Multidimensional installation
Lunarpunk Series, 2024
He was lost. In the luminous abysses , from which one never exits. Trapped in the infinite. Yet, there at the bottom, a glow can be seen. An energy that invites one to discover what happens on the other side, perhaps a divine ecstasy.
Portal is a multimedia device that serves as a bridge between tangible reality and alternative dimensions, allowing access to parallel universes. These universes are created by digital devices that, acting as portals, offer experiences of altered reality. The devices allow users to explore scenarios that follow different laws of physics and logic than we know. Therefore, “Portal” is not limited to representing or replicating reality but transforms it, imagining new scenarios and opening up new spaces for interaction and perception.
Portal is also a video performance in which Anselmo Luisi, a member of the duo MOMBAO, represents a human being who finds himself in an ethereal, light, and soft world from which he can no longer escape. He attempts to emerge from this burial by breaking through a video screen that looms over him.
The Lunarpunk Series is a collection of research works on Lunarpunk aesthetics. It presents a nocturnal and mysterious vision that encompasses a modern and technological concept of magic, placing the individual and spirituality at the center as the starting point for ecosystemic and community transformation.
Technical description:
Portal#1 consists of a performer, a suspended 90″ LCD screen, dynamic lights, low fog machines, and a multichannel audio system.
Duration: 25 minutes.
*The installation uses damaged technological materials with a focus on recycling and reusing e-waste.
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).
