Modular Me - On Body, Pain and Technology
A documentary series about body, pain, and the technology that gets under the skin
There is a question we keep circling back to, and it has never once given us a comfortable answer.
What does it mean to be human when technology stops being a tool and starts being part of you?
Extended Bodies: Modular Me is a documentary series built around that question. Seven episodes. Intimate portraits of people who have redrawn the line between body and machine through prosthetics, implants, embedded systems and artificial devices. Some arrived there by accident. Some walked in and chose it. All of them came out the other side as somebody slightly different, and all of them have something to say about it.
This is not a series about technology. It is a series about what happens to a person when the technology arrives.
The proof of concept: how we met Alessandro
We found Alessandro the way we find most of the people worth filming. Somebody we know mentioned him, almost in passing, and then could not stop talking about him.
Alessandro Colombo was a paratrooper. In 1997, at twenty-three and days before his wedding, a car hit him while he was riding his motorcycle. His left leg was crushed. He stopped the haemorrhage himself, with his own t-shirt, while he waited almost an hour for help to arrive, because that is what the training does to a person.
The leg was saved. That turned out to be the beginning, not the end. Twelve operations in two years. Paralysis and neurosensory damage. The career gone. And underneath all of it, for twenty-five years, pain that never fully switched off.
He became an athlete instead. Para-cycling: two national titles, international races, a call-up to the national team. Later, triathlon. In 2019 another surgery failed to fix what could not be fixed.
So in 2022 he did the thing almost nobody does. He asked for the leg to be removed.
On 13 June 2022, in an eight-hour operation, Alessandro underwent amputation combined with Targeted Sensory Reinnervation, a technique that reroutes the nerves so that sensation belonging to the foot is remapped and can be read again through a sensory prosthesis. He can feel pressure. Texture. Temperature. He paid for it privately, because the Italian national health service did not cover the procedure, which is its own quiet argument and belongs to a different episode of this series.
Three months later he was back on a bike. At seven months he was running. Inside a year he had finished two sprint triathlons.
What makes Alessandro a proof of concept is not the surgery. It is the grammar of the sentence. The amputation was not something that happened to him. It was something he decided, deliberately, in advance, with a plan attached, to end a pain that medicine had run out of answers for and to get back a capability his own biology could no longer deliver. Through his advocacy project Tagliato per Vivere he turned a private decision into a public argument about what prosthetic medicine is actually for.
We filmed him. The result is a short proof of concept that establishes the visual language, the pace and the level of intimacy the full series is built on: close, patient, no pity, no fanfare.
The proof of concept is available on request. Write to us and we will send you the link.
The research underneath
Modular Me did not begin with a treatment. It began with a thesis.
The series grows out of the independent research of Ludovica Giacomini Corponi, co-founder of Onymous Studios, whose Master's thesis at the University of Milan, discussed in 2022 and graded 110 cum laude under the supervision of Alessandro Gandini and Federico Boni, asked precisely the question the series now carries as its subtitle: how embedded systems and prosthetic technology affect identity and the perception of the self. Her training since has run through social research methodology at La Sapienza in Rome and an executive program at Cambridge Judge Business School, which is an unusual combination and exactly the point: this project sits where academic method, field ethnography and film production have to talk to each other.
In 2025 she published the peer-reviewed article "From the Body to the Self: Identity, Aesthetics, and Agency in the Age of Human Augmentation" in IO01 Umanesimo Tecnologico (Edizioni Studium, issue 6), a journal accredited by ANVUR as a scientific publication. The article examines how prostheses, embedded devices and cognitive technologies stop being instruments of repair and become constitutive parts of personal identity and aesthetic expression. Alessandro's case appears in it.
The research is ongoing and it is not desk work. It runs on participant observation inside maker and biohacking communities, longitudinal case studies of people who have chosen enhancement for therapeutic and aesthetic reasons, and direct conversation with prosthetic users, designers, makers and clinicians across several countries. It follows the open-source prosthetics movement, the slow drift from medical necessity toward aesthetic choice, and the places where prosthetic technology meets artistic practice. Further publications are in progress.
That is the foundation. Every episode of Modular Me is anchored to it, which is why the series can afford to be emotional without being sentimental. The feeling is earned by the evidence.
How we intend to make it
Three commitments, and we would rather be judged on these than on any logline.
Protagonists are collaborators, not subjects. The people in this series shape how their own stories are told. Nobody gets narrated at.
Local crews in every territory. Directors of photography, sound recordists, gaffers, makeup artists, runners: hired where we shoot. The economic value of the production stays partly where the story came from.
Fixers as cultural bridges, not logistics. In documentary, a fixer opens doors, but the good ones also tell you which doors you should not walk through. On material this intimate, that judgement is not optional.
The visual approach is hybrid: observational documentary interleaved with visual art, animation and data-driven graphics. Intimate, immersive, and modular by design, so that it works on a festival screen and on a streaming platform without being re-cut into something it is not.
Where the project stands
Modular Me is in development, with the proof of concept shot and an international research and collaboration network in progress. We are talking to co-production partners, broadcasters, prosthetics and medical technology companies, research institutions and cultural organisations interested in supporting a serious, evidence-based public conversation about human augmentation.
If that is you, we should talk.
FAQ
What is Extended Bodies: Modular Me?
Modular Me is a seven-episode documentary series in development at Onymous Studios, exploring the relationship between body, pain and technology through intimate portraits of people whose lives have been transformed by prosthetics, implants and embedded systems.
Is there something to watch already?
Yes. A proof of concept has been produced, centred on the story of Alessandro Colombo. It is available on request: write to studios@onymous.it.
Who is Alessandro Colombo?
A former Carabinieri paratrooper who, after a 1997 motorcycle accident, twelve operations and twenty-five years of chronic pain, chose in 2022 to undergo amputation of his left leg combined with Targeted Sensory Reinnervation, allowing him to regain sensory feedback through an advanced prosthesis. He is the founder of the advocacy project Tagliato per Vivere.
What research is the series based on?
The series originates in the independent research of Ludovica Giacomini Corponi, co-founder of Onymous Studios, whose work on identity, aesthetics and agency in human augmentation includes a University of Milan thesis on embedded systems and the perception of the self, ongoing ethnographic field research, and the peer-reviewed article "From the Body to the Self: Identity, Aesthetics, and Agency in the Age of Human Augmentation" published in IO01 Umanesimo Tecnologico (Edizioni Studium, 2025).
Is the series looking for co-production partners?
Yes. Onymous Studios is open to co-production, broadcaster and institutional partnerships, and to collaborations with companies and research centres working in prosthetics and medical technology. Contact studios@onymous.it.
Can Onymous Studios produce a documentary for my organisation?
Yes. Onymous Studios produces documentaries, branded films and immersive multimedia projects for cultural institutions, companies and research bodies internationally.