Our skin is a landscape that never tells the same story twice. Scanned through a digital microscope, it reveals details that resemble maps of unknown planets: an endless variety of colors, textures, patterns, shapes, and imperfections, at times beautiful, at times unsettling. These microscopic fragments are transformed into digital information that generates live sound and visuals, in constant dialogue with the random movement of my hand.
 

During the performance, I stand naked before two neon lights, with my back turned to the audience so that only the outline of my body remains visible. I pass a digital microscope over different parts of my body, scanning the textures of skin, hair, lips, tongue, and other surfaces usually inaccessible to the eye.
 

A custom software environment created with Isadora calculates the average color of each scanned fragment and translates that flow of data into live generative sound and video. The audio layers blend according to the proportions of red, green, and blue recorded in real time by the microscope, while the projected visuals are built from the same magnified images, processed into hypnotic kaleidoscopic renderings. In this way, even the smallest imperfection becomes image, rhythm, and form. Scars, wounds, wrinkles, and stretch marks are transformed into mandalas, crystals, and unstable jewels.
 

The audience experience

I offer my back to the audience, absorbed in observing the hypnotic digital processing of my own skin. The viewer occupies a subtly voyeuristic position, but what is exposed is not the body in any conventional sense. What they see is its magnified, altered, and abstracted translation: a kind of extreme self-portrait, a super-selfie filtered not through the aesthetics of the network, but through the fourth wall of theatrical staging.
 

Skin color and gender as optical fiction

SKIN / TONES plays ironically with the idea of biometrics, the promise that identity can be fixed and recognized through stable variables such as fingerprints, retina scans, or iris patterns. Against that logic, the work celebrates error, instability, and the irreducible unpredictability of individual existence.

Under the microscope, skin color becomes an endless and unforeseeable field of red, green, and blue variations, losing any fixed relation to the narrow categories perceived by the naked eye. In the same way, male and female bodies begin to dissolve into textures, chromatic fields, and living surfaces, stripped of their socially imposed legibility.
 

SKIN / TONES is ultimately a visual and sonic celebration of cellular life itself: a work in which the body ceases to be an identity and becomes a vibrating field of matter, light, and transformation.

​

Shows
University of Rome, MACRO Museum, Rome - 2017
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao - 2017
Instants Video Marseilles - 2017
TF18 - London Biennial of International Performance Art & Noise - 2018
Villa Trabia Palermo, for Border Crossing and MANIFESTA12 - 2018.

Credits
Concept and art direction - Francesca Fini

Website of the project
https://tonidipelle.tumblr.com/