ON NOW:
Barbarous Relic Solo show by Tomasz Kobialka
28th March - 7th June 2026 *extended
Gossamer Fog

COMING SOON:
Xeno Futurism presents: In/Human Infrastructures
A three-day critical technologies symposium, exhibition, and screening programme
22nd, 23rd & 24th May 2026
Alt_R



Barbarous Relic Tomasz Kobialka
28th March - 7th June 2026 *extended
Friday, Saturday & Sundays 12-6pm


Events:
Barbarous RELIC 7” Record Launch: Friday 15th May 4-8pm (onsite at Gossamer Fog)
The launch party for a 7” Inch vinyl record (limited to 100 pressings). A bootleg remix of a track by DJ D-Sol, the artistic moniker of David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs. Remixed & produced by Orlando Harrison & Tomasz Kobialka (aka Anonymous Cowards)

Meet the Artist: Friday 22nd, Saturday 23rd & Sunday 24th May, 12-6pm (onsite at Gossamer Fog)
Tomasz Kobialka will be sitting in the gallery and present to meet and answer any questions.


In the beginning was accounting. The earliest written word is a statement of accounts imprinted on a clay cuneiform tablet: markings representing grain, fish, and cattle. In the first and rapidly growing cities of Mesopotamia, clay tablets were a way to track, inventorise, and manage the accumulation of resources over time. Our WEIRD nations - Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic - were built on the idea of taking dutiful care of the property one owns and making sure your debts are paid.

Among the corporate offices and luxury shopping vitrines on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, stands The Morgan Library & Museum. On display at this former home of banker J. P. Morgan is Gutenberg's Bible, Dürer’s Adam and Eve engraving and a photo of Pollock’s painting in action, alongside the Mesopotamian tablets. The history of the human world funnels through the purchase history of the world’s capital of finance, New York.

More mundane objects co-habit this history. The orange you fish out of from the plastic box in your local supermarket, a piece of steak in the fridge, vacuumed in a plastic seal - both are products of deep geological time. The soil for growing and grazing, fertiliser, coal, sour crude oil, and natural gas for transportation as well as the packaging you throw away in a second. As you tap your contactless at the self-checkout, you hold a fragment of linear His-story: of market intensification, deep time turned into future contracts, and the father’s name passed down to the son.

Thousands of years ago, a clay tablet was enough to account for one’s flock of sheep, until merchants won against the landowners. Landowners lost control over the prices of their crops and livestock. That cut of meat in your hand at the supermarket carries far more weight than its packaging suggests. It takes the final material form of speculation by investors and traders, machine algorithms, and digital infrastructures. Ironically, Keynes spoke about ‘animal spirits’ - gut instincts - that drive the traders who drive the markets. Somewhere on the 60th floor of a J.P. Morgan skyscraper in Manhattan, behind a computer screen, someone is auctioning off meat that was raised in a muddy field. Without ever seeing the cattle nor touching the grass, and without owning anything, not even the money they trade with.

I’ll pay you today by promising to pay you tomorrow.

We only need to agree on the price ideally today, before the markets close. The price will depend on the value of whatever changes hands, though value is less objective than it sounds. You can point to something that you might desire and declare its price. If another person agrees, a futures contract is drawn up. The promise of a promise that the price will be fixed sometime in the future. On the strength of that promise you buy or sell orange juice or beef, the diesel that distributes them, and the insurance on the machines that produce them. These transactions are wrapped up as a gross domestic product (GDP), a number we use to score how good or bad we did last year. We will call it liberal economics - but perhaps it’s just the long shadow of a setting sun on his-story.

A surprising second order derivative arises: financial stability becomes inherently destabilising. The more you affix the price, the more the market fluctuates. The higher the fear - the emotional index of the market - the more value your stock accrues. You start building, buying and trading in condos built on floodplains, until the externality catches up to you and your fears become facts.

In the end, the history of finance is the linear history of the patriarch. From one Morgan to the next: their fortune made in the cutthroat railroad industry as it colonised the American continent, eventually transmuting into promises traded from the floors of skyscrapers. It is a lineage in which the myth of the self-made man drowns out any record of government subsidy. From the debts of ancient Mesopotamia to your mortgage being sold off by a trader in a Patagonia gilet, the market is the invisible hand of the Leviathan state, a phantom limb we all feel but cannot locate. We are driven by an anxious, relentless compulsion to accumulate capital, one that threads itself through generations of family and kinship. After all, who could resist the temptation of inter-generational wealth?

