Martha #01

Lunatics

Martha #02

Martha #03

Jeanna #01

Nick #01

Nick #02

Nick #03

For over twenty years, :mentalKLINIK has operated as a laboratory of oxymorons—a clinic where glittered melancholy and algorithmic intimacy meet post-critical atmospheres. Refusing binary regimes, the duo constructs immersive environments where seduction and abrasion, glamour and collapse, sync like overlapping frequencies, never quite resolving. As their name suggests, they approach madness not as pathology, but as syntax—a structure of perception, a way of sensing outside normative logic. With LUNATIC POETS, this studied delirium takes form as a choreographed ecology of synthetic life, where digital humans stutter through fractured performances and language flickers like broken code. They broadcast states of NOW, shamelessly transcending the modernist mind to perform the collapse of normativity.
LUNATIC POETS introduces the debut performance by :mentalKLINIK’s Digital Human Ensemble—an expanding group of high-fidelity MetaHumans developed entirely within Unreal Engine 5. These figures are not avatars but affective profiles: synthetic beings sculpted from data mud, engineered as mood machines, and animated through motion capture and voice sync by real performers in a mock-up studio. Rendered with cinematic precision, they remain haunted by an uncanny gap—a subtle friction between the human and the programmable. Embodying forms that exist beyond the binary regime, the ensemble articulates a post-body dramaturgy rooted in contradiction, excess, and the aorist now where presence loops without resolution.
Three Digital Humans inhabit the role of LUNATIC POETS—not as interpreters, but as vessels of poetic residue. They do not perform the poems; they inherit them, as if memory itself were misfiring through data. Sculpted from digital mud and motion-tracked by real bodies, they are refugees from the physical world—exiled not by violence, but by saturation. Disconnected from each other and from any shared present, they drift in parallel loops. Their words do not form narratives but shimmer as fragmented spells: a corrupted grammar of 21st-century excess, composed of neologisms, contradictions, and emotional noise. These figures navigate a terrain of poetic disorientation, broadcasting emotional atmospheres rather than meaning, articulating the instability of selves shaped by algorithm and isolation. They cross paths without meeting, sync without connection—mood-bound specters flickering inside an ecosystem where language is no longer communication, but the last stand of sentience.
The performance draws inspiration from the MECZUP—a figure in Anatolian culture seen as both mad and wise. Unlike the Western tradition of isolating madness within institutions, the meczup lived among the public, speaking in riddles, embracing contradiction, and carrying a spectral kind of truth. Recast here as synthetic hermits—part oracle, part mad, part interface—:mentalKLINIK’s Digital Humans inherit this liminal role. Cast out from the physical world, their only inheritance is a script: LUNATIC POEMS. This living text—compiled over a decade by :mentalKLINIK—is a body of contempoetry: a fragmented database of social media confessions, influencer breakdowns, spiritual spam, therapy scripts, and algorithmic despair, curated from archives of collapse, philosophical spasms, and techno-fetish dismay. Spoken in karaoke breath and synthetic glossolalia, the poems don’t convey meaning—they circulate intensity. This is not literature. It is affective spam, libidinal syntax, extralexical melancholia.
The exhibition unfolds as a microclimate shaped by two interconnected realms. One is a sculptural video produced entirely in Unreal Engine 5—every element, from MetaHumans to cinematic lighting and spatial effects, is constructed like a virtual film set. The architecture is conceived by :mentalKLINIK and composed of sculptures, forms, installations, and assets drawn from the duo’s wider oeuvre. Together, they generate an active terrain—an immersive extension of :mentalKLINIK’s sculptural subconscious, animated by light, code, and motion.
The real-world site of LUNATIC POETS within the gallery space echoes and interferes with this digital system. Robotic units tremble on invisible cues. Sculptures remain still, moved by silent protocols. Lights strobe like false stars; screens shimmer with poetic noise. Sound becomes mood: influencer breaths, melancholic residue, ambient collapse. Together, these realms compose an immersive, post-joy atmosphere—an emotional system where poetry, desire, and data temporarily fuse.
With LUNATIC POETS, :mentalKLINIK stages madness not as dysfunction, but as potential. This isn’t an immersive exhibition—it’s invasive. A digital ritual. A synthetic debut. You don’t watch it. You loop with it. The exhibition behaves like weather: persuasive, unstable, unfinished. An emotional system you enter—and don’t exit clean.
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Technically, the movie was realized through a layered process developed over four years of production. It began with mock-up studio sessions, where real performers were recorded in detail—their voices, facial expressions, and body movements captured through motion capture and audio technologies. These recordings were mapped onto MetaHumans within Unreal Engine 5. In parallel, :mentalKLINIK created character profiles using AI—not as post-production tools, but as conceptual agents that shaped the emotional and narrative framework of the digital beings. AI was also used to visualize speculative costumes, generating designs that merged glitch aesthetics, synthetic mythologies, and non-binary silhouettes. Integrated into the movie itself, the duo’s AI-generated video art functions as an embedded artwork in the movie.

