25 ASSUME FORM
TYPE: EXHIBITION
2026
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Assume Form
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Lendl Barcelos, Oneohtrix Point Never, 0rphan Drift
Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College
April 4 – May 24, 2026
In 1995, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was formed at the University of Warwick in England. Initiated within the Department of Philosophy by theorist and research fellow Sadie Plant, the unit produced a collectively authored body of work that straddled theory and fiction. The collective and its collaborators operated on the fringes of academia, drawing on a wide range of influences including continental philosophy, science fiction, and electronic music. Moving across forms both native and unique to the philosophical discipline including essays, zines, performances, and events, their work attempted to expand the limits of theoretical production. At the advent of the World Wide Web, amidst a present and future unsettled by emergent technologies, they turned to the speculative to interpret these new terrains.
A wide range of figures emerge from the CCRU’s annals. It is this mixed legacy of various influential, maligned, and underexplored practices that led to the uneven dissemination of the milieu’s output via the very platform they grappled with: the internet. There, their legacy is distorted, co-opted by obscure online political sects and Silicon Valley accelerationists.
Assume Form attempts to reconstruct what alchemized within the unit. Via the various influences and practices that entered their orbit, it reimagines this defining chapter of technological and cultural history. The exhibition frames the CCRU as the crystallization of its historical moment, tracking the landscape in which they operated from 1994 until the turn of the millennium. Taking cues from the same sources as the group——the landscapes, texts, sounds, and events that informed them and them——it creates the imagined space in which the ongoing resonances of this highly influential group begin assuming form.