Vestige-The Warm_Moving image_2025

Vestige – The Warm is a hybrid moving-image project situated between experimental film, digital animation, and installation-based media art. Developed using real-time technologies, the work explores the tension between ecological collapse, technological mediation, and the persistence of embodied experience within synthetic environments.

The project unfolds as a continuous cinematic traversal through digitally constructed landscapes composed of scanned organic matter, simulated geological formations, and reconstructed environments derived from contemporary zones of destruction. These spaces—partly speculative, partly referential—form a fragmented ecology in which traces of human presence, non-human life, and technological debris coexist in unstable balance.

Rather than operating as linear narration, Vestige – The Warm adopts duration, movement, and immersion as its primary structuring principles. The camera drifts through compressed spatial fields, encountering remnants—vestiges—of bodies, architectures, and terrains that appear eroded, wounded, or suspended in a state of unresolved transformation. Warmth functions here as a double signifier: as a material condition of decay and excess, and as a metaphor for geopolitical, ecological, and ideological overheating.

Produced in Unreal Engine 5, the work combines real-time rendering, digital character systems, and high-resolution scanned assets, allowing cinematic language to merge with game-engine logic. This technological framework is not treated as a neutral tool but as an active agent shaping perception, temporality, and affect. The image oscillates between hyperreal detail and artificial abstraction, foregrounding the constructed nature of the environment while maintaining a visceral, corporeal presence.

Vestige – The Warm positions the digital image as a site where documentation and fiction intersect. By translating traces of real-world destruction into synthetic space, the work questions how contemporary media technologies mediate crisis, memory, and visibility. It proposes the moving image not as representation alone, but as a spatial condition—one that invites the viewer to inhabit a fragile, unstable ecology where collapse and regeneration remain inseparable.