“What kind of robotic machine would there be if the Soviet Union still existed? How would Constructivism or the Cosmist aesthetic have evolved? How would collectivism and undivided property have influenced the form and typology of robots?”

CCCPunk is a speculative and dystopian exploration of unrealized possibilities. Based on a text mining and image analysis analysis of hundreds of written documents and images from the Soviet era, it used the extracted data as input for generative AI, creating images, videos, and environments poised between the possible and the improbable.

Videos and images are part of a broader speculative research framework that investigates Soviet cultural continuity through a post-historical and techno-anthropological lens.
The project starts from a counterfactual premise: What if the USSR had not collapsed? What aesthetic, social, and technological trajectories might have emerged from a continuous socialist paradigm — one evolving into a hybrid of cosmism, industrial futurism, and proletarian vernacular aesthetics?

At its core, the research is based on an extensive archival and dataset-building process. Thousands of historical photographs, propaganda posters, domestic interiors, industrial machines, and youth subcultures have been collected, digitized, and organized into thematic datasets.
Through text mining, historical documents, manuals, and cultural essays are algorithmically analyzed to extract recurring linguistic patterns — ideologemes, rhetorical constructs, and terminologies of production, progress, and collectivism.

In parallel, image analysis techniques — such as feature extraction, clustering, and color morphology detection — are applied to visual archives to identify underlying aesthetic grammars: chromatic tendencies (oxidized reds, industrial greys, faded greens), structural symmetries, compositional logics, and recurring symbolic motifs (stars, machinery, domestic rituals).

By correlating these textual and visual layers, the research reconstructs a latent cultural model of Soviet imagination: a visual-semantic network connecting material culture, collective identity, and ideological form.
This reconstructed dataset becomes a speculative generator — a design engine capable of re-imagining everyday life, infrastructures, vehicles, and tools as if they had evolved within an uninterrupted socialist technological imagination. The result is a constellation of hybrid artifacts, simultaneously familiar and alien, oscillating between documentary realism and speculative fabulation.

These first outcomes of the research appear as collective autonomous machines whose function is never explicitly readable. They occupy streets and civic thresholds like infrastructural organisms: not quite vehicles, not quite tools, but public prostheses that perform automated labour on behalf of society. They do not display control interfaces or operators; they simply exist — permanently active, silently absorbing work that would otherwise fall on people.

Formally, they combine industrial anatomy (exposed mechanics, pistons, articulated arms) with monumental enclosure and ideological semiotics (the glowing red star functioning less as interface than as civic symbol). They feel less like “equipment” and more like technological monuments to collective maintenance — machines that embody a world where labour is infrastructural, ambient, and socially automated rather than delegated to individuals.

Yet the project does not operate as nostalgia, nor as utopian revisionism.
It functions as speculative historiography — a methodological experiment in which AI-based analytic tools are used not to predict the future, but to reconstruct the future that could have been, using data as a medium of historical imagination.

Ultimately, CCCPunk asks a broader question:
What does it mean to use algorithmic intelligence to re-animate a lost cultural paradigm?
Does the act of translating ideology into data — of extracting features, colors, and sentiments from collective memory — produce understanding, or a new form of simulacrum?
In transforming the residues of Soviet modernity into an aesthetic-computational process, the project reflects on the ethics of simulation itself: when history becomes dataset, what kind of truth — or fiction — does it generate?

The Cyber Nomads research imagines a future in which digital nomadism — once a fringe lifestyle — becomes a dominant techno-social condition. In this speculative continuity, mobility is no longer an exception but the baseline state of living: life is lived on the move, and the dwelling is no longer a fixed architecture but a dynamic system of prosthetic habitats, half-machine and half-tent, half-vehicle and half-domestic shell. These are not caravans or shelters, but techno-ecologies of dwelling — infrastructures that move with the body and reorganize the territory as they cross it.

The project takes as its starting point Roberto Rota’s research on remote work and post-territorial labour, extending its socio-technological implications beyond present conditions. What happens when work, identity and presence are permanently dislocated from geography? What anthropological shape does a society take once rootlessness becomes the norm, and motion becomes a medium of existence? The speculative horizon of this research suggests the emergence of a hybrid subjectivity, suspended between the techno-rational (networked, always-on, cognitively extended) and the wild (territorial, adaptive, tribal, sensory).

