P1
P1 has no say in who P1 becomes. In a virtual anatomical theatre a surgeon with a machine's voice opens the skull and fits a neural implant, while the audience, voting from a Twitch chat, chooses which memories stay and which are wiped. A person is largely what they remember, so every vote edits a character in real time, and no two operations leave the same P1 behind.
The piece belongs to Umanesimo Artificiale, Filippo Rosati's platform for art about being human in the age of artificial intelligence. It puts that question in its bluntest form, a body on a table and a crowd holding its memories, under a title that asks whether the line between the two was ever real.
Two old kinds of theatre were built for looking inside a person. The anatomical theatre opened a body in front of an audience; Giulio Camillo's Renaissance theatre of memory laid out everything a mind could hold, in an order you could walk through. P1 joins them.
The patient is a metahuman in search of authenticity, laid out in a nineteenth-century operating theatre fitted with twenty-first-century instruments, attended by a surgeon with the manner of a lab assistant who has read too much. Viewers vote through the chat and live polls, and between operations they could talk to the patient directly through a P1 chatbot. When the implant goes live the eyes turn white, and memories begin to play inside the head, some lived, some only recalled.
The operating theatre, from the streamed performance.
Then the operation gained a second nervous system. A person in an EEG headset pushes memories into P1 or pulls them out with their brainwaves, so the patient is rewritten by two minds at once, the crowd and the wearer. On stage the wearer is the performer; at Sónar it was whoever sat down next.
Each brainwave had its own memories: delta a sensory deprivation tank, beta a conference room full of people in VR headsets, theta glitching holograms and artificial nature, alpha a sunrise over a city in smog. What P1 remembered depended on how calm or alert a stranger happened to be.
.jpeg)
P1 premiered as an interactive broadcast for Residenze Digitali (28 November to 1 December 2024, produced with Sineglossa) and returned several times on Twitch. In June 2025 it became an all-day installation at Sónar+D in Barcelona, in the Project Area's Worlds to Come section, generating an artificial personality in real time from visitors' brains. On 17 July 2025 it had its world premiere as a live theatre piece at Kilowatt Festival, at the Teatro alla Misericordia in Sansepolcro, under the title Are boundaries real, or do we draw them to feel whole?
Credits
Client: Umanesimo Artificiale
Concept: Filippo Rosati
Scope: Direction, real-time environment, audience interaction, sound design
Co-production: Sineglossa, Operating System Studio