From the Series Transcoding the Museum, Hyperreal God, 00:06:23 min video, data visualization, 1920 x 1080 pixels, exhibition view, December 20th, 2025, Miami. Photo © Alian Rives' Studio
Hyperreal God is a video work constructed from fragments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s virtual index of ancient deities. Drawing from this digitized archive of sacred figures, the work algorithmically synthesizes a new, hyperreal god, one that no longer belongs to a specific culture, geography, or cosmology, but instead emerges from data, simulation, and technological mediation.
The video attempts to transcribe the cultural codes embedded in ancient sacred forms, gesture, monumentality, symmetry, and aura, while displacing their original spiritual function. Once rooted in ritual, belief, and collective myth, these gods are reassembled through contemporary technologies that translate the sacred into pixels, metadata, and visual excess. In this process, the divine is no longer encountered through faith or transcendence, but through interfaces, screens, and digital archives.
Hyperreal God reflects on how technology increasingly replaces traditional notions of belief, the sacred, and the supernatural. As simulation overtakes lived experience, technology reshapes sensory perception and constructs new regimes of truth and aesthetic sublimity. Reality is no longer primary; it is substituted by representations that appear more intense, more persuasive, and more authoritative than their historical or spiritual origins.
The work draws conceptually from Jean Baudrillard’s proposition that “God is not dead, but hyperreal.” In contrast to Nietzsche’s declaration of absence, Baudrillard argues that God persists as a simulation, an image endlessly reproduced until it replaces any possibility of genuine access to the divine. In a media-saturated world, even faith becomes mediated, formatted, and consumed.
This condition aligns with Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, in which social relations are increasingly mediated by images, and lived experience is replaced by representation. Within this spectacle, belief itself becomes a visual and consumable phenomenon. The hyperreal god functions not as a source of transcendence but as a spectacular image, circulated, optimized, and aestheticized, mirroring the logic of contemporary media systems.