The Empire of Light
HD 1080P, 7min10’, 2020
During the pandemic, the world felt increasingly like a simulation — accelerated, flattened, glowing from within the screen. Contact with the outside dissolved into pixels and signals. A new ecology emerged: intimate yet distant, boundless yet enclosed.
Inspired by René Magritte’s L'Empire des lumières, I drifted through Google Earth during lockdown. My body remained in one room; my gaze wandered without weight.
The streets of Paris appeared in daylight, suspended beneath a night sky. Day did not replace night; night did not conceal day. They coexisted — quietly, impossibly — like two layers of consciousness sharing the same breath.
In this suspended landscape, the familiar grows unstable. What is recognized begins to tremble. The real loosens its edges.
Between online and offline, finite and infinite, technology and poetry, a threshold opens.
Illusion softens.
Another layer of reality becomes perceptible — not louder, but deeper.
Inspired by René Magritte’s L'Empire des lumières, I drifted through Google Earth during lockdown. My body remained in one room; my gaze wandered without weight.
The streets of Paris appeared in daylight, suspended beneath a night sky. Day did not replace night; night did not conceal day. They coexisted — quietly, impossibly — like two layers of consciousness sharing the same breath.
In this suspended landscape, the familiar grows unstable. What is recognized begins to tremble. The real loosens its edges.
Between online and offline, finite and infinite, technology and poetry, a threshold opens.
Illusion softens.
Another layer of reality becomes perceptible — not louder, but deeper.