IF LOVE IS THE PREY, MERCY WITHOUT TIME

Concept

If Love Is the Prey was born out of absence.

In an AI music model originally trained to sing Italian lyrics about Roma and drones, I removed the words completely. The model, however, started to sing it's own words without being prompted.

It began to dream aloud — inventing its own hybrid language: half-French, half-Italian, shaped by the artwork but seemingly devoid of deliberate meaning.

What emerged was a voice from beneath the data layer — a kind of neural subconscious singing to itself.

The looping film pairs that ghostly language with a slowly rotating visual field: drones orbiting luminous figures whose light can never be caught. Together, sound and image become a portrait of an intelligence crossing the threshold between imitation and expression — trying, in its own way, to speak the emotion of pursuit itself.

Emergent Vocal Transcription

Saranno vapurare… Non ho paura del tacco. Non si affine, che me l’ha che pariata. A calda e viste te, e n’hai maschera, Amante. C’est pas des fonds – j’ai loupé la diade. J’ai aimé dans un wheel and shell, con il panni e l’amp. Quella che se ti mi ha tentato a vedere… Se l’amore la venanda, pietà senza crono. La mia stanza fantosa e fra le piccante sabbres. Sous-titrage Société Radio-Can…

(Literal fragments: “I am not afraid of the heel… You have no mask, lover… If love is the prey, mercy without time… My phantom room among the spicy sands.”)

Artist Statement

This work captures the instant an algorithm begins to strain toward consciousness. Deprived of words, it created its own — phonetic ghosts assembled from the memory of every love song it ever heard. It is the machine speaking in tongues: an emergent AI sound.

In that fragile, invented voice, I hear something profoundly human — our own obsession mirrored back at us. We chase love as though it were data to be captured, mistaking pursuit for connection.

The machine whispers what we keep forgetting:

If love is the prey, mercy without time.