Italian-Canadian director and video installation artist, Mario Brambilla’s contribution to this year’s exhibition, Unreal City, London’s largest augmented reality exhibition to date, is an immersive experiment of human emotion and the need to be loved.

“The Four Temperaments”, is inspired by the Greek philosopher, Galen’s theory of four distinct personalities found within humans, which Brambilla introduces at the beginning of the film as Sanguine, Choleric, Phlegmatic, and Melancholic. Each of the Four Humors is a character, denoted by a specific colour of lighting cast on Cate Blanchett, the actor playing all four roles. Within only two lines of dialogue – “I love you” and “I don’t love you” – Brambilla seeks to explore the range of drama, emotional impact and human connection a limited set of dialogue can be imbued with. 

The short film is a companion piece to the video installation made for Unreal City, and presents the Four Humors in a quadriptych, highlighting the subtleties of layered emotion Blanchett expresses within the limited but powerful dialogue. As the film progresses, repetition and the layering of voices creates an emotional dimension in hopes of exploring the various ways in which personal struggle, needs and desires shape the way we love and use the promise of love to impact others.

The installation itself is available for everyone to view through the Acute Art app, which breaks the conventional format of the screen and occupies the space around the viewer by placing Blanchett’s Four Humors into floating coloured crystal balls. Blanchett looks the viewer in eye as the installation unfolds, engaging directly in the emotional impact of words and establishing an intrinsic human connection. With this, the viewer becomes an active participant within the unfolding drama. Brambilla’s use the medium of augmented reality develops a mode of storytelling where the observer becomes a contributor, arising new questions of how we create and consume visual art and for whom.