Text is co-authored by Tomasz Kobialka, Gossamer Fog and Vaida Stepanovaite-Kobialka.


Exhibition sound and music design by Orlando Harrison.

Orlando Harrison is a sound artist/designer and musician living in London, His projects include the Radical Sounds event at Senate House London and the Wrong Show on Resonance 104.4 FM. He has recorded soundtracks for a number of independent films and plays with Alabama 3 and Identikal with Steven Thrower.



Limited Edition Bootleg Accumulation T-Shirt by Tomasz Kobialka


£20
Avialable to buy at the gallery during opening hours or online via this link
Sizes: Small, Medium, Large & Extra Large




Xeno Futurism presents: In/Human Infrastructures
22nd, 23rd & 24th May 2026 6-10pm

Alt_R, Enclave 1-2, 50 Resolution Way, Deptford, London, SE8 4AL

BOOK TICKETS

Xeno Futurism and Gossamer Fog invite you to In/Human Infrastructures: a three-day critical technologies symposium, exhibition, and screening programme hosted at Alt_R in Deptford, London. Unfolding across the bank holiday weekend (22-24 May), the symposium will feature a free exhibition and film screenings during the day, followed by a programme of lectures, performances, and workshops each evening.

Moving beyond academic posturing and hype-cycle sloptimism, the symposium aims to establish a communal contact zone where artists, theorists, and technologists can transfer the tactical skills and operational knowledge needed to navigate an era of accelerating technological capture and uncertain autonomy.

Building from Xeno Futurism’s second issue, Technologies of Domination, the symposium will critically examine the technical architecture of contemporary life: from deconstructing the extractive logistics of platform capitalism and surveillance systems to forging counter-platform systems, demystifying machine learning, and unbiasing artificial intelligence development, whether via climate modelling or by embedding somatic interspecies tendencies into budding superintelligence. Our goal is to develop critical technological literacy through both speculative approaches and practical heuristics, fostering a space for politically actionable knowledge grounded in our shared material–virtual reality.


Friday 22nd of May: Systems of Control (6–10pm)
Our first evening's programme addresses the political, military, and economic systems shaping contemporary technological life: surveillance architectures, platform capitalism, datafication, AI governance, and militarised technoscience. Our presenters and performers will frame how power circulates through distributed infrastructures and how these systems script everyday life.

Contributors: Harry Halpin, Uzu Lim, Lucia Rebolino, Steve Goodman (Kode9), and Sam Griffin.


Saturday 23rd of May: Entangled Agencies (6–10pm)
Teasing out epistemic threads from cybernetics, posthumanism, and neo-mechanism, this evening explores how humans, machines and wider systems co-produce each other. Moving beyond techno-fetishism or outright Luddism, we'll explore critical and non-dogmatic approaches to agentic entanglement.

Contributors: Sonia Bernac, Melissa Schwarz & Nella Piatek, Betti Marenko, Zein Majali.


Sunday 24th of May: Counter Protocols (6–10pm)
Our final evening explores counter protocols: tactical methods of rerouting and repurposing soft and hard infrastructures. Drawing from DIY anarcho or alt-tech ethics, we will explore how the liberatory myths of the early '90s gave way to our current techno-authoritarian moment, experimenting with broadcasting technologies (frequencies, static, noise), focusing on community-driven connectivity, interspecies egress and digital autonomy.

Contributors: Parham Ghalamdar, Wassim Al Sindi, Maggie Roberts, and Kat MacDonald.


Exhibition & Screening Programme
Exhibiting Artists: Ruba Al-Sweel, Mika Ben Amar, Lina Deng, Parham Ghalamdar, Geoffrey Lillemon, Zein Majali, Yuri Pattison, Nella Piatek & Melissa Schwarz, Maggie Roberts, Dylan Serventi, Suzanne Treister, 0rphan Drift, Zach Blas and more...

Ticketing
Evening Ticket (£5): Access to the full programme of any single evening.
Weekend Ticket (£10): Grants access to the entire three-day symposium, including all evening lectures, performances and workshops.

XENO FUTURISM