Produced within the Pilot Artists Residency (Lab)
Virtual installation, Newart.city
Hypnagogic Highways approaches the virtual environment as a threshold state - suspended between dream and material reality.
Virtual worlds possess their own physical logic and internal rationale, yet they often feel hallucinogenic, detached from the constraints of everyday matter. When engaged with attentively, they can induce a hypnagogic condition: the liminal state between wakefulness and sleep where perception loosens and thought becomes fluid.
The work focuses on a specific phenomenon - the sensation of driving on virtual roads. Within video games, the act of traversing highways produces a meditative rhythm. A form of digital highway hypnosis. Repetition, movement and ambient space combine to generate subtle alterations in consciousness.
Visitors enter a space that exists outside immediate reality, structured by its own internal rationale. Boxes and spheres punctuate the landscape. There is no prescribed route, no correct sequence. Exploration unfolds intuitively - entering, exiting, drifting.
The work proposes virtual infrastructure not as spectacle, but as contemplative device: a mechanism for gently destabilising perception and extending awareness beyond habitual coordinates.
Christopher Michael’s practice investigates the psychological and perceptual effects of digital environments. Through constructed virtual spaces, he explores how simulation can trigger altered states, inviting viewers to inhabit the porous boundary between waking life and dream logic.