Marco Donnarumma

δISSOLUTION is a high-tech dream within an analog nightmare. Through intense sensorial stimulation and radical haptic intimacy, the piece probes the relation of abjection, memory and care in times of climate catastrophe. Like a matryoshka, movement and space combine to open worlds inside worlds, where one’s own experience shifts between isolation and interdependence.

The dissolution room is one of the most precious and unknown places in the world of Humane Methods. It is were the Oracle lives, but no one knows whether it was forced, hidden or forgotten here. The Officiant serves the Oracle while frantically counting time and organizing space, for it is here that the archive of savaged memories is held.

Entrance to the dissolution room – and thus to the ritual revelation held inside it – is granted only upon a complete eye scan and on condition that a private object is left inside the room. The eye scan is required by the AI construct <dmb>, a disfunctional artificial intelligence, to generate a customised audiovisual sensorial stimulation. The object shall be handed to the Officiant so it can expand the memories archive for future fruition.

The faceless Officiant commands newcomers into intimate relationships with eerie objects, sublow sounds and its own body. These materials – objects, vibrations and flesh – are the vehicles through which a memory may awake. It is a responsibility of the newcomers to release that memory from its material enclosure, to feed the Oracle and be fed by it.

The ritual may be distressing to some. The dark space is essentially a harbor of ill-fated impulses; this is where the too fast emotional detachments, the sparse acts of care and the madness of powerful masters long gone is archived into moulded objects. The dramatic weight of past experiences will be heavy on newcomers, but persistence will be rewarded.

Offensive acts towards the Oracle shall not be tolerated and acted thereupon by the Officiant without warning.

δISSOLUTION is a rhizome of the Humane Methods project, an ongoing reflection on violence in algorithmic societies by the artist group Fronte Vacuo.