International Festival of Theater, Art and New Technologies
“The Wonders of possible” – VIII° edition
SPAZIO DOMOSC – 12 Via Newton, CAGLIARI(Italy)
Saturday 27 November
h 16.30
“Electronic music performance”Marco Donnarumma
Talk with the students of ” Pierluigi da Palestrina” Conservatorio Cagliari – Electronic Music Course – and with the students of the ” Foiso Fois” Artistical Musical High School – Cagliari. Free entrance with advanced bookings required.
h 21
Performance Art and Technology
CORPUS NIL
by Marco Donnarumma (ITALY/GERMANY, Berlin)
THE PERFORMANCE
Human bodies and identities are continuously categorized, online and offline, by artificially intelligent algorithms and machines. But what if, by contrast, artificial intelligence could be used to contaminate human bodily experience? How does a body defiled by algorithms look and move like?
Corpus Nil is a performance for a human body and an artificially intelligent machine. A naked body, partly human and partly machine, lies on stage. It is an amorphous cluster of skin, muscles, hardware and software. Biophysical sensors attached to the performer’s limbs capture bodily electrical voltages and corporeal sounds and feed them to the machine.
Corpus Nil is part of the 7 Configurations cycle (2014-2019), a series on the conflicts surrounding the human body in the era of artificial intelligence (AI).
Thanks to a sophisticated set of algorithms, each nuance of the body’s motion sets off a synaesthetic play of sound and light directed by the machine. The biological signals of the body influence the choices of the machine, but cannot control what it will do. In turn, the auditive and visual saturation produced by the machine influences the body’s movement, but disrupts its perception and motor skills at the same time. Despite being intimately linked to the human body, the machine is autonomous and chooses by itself how to respond to the performer`s movements.
In an unstable feedback loop, the body and the machine pollute each other. The amorphous being on stage slowly evolves into a unfamiliar creature. It reconfigures its parts through a sensuous choreography pushing the limits of muscular tension, limbs torsion, skin friction and equilibrium. The corporeal sound frequencies are spatialised using a multi-channel sound system surrounding the audience, while bioelectrical flashes of light rhythmically illuminate the space.
Through sound, light and optical illusions, the physical mutation of the body impacts and submerges the audience, inducing a trance-like experience. As the body and the machine form a partial, unknown and yet graceful being, spectators feel as if its heart was beating within their own bodies. It is unclear whether the new body is human enough, or perhaps, the common meaning of ‘human’ is not enough to describe it.
PRIZES: 2018, Biennial Bains Numériques (FR) 1st Prize for Performing Arts ; 2018, Biennial Bains Numériques (FR) Press Award; 2017, Prix Ars Electronica (AT)
Award of Distinction (2nd Prize) for Sound Art.
CREDITS
Marco Donnarumma – Concept, music, performance, programming
Baptiste Caramiaux – Additional programming
Margherita Pevere – Stage production & make up
Alessandro Altavilla – Camera
Onuk, ZKM – Photography
EAVI, Goldsmiths, University of London – In kind support
European Research Council – Research funding.
Show Ticket euro 10,00
Advanced bookings requered – Box office and more info:
mobile phone/whatsapp +39 3470484783
mail: info@kyberteatro.it
To follow – inclusive ticket:
h 21.40 – CONCEPT TALK “ARTAUD’S OMENS”
By and with Carlo Infante (ITALY, Rome), changemaker,cultural manager, professor at University and creator of Urban Experience, first reference platform of performing media in Italia. “The omens of Artaud” will be a brief and “syncopated” talk about the relationship between natural and artificial, evoking the radicalism of Antonin Artaud and then the Living Theater until the cyber-performances of Antunez, Fura dels Baus and Stelarc.
Carlo will talk with the special guest Marco Donnarumma (ITALY/GERMANY, Berlin).
SHORT BIO MARCO DONNARUMMA
Marco Donnarumma (IT/DE) is an artist, performer, stage director and scholar weaving together contemporary performance, new media art and interactive computer music since the early 2000s. He manipulates bodies, creates choreographies, engineers machines and composes sounds, thus combining disciplines, media and emerging technologies into an oneiric, sensual, uncompromising aesthetics. He is internationally acknowledged for solo performances, stage productions and installations that defy genres, and where the body becomes a morphing language to speak critically of ritual, power and technology.
Donnarumma’s latest cycle of dancetheater productions, performances and robotic installations is entitled 7 Configurations. It dissects the conflicts between AI and body politics through human-machine choreographic methods aimed at experimenting with the corporeal and psychological relationships of four human performers and six AI prostheses. In 2019, he co-founded the performance artists group Fronte Vacuo with Margherita Pevere and Andrea Familari. Their series Humane Methods consists of hybrid live art events as social experiments, where human performers and audiences, non-human organisms and AI-driven machines expose the violence of today’s algorithmic societies.
Touring consistently for the past fifteen years across major and independent theaters, concert halls, festivals and museums worldwide, most recently Donnarumma’s work has been shown, among others, at Münchner Kammerspiele (DE), Romaeuropa Festival (IT), Ming Contemporary Art Museum (CN), Chronus Art Center (CN), Ars Electronica (AT), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (DE), NRW Forum (DE), Nemo Bienniale/HeK Basel (FR), LABoral (ES), musikprotokoll (AT), CTM Festival (DE), Laznia Center for Contemporary Art (PL), and Kontejner (HR).
His repertoire received numerous acknowledgements, most recently: Autonom Grant 2020-21 by Fonds Darstellende Künste and Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe for ∑XHALE; Digital Award at Romaeuropa Festival 2018 for Eingeweide; two awards at the Bains Numériques Biennial 2018, as well as the Award of Distinction (2nd prize) in Sound Art at Prix Ars Electronica 2017 for Corpus Nil; Artist of the Science Year 2018 by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education for Amygdala.
Donnarumma holds a Ph.D. in performing arts, computing and body theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2020-21 he was a Research Fellow at the Akademie für Theater und Digitalität, Dortmund. Previously, in 2016-18, he was Research Fellow at Berlin University of the Arts in partnership with the Neurorobotics Research Laboratory. He was funded by European Commission, Goethe-Institut, Berlin Senate, Fonds Darstellende Künste, Rockefeller Foundation, British Council and New Media Scotland. His writings are published by MIT Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge, ACM and Springer.
“Marco represents the potential and vitality of the new generation of artists.”