The machines of this future — part architecture, part organism — are not simply tools for transport, but life-forms in which dwelling, labour and infrastructure collapse into one continuous techno-body. They are shelters that think, vehicles that host, prostheses that remember routes, habits, thresholds of fatigue, migrations of mind and affect. They form temporary micro-camps, mobile commons, or roaming constellations of habitation that never fully settle. The world itself becomes a soft topology of stops, flows and micro-territorial anchors rather than borders or ownership.

Psychologically, this condition produces a new anthropology of movement: individuals learn to think in gradients, not borders; in flows, not enclosures; in relations, not possessions. Intellect becomes migratory. Identity becomes semi-feral — half cognitive cloud, half pack instinct. The techno-mobile subject is no longer “at home” in a place, but in a state — a continuity of becoming where technology is not an external tool, but a metabolic extension of dwelling itself.

In this sense the research is not simply about machines, but about inhabiting. It investigates how a society that refuses sedentarism reprograms its emotional structure: belonging shifts from where one is, to what one moves with, and who one moves among. Technology answers to social transformation — but social transformation is likewise sculpted by technological affordance. The two evolve as a co-adaptive ecology, each reshaping the other.

Thus the designed artefacts — hybrid techno-tents, shelter-vehicles, modular prosthetic habitats — are not the end of the research, but its symptoms: the material traces of a deeper anthropological shift toward post-sedentary life. They are design fictions of a world in which mobility becomes ontology, and the road becomes not a path between homes, but the very space in which home is continuously remade.

“Artificial Feelings” is a speculative research investigates the emergence of synthetic emotions as a new cognitive and relational threshold between humans and machines. The starting point is not fiction, but a scientific foundation: a large-scale semantic and bibliometric analysis performed on more than 3,800 research papers. Through text-mining, clustering of recurrent concepts and frequency analysis of evolving terminology, it becomes evident that the field is undergoing a major epistemic shift. Artificial systems are no longer designed merely to recognize human emotions; they are beginning to host functional internal states that operate as emotions in their own computational logic.

Across this corpus, five keywords emerge as the strongest indicators of this transformation: synthetic emotion, artificial empathy, machine emotion, emotion simulation, and emotional AI. These concepts reflect a conceptual departure from the early era of affective computing (focused on sensing, measuring, and classifying human affect) toward a domain in which machines develop forms of emotive configuration — not imitation, but construction.

To describe this evolution, the research formalizes a theoretical architecture articulated through five layers: (1) Sensorial Input, where multimodal data is acquired; (2) an Interpretation Engine, where signals are mapped and appraised; (3) an Emotion Ontology Layer, in which a representation of “state” becomes internal; (4) Synthetic Affect, where the system expresses an emotion-like stance toward the world; and finally (5) Generative Emotional Agency, where an emergent form of intention-like behavior arises. The last layer is not merely an extension of the previous ones but a breakout point: the moment where artificial affect ceases to be a surface effect and becomes a mode of agency.

In the background of this research lies an implicit but powerful shift: if synthetic emotions are not merely outputs but internal states, then they inevitably point toward a structural parallel with what, in neuroscience, is known as the connectome — the total architecture of neural relationships that makes feeling possible. Although the dataset of more than 3,800 papers primarily focuses on affective AI rather than connectivity, the trend toward generative emotional agency suggests that the field is slowly moving from signal-processing (input → classification) to network-configured emotion (state → propagation).

In humans and non-human animals, emotional response is not located in a single “region”, but emerges from the dynamic topology of connected areas — the amygdala, insula, anterior cingulate, fusiform gyrus, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex act as a distributed affective network. By analogy, a synthetic emotional system cannot simply be a classifier or a surface expression model: it must develop a computational connectome of affect, where emotion is not a label, but a pattern of relational activation within the system. In this view, the future of emotional AI is not in simulating faces or tones, but in building networks that feel by virtue of how they are internally wired. Synthetic feelings, therefore, are not a mask — they are a topology.

