His practice always begins with an act of violence. Not destruction for its own sake, but an attempt to push a system beyond the point at which it can continue to function. Each work begins as a structure placed under pressure: variables set against one another, balances removed, algorithms forced to confront conditions they were never designed to handle. The work is never the system itself, but the trace left behind when it gives way.
Marco Silvestre, who works under the pseudonym Nikopol, treats digital systems as organisms rather than tools. He subjects them to continuous strain until they begin to hesitate, producing behaviours they were never programmed to generate. In that uncertain space between control and collapse, the glitch stops being an accident and becomes a symptom. Error is no longer something to be corrected, but the moment when the system reveals, perhaps for the first time, genuinely unpredictable behaviour.
His aesthetic follows the same logic. He is not interested in formal perfection, but in what emerges when a structure begins to deteriorate: abandoned architecture, peeling walls, industrial landscapes, sleepless nights, overcrowded clubs, the constant hum of machines that seem incapable of shutting down. There is no nostalgia here. The imagery is rough, excessive and deliberately unpleasant. Beneath it, however, the same question persists: what happens when a structure can no longer sustain itself? How much pressure can it absorb before it becomes something else?
Presented at ReA Art Fair 2026, Rise (2026) translates this research into an audiovisual environment suspended between emergence and collapse. A recursive diffusion process, driven by changes in luminosity, continuously reconfigures the visual field, while a procedurally generated soundscape responds in real time to the presence of the audience. Nothing remains stable. Every movement through space alters the system, shifting the precarious tensions that allow it to exist.
The work remains in a state of permanent instability. Minute variations prevent it from ever reaching equilibrium, forcing the system into a continuous cycle of deterioration and regeneration. What appears to be chaos is, in fact, a survival strategy.
Nikopol often imagines his works projected behind a dance floor. The visuals are not really the work. The work is the bodies moving in front of them: sweat, kisses, people disappearing into the intermittent rhythm of strobe lights. It is an image that says a great deal about his practice. His works never ask to be observed from a distance. They demand proximity, friction and participation. They ask the viewer to enter the system and become yet another unstable variable. Because nothing truly comes alive until it risks falling apart.
Text by Vittoria Martinotti