Plastique Fantastique: Drag-on-A-I-meme-drag

A special performance in the streets outside The Photographers’ Gallery, with the London-based collaboration and performance fiction group Plastique Fantastique. Entitled Drag-on-AI-meme-drag, the event is inspired by the Felicity Hammond: V3 Model Collapse exhibition and takes place in Soho Photography Quarter.

The group used songs, sonic improvisation and storytelling, as well as masked enactments, to present a communiqué – a sci-fi mumming performance – addressing meme cultures and their social effects. Their intention is to summon and reprogramme an AI. social-media dragon. Drawing on science fiction, Hollywood cinema and folk traditions, their performance speculates on human-technological-animal relations and community.
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About Plastique Fantastique

The London-based collaboration and performance fiction Plastique Fantastique has explored collective fictioning since 2005. The collaboration is currently produced by Ana Benlloch, David Burrows, Arianne Churchman, Tom Clark, Benedict Drew, Marie Marshall, Alex Marzeta, Vanessa Page, Frankie Roberts and Simon O’Sullivan. Together, the group develops fictions attending to digital and meme cultures, human and nonhuman relations, the colonisation of space and environmental change.

Plastique Fantastique also addresses technological development and acceleration relating to their own lives and politics more broadly. While the group produces drawings, posters, installations, comics, digital images and films and installations using moving images, performance is central to the group’s practice. Performances involve transformations of avatars, formations of new tech-animals, and use of masks and objects to tell a story.

The group draw upon science fiction and folk traditions – fictions of the near and far future and from the past – to produce performances as communiques that embody spirits, draw on the sciences and aim at affective transportation, for the group and their audience. The group recently exhibited in Profanations at Fidelidade Arte Lisbon (2023), The Inverted Tower La Casa Encendida Madrid (2024) and Tarot – Origins and Afterlives, Warburg Institute London (2025).

Supported by Westminster City Council as part of its Inside Out festival