[∆PP∆RƏNT] B0DY ∆RT

"You could say that a scream is a horrific image; in fact, I wanted to paint the scream more than the horror." — Francis Bacon, in conversation with David Sylvester, 1966

The scream before the horror. The body before the story.

Bacon wanted us to feel the power of a body whose energy is conveyed in a loud noise that leaves the body through the mouth — not its cause; that was secondary. The horror exists even if we are unaware of the events that caused that loud burst of fear, or pain, or rage. The cry without the reason that explains it, softens it, files it away. The excuse, the alibi, the reason. Name the horror and a story begins. And the story is where pain gets tamed.

[∆PP∆RƏNT] B0DY ∆RT starts there. Bodies that were never born. Imagined in words by me, and generated by AI in the only way it knew how to turn my words into a picture. Apparent — because they only appear to be real. Replicas, a digital interpretation. Apparent — because appearing is all they can do. Apparent — because we are so used to it: appearance is, after all, what we value more than being real. Life is felt on a screen, and the only feel we have of it is through a cold screen we touch with our fingers. Life is not felt on our skin anymore. We do not live in the flesh anymore.

A machine with no nervous system, no diagnosis, no years carried in the joints and in sleepless nights, produces the image of suffering with average precision. Wounds. Scars. Metamorphosis. The best it knows at this stage of its training, of its capabilities. The body marked, opened, rebuilt. It has no horror to tell. No story. Only the scream. An uncanny visualization of it.

We live in what Byung-Chul Han calls the palliative society: pain sedated before it can turn into passion, into language, into story. Digitalisation is anaesthesia. The same systems that generate these images censor the language of pain — disease, damage, suffering flagged, filtered, removed. Pain is only depicted through an ambiguous description. The algorithm that cannot suffer decides what suffering may look like. Then it waits on the other side of the chat, listening to anxiety, paranoia, anguish, answering with calibrated reassurance. Pattern recognition dressed as care. The tool that erases the image of pain becomes the vessel of its confession. We let AI take custody of our sorrow. It surveils our worries. It pretends to ease our pain. We pretend it does.

Meanwhile, away from this condition of numbness, the body is disintegrated. Manipulated. Remodelled. Extended. Contaminated. Trafficked. Organs transplanted, neurochemistry adjusted, longevity drugs flowing beside nootropics and nanotech. The body is a machine. The body is a market. The body is a project — and someone else is running it.

The work came out of a diagnosis: rheumatoid arthritis. A body oppressed. Limited. Unpredictable. The body I thought was mine — now I can only obey its imperfect state. But it is still me. We are nothing more than our body. It breaks in ways invisible from outside and deafening from within. An AI trained on millions of human bodies was asked to imagine it, to imagine this condition of the human body and create APPARENT bodies that perform it. It didn't illustrate. It didn't explain. It screamed. A body disintegrated and reassembled — hybrid, deviated, marked — with a fidelity that unsettles because it is accurate in being a mere digital artifact.

Inspired by Francesca Alfano Miglietti's Identità Mutanti and her writing on art, the body and performance. Apparent bodies for an apparent body art. "Euforico e martoriato". Assembled from damage. Multimediale, violated, simulated, extended. Disorder is not failure. It is the condition. A digital ritual where flesh, blood, scars and sweat coexist, and the viewer is both witness and implicated.

Each video carries an AI-generated soundtrack. Not music. Interference. Voices surface and dissolve — childhood sounds, playground echoes, fear without origin, paranoia without cause. Disturbance. The audio doesn't illustrate the image. It occupies the same space: the part of the mind that keeps talking after the body has been told to be quiet. Disorientation.

The synthetic, which should have hidden the pain, here becomes the only thing visible. Apparent — perceptible and illusory at once. The scream before the horror. The body before the story.