Sequence at the V&A

Alex May exhibited Sequence at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from 25 to 27 September 2015 as part of the London Design Festival. The presentation introduced a new virtual reality experience built with the Oculus Rift and May’s Fugio software, extending the wider Sequence project into an immersive form shaped by its underlying data and footage.

The display placed that VR experience alongside objects and artefacts produced through the project, including live bacteria, and was accompanied by a participatory DNA extraction and preparation workshop led by Anna Dumitriu with Dr Nicola Fawcett from the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project. That combination mattered because it showed the work not as a single digital image or installation, but as a broader system linking biological material, technical process, and public encounter.

For May, the V&A presentation clarified how the practice moves between software, embodiment, and interpretation. Rather than using virtual reality as spectacle, the project used immersive media to extend questions already present in the work: how data becomes form, how scientific processes become experiential, and how digital systems change what audiences can sense, understand, and remember.