The average internet user now spends more than 33 hours a week consuming online media. Mobile screens have become the dominant surface of attention: in some countries, daily phone use has almost tripled in a decade.
Born during the pandemic, Poltrire reflects on the passive condition of endless digital consumption. Three couches face three synchronized screens, turning the act of watching into a suspended loop of information, desire and fatigue.
The work asks: how much power do we still hold over what we see?
I laze, you laze, we all laze.
Lazing idly on the sofa, beyond the hours of sleep, lost in laziness.
Being idle, staying inactive, indulging in inertia, indolence.
An ephemeral compulsive zapping tornado, the whole world in hand, lightness.
False needs and false myths, consuming time.
Are we still too comfortable to react?
A fast cutting of material sourced exclusively from major online platforms, social media and beyond, selected based on viewings during the months of the Covid pandemic. The rhythms and speeds of transition and scrolling vary within a constant multitude of noise.
Year:2020
Type of Project: Audiovisual installation
Materials: 3 monitors, iron structure, 3 couches
Dimensions: Dimensions/Configurations Variable – time 8:00 – fullHD – sound stereo
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).
