CONCEPT
MIAC—Italian Museum of Audiovisual and Cinema (Cinecittà, Rome) is a permanent, 1,650 m² multimedia museum conceived as a “transmedial architecture” that narrates Italian moving-image culture through immersive, interactive environments. Across a dozen themed rooms—spanning language, history, authorship, power, and more—the exhibition blends multimedia effects, light, large-scale video, and spatial sound with archival assets from Istituto Luce, RAI Teche, and partner collections. A custom, centralized control system orchestrates all installations and networking, enabling remote monitoring and updates for day-to-day operation. Opened in December 2019 inside a restored 1930s film-lab building at Cinecittà Studios, MIAC reframes cinema and audiovisual heritage for the digital era, transforming spectators into participants within a continuously shifting field of images and data.
This project was conceived and delivered by the founders of LIMINAL STATE during their previous practice as NONE Collective.
LOCATION
Cinecittà Studios, Rome
YEAR
2019
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).