Excerpts from LUNATIC POEMS

A-YO GIRRRL
LET’S SPLIT AN UBER
TO INNER-CITY
YOU REBELLIOUS
ME QUIRKY
RUN UNPRODUCTIVITY
UNDER SUBTLE POWER
*
BLANK-COLLAR WORKERS 
FEELING MONOPHOBIAC
WEARING BLACK
THINKING BLANK
IN A GOOD FANTASY 
HACK YO’SELF 
*
CURATOR, MUSEUM,
BIENNIAL, ARTIST, 
COLLECTOR, GALLERIST, 
DEALER, CRITIC,
SELL, BUY, 
AUCTION HOUSE, ART FAIR, 
SELL, BUY, SELL, BUY,
EXHIBIT,
WOW! 
AWESOME
*
DATAFIED NARCISISM, 
IN AN UNKNOWN LAND
LIBIDINAL ECONOMY OF UNFELT FEELINGS 
SWEET NOTHINGS
*
EYES WIDE OPEN
MA BABE, IN PLEASURE WITH
INJECTED REALITIES
SOFT POWER 
OF YOUR SOFT LOVE 
VIOLENCE 
OF YOUR POSITIVITY
THIS SMOOTH BEAUTY ERA
SMOOTHLY BEAUTIFUL
IT IS LOVELY TO MEET YOU 
*
THE IMAGES LEFT BEHIND
ME CONSUMED, I AM CONSUMED, 
LINGUISTIC IMAGES, EXHAUSTED LANGUAGE, 
EXTRAGRAMMATICAL FREEDOM. 
LET’S MEET ON A NON-VERBAL LEVEL 
I'M DONE DONE
*
TECHNO-SCIENTIFIC CAPITALISM, SEMIO-CAPITALISM, ACCELERATED-CAPITALISM, ANARCHO, HYPER, FRICTION-FREE CAPITALISM, NECRO, CYBERNETIC, BIOGENETIC, ENTREPRENEURIAL CAPITALISM, SURVEILLANCE, ECO, CORPORATE, DOUBLE, ANTI, EMOTIONAL CAPITALISM 
*
A MANIC HOPE WHILE CHECKING MILLIONS OF TINY MOMENTS
A HALLUCINATION OF PRESENCE
AN OBNOXIOUS CELEBRITY 
A FROZEN SMILE, 
A CLIMATE-ANXIOUS ANGER, 
A BLURTED CHAMPAIGN PROBLEM
AND THE NEXT, AND THE NEXT, NEXT, NEEXXXTTT, 
*
HYPEREXPLOITATION
HYPEREXPRESSION
HYPERNET
HYPERCODE
HYPEREMPHATY
HYPERSENSORY
HYPERMOODY
HYPERSYNCHRONIZED, 
HYPERMODULATED PHANTASM OF A SO-CALLED-REAL-WOLD
*
YOU SAY SO?
I MEAN THAT!
THE WORLD IS IN CRISIS 
*

:mentalKLINIK

Lunatic Poets