LightForms: Future Cities of the Past

Visitors to Roca London Gallery this autumn will walk into a parallel universe where Futurist and Constructivist cities exist in hybrid space, experienced for the first time as cutting-edge light forms. Suspended between two worlds, this spectral architecture – never realised due to the twin obstacles of war and Stalinist suppression – is brought to life by Labforms, an experimental studio run by artist and inventor, Tom Sibley.

Inspired by what might have been created had these artists and architects been able to build their conceptual pieces, Sibley and his team experiment with new imaging technologies - video hologram and his recently patented auto-stereoscopic projector - together with AI, to bring volumetric virtual objects, animated renderings and immersive scenery into the gallery. The exhibit also includes a DIY workstation developed by Fouroy Deng and her group, Aespace, where visitors can build their own images, videos and 3-D models using agentic AI.

The traits and formulas found in these works were enhanced and refined through AI processing, occasionally hybridised across two or more compositions and then converted into animations, 3-D models and interactive 360° environments. Labforms experimented with works by well-known masters, including: Vladimir Tatlin, Alexandra Ekster, El Lissitzky, Iakov Chernikov, Giacomo Balla, Vavara Stepanova, Alexandr Vesnin, Konstantin Melnikov and Antonio Sant’Elia.

 

The latter’s work was considered far too advanced to be built during his short lifetime, but his legacy lives on through his influence on science fiction cinema, including Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The curators chose to reconstitute prototype skyscrapers by Sant’Elia, drawn from his Study Design for New Town (1914), exploring his vision of the modern city as machine and dynamic hub, with connective highways, trams and walkways to facilitate speed, the Futurists’ watchword.

Labforms’ hybridisation brought works by different artists together to create dramatic new forms. One is a mingling of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919-1920) with Alexander Vesnin’s 5 x 5 = 25 (1921). The result is a futuristic Tower of Babel-like structure, resembling Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting by the same name. In an ironic twist, the AI-generated spiral form resembles a commercial mixed-use mega-complex, in contrast to Tatlin’s multi-tiered monument to the Soviet state. Cradled by Tatlin’s double helix, it combines elements from both works.

Sibley says: “It’s fascinating working with AI as image translator, researcher and co-curator, seeing how Large Language Models ‘think’ and generating nw buildings from early 20th Century artwork. AI extrapolated rampant industrialisation from select images and often mirrored a world similar to our own. It was both exciting and tragic to discover scores of incredible, yet obscure artists who were silenced, sidelined, erased by war and political purges, or ignored by retrospectives and literary bias. In many cases the ideologies the artists originally promoted ultimately turned against them, sometimes irrevocably. This exhibition gives them new agency through a diverse hybrid space of mixed media and technology.”

Exhibition team: Tom Sibley (artist/inventor), Libert Revedin (curator/researcher), Gabor Kitzinger (2025 media artist/Lumen Prize finalist 2025), Fouroy Deng (computer scientist) and Zhao Jaijing (composer/sound designer).

Curator: Libert Revedin is an occasional contributor to magazines on politics, culture and the arts. Educated at the University of Virginia and Columbia University, where she was a David Rous Fellow, she has advised and served on the Board of several alternative artist-run organisations based in NYC, navigating challenging transitions from their radical experimentation in the 1970s through the culture wars and difficult funding environment of the 1990s. LightForms:Future Cities of the Past is her curatorial debut.

Exhibition design: Tom Sibley is an electronic artist, filmmaker, and inventor who designs and develops spatial imaging technology. After studying sculpture, film, and writing at Bennington College, he went on to explore electronics, optics and holography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. There he became interested in mechanised optics and experimental projection systems. Fascinated with projecting holograms and hybrid reality, he focuses on these and other light puzzles. He has written the final chapter, “Beyond Image: Path to the Hyperdimensional City” for Image Generation: Artificial Intelligence, Creativity and Design, edited by Hamza Shaikh, and published September 2025 by The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).