ALL THINGS HAVE A LIFE

 Alessandro Chessa - Leonardo Chessa - Piergiorgio Mulas

Things live alongside us, they remember, they dream.

Even if they are now wrecks or scraps, we can have them tell us their stories,

their memories, their vision of the world.

We can find traces of their existence in the universal memory of the Infosphere.

These memories, these images and sounds — we see them, we hear them.

They surround us. They offer a new perspective on the future.

All that remains of Splanc3 are some wreckage: a hand-painted fuselage, a turquoise propeller engine, and a red tail stabilizer.

It has passed through the hands of many children. Now it no longer needs wings to fly.

Reassembled and hung by a thread, it can project its memories and its dreams of being an airplane.

S62 is unusable, a discard. It has listened to the voices of a thousand and one phone calls, but now it’s out of use, replaced by mobile phones that mock it. Even in this state, it can still have a glimmer of life, try once more to connect with the world, and offer us ancient conversations and new calls in unknown and mysterious languages.

Splanc3 contributes to the first conference on artistic research in Italy:

UNFRAMING KNOWLEDGE:

Artistic Research

Beyond Theory and Practice

Napoli, 27-28-29 October 2025

MANN - Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli e

ABANA - Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli

with a paper with the title:

“All things have a life”—revitalizing waste and scrap by drawing on the universal memory paths of AI beyond fashionable aestheticization

ABSTRACT | Machines equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) inherently possess access to a form of universal memory, including traces of objects that have shaped human experience and been recorded through decades of digital image production (i.e., photography, film, and sound). This artistic research project explores the mnemonic pathways of AI, creating a connection with real, discarded, or obsolete physical objects with the aim of reactivating their presence and revealing new possibilities for reuse.

Following an image-to-image approach, a photo of the object under investigation is combined with a minimal, context-based prompt. The memory path is expressed through a predetermined sequence of parameter pairs—denoising strength and classifier-free guidance—which modulate both the fidelity to the original image and the influence of the prompt’s context. Finally, a morphing procedure is applied to generate a video connecting the sequence of images. This method is designed to explore the widest possible range of the machine’s creative variability and generate recurring visual patterns. For the sound component, a text-to-audio technique is used to generate audio snippets, which are then edited and mixed through a process of musical post-production.

Rather than pursuing hyper-aestheticized outcomes, this approach seeks to engage with the ancestral, poetic, and even shadowed dimensions of AI memory. The aim is to free the creative process from dominant aesthetic conventions shaped by consumer culture, adopting a “lo-fi/lo-def” perspective to foster a human–machine dialogue grounded in co-evolution.
This research proposes a standardized methodology for the visual and sonic rendering of the mnemonic pathways at the intersection of visual art, AI, and the material world. This method is adaptable to a range of objects and contexts, including site-specific installations, with the aim of establishing a recognizable and reproducible artistic signature.

PAST EVENTS

 Spazio Felice 52

Roma - Via Cavallotti 52

25 - 26 - 27 September

Opening

Thursday 25 September 7pm-10pm

Friday 26 e Saturday 27 September

10am-1pm e 5pm-10pm

(free entry)

 Cagliari - Via Mazzini 6

(10 meters from Piazza Martiri)

25 - 26 - 27 April

From 6pm to 10pm

(free entry)

Opening DJ Set, Friday 25 April at 7pm

PRESS REVIEW

• "All things have a life": the new low-profile futurism - QE᛫magazine (translation on the left side menu of the website)

LO-FU MANIFESTO

The aesthetic instance of Generative AI (GAI), the one flooding the media with hyperkinetic and hyperrealistic images and videos, even to the point of falsifying the very reality it aims to celebrate, seems like an unstoppable mainstream impulse by now. Photography at the end of the 19th century had pushed the painters of the Divisionist movement, which was inaugurated in Milan in 1891, to go beyond hyper-detail in the description of figures, favoring vibrant and filmy brushstrokes that would break apart and reassemble the representation of reality into larger elementary fragments, almost as if to reveal its hidden side. Today, GAI, the emerging new technology that generates multiple possible realities, could similarly push us to break the trend toward hyper-definition and hyper-aestheticization of the artificial worlds it is capable of creating, in order to delve deep into the machines’ imagination and bring to light their raw, visual, and sonic memory, even in its most hidden and unsettling aspects. In the 20th century, with Futurism, after the Divisionist experience, technology had made a return as a protagonist, almost to celebrate the presumed war glories that were yet to come. What new role then for GAI in the current process of artistic creation?

Like in an updated proposal of Aeropainting for our times, we present Splanc3, a prototype model of a shattered and decomposed airplane that GAI can help us revitalize in a game of mirrors, associative memories, and sound reverberations from the Infosphere.

At the threshold of the 21st century, we would like to inaugurate a new kind of futurism that does not foreshadow a dystopian world of devastation, as has unfortunately happened in the past, but that leverages technological innovation to better understand who we are, how the world around us is made, including all the things that accompany us in our everyday life.

With the Splanc3 installation, we want to propose an aesthetic line of resistance to a stereotyped and massified beauty canon, governed by uncontrollable algorithms, favoring an intimate exploration, not sweetened by digital special effects or ‘generative’ automatism, in which the human artistic work emerges forcefully. So, a less celebratory futurism, one that better captures the fallible and potentially dangerous aspects of new Artificial Intelligence technologies, and that calls back to the countercultural urges of the lo-fi/lo-def movement. A futurism free from unconditional enthusiasm, that also considers the weak side of machines, without, however, falling into Luddite extremes. We could define it as a low-profile futurism, with low aesthetic intensity: lo-fu, to summarize, with an expressive impulse that is less dazzling for our consciousness, but deeper, closer to the unfathomable nature of our being human and of all living and non-living beings: of all things, in short.

CREDITS

In this section, we collect testimonials and contributions from friends of our Splanc3 project, who have helped us in various ways at various stages and have also provided a driving force behind its dissemination and success.

Maria Elena Capitanio. Maria Elena helped us during the founding phase of the project, a delicate moment when we needed to orient ourselves and understand the form to give the installation and how to communicate it. Maria Elena continues to be close to us, supporting us in our relationships with the art and communications worlds.

Agostino Mulas and Angelica Zanninelli. Agostino and Angelica enthusiastically joined our initiative from the start and collaborated in various ways, including meetings, dinners, and hosting us for the inauguration of their new Spazio Felice 52 in Rome (https://www.spaziofelice52.org/), where we were able to showcase our installation to a wonderful Roman audience.

Marina Napoleone. Marina hosted and cared for us throughout the installation's testing and construction. We think that much of his loving kindness resides in that plane suspended in the void.