Augmented Rome

"Augmented Rome" is the grotesque portrait of a city full of contradictions, an augmented, amplified Rome, which reveals herself through the “empty” space occupied by sound waves.

Listening to Rome is realising of being overwhelmed by a disabling acoustic bulimia, that causes distress to the concept of silence and makes unstable the boundaries between harmony and noise pollution. Therefore, "Augmented Rome" is the grotesque portrait of a city full of contradictions, an ode to Rome and to her inappropriate beauty. An augmented, amplified Rome, which reveals herself through the Invisible, through the “empty” space occupied by sound waves.

The sound becomes the mean to describe a place, through the images generated by the physical contact between the acoustic vibrations of the sounds recorded through the city and a liquid, in order to shelve and erase a visual architecture, well-established in the collective memory by decades of photographic production; in order to rebuild the visible, where the sound/visual data are used to build up some hypothetical and possible scenarios (if humans could see sound waves), which become stereoscopic images in order to make possible an immersive experience of them.

What happens to the outside is the reflection of what happens in the inside: we don't just cross the city, but it's also the city that crosses us, effecting the shapes of our internal liquids. In this way, this work is also a reflection on the relationship between the city and its inhabitants.

This work was born in 2018 and went on 'till November 2019, before the pandemic situation. Therefor, the most touristic places where the recorded files were collected, completely changed with the crisis.

Due to that, "Augmented Rome" could be considered as an audio-visual document of how the city sounded and looked like in a time that now could be hard to remember.

Due to the fact that we all are in transition, this work will be left open and unfinished.

AUDIO: https://vimeo.com/303968128