OVERLOЯD
Signal Festival 2025
Old Town – Náměstí Republiky, Prague
NUMBERS SURROUND US, OFFERING ACCESS AND SPEED YET A SHADOW CLING
TODAY, OUR ENVIRONMENTS ARE SATURATED WITH NUMERICAL SYSTEMS AND CODE-BASED INFRASTRUCTURES, SHAPING THE WAY WE CONNECT AND ENGAGE. THOUGH THESE SYSTEMS PRESENT THEMSELVES AS GATEWAYS TO OPPORTUNITY, STILL THEY CARRY WITH THEM AN UNDERLYING TENSION, A QUIET EROSION OF SPACE, TIME, AND MEANING.
OVERLOЯD is a monumental luminous installation that confronts the pervasive dominance of metric rationalism in our cultural, ecological, and emotional lives.
Operating as both critique and counter-system, the work transforms the tower clock into a living feedback loop—one that oscillates between data saturation and sensory collapse. Visitors are drawn into an environment where quantification becomes tangible: glowing interfaces, recursive patterns, and algorithmic soundscapes flood the senses, echoing the invisible systems that govern attention, behaviour, and aesthetic value today.
An inverted ‘Я’, signals reversal of a system turned against itself. OVERLOЯD stages a dissonant theatre of information excess, challenging clarity that flattens complexity. It explores how environments, bodies, and decisions are increasingly governed by predictive systems that obscure the unknown, the emotional, the unmeasurable.
A vast archive of medical and biometric data is integrated into the system, translated into audiovisual signals that shape the evolving visual field. Information is no longer static, but becomes perceptual matter, fragmented, and reassembled in real time.
The astronomical tower, once a device for measuring celestial time, is reprogrammed to register a different temporal logic defined by data flows, algorithmic rhythms, and shifting meanings.
Through motion tracking and histogram-based masking, movement is simultaneously revealed and concealed. Spatial transformations are tracked and translated, while the original source remains partially obscured, displaced beneath layers of computation.
The work returns to the essence of motion. What unfolds within the frame takes precedence over what is visibly present. Action replaces representation; process overrides image..
Through programmed overload and calibrated aesthetic rupture, the installation reclaims presence, slowness, and the right to ambiguity. As a symbolic firewall, OVERLOЯD does not aim to decode or simplify complexity, it aims to filter, distort, and reveal. What remains after the noise are pulses: affective, intuitive, non-linear. In this, it proposes not a return to romantic nature, but a forward-facing, sensorial manifesto, an urgent act of resistance within the closed feedback loops of the Anthropocene.
CREDITS
Art Director – Animation
Soundtrack
Luca Pulvirenti
Giancarlo Trimarchi
Concept – Screenplay & animation – Luca Pulvirenti
Soundtrack Giancarlo Trimarchi
Animation Anna Merkulenko – Cristina Santangelo
3D Animation Alessandro Favarolo, Marco Mereu, Riccardo Mameli