On the occasion of Cyprien Gaillard’s exhibition of his film Retinal Rivalry (2024) at Haus der Kunst in Munich, from October 17, 2025, to March 8, 2026, GR10K, Cyprien Gaillard, and PAN launch a special collaborative project.

Retinal Rivalry is an entrancing stereoscopic film exploring Germany’s urban landscapes and their layers of historical and social significance. Gaillard extends the cinematic experience beyond the screen, offering an expanded and immersive view of the world. The film’s title refers to the phenomenon of visual perception in which the brain receives two conflicting images simultaneously. Rather than merging them into a single 3D image, the neural system alternates between the two, creating moments of confusion and discomfort for the viewer.

GR10K and Cyprien Gaillard collaborated to create a jacket for Gaillard’s film crew during the production of Retinal Rivalry. The jacket functions as both a practical service piece and a conceptual statement. Designed for durability and made from deadstock Gore-Tex® Benbecula recovered from a rejected production batch, it supports both static waiting and moderate activity on set, while symbolically embedding the crew within Gaillard’s artistic practice. As a wearable canvas, the parka features visual references to the film: prints of Bernhard Strigel, and an embroidery referencing the 1919 Bauhaus publication Der Austausch. Erstes Flugblatt by Eberhard Schrammen, reflecting post-war cultural ferment and early Bauhaus innovation.

PAN and Cyprien Gaillard also collaborated to publish the film’s original score, drawing from a wide range of sonic elements to deepen its exploration of dissonance and synchrony. Indonesian instrumental music is reworked and layered with field recordings of heavy machinery, rumbling, and strangely melodic retching. The soundtrack also incorporates the opening lines of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), together with the haunting overture by the German band Popol Vuh. Throughout Retinal Rivalry, sound and image are often in tension - what we hear unsettles what we see. Only in one section do they align: a fractured leg pumps the pedal of an interactive organ to play a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach that repeatedly falters.

Throughout Retinal Rivalry, various stairs, spirals and lifts allude to a state of constant ascent and descent, emphasising the interplay between distance and closeness, chasmic depth and vivid sculptural representation. The film rhythmically pulses with images that swell and contract, inflate and deflate. Manipulating viewers’ sense of depth, scale and texture, it renders familiar materials and locations uncanny, highlighting the inherent inaccuracies and distortions of representation. Recording the ordinary world in magnificent detail while aiming to look beneath the surface of things, Retinal Rivalry is a depiction of space and time, destabilising modes of representation and offering a new hyper-vision version of reality.