Pacific Sun

In the fall of 2010, a YouTube video of an Australian Pacific Sun cruise ship that was struck by tempestuous waters in the Tasman Sea, causing its furniture and passengers to sway back and forth in an eerie, otherworldly cadence, went viral. In one of his most ambitious works yet, internationally celebrated German visual artist Thomas Demand (known for his trompe l'oeil photographs of three-dimensional paper models of real spaces and settings) has recreated the Pacific Sun video using a full-scale set constructed completely out of paper. The 100-second video comprises 2,400 frames, shot frame-by-frame with a team of animators who retraced the vacillations of each item several millimetres at a time. Fifteen months in the making, Pacific Sun is as meticulous as it is bewitching, an ode to the forces that lie outside of our comprehension but seduce our imagination.