Hyper-Realism: A Disneyland with Tomorrowland-Right across your street

Making reality more high-definition than it looks like that’s what is born with the surreal marriage of technology and creativity. Another wax statue? A 3818-28 Barbie Doll? Or a secret garden that we would love to tip-toe into?

- Pratima H

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.” Iris Murdoch

There is a very specific French term called -Trompe l’œil.- a form of art that can make the viewer look at the painted objects or spaces as if they are real.

Then there is something called ‘everyday delusion’ – where we choose to (or are made to) think that the dark, difficult, deer-in-the-headlights reality we see is actually a bad TV show.

Somewhere sitting between this fantasyland and ‘Truman Show’ lies the foetus of hyper-realism.

If you think it’s something from a future still far away, remember that new amusement park you just read about, or the Hi-fidelity art you just scrolled by or that Balenciaga Pope Jacket you might have passed off as a funny meme.

Hyper-realism is underlining reality with the strong strokes of technology. The ink being used is that of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Extended Reality (XR), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and everything in between- arming human creativity like never before. The result is an ‘escape’. But where to? And is it better than where we are now?

Hyper-realism for a Granny