All That You Change: UCL BA Media Degree Show

“All that you touch you change.
All that you change changes you.”
— Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)

Ticketed events

General exhibition entry
23 - 31 May, 12 - 6pm

Launch event
Friday 22 May, 5 - 9pm

Screening 1 and panel discussion
Saturday 23 May, 12 - 2pm

Screening 2 and panel discussion
Saturday 23 May, 3 - 5:30pm

Guided tour
Saturday 23 May, 5 - 6pm

Guided tour
Sunday 24 May, 2 - 3:30pm

Screening
Sunday 31 May, 12 -1pm

Guided tours with project presentations
Sunday 31 May, 4 - 5:30pm

About the show

Words emerge from a world in flux, where change is not merely endured but enacted. In an age defined by climate emergency, algorithmic prediction, social fragmentation, and mediated memory, Octavia Butler’s poem becomes both warning and proposition: transformation is inevitable, but never neutral. Every touch, whether of a screen, an archive, a body, a network, alters the systems that shape us in return.

The degree show gathers research-based projects that examine how agency is negotiated through media. Media artefacts unearth haunted memories, confront gendered silencing, and reclaim authorship from dominant gazes. They explore diasporic practices, haptic intimacy, and the cultural architectures of nostalgia. Others interrogate the attention economy, predictive systems, and AI’s hallucinatory logic, revealing how digital infrastructures remember us, sometimes more faithfully than we remember ourselves.

These projects build worlds of many registers: immersive games simulate ethical dilemmas; experimental films embody trauma and desire; immersive installations dissolve the boundary between self and environment; documentaries listen where institutions fail. Across them, objects, images, platforms, and algorithms become active participants and mnemonic carriers with the power to mediate who or what might be remembered.

Rather than retreating into comfort or spectacle, this year’s degree show invites visitors to consider their own complicity in shaping worlds: the futures we scroll, the archives we edit, the bodies we witness, the stories we authorize. If memory is agency—as many of these works insist—then forgetting is also an act with consequences.

Rooted in practice-based-research, the BA Media program at the School for the Creative and Cultural Industries fosters experimentation across film, games, installation, sound, and AI-driven workflows. Working collaboratively at UCL East, students combine critical theory with computational craft to probe the politics of representation and the aesthetics of systems.

Spanning Marshgate’s exhibition spaces and the One Pool Street Cinema, All That You Change presents 76 capstone projects that reimagine how humans, machines, and environments touch one another. Step into these speculative encounters, and consider what you will change, and what will change you.