About the Artist
David Van Eyssen is a British painter and installation artist who moved to Los Angeles, where he became a writer, director, and producer of interactive advertising and streaming entertainment—which he is widely recognized for helping to pioneer.
He had his first exhibition at Goldsmith's College of Art at the age of 14—two years after building his first personal computer. Recovering from several years of life-threatening illness in 2018, he returned to his art practice, using technology to explore time, memory, and impermanence across video, site-specific projection, virtual and extended reality, photography incorporating AI, lenticulars, and 2.5D printing.
His work is held in private collections in the U.S. and Europe. Past technology partners include Varjo, LG Electronics, and Panasonic. He has exhibited internationally, including a presentation of Encounter at MOCA London—the museum's first augmented reality exhibition—and at CURRENTS New Media in Santa Fe, and delivered a performance lecture, The Romance of Technology, at the Wende Museum.
That hybrid background matters for Abduction. Van Eyssen brings the instincts of a painter, the timing of a filmmaker, and the logic of interactive space to work that often feels haunted by vanished moments: collisions, projections, reflections, bodies caught between presence and disappearance. The nostalgia in the piece is not retro styling, but the ache of being pulled away from ordinary life while still looking back at it.
From Encounter to Abduction
Encounter—2024
The moment of impact.
A life-scale virtual sculpture, experienced through mobile and AR devices, capturing the instant of collision between two drivers and their cars. Derived from the 3.38m piece, a series of 2.5D works on paper depict the wireframe figures of the two drivers locked in an embrace, suspended above the wreckage. Premiered at MOCA London in October 2024.
Abduction—2026
The moment we let go.
A life-scale XR work, 6.8m in height. Shown in eight stages of ascent, a single figure in a hospital gown is pulled upward by an invisible force—a flickering, green cone of light. Premieres at the Wende Museum, Culver City, in late 2026.
Encounter and Abduction are best understood as companion pieces—two life-scale virtual sculptures that hold the body in a single, suspended instant. Both freeze a violent transition: in Encounter, the impact of two strangers thrown together; in Abduction, the seizure of a single figure pulled upward and away. In both, the figures are weightless, mid-flight, neither here nor gone.
Where Encounter looks outward—at chance, at strangers, at the choreography of collision—Abduction turns inward. The tractor-beam motif draws on Van Eyssen's earlier work as creator of RCVR, a streaming science-fiction series about alien possession—but here it doubles as a metaphor for four years of cancer treatment, which he describes as "a kind of medical abduction." The figure caught in the green cone functions, by his own admission, as a form of self portrait.
That autobiographical turn gives Abduction its emotional charge. The work began with a public image—commuters immobilized by their phones on a train platform—but resolved into something private: the memory of being severed from the life one knows by the diagnosis of illness and the treatment that follows. It transforms contemporary urban alienation into a more intimate meditation on vulnerability, survival, and the strange unreality of medical time.
Together, the two works explore the same condition—the surrender of self is the moment of its transformation.
Collaborators on Abduction
Hunter Wenglikowski—Technical design and animation
Damir Price—Sound
Premiere
The Wende Museum
Culver City, California
Late 2026
Press & Exhibitions