NUMERO CROMATICO. SUPERSTIMULUS

Numero Cromatico, an artistic collective that bases its artistic research on neuroscience, frames that enclose immortal flowers or colored wool on which poems created by artificial intelligence stand out as epitaphs on shrines.

Don't You Forget About Me, Numero Cromatico, edited by Daniela Cotimbo, 2021 (https://segnonline.it/)

Numero Cromatico is a collective of artists born in 2011 when young researchers of both the visual arts and neuroscience combined their artistic and scientific research. The group's practices are developed along three different lines: artistic, scientific and editorial production. The Nodes magazine, belonging to the collective, is a reference neuroaesthetic magazine for researchers from all over the world, a magazine halfway between art and science that since 2016 has been dedicated to ecological printing with risograph technology.

You are our hands, our hands, our ears, our breath. You are landscapes and sounds and sweet smells. You are a feast for the eyes, the art of tomorrow. (Numero Cromatico)

The research of the collective that resides in Rome in San Lorenzo district works on installations and artistic projects in which the scientific approach inevitably emerges, the basis of the academic and university backgrounds of its members. Most of the collective's projects involve carrying out scientific experiments on the perception and enjoyment of the work of art, in which the public is configured as an active part. The group's artistic research branches out along two paths: aesthetic use influenced by cognitive processes and the perception of the work of art.

When your footsteps arrive at dawn and the horizon of the night surrounds you and turns upside down, you drag me like the sunset to become the moon. (Numero Cromatico)

Numero Cromatico's artistic works come from studies on artificial intelligence. Works characterized by a precise stylistic code. Thick frames of various sizes enclose real rugs or carpets made of soft pure or colored wool or mosaics of dried flowers that never fade. Sepulchral compositions in which, almost as if they were epitaphs, unravel letters that form words and then sentences created by an artificial intelligence following a series of algorithms. Poems that invite to reflect on the way in which human beings perceive the passage of time and its transience. Invite to reflect on memory, on investigation of oneself and the meaning of human existence, on the stimulation of dream experiences and the study of perceptions, on technology as a means to build and not as an object to represent, on the future of the artist within the society in which technology is advancing at great speed, perhaps destined to replace man.

You are a flower in the dust where the light is dispersed in a silence that does not exist and does not live. (Numero Cromatico)

Emblematic of their artistic success is Superstimolo installation at MAXXI, recently dismantled, whose title refers to the 1948 concept of the Nobel Prize winner Tinbergen, the "supernormal stimulus". An artificial stimulus enhanced with respect to its natural state. An immersive and introspective space built to trigger an intense reaction in the user and to outline a new way of coexistence between human beings, artificial intelligences and apparently opposite elements. A large box that contains the synthesis of Numero Cromatico research on the synaesthetic mechanisms of perception and on how the aesthetic experience is "multicomponential" and determined by various physiological, cultural and social, but also environmental factors. A totally immersive experience from a sound, olfactory, tactile and visual point of view for the shapes and colors that enclose the viewer and project him into another dimension. An immense reaction is unleashed in the soul of the user.

Look for foreign hands. Hands that desire, that demonstrate. Collect them and then burn them. Foreign hands that write your name on my body. (Numero Cromatico)

A new modality of coexistence between human beings, artificial intelligences and apparently opposite elements is outlined, thus trying to undermine the convictions of distance and diversity. In fact, the collective, as usual, presents its work by also acting on the architecture of the space, through additional tactile, olfactory, visual and sound elements, in order to activate a deep relationship with the visitor. Numero Cromatico creates artificial landscapes that stimulate a multisensory, ambiguous and introspective experience in the user.