Concept
The stories we tell have always carried our dreams, desires, fears, and visions of the world. From the depths of the web, images, creatures, symbols, and aesthetics have surfaced, giving rise to the vast cultural landscape known as internet folklore.
The installation The Lamp draws inspiration from one of these stories, which first appeared on Reddit in 2012. The viewer is drawn into a liminal scenario—a space suspended between reality and imagination, where fog wraps the environment, creating a cinematic and dreamlike atmosphere.
At the center of this boundless environment stands a luminous hyperobject—an installation that resembles a moving hypercube, akin to a beacon, emitting a pulsing, dynamic light. This light guides the viewer through the darkness, becoming a point of reference in a world where time and space seem to dissolve. It is an immersive, cathartic, and total experience, in which the categories of time and space collapse into a whirlwind of light and sound, offering visitors the chance to truly experience a parallel world.
A rising climax unfolds, as powerful light and sound installations lead those who surrender to the moment into another dimension—a meditative state in which thought begins to wander freely, carried by the echoes of the impressions received.
Technical description
Custom steel structure, kinetic system, dc motors, incandescent lamp, dynamic lights, audio system, haze
LOCATION
Liminal Space, Rome
YEAR
2025
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).
