LIMINA: a digital window at San Filippo Neri

In a waiting room of the San Filippo Neri emergency department, next to a window overlooking the hospital gardens, a second one has appeared. It is a three-by-two-metre LED wall, mounted horizontally and placed exactly parallel to the real window.

It is LIMINA.

A permanent visual device designed for Fastal and ASL Roma 1 that continuously screens video works by selected artists.

A window beside a window

The starting idea is simple and grows out of the architecture of the place. Like many hospital waiting rooms, this one has a window onto the garden. We chose to set a second opening beside it, built from a high-density LED wall — 2.6 mm pitch, around 3,200 full-colour SMD LEDs per square metre, a total resolution of 1,152 by 768 pixels — calibrated not to emit aggressive light and to render deep blacks even in strong daylight.

This symmetry is not a visual game. It is the thematic statement of the device: the digital window does not replace the window, it sits alongside it. One shows what is outside; the other shows what artists imagine could be there, in that moment, beside it. The two openings enter a silent dialogue with whoever is waiting.

Līmen, liminis, in Latin, means threshold, passage, boundary. The poetic plural līmina evokes places of transition, in-between states — between inside and outside. The destination context — a hospital waiting room — is itself a threshold.

LIMINA takes this condition seriously and tries to populate it with images that respect it.

The most important specification we set with Fastal and ASL Roma 1 is not about technology, but about the editorial behaviour of the device. The three guidelines work by subtraction: LIMINA content is not informative (no waiting times, queue numbers, clinical instructions), not narrative (no stories with a beginning, a middle and an end), not intrusive (no interruptions, no calls to action, no bid for attention).

What is left, then? Forms, colours, movements oriented towards states of calm — a visual vocabulary that contemporary research on perceptual environments associates with relaxation, anxiety reduction, slow concentration. It is a direction the curatorship has written down as a reference for every artist invited to produce work for the panel. Not a rule, but a shared framework of intentions.

Technical scheduling is automated: content runs in a continuous loop, is refreshed in defined cycles, and the wall stays on during the waiting-room opening hours. No one has to press a button.

The first work: 3.33 by Tommaso Zagni

The first work screened on LIMINA is titled 3.33 and was made by Tommaso Zagni, an artist Chirale has been collaborating with since 2022. It is an ambient piece in three acts, built as a single ten-hour visual composition divided into three blocks of three hours and thirty-three minutes each.

The footage, shot in the green spaces of the hospital, gathers trees, leaves, long shadows, foliage moved by the wind. Across the three acts, these images undergo a progressive transformation. The natural element gradually dissolves into its digital representation — pixels, meshes, abstract geometries — until every figurative reference is lost in the third block. It is a path that works on the boundary between the real and its numerical encoding, in tune with the threshold theme that gives the device its name.

The subtitle of the work is Three times to measure the real.

For those who enter the room once, 3.33 is a slow, silent backdrop. For those who return over the following months, it is a piece that reveals itself in duration: a rare case of digital art that asks for its audience’s patience.

Art in healthcare spaces

With LIMINA, Chirale moves into new ground: art in healthcare spaces.

Hospitals, clinics, waiting rooms, transit corridors — these are intensely frequented public places, in which the quality of the perceptual environment has measurable effects on the wellbeing of patients, companions and healthcare staff, and they are also places traditionally excluded from the exhibition circuit of contemporary art. The device we have built fits precisely into this excluded space.

LIMINA does not bring art into the hospital as a decorative exception: it integrates it as a structural component of the environment, and it does so with a device that is updatable, programmable, documented.