Marco Donnarumma
Configurations - Extending Biophysical Music with Autonomous Machines
In collaboration with the Neurorobotics Research Laboratory, Beuth-Hochschule für Technik, Berlin
This research project is about musical performance and body art performed through human bodies, sound and autonomous machines. These are computational systems possessing a physical body as well as the artificial cognitive and sensorimotor skills that come with it. Existing technologies in the field of cognitive robotics will be used to create two sound-based performances exploring the borders between human and machine, between sensory coercion and musical experience, between disturbing clusters of flesh and circuits and graceful unfamiliar bodies. The theoretical implications of these kinds of human-machine configurations will be broached using notions from philosophy of technological embodiment and cultural study of the body, with a particular focus on the thin border between abjection and intimacy.
Marco Donnarumma distinguishes himself by his use of emerging technology to deliver body performances that are at once intimate and powerful, oneiric and uncompromising, sensual and confrontational. Working with biotechnology, biophysical sensing, and more recently artificial intelligence and neurorobotics, Donnarumma expresses the chimerical nature of the body with a new and unsettling intensity.