Like an airport, the modern hotel is a gleaming space of arrivals, exits and waiting. Much like the enclosed spaces of a J. G. Ballard novel such as High Rise, they impose themselves on guests’ minds, altering the psychology to create something not so welcoming, but alienating instead.Video artist Sabrina Ratté, one half of the avant-garde audiovisual electronic duo, Le Révélateur, and creator of immersive virtual architecture and synthesized music videos, explores this Ballardian realm in the virtual space of her new video artwork, Escales. Taking hotel lobbies as her inspiration, Ratté synthesizes virtual rooms, making them oscillate, flicker, blur and slowly mutate to the unsettling ambient soundtrack of Roger Tellier-Craig.
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“Escales is the result of the manipulation of electronic signals using digital means,” Ratté says. “Electricity, as raw material, is being sculpted, transformed and altered to be reborn as architecture.”“Inspired by hotel lobbies, the video recreates the ambiance of these aesthetically rigorous spaces which, despite their aim at being inviting, are in fact impersonal and cold,” she added. “It's a transit space, neutral, which can be reminiscent of certain virtual experiences where the visitor is anonymous and only passing by.”Watch Escales below:
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