The intimacy of an inner world animated by the interest in the paranormal, mysticism and the weird web, takes shape in CGI visions and mirages, partly coming from her spiritualist family context and a closer relationship with nature and folklore of the French countryside.

In Sybil Montet's work, technology is a magical artefact, a tool with which to investigate the mysterious sides of both virtual and objective world, understanding not the difference but the coexistence of the natural in the technological. After several commissions (such as for Dark0 and Travis Scott), Sybil is now entirely focusing on her own production, through CGI visual works, cinematic essays and 3d printed sculptures.

Landscapes, architectural elements, human/nonhuman creatures, catastrophic events recur in the visionary imagination of the artist, whose research is a study on the narrative possibilities of virtual space and light to erase the boundaries within the concepts of real and simulation, organic and synthetic, instilling doubts and ambiguity in the one’s own distinction between truth and fiction.

The mirage becomes the point of cohesion between the possible and the non-existent, intersecting the virtual imagery with the physicality of places opens up - according to Sibyl - infinite potential for narrative fiction. Finding ourselves caught up in a vortex of uncontrollable cosmic and natural energies, Sybil aims to stimulate an intense emotional response in those who observe and experience her work.

In this interview, Sybil talks about the experiential potential of virtual space, magical realism and the poetics of simulation, presenting a preview of three new works for Coeval: Skyscraper, Flood and Safeguard.

Your interest into mysticism, the paranormal and cosmic forces seems to be the nurturing core of your scenes of mirages. Set in mixed natural/synthetical environments, extreme events emerge in a glossy aesthetic, in which virtual light is a key element of your research. Growing up, what sources of inspiration or personal experiences brought you to the definition of these visions?

It’s truly an ever evolving mix of my ongoing researches and my upbringing - but in terms of background, I come from a very spiritualist family, where discussions and stories about hauntings, paranormal energies and UFOs were common, my mother was a bit medium and very connected with the forces of Nature, my grand-uncle was a practitioner of black magic.

I grew up in small and remote villages in the countryside of France, places that were known for their strong, sometimes scary folklore and a relatively preserved wilderness. My parents were not so sociable and did not travel, and even if financially it was comfortable, i experienced a lot of darkness. So we (my sister and I) were almost all the time outside playing and exploring super freely.

I created a complex, labyrinthic inner world, interconnected with a fantasmagoric Nature. And when i was teenager, i spent 80% of my time reading books on all types of magic, satanism, alchemy... I also experimented with psychedelic plants & chemicals like magic mushrooms, salvia or LSD at a relatively young age and even if it was dangerous, i feel it expanded even more the scope of my sensitivity and validated some intuitions i had naturally since being a child. Also internet was very foundational from my early teens, and all the strange theories, paranormal sightings and dark stories i could find there imprinted very much into my thought process.

Finally, my grandfather was a mathematician and astronomer - we were often in holidays at his place and he had all these astronomical fascinating tools, and he always showed us the deep sky with his telescope, and explained to us how the stellar systems works, how the universe is mesmerizing, how mathematics underlie everything - It created in me an intense fascination for technological tools as a child, almost as magical artefacts, and i think it laid a symbolical basis in my psyche, of how technology seemed like a key to get closer to nature, and to seek for the mysteries of life.

But globally i’m always more interested by the future than the past. There is great part of my imagery that come up intuitively, and i’m searching to manifest them with the most intensity, refinement and details possible.

In recent works you focus more on the human figure, giving full close-up on simulated face realism. In this way, a traditional genre such as the portrait is turned upside down by non-existent human appearance. What intrigues you when creating this sort of avatars?

I’m progressively working towards more fiction in my work - I’m writing my first movie almost entirely in CGI, and there is a lot of characters in the plot, it’s like a choral-type of story - I’m still not finished in the writing but i’m already designing some beta versions of my characters in my recent renders, some portrait studies that help me to embody psychological states & storytellings in virtual figures - For example in my last serie for Flash Art, there is a businessman figure with an iridescent face and shiny eyes, and this is a study for one of my upcoming character, a high end stockmarket trader that made a pact with a demon.
I’m also very fascinated by the structures of the face, mostly male but even more post-human cyborg-ish figures - Like how a virtual being can look very emotional and hyper-evocative just by a detailed work of lighting, camera angles and moves.

Finally, i like the fact that these avatars are like ghosts or spirits, they don’t have a material envelope but they are charged with intention.
I will soon be experimenting with motion capture in order to animate my characters with the most physically accurate movements possible - to give the maximum simulacra of aliveness to these virtual beings.

Majic Eyes Only, page 10.11, geoengineering

You did a lot of commissions for other artists, musicians, events, fashion brands, etc. How do you find a balance between your own personal imagery and creating for someone else’s product?

Actually, for the last 3 years i almost focused only on commissions - I learned a lot and i’m super thankful for this, but it also took a tremendous part of my creative energy.

In fact, I did not really found a balance, because i fully embraced the works and wanted them to be perfect - i totally instrumentalised my style and my vision for projects that are not mine and it took me some time to understand that it was pretty toxic for me, because in the end, i feel accomplished only when i art direct projects, and exteriorize personal research. For the next months I’ll focus entirely on my upcoming exhibitions and my movie.

