With an aim to shed led light on place, practice, and person, Ugo Arsac’s artistic approach straddles the boundary between anthropology, research, and documentary filmmaking. Associating urban and human, mythology and anthropology, Arsac produces films, installations, immersive experiences as well as graphic works.

During this discussion and presentation, Arsac talked about two interactive projects that he developed using XR & VR technologies (Energie and IN URBE) where participants could wander freely in 3D scans collected from the Paris underground. In the work IN URBE, participants were able to virtually come into contact with the different inhabitants of the so-called Parisian underground, as well as to explore the city’s subterranean spaces. Participants are invited to lose themselves in mostly unseen subterranean architectures of the French capital.

Arsac’s investigative research into the city led him to question the order of the everyday lives we inhabit above the asphalt. He draws correlations between our bodies and urban infrastructure, comparing for example our fluids, arteries, appendages, nerves, veins, and organs with tunnels, tubes, cables, ducts, circuit breakers, doors, plates, ladders, walls, and rails. The artist also briefly discussed his new, New York-based project where he plans to explore the underground spaces that have been featured in several films and books as well as to interact with wanderers of New York’s underground world.