YURI’S METAMORPHOSIS
Video Installation by Hugo Arcier. 2026
Produce by N°130
Text by Patrick Bouvet
Performance Capture Performer (Yuri): Vincent Berger
Music by Annabelle Playe
Sound Design by Hugo Arcier and Marc Siffert
Audio Mixing by Marc Siffert
“With Yuri, I imagine the ultimate technological escalation:
transforming humanity so it can survive in the world it has
made uninhabitable.” Hugo Arcier
What if, to survive the world it has transformed, humanity had to transform itself?
“Yuri’s Metamorphosis” is an immersive video installation by Hugo Arcier (produced by N°130). This speculative narrative explores the trajectory of a humanity facing climate collapse and questions the promises of techno-solutionism.
Yuri, the narrator and a hybrid being—part human, part plant—bears witness to an overheating future world that echoes our own. The installation alternates between visions of climate disasters and depictions of technological solutions drawn from real research and experiments—from the dispersal of silver chloride to oceans covered in white spheres. By juxtaposing these images, it leaves viewers free to form their own interpretation of this future and its resonances with the present.
As attempts to control the climate fail, the last resort becomes biological: modifying humans so that their bodies can absorb carbon. Through the metamorphosis of Yuri, the first test subject to undergo this transformation, the work explores the existential cost of a survival that requires us to alter our own nature.
Interview for Videoformes Festival 2026
Yuri’s Metamorphosis during Frieze New York (May 13-15) on one of the largest and most iconic billboards of Times Square in New York (thanks to Art Innovation Gallery)
Art, Video, 2026
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YURI’S METAMORPHOSIS
[…]
ARS NATURA
[…]
LIMBUS
Sometimes a bug in a video game can be magic. It gives the keys to a normally unexplored area, beyond, in the limbo of the game.
CLINAMEN
Video
EDEN
Immersive artwork (virtual reality)
inLAND
Audiovisual live performance
DE RERUM NATURA
Video
NAVIER-STOKES OR THE BEAUTY OF THE CRESTS
Video
OVERVIEW
live audiovisual performance
#SOFTLOVE
Audiovisual creation for the live show “#softlove”
CIEL DE TRAINE
Video creation for a musical performance of Nihil Bordures
FPS
Interactive installation.
GHOST TREE
Interactive sculpture
GHOST CITY
Video installation
11 EXECUTIONS
“11 EXECUTIONS” confronts armed violence and modern terrorism to video games artificial intelligence (AI).
LOUISE ROAM “THE WALK”
Official music video for Louise Roam “The Walk”
CAMGIRL ODALISQUE
“Camgirl odalisque” aims to establish a connection between classical nude artworks and a more contemporary vision.
HNN “JE PARS”
Official music video for HNN
FOLDED NATURE
The hallucination is in fact a set of memories, where the colors of a real nature mingle with the folds of a pop-up book nature.
UNFOLDED NATURE
…The result of this is a distraught vision of a destructured nature, an artefact formed with multiple shreds, that Arman would have designate as « archaeology of the future ». A puzzle for future generations, for the day nature will have disappeared.
SURFACE MOUVEMENT – SURFACE LUMIERE
The digital material in this film is a repository and only exists thanks to the creations of Len Lye; but also, as in a painting by Soulages, it forms, transforms and emits in its turn.
L’AFFAIBLISSEMENT PROGRESSIF DES RESSOURCES
Thanks to the movement we distinguish a hollow character caught in a stylised snow storm. He walk and slowly exhausts himself…
NOSTALGIA FOR NATURE
Nostalgia For Nature is a full 3D computer graphics film.
NOSTALGIA FOR NATURE – WIREFRAME
These white lines on black reveals the raw beauty of 3D.
NOSTALGIA FOR NATURE – INSTALLATION
This installation is the litteral representation of the link (fight?) between the real and the virtual.
FICTION 1
This full 3D computer graphics film draws from the events that struck Japan in March 2011, and more specifically, the way the events were covered in the media.
FICTION 2 or a gentle evocation of radioactive particles.
This series follows “Fiction 1” a work inspired by the events that took place in Japan, March 2011. We are in this series after the tsunami.
ARTEFACT
The aim of the Artefact series is to highlight those ‘material accidents’ in 3D computer graphics, and by doing so, to showcase the way in which the artist takes a ‘trial and error’ approach.
