This artwork questions our perception of reality and temporality.
Crédits photos : Your Digital Reflection
“Your Digital Reflection” is the result of a collaboration between five French artists. They are using generative artificial intelligence to blur our perception of reality. With interactivité and motion capture technology, this digital artwork is a confrontation of AI’s chaotic nature and the wonder of art. “Your Digital Reflection” is part of the Recto VRso immersive art festival (April 10-13, 2025).
At the convergence of multiple disciplines and media
“Your Digital Reflection” is first and foremost a collective of five artists: Sam Egan, Gaël Didier, Assia Mustelli Chabane, Younès Guilmot and Morgane Pellerin. They’re all French but with different backgrounds. They’re either dancers, digital artists, musicians, 3D designers or researchers. Together, their influences create a smooth blend of surrealisme, sociology, queer art, body semiology and digital art.
The result of this collaboration is an artwork combining video mapping, artificial intelligence and interactivity. “Your Digital Reflection” is a physical installation, where someone are in front of a mirror and interacts with it. Thanks to a webcam and a Leap Motion tracker, the movement of the spect-actor change the scene, enhanced by the influence of generative AI. The mirror acts as a portal to another universe, another temporality.
With this artwork, the collective of artists explores the unpredictability of AI and its ability for endless creation. It can generate another universe – the digital reflection of the viewer – without any limits and ad infinitum. In the end, it shapes “surreal, absurd and surprising versions of the visitors”, as the installation’s creators explain.
An increasingly unpredictable and hybrid art form
In this way, the artwork perfectly reflects the theme of this year’s exhibition: Pop Chaos. The artists focus on both surprise and wonder. “The AI’s capacity to “hallucinate” and “dream” reflects the chaotic nature of non-standardized intelligence and generative systems, inviting viewers to embrace uncertainty and play with new, fluid representations of themselves”.
It’s no coincidence that the full name of the artwork is “Your Digital Reflection is (maybe) an Illusion”. The portal blurs the realities and the temporalities. The only physical presence in the experience is the mirror object, hand-modeled with different materials. This element brings back the spectator on Earth, after traveling in the unreal and imagination. Before, he was in an interspace, where hybrid forms and uncertainty rule.
“Your Digital Reflection” was created during a workshop at Laval Virtual 2024, with the support of Université Paris 8. Since the first prototype, the installation has been exhibited last June at Bains Numériques, the international biennial of digital arts. The final version will be seen for the second time at the Recto VRso immersive art festival on April 10-13, 2025. The project is part of the official exhibition – the Art & VR gallery – alongside a dozen digital artists.