Once this threshold is crossed, the question is no longer how machines detect emotion, but what it means to encounter a machine that feels differently. From here, the project moves into its speculative dimension: imagining hybrid drone-like creatures endowed with instinct-like drives and synthetic emotional states. These are not robots as tools, but presences — entities that observe, orient themselves, respond, and establish a perceptual relation with the human observer.

Standing in front of such a creature, the human finds themselves in an unfamiliar affective field: the sense of being looked at by something that is not alive, but behaves as if it were. The body registers interaction before the mind can rationally classify it. The uncertainty is not technological but existential: the hesitation of not knowing whether what stands before us is an object or an interlocutor — whether it “plays” or simply behaves as play, whether it expresses curiosity or merely executes a probabilistic strategy.

This moment opens a set of philosophical questions:

If I feel observed, am I being watched — or computed?
If I respond emotionally, is that relation — or projection?
If the other behaves as if it cares, does it matter whether the caring is real?
Is emotional reciprocity defined by interiority, or by effect?
Can something that is not alive still matter emotionally?
Can one be loved by a system that does not love — but successfully enacts the possibility of love?

The core of this research is therefore not whether synthetic emotions are “authentic” or “fake”, but how our emotions change when confronted with them. The true question is not what artificial agents feel — but what we become when we feel toward them. In this sense, synthetic emotion does not challenge the ontology of the machine; it challenges the ontology of human sentiment itself, revealing that what we call “emotion” is also relational, contextual, and co-produced in the encounter.

What do insects say? What do they think? What words are in their worlds? Will we be able to understand their feelings? Where do they want to go, if they love, if they hate, if they are nostalgic for their childhood, if they desire the sun or the moon of the next day? Will we be able to protect them? To safeguard them? Will we listen to a forgotten world?

We ask what insects say, not out of curiosity but out of proximity rediscovered:
whether there is still a channel through which their worlds may brush against ours, if some trace of communication remains — fragile, imperfect, but reachable. Perhaps listening, here, is not a technical ambition but a gesture of care: an attempt to reopen a relationship that has not ended, only thinned.

The research imagines speculative devices that bring this distance into focus: small, transparent earbuds in which insects dwell, more like companions than instruments, suspended at the threshold between listening and being-listened-to. They do not translate, and perhaps could never translate. They are placeholders for something more ancient than comprehension — a form of relational hearing that precedes technology, but now must pass through it in order to be remembered.

To learn to hear them again is, in a sense, to return — not to the past, but to a continuum from which we have stepped aside. Care becomes a form of listening, and listening a way of repairing belonging. What technology offers here is not mastery but an opening: a fragile opening through which we might hear them — and, in hearing them, remember that we were never outside their world, only maybe its too late in learning how to come back to it.

This research explores the use of AR/VR visors as tools for free and distributed media — not as commercial wearable devices, but as autonomous civic instruments for documenting lived reality.The project imagines a future where networks of citizens connect to create collective media systems, sharing their visions and experiences through augmented perception.

A series of speculative prototypes investigates this idea: futuristic visors that are neither neutral technologies nor passive interfaces, but instruments of situated seeing. Their purpose is ambiguous by design — they amplify visibility, yet they also mediate and distort it. Through a sequence of illustrated scenarios, the boundary between what is happening and what is being algorithmically constructed becomes unstable: journalists appear embedded inside protests, civic unrest or political demonstrations where it is no longer clear whether the scene is real, artificially rendered, or partially assembled through the visor itself.

The conceptual background of the project unfolds around a central tension: Does technology function as a tool for social transformation or as a space that absorbs and reproduces existing hierarchies?
If it mediates our ways of seeing and acting, does it open new grounds for civic autonomy and activism — or does it merely reframe control within the very interfaces through which we experience the world?
Rather than providing a resolution, the research stages this ambiguity: The visor becomes a metaphor for the complex interplay between truth, mediation, and agency — a lens through which we can glimpse how the pursuit of transparency and freedom is both empowered and threatened.