Harun Farocki, Parallel II (still), 2014. Courtesy Harun Farocki GbR and Greene Naftali, New York.
Harun Farocki, Parallel IV (still), 2014. Courtesy Harun Farocki GbR and Greene Naftali, New York.
Some interesting research and theory on the hyper real digital age.
Harun Foracki, a German artists, has a research archival video work that studies the development and it's relation to classical periods aesthetics, the economic expansion and how the visual simulation is slowly replacing the new world. Although I did not get the full video clip I found some of the topics discussed in the documentations and reviews very interesting, such as comparison of wind in a real film set v.s the computer simulation of wind, in real set there are two kinds of wind, the natural and the ones by the wind machine, but in the game engine there is only one (Foracki, 2012). The digital is much more controlled and unified but yet creating a very persuasive wind effect at the same time, it is almost uncanny in this sense, where I feel like might be in the realm of Technological sublime.
A video essay on Charles Space is very inspiring in the same way as it discuss the post-truth, post-cinema and Theoretical Photorealism of digital medium. When the 3D engine is so robust it can provide reality without the actual reality, the image then becomes something alien or uncanny, a lot of the digital visual art is exploring the uncanny feel of hyper reality, something that looks real and unreal at the same time.
Exploring the uncanny zone, where I consider it does not have to be figurative, it could be about the texture of the 3d render that makes object seems realistic, the material actually take a strong effect on whether the final image sequence is realistic or not, the "skin" of a virtual object, could be quite revealing of how 3D photorealism is constructed.