Myoclonus is an evolving body of work that navigates the fragile boundary between life and death, presence and absence, memory and transformation. Borrowing its title from the involuntary muscle spasms that can occur after death—brief, residual echoes of life within the body—this work examines how forms persist, shift, and reverberate beyond their original state.

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The project originates from a deeply personal experience. As a child, I spent most of my summers on an island in the Adriatic, where my great-grandfather had a restaurant on the beach. I would fish the inhabitants of the sea, preparing meals for my family. One summer, driven by an impulse I couldn’t fully articulate, I spontaneously decided to print the freshly caught, still writhing octopuses on whatever paper I could find. This raw, instinctive act marked the beginning of what would become a three-year series.

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After repeating this process three times, I found myself unable to continue hunting and consuming these beings. Their imprint on paper served not just as a physical record but as a document of the implications of my actions on the environment. It was through this process that I experienced firsthand the power of artistic practice to initiate another kind of understanding—a shift in perception that fundamentally altered my relationship with the natural world.

Although the prints were made over ten years ago, they now come to exist in a new form, reanimated through contemporary processes. As the work evolved, so did its ethical considerations. Instead of repeating the act of extraction, I chose to digitize the original prints and employ artificial intelligence to generate new forms, freeing the process from the need to harm additional creatures. This technological intervention becomes its own kind of post-mortem reflex—a digital myoclonus—where data and algorithms give rise to new, unexpected distortions and echoes of the original lifeforms.

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Central to the installation is a kinetic sculpture, composed of marine fenders and ropes, motorized to gently sway and collide with the digitized plexiglass prints. This repetitive, mechanical motion evokes the subtle, involuntary twitches of myoclonus—an echo of life lingering in material form. The soft, rhythmic crashing of the fenders against the fragile surface of the prints mirrors the tension between fragility and force, between control and surrender. The kinetic element introduces a physical dialogue: an interplay of impact and resilience, echoing the delicate balance of life and death, memory and erasure.

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Myoclonus speaks to the paradox of preservation: the desire to hold onto something ephemeral without fully acknowledging the cost of that act. In the biological process, myoclonus is a fleeting, unconscious gesture—a body’s last residual spark. In this project, it represents the tension between the organic and the synthetic, the authentic and the simulated, and the persistent traces life leaves behind, even in its absence.