Installation view: Skygolpe, “EMPATIA DIGITALE” (DIGITAL EMPATHY) Viale Bodio 17, Milano, BLACKOUT, Public installation, 2025

Language as Urban Short Circuit — Fakewhale in Conversation with Skygolpe: Exploring the Public Billboards of BLACKOUT

With a gesture that is both radical and deeply philosophical, Skygolpe’s latest work takes over the urban landscape of Milan with BLACKOUT, a project that probes our relationship with artificial intelligence, language, and contemporary identity. Through cryptic statements spread across massive billboards and a deliberately ambiguous collaboration with an autonomous AI, the artist transforms public space into a field of aesthetic and conceptual tension. We at Fakewhale had the pleasure of delving into the theoretical and visual dimensions of the project with him, exploring his reinterpretation of Socratic maieutics and the evolving frontiers of creation in the post-human era.

Fakewhale: The use of Italian is a non-neutral choice within the context of BLACKOUT, especially given the visual universality of urban art and the global nature of AI. Why did you choose to craft the project’s slogans in Italian? What conceptual weight does this linguistic choice carry within the work?

Skygolpe: BLACKOUT marks my first full exploration of language conducted entirely in Italian. I had been wanting to work in my native language for some time, but I hadn’t found the right context, until now. At a time when English dominates global communication, particularly in technological and artistic spheres, choosing Italian introduces a kind of friction. Not just linguistic, but cultural. It’s a way to assert specificity, rootedness, while also compelling the viewer to slow down, to engage with the work less automatically. Italian functions as a filter: something that demands pause, mental translation, an effort. It becomes an element of both intimacy and resistance.

At the heart of the BLACKOUT project, there’s a palpable tension between revelation and concealment, an ambiguity that seems to echo Heidegger’s notion of Technik as a “mode of revealing.” How did this concept influence your decision to use public space as the site for these cryptic statements?

Heidegger’s idea of Technik as a form of revealing was pivotal in shaping BLACKOUT. But my interest goes beyond theoretical alignment, what matters to me is the insight that every technical form, including art as construction, is never neutral. Every act of appearance carries with it a shadow. That’s why I chose to place these phrases in public space, the very site of instant consumption and direct communication. It’s a context where people expect functional, commercial messages. By placing enigmatic statements there, I triggered a short circuit: declarations that don’t explain, but demand reflection. It’s precisely in this ambiguity, in the clash between visibility and unreadability, that the revealing occurs. But it’s not about revealing a truth. It’s a rupture. An opening. A fracture in the flow.

In BLACKOUT, it’s the statement, not the question, that generates doubt and disorientation. How does this “declarative maieutics” shift the relationship between artist and viewer, between communication and critical thought?

We live in an era where questioning has been absorbed into the rhetoric of answers. Everyone seems to already know, and doubt, once a fertile space, is now seen as weakness. With BLACKOUT, I wanted to overturn the maieutic paradigm: not the question as a tool to extract inner knowledge, but the statement as a detonator of uncertainty. These are “ambiguous affirmations” that don’t guide toward resolution, but open a rupture. In this way, the relationship between artist and viewer is transformed: no longer a creator transmitting meaning, but a trigger asking the viewer to fill in the void. Language becomes an event, not a message.

Phrases like “ART WITHOUT ARTISTS” or “THE FUTURE IS GENERATED” destabilize some of our most deeply held beliefs about creativity, authorship, and authenticity. What kind of response are you hoping to evoke in the audience through this ambiguous, provocative language?
I’m not aiming for provocation for its own sake. The ambiguity in these phrases comes from a genuine urgency: the need to confront the slow collapse of the boundaries that once defined our concepts of the subject, of art, of the future. A phrase like ART WITHOUT ARTISTS isn’t a slogan, it’s a live paradox. In a time when AI can create images indistinguishable from human-made ones, what remains of the author? Where does the creative act reside? These are uncomfortable but necessary questions. The language I use is meant to create displacement, a subtle semantic earthquake. I don’t want the viewer to understand. I want them to pause. To wonder. To become uncertain of what they thought they knew.

The project originated in Milan, a city symbolic of visual and advertising culture, before expanding elsewhere. How important is the urban and cultural context in shaping both the meaning and reception of the messages?
The urban context is not just a backdrop, it’s an integral part of the work. Milan, with its history rooted in advertising, design, and visual communication, offers a fertile yet oversaturated terrain: a space where images are consumed and words are instrumental. Introducing BLACKOUT into this landscape means creating dissonance, as if language itself were collapsing in on itself. The statements don’t try to compete with the city’s noise, they aim to dismantle it from within. Each city will bring its own resonance, precisely because the messages are open-ended, and the environment, with its culture, visual codes, and collective memory, becomes a co-author of the work.

You chose to work with artificial intelligence to generate the images. What is your approach to co-creating with AI? Is it a technical act, a symbolic one, or both?

