Numero Cromatico’s Superstimolo is a project room conceived for The Independent – MAXXI’s project curated by Giulia Ferracci and Elena Motisi – aimed at showing the public not only artworks but also a particular approach to art research. For the whole duration of the project the artist conducts, together with Brain Signs, an experiment on neuroaesthetics.

 Three different scenarios alternate in the project room, each of them presenting different elements and devices, both natural and artificial, designed and arranged to stimulate the user’s synaesthetic experience.

The title Superstimolo is born out of the eponymous concept theorized by the ethologist and Nobel Prize winner Nikolaas Tinbergen in 1948. Indeed, Tinbergen’s “supernormal stimulus” is an artificial stimulus, quantitatively or qualitatively strengthened with respect to its natural state, causing more intense instinctive reactions. Starting from this premise, the project seeks to corroborate the hypothesis that art itself can be defined as something that activates the visitor in ways that are more complex and diversified with respect to the normal.

The environments presented are linked to the most recent research initiated by Numero Cromatico on the mechanisms of perception and on how the aesthetic experience is made up of multiple components and determined by physiological, cultural, and environmental factors. Each project’s phase is distinguished by particular sounds, smells, materials, shapes, and colours, which are offered in the form of various devices. The objective is to create an immersive and introspective space, an environment built to trigger an intense reaction in the user and to outline a new mode of coexistence between humans and artificial intelligence and between elements that are apparently the opposite of each other, seeking to unravel the idea of distance and diversity.