Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, 23 November – 8 January 2017

Cavorting among absurd sets, costumes and collages, with both actors and visitors alike, Chetwynd’s rollicking theatrical happenings are difficult to miss. They form “dense but unexpected arguments for being alive and free to share”, says CCA’s senior curator Remco de Blaaij; “I experience her work as a tackling of fear in times where this fear now has a great influence on our lives”. The Turner Prize nominee has filled the galleries with animated sculptures of characters from previous works, which take as much influence from science fiction as they do Shakespearean feasts and Situationist follies. Throughout the exhibition, Chetwynd will be producing a new chapter of her Hermitos Children project, a raucous, carnivalesque performance played out and filmed among the installations.

Winns Gallery, London, 16 November – 3 December

Nestled amid the grounds of leafy Lloyds Park and the floral fancies of the William Morris Gallery are the latest examples of artistic experiments with pixels, algorithms and virtual universes from across the world. This show features current and previous shortlisted works from Lumen’s pre-eminent prize for digital art, including this year’s Gold Award winner, Hyperplanes of Simultaneity, by Fabio Giampietro and Alessio de Vecchi. Combining familiar canvas painting with Oculus VR headsets, the work “creates the illusion of being immersed in the artwork… conveying the power of the brushstrokes, the vibrancy of the gesture”. Also on show is Bonjour Lab’s Passage, which creates a projection of each visitor’s visual and audio imprint in the gallery, forming a silhouette of data that melts away as “digital rain”.

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, until 19 March 2017

Kikuji Kawada photographed celestial phenomena above Tokyo for thirty years, culminating in his series ‘The Last Cosmology’ – a prolonged, portentous gaze at the sky, capturing eclipses, meteorites, lightning, and a brooding moon hovering over the city. His work is shown here alongside two other notorious 20th century Japanese photographers: Nobuyoshi Araki and Eikoh Hosoe. The latter co-founded the Vivo collective with Kawada and others, pushing their documentary photography toward a more experimental, symbolist, unsettling depiction of post-war and post-Hiroshima Japan.

The Fine Art Society, London, until 30 November

“I really needed to understand the land I was born in, to be back standing on my own muck”, says the Academician of his six decades depicting the coastlines and landscapes of Britain, after a brief spell in the USA. Through his unerring commitment to crags, skies and chasms, Ackroyd has also strived to follow the advice his tutor at the RCA gave him: “Be single-minded. Just be a poet”. Taking its title from this counsel, this exhibition, showing prints from 1978 to 2000, captures a single-mindedness that has produced an encyclopaedic knowledge of the wild places of the British Isles.

Plymouth Arts Centre, Plymouth, until 7 January 2017

Megan Broadmeadow – recently awarded the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award – captures the radiant mind of the legendary lighting designer Pasquale ‘Paky’ Quadri through her own sculptures of video, light and illusion. Quadri began experimenting with shadows, bulbs and mirrors at his mother’s kitchen table, and went on to create the fantastical lighting structures that set the stage for 1970s and 80s dancefloors. Synchronising beams to the music’s beats, his lights pulsated throughout disco culture, altering perceptions of architecture and music. As the architectural writer Aaron Betsky said of disco: “Its forms were as ahuman as the sounds: multiple coloured lights, strokes, and mirrored surfaces dissolved space, made bodies seem discontinuous, and exaggerated experiences…[creating] programmed moments of letting go of one’s body, normalcy, and all connections to material reality”.

Alice Primrose is an editorial intern at RA Magazine.