Die-cut hardcover, 168 pages
11.8 in. x 11.8 in.
29.972 cm. x 29.972 cm.

Foreword by Derek Boshier
Essay by Bil Brown
Afterword by Penny Slinger

Simulacre is an Augmented Reality (AR) enabled book. Additional digital content can be unlocked by installing the Hoverlay AR app on your mobile device. 

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As with most work that explores new territory, Simulacre challenges the viewer to re-examine how they perceive photography, construction, and digital art. It forms its own unique genre and has the aesthetic and attention to detail necessary to ensure its recognition and longevity as a masterful work.

Dasu’s poetic commentaries serve to reinforce the sharpness of his critical eye and judgment, as well as adding dimensions to the appreciation of the work, dimensions which are related both to personal experience and finely honed observation. Humor blends with satire as he reconstructs elements of a man-made world to reflect what lies beneath and within these structures, skillfully bringing sentience to the inanimate.

—Penny Slinger

Dhiren Dasu is everywhere in this considered travel diary of the faces of a neo-constructivist worldview. These images, meticulously produced here, are a labor, a creation, a series of places and points of time and times. Dasu’s poetic, sometimes comedically caustic but always illuminating, text accompanies the work.

Architecture is often considered a product of the culture it was designed for. Dasu’s personalized collage assembly reveals not only the beauty but the character of the places the work dissects and reconstructs into an immediate and new landscape that you can’t unsee.

—Bil Brown

The works in this series were created from my travel photographs. The entities that arose from these photo collages reveal the nature of the places and the people who created them. The works in Simulacre look like faces—human, android, robot, or animal. In the words of René Magritte from his epochal work The Treachery of Images, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” My works are juxtapositions of inanimate architecture and objects. It takes a viewer to complete the artifice of sentience.

—Author’s statement

Works from Simulacre were featured in the following group shows:

• Grand Avenue Augmented, Los Angeles, U.S.A.
• Nostalgia, KaleidoAR/Launch House, Beverly Hills, U.S.A.
• How The Computer Sees, Gallorie, Dubai, U.A.E.
• Click, VITA Arts Center, Ventura, U.S.A.
• Images of LA, Jack House Gallery, Portsmouth, U.K.

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Dhiren Dasu, under the moniker of Shapeshifter7, has been making art since 1996. He works in photography, collage, film, animation, drawing, poetry, and music. He makes artworks that echo and recompose the architectural spaces he photographs, turning them into immersive spaces while exploring the nexus of photography, collage, symbols, and perception.