The trio of filmmakers met at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier, where they soon founded a research collective exploring the intrusion of reality into online video games. After several films delving into this relationship, they arrive at Normal Planet, where a virtual museum welcomes visitors embodied by extravagant avatars.
For about a decade now, this trio of filmmakers has been exploring, between research and cinema, the ways in which experience and perception of reality are shaped in virtual worlds. In Normal Planet, they imagine a day in a crumbling virtual museum, inhabited by curious avatars delivering disarming and often biting commentary on the artworks. A very polite frog controls the entrance with a metal detector; a festive dinosaur mistakes a horse-riding orangutan in a painting for Louis XIV; a group of kawaii teenagers in TikTok mode animates the space with lively discussions. Amid rooms overrun by vegetation, canonical works and crudely rendered surfaces, a flow of conversations unfolds that is as absurd as it is revealing: they discuss nudity in paintings, contemporary modes of art consumption, the way video games shape our perception of landscape, and the impossibility of “undoing” an action in art as one would on a screen. At the same time, the virtual bodies glitch, distort, and pass through surfaces, as though testing the limits of that world. Guided by the gaze of a fish, Normal Planet becomes a playful essay on the museum as a space of projection, where the virtual and the real contaminate one another and aesthetic experience is continually reinvented by its visitors. (Cláudia Marques)