It’s both, inseparably so. The technical gesture already carries symbolic weight. When working with AI, I don’t treat it as a passive tool, but as an entity that participates, generates, responds. This kind of co-creation introduces a new tension: the image is no longer merely the expression of a human intention, but emerges in an interstitial space between control and unpredictability. In that sense, the process itself becomes a commentary on our era, a living reflection on what it means to “create” today, when the figure of the artist begins to blur, almost to the point of vanishing. AI is not the future of art, it’s the present embodiment of our ambiguity.

Your reference to the thought of Emanuele Severino, especially his view of technology as the inevitable structure of human destiny, seems to offer a powerful lens through which to read BLACKOUT. How has this perspective shaped your understanding of the relationship between aesthetics, technology, and identity?
Severino’s influence on my work is deep, though not always explicit. What interests me is his interpretation of technology not as a tool, but as an ontological horizon, a condition that shapes and permeates us. In BLACKOUT, technology isn’t thematized, it’s embodied. The phrases and images speak from within that horizon, without nostalgia for a “pure” form of creativity, and without celebrating a new era. Identity is no longer a stable center from which artistic expression emerges, it’s a temporary knot, a transitional function within the technical flow. In this sense, Severino has helped me think of crisis not as an end, but as a foundational state: a constant oscillation between promise and loss.

BLACKOUT follows in the footsteps of artists like Holzer, Kruger, and Weiner, who transformed language into a visual and conceptual device. In what ways does your use of language differ from their experiments, and what do you carry forward from them?
There’s definitely a continuity: the belief that language can be both visual material and a site for critical engagement. Like Holzer or Weiner, I see the word as an event, an appearance that disrupts. But there’s also a rupture, a shift that demands a new posture. Whereas the conceptual artists still operated in a context where the author was present and recognizable, BLACKOUT unfolds in a zone where identity dissolves, where language is generated in dialogue with a non-human intelligence. My statements aren’t searching for universal truths, they are deliberately ambiguous, unstable, even fallacious. These aren’t truisms, but glitches in the grammar of the real.

The fact that these statements appear in public space rather than in museums or digital platforms gives them a particular force. How does the meaning of the work shift when it’s embedded in the urban fabric, amid advertising and daily routine?

Art in public space carries a different kind of responsibility: it’s unprotected, uninvited. That makes it more vulnerable. but also more powerful. Taking BLACKOUT outside the white cube is a way of returning to language its subversive, almost clandestine dimension. A phrase, torn from the logic of advertising, becomes an interference. It doesn’t seek a prepared audience. it catches people off guard. It doesn’t ask to be interpreted. it imposes a pause. And because it emerges in the same space that sells happiness, discounts, and progress, it subverts that logic from within. It’s a poetic gesture, but also a tactical one. An act of subtraction: stripping meaning away from function.

The project doesn’t offer answers, it opens questions, and explicitly resists synthesis. How do you see the role of the artist today: is it still to propose visions, or rather to complicate and destabilize?

I no longer believe in the figure of the artist as prophet or visionary. Imagination shouldn’t simplify, it should make complexity visible. In a world governed by clear-cut narratives and predictive algorithms, the artistic gesture only makes sense if it resists clarity. BLACKOUT doesn’t aim to explain the present, it seeks to unsettle its categories. To complicate is a political act. To destabilize is an ethical one. It’s not about proposing an alternative, but about opening a space where the alternative becomes thinkable. In this sense, the artist is less an author, and more an instigator of disorder.

Your work CONTACT was presented as a short film during the press preview of BLACKOUT, serving as a visual and conceptual counterpoint to the public installation. How does this short film expand or refract the tensions explored through the urban billboards?

CONTACT emerged as a natural extension of BLACKOUT, but it reverses its energy. While the billboards operate through impact, concise, frontal, and public declarations, the short film moves through accumulation and suspension. Presenting it already during the press preview was crucial, as it emphasized that every surface, including the cinematic one, belongs to the same conceptual body. Here, the inquiry becomes more intimate, more layered. The hands that never quite touch, the deconstructed reference to The Creation of Adam, the AI-generated imagery, all contribute to constructing a state of perceptual ambivalence. CONTACT doesn’t seek to explain BLACKOUT, but to reveal its shadow zone, its internal lens. It is a short film that questions the very nature of contact between human and machine, not as a completed gesture, but as an enduring tension, much like that between desire and delegation.

You’re planning to bring BLACKOUT to other Italian and international cities. Can you share anything about the next stages of the project and how it might evolve in form or language?

Yes, the project is designed as a living organism, always expanding, always evolving. After Milan, we’re bringing it to other Italian cities, including La Spezia, and we’re working to stage it in very different urban contexts: from hyper-digital metropolises to peripheral territories. Each place reshapes the language: the statements change, the images adapt, the surfaces respond differently. BLACKOUT isn’t a replicable format, it’s an adaptive device.The goal remains the same: to use the city as a philosophical machine, and to transform visual habit into a form of critical astonishment.