What If We’re the Machines? Interview with Emma Scarafiotti

Emma Scarafiotti is an artist of thresholds. Trained in music, shaped by cinema, and deeply embedded in visual art, her practice moves fluently between mediums, time periods, and emotional states. In What If, her latest audiovisual piece, Scarafiotti conjures a hybrid being that feels more emotionally legible than the humans surrounding it. This creature—part machine, part memory—becomes a vessel for exploring identity, trauma, and futurity. The video plays in a loop, evading closure, much like the artist’s own way of resisting fixed forms.

Blending analog textures with artificial intelligence, Scarafiotti situates her work at the intersection of nostalgia and technological experimentation. The warmth of childhood memories, however fractured, sits alongside a speculative imagination that reaches toward the posthuman. Her characters—often outsiders, wounded or misunderstood—inhabit dreamlike spaces that blur the line between real and artificial, intimacy and estrangement. In What If, this sensibility takes the form of a song written in a single take, born from an image, and translated into spatial sound in collaboration with composer Salvatore Versace.

Read our full conversation below!

“What if” begins like a question but feels more like a memory. Was there a specific image, lyric, or emotion that sparked the first breath of this imagined creature?

The origin of What If has an interesting story. I had a very powerful image in my mind — a girl in a desolate house, trying to reconnect with a non-human creature she had assembled herself, as if the machine had more soul than a human. With that image in mind, I picked up my guitar, turned on the record player, and just played and sang once.

The whole song came out all at once.

The being at the heart of the work isn’t quite human—but somehow feels more honest than most people we meet. What does this hybrid represent for you? A refuge? A rebellion? A version of yourself that could never exist in this world?

Yes, this hybrid represents both a refuge and a rebellion. In much of my work, these undefined beings serve as a way to confront rigid structures and social injustices — as well as to comfort oneself from personal pain or trauma.

There’s a delicate tension in your practice between analog textures and AI driven visions. Where do you feel most at home: in the tactility of the past or the generative chaos of the near future?

I feel to position myself in between both. I am attracted by this unsettling balance between a nostalgic childhood and the comforting essence of analogue that constrains this generative chaos. I think in this way the near future could appear more reassuring, as I hope it would always be connected to a certain humanity.

The video loops endlessly, like a dream that refuses to resolve. Is that a way of resisting closure—or of inviting the viewer to stay lost?

I love the idea of loops because they don’t suggest an end — your imagination can move in cycles. In What If, the loop is meant to resist a closed ending. I wanted to give the video the same sense of endlessness as the song.

Your collaboration with Salvatore Versace seems alchemical. How does your creative dialogue shape the emotional architecture of a project like this?

Salvatore is an empathetic sound artist, and our connection was first and foremost on a human level, even before the artistic one.

What If was our first collaboration, and I completely entrusted him with translating my piece into a sound architecture that could evoke those visual images.

When I write music, I work a lot through images — coming from visual arts and cinema — and with Salvo, we truly connected because he knows how to give shape and spatiality to my sonic paintings.

“What if” feels like a song composed not just for humans, but for something—or someone—yet to arrive. Do you imagine your work being witnessed by future beings? Or is it more like sending a signal into the void?

I imagined my work being witnessed by future creatures — a bit like the final scene of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in Spielberg’s film, when humans begin to communicate with aliens through sound. However, for me, the song could also be imagined as a kind of time capsule — a nostalgic expression of hope and imagination from a girl living in a collapsing present, dreaming of a near future that could be positive depending on our decisions and choices

You speak of creation as comfort. What does it mean to give life to something artificial—and to find solace in its presence?

Giving life to something artificial, for me, is a way to fill the voids and wounds left by the real world. It’s a way to find security and shelter. You could also see it as an extension of yourself into an artificial dimension — a response to the need to reassemble yourself after a traumatic event.

Childhood echoes through the piece, but it’s filtered through a post-human lens.What parts of your younger self are still haunting, guiding, or glitching through your work today

The essence of childhood is a red thread in this piece, as it is throughout all of my work. My dreamy childhood was shattered, and from that moment on, solitude and misunderstanding created a kind of broken toy. In all of my work, this element returns — the uncertainty, the innocence, the wounded creature searching for shelter… and finding it in the poetry of a lost childhood.

Interview by @danielface_ Images by @emmascarafiotti

RED•EYE WORLD