Transient Visibility - Studies in Failed Resurrections

Door Christophe Muylaert, 2026

200cm x 300cm x 300cm

Transient Visibility – Studies in Failed Resurrections is a video and sculptural installation exploring digital warfare, anonymity, and the fragile visibility of human existence. The work originates from circulating FPV drone footage from the war in Ukraine. In these videos, soldiers are tracked and approached from the perspective of the drone itself. Through their massive circulation on social media, these death sequences gradually lose their gravity and become reduced to transient visual information within a continuous digital image stream. The installation attempts to reverse this process. Through dual-screen projections, the footage is temporally deconstructed. Both screens show the same event, but their synchronization is deliberately displaced: the image of the targeted soldier begins later so that the final moments on both screens coincide. This temporal strategy redistributes attention away from the drone trajectory and toward the fleeting human presence that would otherwise disappear almost instantly within the original footage. By extending the visibility of the victim, the work shifts attention away from spectacle and toward vulnerability, from operational velocity toward contemplation. Opposite the projection, a series of small 3D-printed figurines is placed on a white floating wall shelf. These figures are derived from frames extracted from drone footage, AI-enhanced reconstructions, and digital 3D conversions of the depicted soldiers. Printed in matte white PLA, they function as fragmentary relics or failed resurrections: material echoes of individuals who have already disappeared. At the center of the work lies the idea of the “failed resurrection”: the attempt to temporarily restore human presence through digital reconstruction, while every reconstruction inevitably remains incomplete and artificial.

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