An award-winning stereoscopic short film exploring metamorphosis, transcendence, and the indomitable spirit of transformation.
Directed by Ina Conradi and Mark Chavez
Inspired by the ancient Daoist parable from the Zhuangzi—in which the philosopher dreams he is a butterfly and awakens unsure whether he is man or insect—Chrysalis reimagines transformation as a profound metaphor for the human will to evolve and endure. The film draws upon an old legend of the butterfly’s struggle to emerge from its cocoon, reflecting the resilience and renewal of the human spirit.
Created in Singapore, Chrysalis stands as a tribute to vision, perseverance, and the poetic power of becoming.
Chrysalis was featured in stereoscopic 3D on the NVIDIA 3D Vision Live channel, awarded Best 3D Film at the 8th Annual New Media Film Festival, and honored with the Lumiere Award by the Advanced Imaging Society at Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank. (Requires NVIDIA S3D setup for full 3D viewing.)
Context: Decolonial frame → Quantum trajectory
Chrysalis approaches metamorphosis through a decolonial lens, refusing linear narratives of “progress” that dominate Western technological imaginaries. Its S3D language unsettles habitual depth cues, inviting viewers to inhabit plural planes of perception where becoming is cyclical, relational, and non-hierarchical. Produced in Singapore—between Asian philosophical lineages and diasporic Chicanx experience—the film performs a transnational worlding that resists singular authorship and centers interdependence over individual mastery. By staging the Zhuangzi parable not as illustration but as embodied uncertainty, Chrysalis recasts identity as a continuous negotiation between states: human/butterfly, dream/waking, self/world.
This indeterminacy directly prefigures the artists’ quantum art trajectory. The work’s poetic oscillation echoes superposition (man and butterfly as co-present potentials), its layered stereoscopy hints at observer effects (meaning collapses through situated viewing), and its cross-cultural entanglements anticipate later explorations of entanglement and entropy in architectural media (Echoes, Whispers & Memories; Vision Serpent Logics). In this sense, Chrysalis is a methodological seed: it establishes a practice of perceptual de-centering, non-anthropocentric narration, and algorithmic montage that evolves into large-scale, quantum-attuned installations where multiple temporalities, bodies, and cosmologies co-exist.
Chrysalis by Ina Conradi & Mark Chavez on Vimeo.
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