CONCEPT
DEEP DREAM is an immersive, interactive installation that explores memory, identity, and sociality through the interface of networked data and human presence. Commissioned for the Digital Life section of Romaeuropa Festival and exhibited at MACRO, Rome, the work blends a web page, mobile app, audiovisual systems, and environmental sensors to weave together public and personal data streams into a living, malleable space. Social media content, especially from participants’ own Facebook images, was algorithmically recontextualized and projected in real time, merging collective memory with individual contribution.
Interaction is key: participants submit personal visual data via an app before entering; inside, motion detection (via hidden Kinect devices) affects the unfolding visual narrative. The installation’s soundscape, crafted with Ableton Live, responds to the dynamics of the visual field.
Derivative
DEEP DREAM probes the porous boundary between user and system, asking how we inhabit, feed, and are shaped by data. By embedding spectators within their own digital traces, it surfaces new experiential modes of presence amid the algorithmic flux of the web.
This project was conceived and delivered by the founders of LIMINAL STATE during their previous practice as NONE Collective.
LOCATION
MACRO Museum, Rome
YEAR
2016
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).
