During an exploration mission on the dark side of the Moon, astronauts encounter an alien being: an indigenous lunar life form. It is captured and brought back for study after researchers discover its ability to generate large amounts of energy autonomously.
S3NT1N3L takes shape as an assemblage of salvaged technologies and reclaimed materials: discarded electronic components, obsolete peripherals, infrared and LED lamps, RGB matrices embedded into a central body, and a 500-watt horn tweeter compression driver. Its form recalls a deep-sea creature, suspended between marine organism, machine, and alien presence.
Built from technological remains, the work also draws on a permacomputing perspective: reuse instead of replacement, maintenance instead of obsolescence, and the possibility of reactivating what has been discarded. Here, electronic waste is not treated as residue, but as active matter—reassembled into a new body that emits light, sound, and signal.
Yet this act of recovery is bound to a deeper contradiction. The creature is chained, held in captivity, and transformed into a potential resource for humanity. In this gesture, the work reflects on the link between technological extraction and colonial logic: the tendency to encounter the unknown only by classifying, controlling, and exploiting it.
Within the speculative world of THEIA, S3NT1N3L asks a simple but urgent question: when we meet another form of life, do we recognize a subject to coexist with, or a resource to consume?
fiberglass horn speaker, UV LED panels, copper pipes, LEDs, silicone LED tubes, cables, iron frame, chains, approx. 150x150cm
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).
