To mark the reopening of cultural venues across France on 15th December 2020, The Musée d'Orsay in Paris releases this hypnotic video piece announcing their latest exhibition, The Origins of the World: The Invention of Nature in the 19th Century. French artist Laurent Grasso has created a new film for the exhibition which will be screened as an installation in the nave of the museum.

Artificialis is an exploration of nature told through human perception, inviting the audience to inhabit the liminal space between the material and phenomenological world. “The idea of artificiality has been in my work for a very long time,” says the artist, who uses anachronism and hybridity to shift our states of consciousness. “I’ve always tried to give a virtual form to the world through aerial views and color changes.”

The film shows an ambiguous, spectral territory in full mutation where reality and virtuality cross over and landmarks dissolve into an imagined space; geysers spew flames across an Arctic landscape, the acid pools of the Danakil Depression evoke a Martian landscape, and a densely wooded forest is rendered almost invisible thanks to LIDAR and microscopic scanners.

“Today the world is ‘derealizing’ itself. I have tried to capture moments when we no longer know where we stand, between the artificial and the natural,” says Grasso." Artificialis is the name of this hybrid, post-Anthropocene territory in which reference points have totally dissolved.”