I think you need an electrician for this type of work . How many plugs do you have in the space now and where are they? Are your walls drywall? If they are you d not need to do surface wiring at all since you can propably have wires fished .

Yep an electrician advised surface wiring or opening up the drywall to put the box behind the wall. I prefer to do surface wiring, just wondering about the aesthetics of it. There are plugs in the wall already but in order to hardwire the sconces they would need to add boxes/wiring. Thanks!

That actually looks like copper plumbing pipe in the second picture rather than electrical conduit.

Looks like copper pipe to me, too.

I'd open up the walls instead. Because I wouldn't want to dust the pipes and because I would get tired of that look in short order.

You can use thin panel LED's with that ceiling if you want overhead lighting. And Wiremold raceways to conceal the wiring if you go the surface route. Raceways look neater/ less obtrusive than conduit.

its conduit, simple as that. your electrician knows that. you can paint it what ever color you want after that.

if you are just running wall sconces, you might be able to use the wall outlets and cord cover. I would wait until you know the furniture placement.

This is what conduit (EMT) elbows look like:

Not sleek. All those nasty protruding set screws.

Wire mold raceway installation:

They decorative rods to cover wires.

It's quite easy to do electrical work (on houses anyways) you just need to make sure the fuse for each circuit has the right amount of watts (volts x amps = watts). And you can use power strips and pull all of them from one outlet if the power strip can handle it, and power strips are supposed to be like circuit breakers them self. Wiring in parallel produces less heat, but there's series parallel that might save wire. Series is bad but it saves a lot of wire and you have to connections that are on for the outlets or electronics after it to work.

But um put a bright light in the corner with a bright bulb and put a white sheet in front of it like photography indirect lighting.

It's part and parcel of the loft ambience. There are covers that can be painted or as said just paint the conduit/wires and move on to more pressing issues.