PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT
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PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT 〰️
Currently on display at VRAL is Ghost City, Hugo Arcier’s groundbreaking 2016 video installation, which, until now, has never been exhibited online. The artwork clearly deserves a closer look, especially in its original iteration.
Digital Realism
A red-haired woman wearing a pitch black dress appears vaguely uneasy as she clasps her lavish handbag, perhaps wondering if the voracious camera consuming Los Santos before her eyes might breach the fourth wall and snatch her prized possession. She is taking in Hugo Arcier’s Ghost City at the 2016 Beirut Biennale, where the installation’s documenting the accelerated erosion — or rather full disappearance — of a virtual cityscape evokes a touch of apprehension in the viewer.
Inspired by a critical reading of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, Ghost City is a creative reinterpretation of Los Santos, a virtual replica of Los Angeles, within the alternative reality of San Andreas, that is, Grand Theft Auto V’s setting. Originally conceived as an immersive installation, the work blurs the boundaries between reality and virtuality. With a masterful blend of architectural and graphic elements, the viewer is immersed in a hauntingly desolate, monochrome landscape, completely devoid of human presence. As the camera incessantly explores this evocative environment, the city’s structures fade away as if consumed by an invisible force. Through the juxtaposition of architectural details, the deliberate removal of living presence and the render-like aesthetics, Ghost City prompts viewers to contemplate the interplay of memory, virtuality, and the epistemological foundations that shape our perception of the world.
As an installation, Ghost City comprises two large parallel screens projecting the vision of the vanishing world, and a third screen that acts as a kind of poetic voice-over that can be read and listened to before or after, functioning therefore either as a prelude or an epilogue. Arcier compares such a narrator to a digital ghost, a placeholder for the virtual identities we leave behind through our online activities…
Matteo Bittanti
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