Shadow play, one of the earliest and simplest forms of moving pictures, has three components: a light source, an object and a screen or wall. Most of us have probably tried making shadow animals with our hands in the light of a lamp. Shadow play has long been central to the work of the Belgian-Swedish artist Oona Libens, and it is the starting point for her virtual sculpture Plato and the Canary.

Libens’s virtual sculpture can be experienced in different versions for the computer and smartphone/tablet, or as a download. The viewer enters a dark virtual cave. In the centre, there is a cloud that is constantly changing its shape. Here and there, holes in the cave walls let in a little light. As you move around, the soundtrack unfolds and different aspects of the cave, the cloud and its shadow are revealed. Plato and the Canary has all the components of a digital shadow play. A light source, cloud and wall make up the sculpture: the changing shadow on the cave walls.

The best known shadow play in history is surely Plato’s allegory of the cave, a cornerstone of Western epistemology. A group of people trapped in the cave only see life outside as shadows projected on the wall, simplified copies of the outside world. Were they ever to leave the cave, they would be blinded by the light and the realization of what the world is really like. Likewise, the digital world is made up of copies. But the shadows in the cave and the digital realm also share other immediately immaterial, mutable and inaccessible qualities. These qualities do not stand in contrast to the material reality. They exist because of it. Making this artwork, Libens similarly worked with converted analogue to digital. The cave is a 3D-scanned plaster model, while the cloud’s texture is the product of analogue image processing of moss. Unlike Plato’s cave, there is no hierarchy in Libens’s work between the shadow and the outside world, or between digital and analogue. They are interdependent.