I feel that it’s vital for me to achieve some creative goals and i also simply don’t have the time anymore to work for someone else.

When it comes to CGI production moving out of that specific corporate terrain of image-making and embracing a more “artistic” domain, there’s a certain scepticism in recognize CGI or New Media Art in general within the vast institutionalized art sphere, often “ghettified” into separate areas such as specific festivals or labeled and reduced to its technical aspects. A renewed interest is now investing these productions, so I wonder how’s your relationship with art institution?

To be honest, i’m grateful because i feel pretty well supported by art institutions. Most of my recent & upcoming exhibitions take place in art centers or national institutions. I would say that institutions & institutional curators are way more open towards new media and emerging technologies in Art - the stigmatisation comes more from market-oriented galleries.

Also, the NFT craze, packed with very bad digital art, did not help in this situation - It parasited a bit the great potential of DAO for art, as means of artist’s re-appropriation of his/her own economy, to become for many people some kind of bad taste circus - some high end curators that were already very little exposed to sensible new media art were suddenly exposed to a majority of mediocre CGI pieces and i feel this was pretty detrimental for the credibility of emerging technologies in a contemporary art context.

Nevertheless, i feel that in recent years there is more and more opportunities of exposure and development for New media. As automation, hyper-digitalisation of life and the virtual are becoming crucial thematics in an academic/curatorial scope, there is more and more exhibitions trying to investigate these problematics and more and more space for artists working with very contemporary mediums such as CGI or .AI.
But in the end, i also think that the medium should not be hyper deterministic in a practice - it should be able to morph and modulate in reaction to different projects.

Your subjects escape a fixed dimension: they’re evasive, boundless, constantly morphing and transforming. For this reason it is possible to imagine multiple possibilities of narration of your work, besides the dimension of the screen. For example, you recently published some works on Flash Art Magazine, using the pages as a fragmented narrative space of fiction.

So when it comes to the exhibition space, how do you stage your work? And based on your experience, what kind of undiscovered potential methods of narrative and exhibition can be explored within CGI productions?

The exhibition space is a work in progress for me - I’m just coming back to designing objects and conceptualising them in space - my previous art project, a duo named core.pan, ended at the same time the pandemic hit, and for the entirety of 2020 and most of 2021, i focused only on commercial work because it felt safer. Since a bit more than 6 months i’m producing objects again - 3D print sculptures - and this coming year is a huge transition for me as i’m having a lot of exhibitions projects to experiment with as a solo. I’m excited because i consider the space as a medium and i’m very willing to develop pieces that act as experiential spaces, as zones of intense emotional & physical suggestion - beginning with the concept of the labyrinth, or the use of holographic technologies.

Regarding CGI and emerging technologies as narrative methods, behind the classic concept that you can manifest any surrealistic and supernatural imagery, i’m also fascinated by the fact that you can sublty disrupt the elementary & physical layer of reality in order to diffuse ambiguity and trouble - Like with compositing where you overlay CGI on actual locations in the real world, where you can open endless fictional potentialities on existing spaces - That’s why i explore a lot the concept of Mirage, and why i try to attain some form of magical realism in my CGI work.

Also with deepfakes, where CGI (through AI) is completely breaching into the notions of truth and identity - a technology that you can also use to raise the deads and make them talk... Finally, with CGI simulations, you can have the opportunity to study and experience some phenomenas that are either too dangerous (tornadoes, massive explosions...) or invisible (like electromagnetism, oceanic currents, societal dynamics...) and from these simulations and live-data you can design very contemporary, hyper-real forms of poetics or physicality.

Today the idea of merging both physical and virtual life as one single reality is not a science fiction fantasy anymore but an object of interest for both techno-corporates and scientific research — e.g. Metaverse is on everyone’s mouth now. How do you relate to these extreme prospect of future life?

I think this is the logical continuation of technological progress, the logical evolution of internet, that is already an archaic metaverse in the sense that it’s another dimension of life. There is no way this won’t happen - And perhaps in a not so far future, this will be the only free territory we’ll have if the earth is in a terrible state because of climate catastrophe (or wars).

Personally, i hope that we’ll still have the choice and the luck to be able to evolve and experience in a transversal way, in between worlds - To choose when you want total dematerialisation in the metaverse, or when you want to stay in the actual, objective dimension and be able to be confronted with the explosion of a volcano, the contemplative sensitive complexity of natural scapes, or intense physical sex.

I feel that the key is to be able to cruise the different dimensions seamlessly.

Do you have future personal projects coming up?

I’m working on an online piece that will release in march in a virtual exhibition curated by Dateagle - an hybrid between 360 storytelling and .ai coding, investigating the idea of computing & .ai as potential tools of prophecy.

I’m also working on two new sculptural pieces, one for a group exhibition in April at Kunstverein Freiburg in Germany, the second for another groupshow at MAGCP Cajarc in July in France (my first ever show in my country lol).

I’m working on a live-video installation for the opening of Oslo’s new national museum in June, with Norvegian duo Wetware Solution, and i gave myself the deadline of finishing my movie’s scenario before autumn. Finally, i’ll begin to launch limited editions of clothing and accessories inspired by my visual works, the first items should release before spring.

There is other TBA projects that are still not confirmed, but this year is definitely a shift for me.