If you’ll be spending your holidays in Europe and, to be more specific, in the City of Love, you may notice a few unusual creatures while sightseeing and checking out the Parisian nightlife.
French visual artist Julien Nonnon has turned the streets and urban centres of Paris into his ‘digital playground’ with a holographic-dinosaur art installation called the Prehistoric Safari.
The Blue Raptor ©JulienNONNON
Housed in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a French amusement park on the city’s famous Bois de Boulogne, Prehistoric Safari transports you into the extraordinary world of dinosaurs through the funky lens of pop-culture using luminous 3D-projections, video-mapping techniques and animatronic sculptures.
It’s not the first time the French artist has been inspired by nature or magnificent beasts. In 2015, Nonnon presented Safari Urbain, which depicted wild animals like tigers, gorillas and lemurs in clothing and projected large upon the sides of buildings and urban infrastructure in Paris, Orlando, Madrid, Stockholm and Hong Kong. For Crying Animals in 2018, he projected luminous renderings of wild animals onto rocky cliffs to highlight the extinction of emblematic mountain wildlife.
Image: Charlotte Gonzalez
This time however, the alleyways of the amusement park host the likes of the formidable T-Rex, triceratops and other icons of the Jurassic period which are brought to life at night with sound-and-light shows projecting Nonnon’s digital renderings.
‘For this project, says Nonnon, ‘I was inspired by [the] adventure books of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and Michael Crichton, as well as Steven Spielberg’s movies.’
The Prehistoric Safari digital art installation will light up the Parisian night skies until 5 January 2020. Tickets cost €19 (about R312).
