Rendering the supernatural

Meditation: Pascal Haudressy's Saint-Francois (2010).

Pascal Haudressy's Saint-Fran?ois (2010) and Heart (2008) are quieter and less interactive, but no less powerful. The former, a 3D rendering of St Francis contemplating a skull reminiscent of Caravaggio's 1606 painting of the same name, successfully stretches realism into the third dimension. Subtly rendered with pinpoints of light, the animation glows like a ghost, jagged lines highlighting the contours of flesh and bone.

Heart is an impressive rendering of a human heart in the same style, and it beats in a way that will make you swear it is alive. Both pieces dwell upon mortality, one using the age-old symbol of the skull while the other focuses on that vital organ of life itself, daring us to wonder whether a virtual image can counterfeit life.

Maurice Benayoun's Emotion Winds (2014) not only uses technology as a medium, it also contemplates our use of technology. On a midnight-blue map of the world, winds are projected using real-time data of weather systems, representing the emotions of the world as they flow on the internet.

Calligraphic swirls meander from city to city, drifting across oceans and connecting one continent to the next. Haunting and beautiful, it attempts to graphically render the emotional condition of the world in real time, offering the viewer an unusual lens on our interconnected society.

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". That is abundantly clear in Metamorphosis of the Virtual.

So seamless is the use of technology that the works hover between the magical and the real, using exciting new technology to ask the most fundamental questions that human beings have asked for millennia.

IF YOU GO

Metamorphosis of the Virtual

K11 Artmall

300 Huaihai Road M., near Huangpi Road S., 淮海中路300號 近黃陂南路