The project is an artistic and experimental exploration on the topic of video game worlds in relationship to photography. It plays with virtual three-dimensional worlds displayed on a screen (a two-dimensional plane) and how photography can distort our perception of what is real and what isn’t. In addition, the images tend to show the limitations of the screen as a means of displaying images, such as color deviations, distracting reflections or a lack of resolution.

As a consumer of video games from an early age, I have developed a deep understanding of the medium, about how games are structured and constructed, about the community and culture around them. I mostly play games that fall into the open-world genre, in which the player is not constrained to achieving specific goals and has a large degree of freedom to explore, interact with, or modify the game environment. Examples of such titles are: Grand Theft Auto Series, Red Dead Redemption Series, Minecraft and others.

In these game worlds, I have the possibility to explore freely, to contemplate, analyze, observe, the same things I do when I go out to photograph in the real, physical world. After realising this, I started selecting scenes that worked photographically, framing the virtual environment as if it was the real one. I photographed things that I would photograph in the real world.

It seemed to me incomplete for the final product to be a screenshot, as it wasn’t describing the full context of what I was seeing. I turned to photography as the tool that would translate the virtual into the real, because, as a medium, photography is conceptually anchored into reality. In the images, the screen is present through it’s shortcomings. The screen becomes a voile (french for veil), an incomplete filter that ambiguates our understanding of what we are looking at. The limitations of the screen create artefacts – light leaks, color aberrations, dust, accidents that can also be present in old film photographs. As a result, the virtual worlds become oddly real through this new representation.

The images below are incipient experiments with this technique and subject. The project and it’s direction are subject to change.

Work in progress.