
Yambe Tam & Albert Barbu
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Yambe Tam and Albert Barbu are a visual artist and creative technologist duo based between London and Paris. They create virtual worlds that speculate on the past, present, and future of consciousness by combining digital technology, gaming, and spiritual practice. Their interdisciplinary approach is inspired by the liminal space between scientific and spiritual, drawing upon exchanges with researchers and academics, as well as Tam’s experiences of contemplative life at Zen Buddhist monasteries.
The worlds they create contain journeys structured around forms of ritual and meditation, merging human, animal, and machine into new depths of communion to herald the emerging post-human age. These serve as places of transcendence – where perspectives shift to other ways of being that are relevant to this historical moment of technological and ecological change.
Their works have been exhibited at institutions including FACT, Liverpool (2021); Two Temple Place, London (2023); the Korean Cultural Centre, Berlin & London (2022-23); the Science Museum, London (2024), and selected for gaming festivals WASD Curios (2022) and The Leftfield Collection, EGX Rezzed (2020). They were previously artists in residence with the Wellcome Centre for Ethics & Humanities, University of Oxford (2022-23).
‘At Cove Park, we will be completing development of a new interactive digital work called “Shadow of Unknowing”, centred around black holes and Eastern concepts of the void/emptiness/nothingness, for the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Edinburgh.’