Davide Balula’s multifaceted artistic practice—which includes sculpture, installations and performances, often in direct connection with the spectator’s space—is enriched by a relationship with a wide range of disciplines: from music to dance, from gastronomy to philosophy, from physics to architecture. Fascinated by technology, the body and organic materials—all understood as changing and continuously developing organisms— Balula conceives his works as elements that do not just take up space, but modify its very structure, thereby creating an unprecedented fusion between human, work and environment. His performances often activate real experiences, in which spectators find themselves becoming active participants, and redefining their own perceptions of time and space, as well as their relationship with other individuals. For the 58th October Salon, following the guidelines and conceptual instructions generated by a Natural Language Processing program, Davide Balula creates a new display for a set of objects, spread around the exhibition space. After being pre-trained with datasets coming from former artworks created by the artist in the past, as well as lists of objects, behaviors or functions, the digital program dictates its own protocol for the artist to execute. Even at the mercy of the machine’s instructions, a human artist still holds the capacity to interpret the outcome, charged with subjective responses and biases that have infiltrated the process: from digitized ideas simplified and fed into programs only partially produced by humans, back into a reality populated by complex things and beings. The mentioning, on the caption for each object, of the amount of CO2 needed to produce it, emphasizes the importance of our coexistence with natural phenomena and elements and highlights at the same time the perversity of depending on technology to teach us how to deal with our environment. Balula also presents a performance—Bird Calls & Songs (The Tragedy of Orpheus) (2021)—that involves the audience in an exchange with another non-human language: the work is based on the singing through which birds mark their territory, and thus is connected to themes of identity, migration and mixing, all featured in different ways in the exhibition.