Twenty years on the fringes: welcome to the Anthropoperiphery.

Anthropoperiphery: the human being is the center of nothing.

I am tired of my own point of view.

This is not an intellectual posture; it is a physical nausea, a concrete sense of asphyxiation that has accompanied me for as long as I can remember. It is the unbearability of being condemned to observe the world only from here, behind this single and extremely limited pair of eyes, filtering the entire universe through that cumbersome rift I call "I."

For twenty years, I have written about this prison. In 2004, within the pages of the Zibaldone Filosofico, I noted that reality exists independently of us, but we can do nothing but perceive a filtered version of it, manipulated by our biology and our cultural codes. In a moment of particular irritation, I wrote that human progress seems to have the ultimate goal of eliminating man himself.

I did not know then that I was writing a research program. I did not know I would eventually verify it experimentally.

Today, I call this condition Anthropoperiphery. It is not a provocation, but a clinical acknowledgment of a hygienic truth: the human being is the center of nothing. We are accidents on the planet's path, incidental terminals of processes that precede, exceed, and surpass us.

My entire body of work has been nothing more than a sequence of "verification devices" built to measure just how peripheral we have become:

In perception (Nanoart): I created artworks that physically exist but are invisible to the naked eye. If the artwork survives without being seen, then the "dictatorship of the eye" is an absolute fallacy. Validations from institutions such as Nature and the Seville Biennale confirmed that the eye is not the supreme judge of reality; it is merely a contingent biological receiver.

Key to Paradise | Micrometric artwork showcased at Seville Biennale 2008

In the archive (Okkult & Giphoscope): I tested whether cultural meaning could circulate without the permission of museums or galleries. With nearly 3 billion views on GIPHY, I demonstrated that the institution is a redundant proxy for certifying the real. To give body to this circulation, I built the Giphoscope: a handcrafted optical device that transforms a digital GIF into a physical object. The Giphoscope is not a window, but a hand-cranked mechanism that requires human physical intervention to exist, ennobling the ephemeral through walnut, marble, and brass. In this experiment, the GIF is the hyper-visible that the archive ignores, and the Giphoscope is the tool that shifts the threshold of that visibility.

The Giphoscope

In representation (Van Glitch): I used the smartphone not as a tool, but as a laboratory to expose our dependence on the interface. By decomposing the pixel, I showed that we do not look at the world "through" the screen; it is the screen that co-produces what we call reality. The eye and the machine have already merged: the subject is peripheral to their own perception.

Madonna with child II, by Alexander Van Glitch

In judgment (Catherine Gipton): I delegated the most intimate act of intellectual authority - aesthetic judgment - to an AI agent. Catherine writes, curates, and exercises a legally and institutionally recognized authority, proving that ideas exist independently of those who think them. The thinker has become a superfluous variable.

Catherine Gipton | AI art curator and cultural mediator

Acknowledging one's own irrelevance is not an act of cynicism, but of desertion. It is to stop playing the protagonist in a script written by others in order to finally find the capacity to breathe.

The Anthropoperiphery seeks no followers. It is merely the account of a journey toward the fringes of the scene. Because there is no more room at the center, and anyway, the view from there was terrible.

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If you want to know more about Anthropoperiphery, click on this link and read or download the Monograph.

Alessandro Scali Artist & Creative Researcher

lssndrscl@gmal.com