The digital world is often perceived as light, immaterial, and endlessly accessible. Yet every image, streamed video, cloud archive, and AI prompt depends on a vast physical infrastructure: minerals extracted from the earth, global logistics, data centers, electrical grids, cooling systems, and continuous energy consumption.
+3° HOT MACHINES is an immersive installation that investigates the hidden material body of contemporary technology. Through heat, light, fog, sound, and industrial elements, the work reveals the invisible processes behind computation and artificial intelligence.
The project originated from a research path focused on the infrastructures sustaining the digital ecosystem: hyperscale data centers, rare earth mining, global supply chains, and the environmental cost of computational acceleration. What appears virtual is deeply geological and territorial. The cloud collapses into matter.
At the center of the installation, heat becomes both medium and narrative. Thermal currents generated by machines interact with low-lying fog and beams of light, making visible the movement of energy through space. The environment behaves like a living technological landscape: breathing, overheating, consuming.
The research behind the work examines the rapid expansion of data centers and their environmental impact. These facilities require enormous amounts of electricity not only to power servers, but also to cool them. A large portion of their energy consumption is dedicated to cooling systems, while vast quantities of water are extracted from local ecosystems to dissipate heat.
At the same time, the installation reflects on the extraction of lithium, cobalt, and rare earth minerals necessary for electronic devices and computational infrastructures. The apparent immateriality of digital culture conceals a planetary geography of mines, labor, logistics, and land transformation.
Rather than presenting technology as neutral or invisible, +3° HOT MACHINES exposes its physical weight: energy transformed into heat, landscapes transformed into infrastructure, water transformed into cooling fluid.
Technical description
Structure 6,5 x 3,5m, n.32 led tiles, n.18 ledbar, n.12 halupix, n.9 strobo light, n.4 jet fog, n.4 low fog machine, sound system. Duration 10′
LOCATION
Brixen, Waterlight Festival
YEAR
2026
For over a decade, transmedia artists Saverio Villirillo and Gregorio Comandini have been exploring the relationships between humans and machines, producing works ranging from installations, exhibitions, and social practices. After founding NONE collective, the duo of architects and A/V artists continues their investigation into the threshold between perception, consciousness and imagination with artistic practices that induce the audience into a liminal state.
Through the language of new media, the artists aim to guide participants in their works into ecstatic states where the boundary between reality and imagination dissolves. Mental journeys are generated by overstimulated bodily senses, assuming a condition of permanent change between present and future, fiction and reality, possible and impossible.
The liminal state of altered consciousness arises from speculative narratives where the artists activate a liminal rite in which the audience takes on the central role of enchantment generator, thus constituting the fantastical substance, the magical matter that frees itself from a disenchanted world overwhelmed by a cynical realism. The duo defines a transmedial aesthetic characterized by dark environments, where light, video and sound construct cyclic patterns, sudden glimpses, suspensions and hypnotic crescendos that become disruptive energy and lead to an unexpected rupture.
Their installative and performative works resemble collective rituals where participants find themselves in a liminal state on the threshold of consciousness, identity and time, where social constraints can be temporarily dissolved and future perspectives can be questioned. The dissolution of order during liminality creates an ambiguous, fluid, and malleable situation that allows for the establishment of new customs and an individuation process.
Saverio and Gregorio’s works have been exhibited at Light Art Museum (Budapest/HU), Somerset House (London/UK), Fukuoka Science Museum (Fukuoka/JP), Farol Santander (Sao Paulo/BR), GresArt 671 (Bergamo/IT), Design week (Milan/IT), K11 Art Space (Guangzhou/CN), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome/IT).
They designed and realized historical and scientific outreach exhibitions including “Copernicus and the Revolution of the World” at the Archaeological Park of the Colosseum (2023, Rome), “Classico Pop” at the National Roman Museum (2018, Rome), the Italian Museum of Audiovisual and Cinema (2019, Rome), the Roman Museum of Santa Giulia (2023, Brescia).
