L’architettura del sensibile: Tecnoestetica e performatività in Crimes of the Future (1970-2022)

Abstract

The latest film by David Cronenberg (Crimes of the Future, 2022) restages his second

film after more than fifty years and, (almost) closing a circle, returns to some of the recur-
ring themes of his filmography: the relation between architecture and sensory space, evolu-
tion and design, organ and performance, mediation and reality. Tenser (Viggo Mortensen)

is an artist who uses his own body as support and medium. Art work and artistic process

are, for him, literally organic, but at the same time hypermediated: in Cronenberg’s “phar-
macopornographic” modernity, both inner and outer space are modelled indistinctly by

biochemical mutations and spectacular gestures. The transformative power of information,

the screen, and the machine becomes then formative of what bodies are to begin with, fol-
lowing an instrumental logic and a posthuman aesthetics that, at once ambiguously prom-
ise a future and frame it as a foreign body and an object of horror.