Drawing, printing, painting, listening, London’s hand is visible again. The Royal Drawing School’s 25th-anniversary programme makes drawing a public skill. At Serpentine South, Peter Doig turns the gallery into a listening room where paintings and analogue speakers share breath. At Studio Voltaire, It’s A Love Thing brings archival posters and new commissions into a living print room. Imperfection is not a flaw, it is a stance, a way to remember, to repair, to pay attention.

Intimacy, but re-plotted. At Southbank Centre, Rambert and LA(HORDE) turn the site into a moving score. At Somerset House, Virtual Beauty studies the ache between screen and self. At Piccadilly Circus, IWM screens Es Devlin and Machiko Weston’s I Saw The World End, a public memorial in light. London tests how closeness can exist without touch, how memory can be shared in air.

What if the system itself became the poem?

Rather than tear systems apart, artists are now weaving with them. Industrial pipes, legal codes, public seating — these are not just materials, they’re metaphors. At HSUBAND, fittings become stand-ins for emotional closure. Claudia Pagès Rabal turns water laws into choreography. Olaf Metzel bends public infrastructure until it speaks.

This isn’t escape. It’s entanglement. It’s what happens when poetry emerges from inside the grid.

In a world obsessed with scale, speed, and algorithmic reach, some artists are choosing to go small, slow, and tender — not as retreat, but as revolt.

For Yasuhiko Iida, photography is a diary that forgets its grammar. For Cassidy Toner, a sculpture becomes a murmur instead of a shout. For Ruth Asawa, looping wire is a way of being in the world, not just a form. These aren’t acts of nostalgia. They’re refusals — of spectacle, of polish, of performance.

Intimacy becomes the rebellion. Material becomes memory. And presence becomes enough.

What happens when artists stop resisting simulation and start speaking its native tongue?

In a cultural moment saturated with machine logic, art is no longer pretending to be “real.” It’s metabolising the artificial, not as aesthetic but as infrastructure. Artists like Matteo Rattini, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, and the conceptual writers at Fakewhale aren’t warning us about AI. They’re staging its instincts, exposing the systems we’ve come to call thought.

A sculpture that doesn’t exist. A game that lies to you. An essay that loops like a machine. The Simulation Reflex isn’t dystopian — it’s diagnostic. These works don’t reject illusion, they reveal the reflex that powers it.

This is what happens when performance becomes substrate, and cognition itself is the medium.

As simulation collapses and spectacle exhausts itself, a new cultural grammar is quietly emerging — one grounded in refusal, presence, and symbolic integrity. This SUPERWRX dispatch maps the fault lines.