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Medusa Gets a New Face, Thanks to Projection Mapping

There's a reason why statues at the Lyon Museum of Fine Art are coming to life.
GIF by the author via

After centuries of immobility, classical statues at the Lyon Fine Arts Museum are waking up for the new installation from Arnaud Pottier, of  BK Digital Art Company, Golem X MBA. Working with the Mirage Festival at the Lyon Fine Art Museum, he used 3D scanning and projection mapping to animate the pasty white sculptures throughout, including Laurent Honore Marqueste's Perseus Slaying Medusa. As in his animated bust, Golem X Apollo, the effect of faces shaped by master sculptors looking back at you, blinking and wiggling their lips, is uncannily lifelike. "All our augmentation tells a story about the sculpture," Pottier tells The Creators Project. "My artistic approach to contemporary art is to create the ambivalent feeling of the uncanny ("Das Unheimlich," for Freud). It is this disturbing impression that we feel when we breathe life into non-humans. [It is] a contemporary question in our time, when the public can’t see difference between the truth and the virtual."

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Check out a teaser of the installation, which reinvigorates James Pradier's Odalisque, Barrias' [Les Premières Funérailles](http://www.culture.gouv.fr/public/mistral/jocondefr?ACTION=RETROUVER&FIELD98=AUTR&VALUE98=BARRIAS%20Louis%20Ernest%20&NUMBER=20&GRP=0&amI'm p;REQ=%28%28BARRIAS%20Louis%20Ernest%29%20%3aAUTR%20%29&USRNAME=nobody&USRPWD=4%24%2534P&SPEC=3&SYN=1&IMLY=&MAX1=1&MAX2=1&MAX3=200&DOM=All), and Laurent Honoré Marqueste's Persée et la Gorgone_, below:

Images courtesy the artist

See more of BK Digital Art Company's work on their website. Check out the Mirage Festival for more projects.

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