M+ (Hong Kong)

DECEMBER 9, 2022 – JUNE 11, 2023
CURATOR: SUNNY CHEUNG

HUMAN ONE (2021), installed in the museum’s Focus Gallery, is Beeple’s first sculptural work. It is a four-channel video sculpture that focuses on the journey of a mysterious figure, informally named the ‘traveler’. This figure tirelessly treks forward through a virtual landscape capable of evolving from a dystopian war zone to a benevolent jungle and everything in between.

This seemingly endless digital world is confined within a physical box constructed from four LED panels. The structure is a virtual version of the time-traveling portal known as the TARDIS in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which contains a space much larger than the surrounding confines of the box.

Indeed, HUMAN ONE draws attention to the border between reality and virtuality through two structural devices, one is the rotating mechanical box that allows us only glimpses into the metaverse. The other is the synchronicity of time. Time as a technological tool is so subtle as to almost recede into the background, but the synced subtle color filter applied to the piece linking the time of day between physical and virtual becomes the umbilical cord connecting the two realms—the virtual and the real.

The magic that holds the piece together is the application of the technique of projection mapping, commonly seen as high-power light projected to the side of buildings with perspective correction so as to cause the video played on them to look as if they fit correctly. In HUMAN ONE, the physical aluminum pillars on the outside of the sculpture become replaced as a 3D render inside the virtual realm, creating a trompe l’oeil effect akin to the phenomenological conundrum of staring at a drawing of a transparent-sided box. As a result, the box feels present both inside and out.

LINKS
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