The Soviet film director and cinema theorist Sergei Eisenstein, a pioneer of expanded cinema and montage techniques, mused in his 1947 essay About Stereoscopic Cinema that stereoscopy in the movie theatre – what we today refer to as 3D film – would have the capacity to extend into real space and engulf the viewers, penetrating them in ways traditional cinema could not. Retinal Rivalry, a new 30-minute 3D video work by artist Cyprien Gaillard currently on view at OGR Turin, is a conceptual and technological masterpiece that harnesses this means of ultra-representation to inspire – at once – marvel, dread and disorientation. Having benefited from Hollywood-level production standards, the work builds on Gaillard’s previous investigations of the three-dimensional moving image’s sculptural qualities. Or, more precisely, on his interest in conjuring a level of trickery in the viewer’s brain akin to losing one’s grasp on physical reality. Eisenstein would have been delighted.

Yet in addition to investigating the physical qualities of pure vision, Retinal Rivalry presents a layered, rich and nuanced meditation on the ways in which we read and interpret visual information in public space. Specifically, in public spaces in Germany. Gaillard, who is French and has been living in Germany for the better part of the past decade, is an astute observer of the peculiarities of German-ness: the country’s historically charged landscapes and public squares, its cultural specificities and the many spatial opportunities for “Lost in Translation” moments hiding in plain sight. Take, for example, the film’s doleful scenes inside a concrete car park. The bland, functional architecture expresses efficiency; and yes, placing an underground parking right beneath the staggering Cologne Cathedral must have made sense in the post-war years of the German economic boom and its heavy reliance on the automobile industry. The camera lingers on a piece of trash, nothing out of the ordinary for an urban underground pass. Then, as the angle widens, we see that the underground carpark borders on an archaeological site, metal bars and soot thread into ancient Roman ruins discovered under the foundation of the colossal gothic cathedral in the 1970s.

The work journeys through Germany, mostly empty of people. Occasionally the camera trains on a human figure, but it’s always viewed from the back, from afar, passed out in a park. It must be Oktoberfest. Elsewhere, a façade of a Burger King bears the faintly visible traces of a long-removed Nazi swastika. The fast-food restaurant now occupies what was once an electric substation for the Nazi rally grounds in Nuremberg. Elsewhere still, a monument on a city square honours a long forgotten Renaissance composer. But since 2009, the bronze statue has been transformed by inconsolable fans into a “Michael Jackson Memorial”, as it faces a luxury hotel the embattled King of Pop would usually stay in. Photos, hand-written notes, stuffed animals, even bottles of wine are some of the offerings brought to this idiosyncratic shrine.

Then there’s nature — the magnificent boulders of the Bastei, immortalised by painter Caspar David Friedrich and now crisscrossed by tourist infrastructure. In the moodiness of German cities, dread slowly creeps in. Who’s in charge here, one might wonder. Who makes these awful decisions? Gaillard takes us where no camera has gone before, a gesture that is true to his artistic roots of claiming, intervening and inserting his work into public space. In one sequence, the camera places the viewer inside the hollow face of a 19th century bronze statue called Bavaria, towering over the city of Munich. In another, it places us at eye-level with a hideous public sculpture of a grotesque, potato-nosed drinker. There is sharp humour in Gaillard’s observations.

Although the video premiered this past spring at the Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland, as part of a group show co-organised by artist (and Gaillard’s friend) Philippe Parreno, the work was created for the unique viewing conditions afforded by OGR Turin, a cultural space located inside the massive halls of a refurbished train repair hangar. The show’s curator Samuele Piazza explains that the cutting-edge technology Gaillard employed here has never been used in the context of an artwork before. “Hollywood director Ang Lee used it twice in action movies and Retinal Rivalry is a big detour from that.” The new technology shoots and projects 120 frames per second, in 4K quality — double the brightness and details of regular cinema. A special projector and a custom-made screen are required to show the work optimally, which complicates touring it. Nevertheless, the show is slated to travel to Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2025. “What happens with your brain is, since the eyes perceive way more information than usual, they don’t have to fill the gaps,” Piazza adds. “You are constantly bombarded with more information than you can process so the brain believes it is seeing the real thing.”

As is typically the case with Gaillard’s work, the imagery is paired with an emotive soundtrack that enhances and amplifies the sense of estrangement. Here, the artist collaged samples from a variety of sources, including Javanese music, field recordings from the UNESCO archives and a small organ found on the streets of Weimar commemorating Johann Sebastian Bach, played by an actor who steps on the organ’s pedal with a fractured leg that’s realigned with clanky metal bars.

The work’s titular Retinal Rivalry, a term also sometimes referred to as ‘Binocular Rivalry’ describes a phenomenon in which visual perception alternates between two different images perceived by each eye. It is both the opposite of stereoscopy and its fundament — 3D glasses are needed to reconcile the two into one image. In the work’s very last sequence, Gaillard breaks open the illusion. An image of a small figurine from the artist’s own collection is seen doubled and spiralling on the screen. As it slowly splits into two images with red and blue hues, the viewers are faced with a supposed visual impossibility, in the form of a 3D presentation of the phenomenon of retinal rivalry. If the work’s crisply captured details can be described as a bad trip through Germany’s self-image, the final scene is pure intellectual psychedelia.

Cyprien Gaillard’s ‘Retinal Rivalry‘ is on view at OGR Turin until February 2, 2025.