8 digital art works you'll enjoy at the immersive 'Eternal Art Space' exhibition

It’s easy to feel cynical about our future when humans are growing ever more reliant on technology. While many artists have explored what the future holds with dystopian visuals of advanced machinery overtaking mankind, Turkish-American media artist Refik Anadol has a more optimistic perspective on our evolving relationship with data and machine intelligence. 

In this piece, the 37-year-old encourages the viewer to reevaluate the potential of machines and AI through a synthetic reality inundated with data and information technology.

Shortly after presenting her ‘Alive Painting’ at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics closing ceremony, Japanese painter Akiko Nakayama has collaborated with musician Eiichi Sawado to present an audiovisual allegory of ‘bubbles’ observed in modern society.    

The lurid visuals of bubbles in this piece represent our values and social circles, as well as the roles we play in this ever-changing environment. Alongside Sawado's original composition, the piece is overlapped with a medley of soundbites from live performances recorded on different occasions. In this sense, what the observer hears is not just music but a collage of individual sounds, each capturing a moment in time. 

Rhizomatiks is a multimedia company that works to create unique installations and productions using cutting-edge technology, while Elevenplay is a Japanese dance troupe known for incorporating digital elements like projection mapping into their performances. 

In this collaborative piece, they take on the challenge of fusing light and dance. The computational video of a dancer with computer generated visuals of geometric shapes and distorted physical movements create an entirely new performance, all from one piece of choreography. 

Shortly before his death, Monet set out to create a painting that people could immerse themselves in. With the aim of bringing beauty to those who had suffered through World War I, he painted his famous Water Lilies series, which is still displayed in the oval rooms of Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris as Monet suggested.

Immersive Museum Japan initially planned to host a dedicated Impressionism exhibition at Terrada Warehouse in 2020 before the exhibition had to be postponed indefinitely due to Covid-19. In this brief but spellbinding piece, the Immersive Museum showcases an installation inspired by Monet’s Water Lilies.

French digital artist ​​Mathieu Le Sourd, who goes by the name Maotik, has had an impressively diverse career collaborating with everyone from the Nine Inch Nails on their world tour set design to luxury brands like Chanel and Hermes. 

This work, which was first displayed at the Deep Space 8K Media Display at Ars Electronica, is inspired by the rising and falling of tides caused by the gravitational pull of the moon. Here, the vibrantly coloured computer generated visuals realistically capture the movement of ocean waves while creating a playfully poetic environment for viewers to step into. 

This surreal soundscape is centred on the theme of Zen and features a synthetic re-creation of Kyoto’s Kennin-ji Temple. Here, three-dimensional images of the temple are created with photogrammetry (the process of extracting 3D information from photographs). The digital version of the temple formed by coloured dots reflects the way our environment influences how we perceive the things we see.

The piece has roots in Zen philosophy, which teaches that some things can only be perceived in silence. The sound that accompanies the work drifts from soft and subtle beats to dynamic notes with high frequencies to draw attention to the different layers of sound bouncing across the space. 

Sabrina Ratté is a Canadian artist and filmmaker based in Paris. This piece, inspired by the writings of Donna J Haraway, Ursula K Le Guin and Greg Egan, is a kaleidoscope of computer generated extinct plants and species that no longer exist. Through this virtual ecosystem, Ratté explores the traces of our history showing past and future are in perpetual tension with the present.  

The Dimensional Sampling series is an art project started by Chinese artist and coder Cao Yuxi in 2019. The project primarily revolves around the rise of the QR code and its ubiquity in modern society, especially in China, where the machine-readable codes have a wide range of functions from purchasing goods to identifying senior citizens. 

For this particular piece from the series, Yuxi collaborated with Hong Kong-based sound artist Lawrence Lau to incorporate a combination of abstract sounds from the real world as well as the digital world to fuse the domains of our physical and digital reality.