Eyal Gever is an Israeli 3D sculpture artist who seems to share Paul Virilio's fascination for the aesthetic and philosophical aspects of catastrophes, and who, very much like the characters in Ballard's Crash, has a perverse relationship with accidents.For more than two decades, he’s used 3D and visual programming software to stage Collisions, Floods and Disintegrations, to portray calamities of all scales by simulating collapsing walls, Biblical scenes and road accidents.In his eloquent artist statement, Gever confesses a troubling interest for those "sublime moments," that "fill a person with amazement, awe, terror, astonishment, and silence," and also fuel TV news reports.When he's not busy fabricating or re-enacting stunts, Gever creates digital anthropomorphic sculptures, and makes them undergo an animation treatment that conveys his strange passions, choosing a few frames from the animation to create a real life 3D-printed representation.These realistic, chrome-coated statuettes, depicting young people like old toy soldiers, are twisted, bent out of shape, grotesquely inflated and stretched in sync with a sound sample taken from "Rabbit In Your Headlight," a track by UNKLE (with vocals by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke). The topographic inscription of the sound onto the bodies of the statuettes contrast with the digital and virtual reality of the project, giving it a real visual edge.Gever made three different types of sculptures that correspond to various types of animation techniques. He describes his project: "In a digital environment, audio input can have a more obvious impact on the object and its distortion than in reality. In these Sound Sculptures I investigate the unseen effect of sound waves’ infusion onto an object."
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