Somerset House Studios turns ten this year. The anniversary program skips its own halls and moves to Wapping Hydraulic Power Station in East London — a building that has been closed to the public for the last 13 years — for 3 Evenings: Experiments in Performance and Technology, October 16–18, 2026. Three nights, sixteen artists, one explicit re-run of 1966.

The 1966 template

9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering put ten artists on the stage of the 69th Regiment Armory in New York with more than thirty engineers from Bell Telephone Labs. It is usually cited as the first large-scale artist-engineer collaboration. It is remembered for a second reason: much of the technology failed live, in front of an audience, and those failures are part of the show’s canon status.

Sixty years later, Somerset House Studios asks the same question — what does it mean to perform with technology now — with sixteen artists, twelve of them current Studios residents, in a decommissioned Victorian power station. The venue choice is deliberate: industrial shells read as the right room for engineered things that misbehave.

The program

Three different live-performance experiments per night:

  • Friday Oct 16 — Gazelle Twin’s Ragebait (performance with robots, built with UAL’s Creative Robotics Research Hub), Lawrence Lek’s NOX (live version of his AI-startup rehab program for disobedient self-driving cars), Jenkin van Zyl & Agnieszka Szczotka’s Hostess, SERAFINE1369.
  • Saturday Oct 17 — Team Rolfes’ The Mustang Speedrun – Pitt Call (UK debut; the audience controls a motion-capture cockpit and the show ends successfully only if the room cooperates — “between a game show and an emergency”), Holly Blakey & Tai Shani’s first collaboration with live multi-camera broadcast between venue and 3ETV, Gary Zhexi Zhang with Klara Kofen & Cameron Graham’s Puss (Basile’s 17th-century tale retold with a robot dog hero inside a live-generated 3D world).
  • Sunday Oct 18 — Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Constructing Roberta, reviving Roberta Breitmore, the fictional persona she built and lived as in 1974, now returning at a later age in a world of filters and digital doubles; Ligia Lewis’s The Rant That Can’t, stuttering voices through a 4D sound system that uses the building’s own echo; Precious Renee Tucker, the Arkansas pianist who composed music from exoplanet atmosphere observations with astrophysicists; dmstfctn.

Installed across all three days: world-premiere commissions from Ayoung Kim (a playable game from her Delivery Dancer series — generative AI and game engines, where the player can keep the optimization system running or tear it down), Keiken (Liquid Perception, haptic devices for communicating without words), and Xin Liu (nom nom, an LED wall of millions of biology-modeled particles). Kim’s rover Morlae — originally commissioned for Bold Tendencies’ 2026 Euphoria program — roams the courtyard as the venue’s self-appointed janitor.

3ETV and the broadcast layer

The live nights are half of it. 3ETV, an interactive TV channel and evolving digital artwork, runs September 30 through December 16, 2026 on Somerset House’s Channel platform: nine channels mixing new commissions with archive material, with HEK (Basel), M+ (Hong Kong), Onassis ONX (Athens/New York), and Pioneer Works (New York) each curating. Contributors include McKenzie Wark, Mimi Ọnụọha, Cory Arcangel, and Eva & Franco Mattes.

The venue

Wapping Hydraulic Power Station opened around 1892 and pumped pressurized water through London’s streets to run lifts and cranes until 1977 — reportedly the last station of its kind on a public supply anywhere. In the 1990s theatre director Jules Wright converted it into The Wapping Project arts venue. The Glass Castle Foundation is now restoring the site; the next eighteen months are described as a “prelude” — a small number of events with trusted partners ahead of major capital development. Ten of the sixteen artists come from a studios program (200+ residents over its decade) whose home building sits a few miles west, open as usual.

Context: a season of displaced and reopened infrastructure

The announcement lands in a stretch where institutions keep moving art out of their own buildings. The Centre Pompidou — closed since September 2025, reopening 2030 — sends roughly forty works from its new-media collection to the Hamburger Kunsthalle on November 20 under the title Unstable Media in the 21st Century. Somerset House, still open, marks its studios’ decade by broadcasting from a power station that has to be temporarily unsealed. Both cases route around permanent gallery space: the collection travels, the studio broadcasts.

Tickets and facts

October 16–18, 2026; day tickets £25 (£20 concessions), weekend pass £60 (£48). Friday 7pm, Saturday 6:30pm, Sunday 3:30pm. 18+. Full program at somersethouse.org.uk.

Sources: Somerset House official program page; Clot Magazine; London Korean Links (Sept 28, 2026); Right Click Save newsletter (Aug 7, 2026).