Virtual body
The works of the collective AES+F are a quintessential manifestation of hyperrealism in digital form. Using luscious visuals, Inverso mundus presents a version of life in high definition: timeless, colour-saturated and far more alluring than reality.
Four main storylines run through the overarching narrative: the poor overthrow the rich, women torture men, youth punish their elders and animals usurp humans. The film shares the addictive aesthetics of daytime soap operas—another form of hyperreality in which the viewer becomes so immersed they might begin to imagine fictional characters are real, obsessing over the details
of their lives.
The concept for Inverso mundus, which translates as ‘The world turned upside down’, comes from a series of sixteenth-century engravings that invert what we believe to be the natural order of things. As AES+F explains, ‘the media is also to some extent a world turned upside down, and it is unclear which world and which consciousness we exist in: in the media’s virtual world or the real world?’
