Divergences is a film and a 1:1 scale video installation by mixed-media artist Federica Sasso and sound artist Luca Pagan. Taking up the photographic tradition of studies on human motions the artists reframe Muybridge legacy resulting in a moving statue that embrace hyper-contemporaneity. Conceived as a live recorded performance, a middle age man who lost his left leg in an after-work accident walks continuously on a treadmill surrounded by an aseptic space while immersed in virtual reality.

Walking trough four VR liminal environments, the subject wears a biosensors suit developed by the artists and an high-tech prothesis by the Rehab Technologies Lab of Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) and INAIL - where the treadmill is typically used for functional tests. Wearable technologies drive him to a real-time feedback to his movements by generating sounds reminiscent of water, grass and the step of female and male heels, all connected to the four spaces he is virtually walking in. Immersed in an architectural concrete corridor with a metaphorical light on the horizon, as he proceeds, the surfaces change, from carpet to marble, from water to turf.

DIVERGENCES explores a range of phenomena encompassing the sensation of embodiment (feeling an external – digital or physical – object as part of one's mental representation of their body) and the human perception in a surrounding environment, aside its reaction to external digital urges. Citing scientific experiments and putting them outside of their common context – with the video, suspended in white, bright and fictitious on the border between art and advertising – the artists extreme the relationship between humans and technology leading the viewer to question the future of physical and virtual interactions, ergonomic solutions and their implications in contemporary society.

Sasso and Pagan investigate new possibile connections between body, sound impulses and new realities, eager to experiment how a digital-physical setting (including a virtual environment and a bionic extension of our body) can make a person perceive aptical feelings. They guide us through a suspensed universe that unfolds the unconscious and brain reactions making us question: “Would I react in the same way?”

PREMIERE AT 2023 ARS ELECTRONICA SEPTEMBER 6-10, POSTCITY LINZ (AT)

Artists: Federica Sasso and Luca Pagan
Art Director: Emanuele Amighetti
Styling: Giovanni Nordio
Editor & Supervisor: Carlo Fusani
Director: Emanuele Cantó
Dop: Ciro di Niccolo
Producer: Isotta Fiorenzi
1st AC: Emma Mariano
Gaffer: Tommaso Bolongaro
Grip: Alberto Braga
Bolt Operator: Marc Debon
Photographer: Giacomo Alberico
Styling Assistant: Miriam Perego
VR Designer & Developer: Igor Iurevici
Vice Project Manager Hyperleg Project: Samuele de Giuseppe
Test Subject: Omar Cantoro
Orthopedic: Francesco Migliarese
Graphic Designer: Maria Chiara Moro
Web Developer: Marco Pagan
Shot in August 2023, Milan (IT). Thanks to MovieChrome.
In collaboration with the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and INAIL.