In Replicatio – States of Collapse, Marco Conti Šikić (MCSK) poses a persistent question: what happens to our consciousness when experience, memory, and emotion pass through algorithmic systems before they have time to become part of us? Rather than illustrating "technology" in general, the work focuses on the very personal scale of the human hand, the line, the face, asking what it means to truly have an experience at a moment when so much of what happens to us is mediated, archived, and reformatted.

Replicatio is conceived as a research vehicle as much as an installation. The work asks whether the ongoing erosion of attention, memory, and empathic connection under algorithmic conditions can be clearly defined, and what role an artwork can play as a form of testimony in that process.

At the centre of the installation is a series of portraits hand-drawn from memory. The artist does not use photographs or screenshots. Each drawing begins with a real encounter, someone met, felt, and later recalled on paper. What appears is not a perfect likeness but a psychic imprint, how another person's presence has lodged itself in the artist. Imperfection is crucial. Tremors, hesitations, and excess in the line are not mistakes to be corrected; they are evidence that a human was involved, that emotion and motor control interacted in real time.

The subjective drawing is layered with a custom AI protocol that reads each portrait through five conditions: CONFUSION, ANGER, HOLLOW, DESPAIR and VOID. These are not clinical labels, but a new vocabulary for life under continuous connectivity. Like loss processing, which moves through stages recursively, consciousness under algorithmic conditions cycles through these states without resolution. Each represents a distinct mode of collapse, how direct experience gives way to algorithmic mediation.