Concept
The work is a transmedia composition aimed at enhancing the value of geothermal energy that is, the energy source that can be harnessed through the heat contained within Planet Earth.
PULSE seeks to serve as a means of drawing attention to sustainability by implementing a harmonious hybridization of science and art, which proves functional in fostering transdisciplinary research, inquiry, and experimentation. Straddling the line between aesthetic narrative and educational tool, this multimedia monolith challenges perceptual habits shaped by recurring elements of Anthropocentrism.
An artwork, a warning: the ability to envision and build the future is not an elitist privilege but an inalienable right of the global community. The apparent stillness of the underground is a profoundly deceptive certainty. At times, it conditions our sensory perception of the surrounding reality—but the resurfacing of a primordial, latent, and inexhaustible impulse could become the necessary occasion for dialogue, making it truly possible to collectively imagine another tomorrow.
After all, the Earth itself generates change.
Technical description
Custom steel structure, high resolution outdoor ledwall, infrared lamps, jetfog machine, audio system
LOCATION
INGV , Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Rome
YEAR
2025
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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).
