Theia Committee is a 2026 short film that expands the narrative universe of THEIA through the device of the institutional assembly, turning the language of governance into cinematic and critical material. In 11 minutes, the film stages an extraordinary session of the lunar colony’s committee, called to deliberate on the fate of S3NT1N3L, an alien entity capable of generating the energy necessary for the settlement’s survival. Beneath the apparently rational and procedural structure of the debate, deeper tensions emerge: the boundary between care and domination, between necessity and violence, between a sustainable future and the repetition of extractive and colonial paradigms.
Produced through an ecosystem of artificial intelligences combining scriptwriting, character construction, image generation, voice synthesis, and animation, the film incorporates its own conditions of production into its critical framework. Rather than treating these technologies as neutral tools, Theia Committee exposes the political and infrastructural regimes embedded within them: systems owned and operated by private platforms, shaped by concentrated and largely unaccountable power, and tied to mechanisms of data extraction, surveillance, predictive control, and cognitive manipulation. In this sense, the film does not stand outside the technological order it questions; it exists within it, using speculative fiction to reveal how contemporary apparatuses of control continue to shape imaginaries, governance, and the terms through which futures are produced.
Short film
Duration: 11 minutes
Year: 2026
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).
