Most people would agree that this world exists, that the screen on which you are reading this text is real. But what if it isn’t? Could it be that our world is just a construction – a manufactured illusion? The Merge visually explores this question.

A few years ago, this existential discussion was limited to the academic world and science fiction. But things are changing. Bank of America recently issued a report to all of their customers in which they stated that the probability that we live in an artificial reality is between 20% and 50%. And the Tesla founder, Elon Musk, believes that the chance that we do not live in a computer simulation is one in a billion.

To speculate as to whether we are living in a computer simulation is to fundamentally question reality. So doing has pushed the photography collective of Tobias Selnaes Markussen, Sara Galbiati and Peter Helles Eriksen to rethink how they would photograph this reality. Over a period of four years working in the USA, South Korea, Germany, Thailand, Portugal, Israel and Denmark, the collective has explored how far humans have come in creating a perfect simulation by gaining access to some of the world’s most prestigious laboratories and companies working with AI, robots and computer simulations.

The authors look at the world as if we are all already living inside a simulation, visually questioning reality and trying to find flaws and glitches that might lead us out of the simulation. Additionally, the collective has employed cutting-edge camera techniques such as LIDAR and Real Sense to give a visual interpretation of the world as seen by machines.