LAS MENINAS
A stereoscopic moving-image experiment created for the CAVE virtual reality theater, Las Meninas transforms three-dimensional digital space into a site of historical, political, and artistic critique. Operating as an immersive meditation, the installation investigates the intersections of power, spectacle, and authoritarianism through the lens of European painting.
The work directly integrates the spatial and compositional logic of Diego Velázquez’s 1865 masterpiece Las Meninas, dismantling its complex play of gaze, royal illusion, and courtly authority. By translating Velázquez’s painted architecture into a navigable VR environment, the installation places the viewer within the volatile nexus of observer and observed, exposing how visual representation has historically served the mechanisms of power.
Layered against this classical Baroque foundation is the brutalist, fragmented iconoclasm of Pablo Picasso—specifically referencing his 1957 series of 58 reinterpretations of Velázquez’s canvas, alongside the anti-fascist agony of Guernica. The virtual architecture mutates and fractures, reflecting Picasso’s response to Francoist tyranny and the trauma of twentieth-century total war. The installation bridges seventeenth-century royalist illusion and modern totalizing regimes, framing fascism not merely as an ideology, but as a coercive regime of vision that virtual space is uniquely equipped to interrogate.
Interactive Stereo VR Installation | ~10 min (1998)