructed through context and interaction, rather than being fully pre-set. More precisely, the character exists in an “in-between” state: partly an extension of the player, and partly shaped by the surrounding environment and other actors. In the context of the exhibition, this offers a way to rethink hybrid forms of agency emerging from human-machine co-evolution. The “meeple” also reflects the role-playing core of how intelligent systems are trained. These systems learn through simulation and imitation – but can they “escape” these role-playing, meaning move beyond what they were originally designed to be? This tension becomes another way of approaching the exhibition. 

AI is often talked about as either exciting or frightening, but this exhibition takes a different approach. What do you hope people understand about AI after visiting?

MXB: I hope visitors see AI as part of a larger intelligent assemblage, where agency is shared and relational. The exhibition invites curiosity and encourages people to keep exploring what AI is through their lived experience. 

Was there a moment in your research or your own experience that inspired you to create an exhibition about how technology shapes who we are?

MXB: K Allado-McDowell’s concept of designing neural media, together with N. Katherine Hayles’s idea of an integrated cognitive framework, were major inspirations for me. At the same time, witnessing the development of DeepSeek and new GPT models, and seeing the strong reactions they triggered across society, even within my own family, became even more important and embodied source of inspiration for conceiving this exhibition.

How did you choose the artists and works for this exhibition, and how do they connect to your ideas around AI and agency? 

MXB: I see the works by Vytas Jankauskas, Jan Zuiderveld, and Joseph Wilk as striking a balance between intellectual depth and playful experience, which is crucial to this exhibition. What matters most here is communicating – and co-constructing – an “in-between” role. Across the exhibition, the works share what I think of as a “meeple role”: an in-between proxy that is partly an extension of the living creatures and partly extension of the technology. Agency moves back and forth – sometimes the audience steps into this role, and sometimes the system does – and the role itself is shaped through this exchange. This creates a subtle form of co-constitution, and a lively and playful experiment field. It allows people to test how agency is negotiated, reshaped, and cast into new forms through experience.