DoubleMoon: The Light Eaters

DoubleMoon, the new home for ambitious, multi-sensory art , champions site-specific contemporary projects. Its inaugural project, The Light Eaters, will be co-produced and on view at Town Hall by Bottaccio in King’s Cross, London on 17–18 October 2026, with a preview on Friday 16 October. About The Light Eaters traces a lineage of artists who have used light to alter the mind, and unfolds in four parts. An exhibition in the Salon spans six decades, from the 1960s pioneers to today's leading practitioners, and includes Trevor Paglen’s cloud images, an ongoing study of how computer vision and AI systems “see” the world. The exhibition sets the context for two major works: Philip Vermeulen's immersive installation Chasing the Dot , on view in Town Hall's flagship neoclassical space, Vision Hall for three days only, and Chris Levine's Higher Power , a laser work projected into the night sky and visible across London. Complementing these is what is billed as the world's first immersive symposium on consciousness, where audiences will be seated inside Vermeulen's installation as scientists, philosophers, and artists discuss the mind. Trevor Paglen: CLOUD #211 Region Adjacency Graph and CLOUD #248 Progressive ProbabilisticHough Transformation; Hough Circle Transform Paglen’s cloud images begin with photographs of the sky. He then processes these images using computer-vision algorithms, overlaying the results onto the original photographs. The lines and marks are not simply decorative additions: they visualise what particular algorithms detect in the image. The algorithms involved in Paglen inquiry into computer vision are also used in technologies such as autonomous surveillance and facial recognition. Philip Vermeulen: Chasing the Dot For three days only, Philip Vermeulen's Chasing the Dot takes over Town Hall’s Vision Hall. This immersive dome installation pairs a horizonless field of precisely choreographed light with spatial sound, generating open-eye hallucinations that go to the fundamentals of human perception. Vermeulen’s work builds on scientific research into hallucination and synaesthesia, translating these phenomena into large-scale installations. He represents a new generation of artists using light not only as an aesthetic material but as a means of probing the architecture of consciousness. This sensory work invites audiences to engage with their whole body, as movement, light, sound, and vibrations play a hypnotic and often disorienting role. The project coincides with the launch of Vermeulen’s first monograph, From Off to On; Philip Vermeulen’s HyPeRR-ScULpTUressss, in collaboration with Kunstmuseum Den Haag. Chasing the Dot is presented with support from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Chris Levine: Higher Power Projected into the night sky and visible from Town Hall and across London, Higher Power is the latest in Levine’s series of high-powered aerial beam works, most recently shown during the opening week of the Venice Biennale. This rendition projects a matrix of lasers oscillating at 432Hz — one of the sacred Solfeggio frequencies associated with harmony and healing. Higher Power is supported by Peyote. “Many of the artists exhibiting in The Salon have spent their careers exploring consciousness from completely different directions. James Turrell, Liliane Lijn and Carsten Höller challenge the way we see and experience reality, while Loie Hollowell brings perception back towards the body and inner experience. Together with Chris Levine, Philip Vermeulen, Leo Villareal, Tomás Saraceno, Amanda Feilding and Trevor Paglen, these artists suggest that consciousness is not fixed, but fluid — continually shaped by what we encounter, how we perceive and where we place our attention.” — Virginia Damtsa, Director of Arts at Town Hall Salon Exhibition The opening weekend offers rare public access to The Salon, Town Hall’s normally private upstairs space for intimate talks and gatherings. Co-curated by Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst and Virginia Damtsa, the exhibition considers a lineage of artistic inquiry into perception and consciousness from the 1960s to the present. Emerging alongside psychedelic experimentation and new thinking about the mind, early works in the exhibition use light, flicker, movement and altered sensory conditions to challenge conventional modes of seeing. Rather than positioning art solely as an object to be viewed, these practices explore its capacity to act directly on perception and transform the viewer’s experience. Bringing this history into dialogue with contemporary practices, the exhibition considers how perception is shaped by the body, the senses, technology, and the environments we inhabit. Across generations and approaches, the works invite viewers to consider seeing as an active process, and consciousness as something continually shaped through experience. The exhibition will take place in the Salon at Town Hall by Bottaccio and remain on view through 20 December 2026. Symposium Curated by Michael John Harris, Town Hall’s Director of Programming, the symposium on Saturday 17 October will place audiences and speakers inside Philip Vermeulen’s Chasing the Dot. The artwork becomes the setting for discussions, forming one of the world’s first immersive symposiums on consciousness. Speakers include psychiatrist and psychedelic researcher Dr David Erritzoe (Imperial College London); artist Chris Levine; Cosmo Feilding Mellen, co-founder of Beckley Psytech; Dr Anjali Bhat, Lecturer in Psychology and Psychedelics at the University of Exeter; contemplative neuroscientist Dr Elena Antonova (Brunel University London); AI art curatorLuba Elliott; and artist Hana Omori, co-founder of Keiken. Read more Toggle Performance / Live Art Audio / Sound Film / Video