The festival will be concluded with 'Corpus Nil', a raw, physical performance by media and performance artist Marco Donnarumma. The solo performance illustrates the force field between humans and machines, aligning with the festival theme 'Exit Human'.
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.
Marco Donnarumma (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 Volkstheater Wien (AT), Münchner Kammerspiele (DE), Romaeuropa Festival (IT), Ming Contemporary Art Museum (CN), Chronus Art Center (CN), Ars Electronica (AT), Donaufestival (AT), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (DE), NRW Forum (DE), Nemo Bienniale/HeK Basel (FR), LABoral (ES), musikprotokoll (AT), CTM Festival (DE), tanzhaus nrw (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.
