Life-scale virtual sculpture
Encounter
The instant two cars collide—drivers thrown from their seats and entangled mid-air—held in space and revealed through augmented reality.
Life-scale virtual sculpture
The instant two cars collide—drivers thrown from their seats and entangled mid-air—held in space and revealed through augmented reality.
“I wanted to make a piece that would defy gravity, and have both mass and weightlessness. Real and imagined at the same time.”
David Van EyssenThe work
Encounter is a life-scale virtual sculpture that captures a single instant: the moment two cars collide. Their drivers are hurled through the windscreens and suspended above the wreckage, arms and bodies entangled. Spinning glass shards and mirrored spheres hang in the air around them, reflecting the room.
From one angle the two figures—one female, one male—are locked in an embrace. From another, the man appears to be holding only himself. Both have serene, closed eyes: dreaming, or in rapture. The work hovers above the gallery floor, seen only through augmented-reality devices, with the brutal sound of a real crash. Outside, one car’s rear protrudes through the gallery window into the street.
“The crash is visceral and hits you hard. The flying glass looks sharp enough to cut you… The suspended embrace is touching, and for a digital work it is amazingly human and humane.”
Dr. Michael Petry — catalogue essay, MOCA London
The work
Related work — Mirror Mirror
Reflection runs throughout Van Eyssen’s work. For A Slim Volume of Poetry In No Particular Order, he installed and broke large mirrors across Los Angeles and photographed himself within them—the figure half-hidden, the city fractured and reversed in the glass. Two of these works appear in Dr. Michael Petry’s Mirror Mirror (Thames & Hudson, 2024).
The same search—for a figure held inside the glass—runs through Encounter, whose mirrored spheres already carry the room. It enters the sculpture itself in the second realisation: the Mirror Version, shown in Los Angeles, sets a mirror at one end of the crash and doubles it.
Two installations
