Hyperreality

Liat Segal

Hyperreality is a large-scale, site-specific installation that transforms the façade of the Wende Museum into a luminous interface between data, memory, and material. Dozens of machine-made paintings overlay the museum’s windows - created through a hybrid process merging personal visual archives with algorithmic transformation, coding, and physical craftsmanship. Created using a custom-built painting machine, the work reimagines the visual vocabulary of stained glass through contemporary code and ink.

Hyperreality, coined by Jean Baudrillard, is a state in which representations no longer reflect reality but become reality itself. In today’s digital age, our fundamental human needs for self-representation, communication, and belonging are increasingly met through hyperreal images and mediated interactions. In exchange for momentary contact, we often accept being watched and manipulated, absorbing the psychological, social, and political consequences in silence. From hundreds of thousands of images taken over the course of decades, the artist selected dozens that reflect a personal worldview.

These images - intimate, political, or mundane - are filtered, encoded, and abstracted to the point of near-unrecognizability, becoming data-informed ghosts of lived moments. The resulting paintings float between abstraction and figuration. Their placement across the museum’s windows recalls the role of stained glass in spiritual architecture - storytelling through light. As daylight moves across the surface, the paintings filter and refract it into the museum space, immersing the viewer in a mediated, shifting atmosphere. What we see is not a direct reflection of the world, but a constructed reality shaped by memory, data, and desire.

Project Collaborators:

Hyperreality was commissioned by the Wende Museum, Los Angeles, CA, as part of Getty's PST ART initiative.