Concept
Realty is an immersive experiece that explores the relationship between perception, audiovisual culture and social behavior. Like in a group therapy partecipants are invited to share their screeen addiction, in a sort of collective isolation that can generate a cathartic active re-education. A perceptive experiment that addresses the ambiguity of digital, poised between awareness and emotional dependence, relaxation and technostress, entertainment and the abuse of fiction.
Does Technology expand the real or capture into a perpetual fiction?
Digital devices allow you to see “beyond” or do they prevent us from focusing on the horizon?
Are we enchanted by the beauty of an image or are we mesmerized by its glow?
Are we using technology or is technology using us?
Technical description
Two suspended square screens, four channel audio system, strobos, par light, fog machine, cushions
LOCATION
Cavallerizza Reale, Torino, IT
YEAR
2022
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).
