What does it mean to grow up autistic in a digital world? Follow the story of an autistic person ‘growing up online’ – navigating message boards, building a digital avatar and finding new friends. In this digital space, they learn, explore, and discover new ways to connect, access education, and find work outside of social barriers and stigma. Voyager 2000: Worldbeing & Wonder invites you on a sensory, emotional, and digital journey through art, technology, and the world we build online. It is shaped by the conversations and experiences of autistic and disabled people from SEN schools, support groups, video games, and other online spaces. Through video art, animation, sculpture, paintings, drawings, photography, and more, this exhibition explores how art and technology, from TV to Tumblr, video games to dating apps, have shaped lives, identity, intimacy, and imagination. About the exhibition Unlike many stories about technology that focus on risk, harm, or surveillance, this exhibition highlights how art and digital tools can support imagination, connection, education, and new opportunities for employment. For autistic and disabled communities, especially, these tools may open up new ways to communicate, learn, and form relationships outside of social barriers. The exhibition also explores how visual communication, shaped by online experiences, can be used offline to create more inclusive spaces, where connection and understanding come more easily to everyone. Essex and the making of social networks The exhibition’s name comes from Voyager 2000, an early interactive TV system tested in Colchester’s schools that gave people their first taste of on-demand content, learning, and online games. From Essex’s early innovations – like Chelmsford’s pioneering radio and Colchester’s world-first mass multiplayer online game (MUD) – to today’s platforms like OnlyFans, Essex has helped shape the world’s social networks we use now. What to Expect Move through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood as the exhibition takes you through rooms themed around human stories shaped by technology. Discover artworks like green-screen music videos, nostalgic Tumblr influenced photographs, anime-inspired works, Instagram art history meme graphics, tapestries of blog selfies, and sculptures made from LEGO and found materials. See new commissions by artist S from our Holiday Fun programme alongside works by artists selected through an open call.