Horror Vacui has been selected for inclusion in the FILM program at ART SG, showcasing new film-making practices, experimental film or film as artistic medium from artists and practitioners from around the world. ART SG FILM will run at ArtScience Museum Cinema during the fair dates, and will be open to all ART SG and ArtScience Museum visitors.

Denoting from the Latin, ‘fear of empty space’ or ‘fear of emptiness’, ‘Horror Vacui’ is a term used to describe the artistic obsessions of filling every surface without leaving any empty space. This concept relates, on the one hand, to the frenetic expansion and hyper-development currently undertaken by mankind, and on the other, to Buddhist belief that human beings are limited in grasping the ‘true nature of things and events’.

Visually the film contrasts Earth’s untouched lands with artificial settlements, layering multiple landscapes with the use of various image-producing techniques: aerial drone footage, macro photography, and 3D scanning for example. Horror Vacui reflects upon the alienation from nature and the resulting break of the harmonious balance of the ecosystem.

Matteo Zamagni's practice encompasses visual arts, multimedia installations, film production, and electronic music. Combining these unique yet interlinked contemporary technologies with oracular themes, Zamagni reflects on the environmental, economic, and social turbulence of today.

Zamagni’s practice offers a holistic commentary on the correlations between disaster capitalism and the Earth's ecosystems. Using analytical geoscientific tools, VR/AR/MR, real-time generative imaging, world-building, photogrammetry, physics simulations, and CGI techniques, his artworks simulate and combine elemental natural forms with immersive media. This has included procedurally generated fractals, local reconstructions of existing terrain via LiDAR point clouds, and macro-scale aerial views of the earth. The resulting works are often stacked composites of recurring patterns in tangible and notional structures, depicting a complex continuum of local-global phenomena (from densely overpopulated spaces to climatological models).

Zamagni creates accessible, interactive entry-points for participants, who in turn, embody the artist's exploration of the entanglements of critical-gaze, agency, human-machine perception, tracking the evolution of post-anthropocentric consciousness fostered by an entangled technosphere and biosphere. His music production project, Seven Orbits, provides a further platform for playful experimentation with audio-visual experiences. Immersive audio-visual live sets and a recent EP released with the Shanghai-based SVBKVLT label make use of a broad palette of post-club stimuli that play with and confound audience perception. An experimental form of experience-hacking and inducing altered states that reflect the vertigo of Zamagni’s machine-vision driven visual art.