The Abstract Films: Sculpting Narratives in Space
When architecture becomes a computational membrane
On June 24th, The Abstract Films: Sculpting Narratives in Space opened at Mattatoio museum in Rome. The exhibition curated by Paola Lagonigro and Laura Leuzzi runs until August 2nd and includes two free guided tours with the artists on July 14th and July 22nd at 6:00 pm.
Standing inside Theatre 2 after the installation was completed, I realized that the project had shifted once again. What began between 2022 and 2023 as a series of interactive films and later expanded into video sculptures had become a sort of Super Place, a concept that emerged in my virtual artworks of the late 1990s: a performative environment where architecture, sound, moving images, objects, and now artificial intelligence continuously rewrite one another, inviting visitors to encounter a digital elsewhere that is impossible to ignore.
The four artworks: Yellow Film, Black & White Film, Blue Film, and Red Film, were developed as non-linear narrative systems. Each one invites visitors to intervene, redirect, remix, and transform the unfolding experience. The story is never fixed. It emerges through interaction.
Installed inside the former slaughterhouse, however, the project acquired another dimension. The worn surfaces, industrial structures, and irregular volumes of Mattatoio became active participants in the work. The architecture no longer functioned as a container. It became part of the narrative system itself.
The four rhomboid LED walls embedded in the space operate less as screens than as computational membranes. They absorb the geometry of the building, respond to its tensions, and project new abstract spaces back into it. Physical architecture and digital architecture begin to overlap, generating an environment that is simultaneously material and computational.
In this sense, The Abstract Films are not films in the traditional sense. They are spatial narratives: systems that unfold across architecture, interaction, memory, and imagination. They are attempts to sculpt narratives in space.
Yellow Film explores narrative remixing through a set of interactive envelopes. Each intervention functions as an AI actor, redirecting the unfolding story and generating new relationships between shadow, geometry, and sound within an ever‑changing visual environment.
Black & White Film turns geometric objects into narrative AI agents. Physical sculptures and software interact in real time, reshaping both the visual structure and the unfolding of the story through audience participation.
Blue Film explores AI-generated storytelling through abstract architectures, digital drawings, and evolving narrative possibilities. Participants actively influence the unfolding experience, while interactions continuously reconfigure the film’s spatial and visual logic.
Red Film develops an emotionally charged narrative environment driven by AI-generated choices, sonic interactions, and chromatic transformations. Together with Blue Film, it forms an interconnected system in which actions performed in one work can influence the other.
For the Red and Blue Films, I trained the AI for about three months, developing a generative machine operating between philosophy, Object‑Oriented Ontology (OOO), Object‑Oriented Programming (OOP), architecture, cyberspace, spatial affect, and computational poetry. Each sentence emerges from the interaction of a technical concept, a philosophical lens, a poetic vocabulary, a syntactic pattern, and often a conceptual opposite.
If you happen to be in Rome this summer, I’d love to welcome you to the exhibition. Feel free to get in touch.
My best, Chiara