"Eternel.le.s" is a blend of video game and film, exploring the frontiers of virtual worlds.
Crédits photos : Wilfried Thierry
Wilfried Thierry, visual and sound artist, takes us into his world, which explores video games and cinema. In “Éterne.le.s”, he explores our relationship with absence and death, through an avatar who lives in a timeless virtual world. His interactive short film is part of the selection for the next Recto VRso digital art festival, on April 11-14, 2024.
An ode to space and time
“Eterne.le.s” is somewhere between a film and a video game. The artist describes it as an interactive short film. The result of two years’ work, it was produced using the Unity game engine. “Eterne.le.s” is a melancholy piece, an ode to space and time, an intimate experience that questions our relationship with death, reality and absence. “We meet a character who questions his relationship with reality after the death of his father, and with the infinity made possible by virtual universes,” says Wilfried Thierry.
Wilfried Thierry is a visual and sound artist whose work ranges from video games to music, performance art and the visual arts. He likes to work with ephemeral objects, and his works are essentially performative, exploring sound and image. At the 2022 edition of Recto VRSo, Wilfried Thierry presented “Wonderful Life”, a diptych of video games offering hypnotic, infinite wanderings devoid of objective or narrative.
The infinite potential of digital technology
Above all, Wilfried Thierry is interested in digital technology because of its potential for infinity. It is this endless temporality that he explores in “Eterne.le.s”. The teaser of the piece says: “I am this avatar on a flat screen. My movements seem devoid of purpose. My walk is a trance. Each step crosses space and time. What reality carries me away, absorbs me? They don’t stand alone, they overlap. I watch, lulled by my footsteps, by hers. Perhaps time only exists in its boundaries, in those moments that tip the finite into the infinite.”
“Eterne.le.s” follows a character who has to deal with the death of his father. As he wanders through the world, the audience is left to wonder. Have virtual worlds changed our relationship to grief and death? Are we eternal? These digital environments have created infinite spaces, with no end in sight. Time does not work in the same way in the virtual world. There is no more space or time, everything seems possible. “This project is based on an intimate observation: the feeling of eternity that virtual universes can give us when we are faced with our own finitude,” concludes the artist.
“Eterne.le.s” can be tested at the 7th edition of the Recto VRso digital art festival, taking place on April 11-14 alongside the Laval Virtual exhibition.
