Hasta La Ideas

Inspired by the Grandsphere concept car, this digital installation imagines a new way to travel

For the first time, Audi has created digital artwork, partnering with Argentinian digital artist and designer Andrés Reisinger to create a video installation that rethinks the boundaries of automotive design, movement, technology and functionality. Unveiled at this year’s Design Miami, “Sphere” is, on the surface, a depiction of what the experience of being in Audi’s latest concept car Grandsphere could be like. But more than that, Reisinger’s work imagines a world where vehicles are no longer held to their architectural constraints and instead offer a new vantage point to view the world.

The large-format video of “Sphere” depicts different moments in the same central space that change in mood and lighting over the course of a single day. It has all the markings of a typical Reisinger work, meaning it’s ambiguous in form yet palpable and emotive. Like the Grandsphere, the spaces the artist showcases are open and varied, enabling a range of use and liminality and suggesting how the automakers will approach design going forward. The heart of the work, the artist tells us, “is about changing the way we move through spaces and that’s all about experiences.”

Rather than just making a surface-level change in colors or materials, Reisinger re-conceptualizes the feelings and uses within cars, thinking of them not as a means to a final destination but as destinations themselves. “I really understood a totally different way, different perspective of experiencing moving in spaces and all the limitations that we are actually having at this moment. If we just forget about those limitations, we end up with limitless possibilities of experience and entertainment,” he says. “This was more focused on interior—how you feel and how you want to spend time.”

When crafting this new age world of movement and technology, Reisinger began with the idea of water and the mirror that features in the video. “This mirror that is reflecting the outside, but is in interior space,” he explains. It captures the “connection to the inside/outside that is totally unreal, because a mirror on the inside will never reflect a sky.” Coupled with water whose surface similarly acts as a reflection point, the mirror envisions an environment that blurs the boundaries between indoors and nature.

“The seats are almost reclining the whole way and there’s a glass ceiling, so you’re seeing the sky,” continues Reisinger, “that was my main scene.” The visual, which also nods to the Grandsphere’s design, evokes a way to travel where the vehicle itself is a means to better see and explore new landscapes, cities and destinations.

Although “Sphere” is immediately futuristic, it also feels warm and inviting, in part because of Reisinger’s careful use of color: dusty pink, foggy blues and beige. He says, “I felt like they are very much organic, natural to our lives, our bodies, our sexual organs.”

When it comes to craft, Reisinger, an artist at the forefront of the digital space, approaches digital work the same way he would physical. “I actually see them the same,” he explains. “We can have a beautiful physical experience with a very amazing digital concept and marketplace for it,  making it all possible.”

“I usually see it,” he concludes, “as the body and the spirit and they all work together.” Similarly, the digital work alongside the Grandsphere proffers new ideas about how to travel, live and experience the future.

Hero image courtesy of Audi