Manifesto
A Manifesto for Augmented Painting
Perceptrum² is an artistic research platform founded by Dora Motèque and Luciano Ciamarone. This manifesto outlines the conceptual foundations of Augmented Painting, a practice situated between image, body, sound, and responsive systems.
Perceptrum proposes Augmented Painting as a new ontological category for the image in the post-immersive era.
Our practice investigates the collapse of distance between the observer and the observed. Through the Sounding Canvas, an ongoing cycle of augmented surfaces, we develop Augmented Painting, a third state of painting situated between visual contemplation and spatial immersion. Here, the canvas becomes a physical, haptic surface that negotiates meaning through the body's presence. Interpretation is no longer an act of looking but an act of engagement.
The Relational Object
In our work, the painting becomes a relational object, it listens, remembers, and responds. It exists simultaneously as a surface, a score, and a living archive. This is a deliberate philosophical repositioning: we strip away the "tool" to reveal the "voice." By fusing semiographic research with the logic of responsive soundscapes, we transform static tradition into a permanent language of interaction.
Augmented Presence
We do not "use" technology; we inhabit it. Our work operates as the missing link between the pictorial tradition and the future of experience, extending the studio tradition into the realm of the digital sublime. The canvas is no longer a window to look through, but a threshold to enter, a distributed, networked space where distant communities share a single, tactile reality.
Toward a New Artistic Direction
Augmented Painting extends the history of painting beyond representation and beyond immersion. It establishes a new field of artistic practice in which images acquire agency, memory, and responsiveness. Through relational objects and augmented presence, Perceptrum² seeks to define a contemporary language of interaction grounded in touch, perception, and shared experience.