the_local_aura by Antonio Pezzella (niceunderground) is an interactive installation that turns the act of crossing a place into an encounter with its present. Conceived for Barriera di Milano, a district in the north of Turin, the work attaches real-time local news to the bodies of the people who walk through the exhibition space.
Barriera di Milano is a neighbourhood many people tend to avoid, and one that even those who cross it often ignore. Antonio starts from this condition of distance, the habit of moving through places without registering what happens in them, and points to it as one of the quiet mechanisms through which urban neglect is produced and sustained.
When a visitor enters the field of the camera, a sequence of white text boxes opens around their silhouette, each containing a headline about the district drawn live from local news sources. The headlines follow the body, falling slightly behind its movements and catching up as it slows, and remain attached to it for as long as the person stays in front of the screen. The news is real and cannot be shaken off: for the duration of the crossing, the visitor carries the neighbourhood’s present with them.
The installation borrows the visual language of surveillance systems, framing each body with brackets, identifiers and dwell times, while reversing their logic. Tracking here does not extract data from the people it observes; it returns information to them about the place they are in. No images are recorded. What the work captures is not the visitor, but their attention.
When the space is empty, the full news feed scrolls slowly across the screen: a continuous stream of local events waiting for someone to carry them.
| Custom Software | TypeScript, rendered with Three.js in Chrome (kiosk mode) |
| Sound | Generated with native Web Audio API |
| News | Google News RSS feeds, filtered on street and place names of Barriera di Milano |
| Weather | Weather and air quality data from Open-Meteo |
| Hardware | 55″ display, Logitech 720p webcam, ASUS TUF A15 laptop (Windows) |
The installation was presented at TRIP 2026, the diffuse festival organised by the Barriera Design District association, with artistic direction and curation by Lucrezia Nardi, at the festival’s Secret Location in Turin on 3 and 4 October 2026, inside the same neighbourhood whose news it displays.
Project Page | Antonio Pezzella | Instagram
Concept, design and software: Antonio Pezzella.
Photos and video: Antonio Pezzella.
