Marco Donnarumma

Originally a musician and sound designer, his artworks from the early 2000s are sound and video compositions for fixed media, web-based audio installations and participative concerts. A collaboration with a butoh project by dance company I-Dejas in 2007 prompted his shift to body performance, which he began complementing with methods of human-machine interaction. In 2010, he engineered the XTH Sense, a wearable biosensor that allows improvising computer music by sampling sounds within a performer’s body, what is known as biophysical music. The XTH Sense became a platform to experiment with the sonic and visceral body and it is, still today, a signature element of his work.

The “Body series” (2010-2014) are works focused on physical and psychological strain. Using the XTH Sense, the sounds of muscle, bones and blood from the bodies of moving performers and passive spectators are amplified and composed in real time, creating syncretic experiences of sound and movement. Each piece in the series lingers on the symbolic meanings of tension, carnality and vexation. In Music for Flesh II (2011) and Ominous (2014), Donnarumma plays haunting music by amplifying sounds from forceful vibrations of his muscles. In Hypo Chrysos (2013) audiences are immersed in multichannel sound and video produced by the flow of his blood while pulling 50kg stones. Nigredo (2013) feeds sounds from the bodies of visitors back to their skulls and bones, inducing them in altered states of self-perception.

The “7 Configurations” (2014-2019) are dance theater productions and media installations. The cycle gathers artists, scientists and designers to test the physical, psychological and cultural conflicts surrounding the human body in the era of artificial intelligence (AI). In Corpus Nil (2014-2016), a tense choreography slowly morphs Donnarumma’s body into fleshly figures while an AI software responds to his muscle activity by generating sound and light. Amygdala (2017-2018) is an uncanny AI prosthesis endlessly learning how to cut its own skin. In Eingeweide (2018), with Margherita Pevere, the performers’ bodies are fused and disjointed while struggling with a facial AI prosthesis and organic tissues created by bacteria. In Alia: Zǔ tài (2018), with Nunu Kong, three performers engage in a cruel play to possess two AI robotic spines. Calyx exhibits bodies that have become relics, ruins of those configurations, remains of what once was or could have been.

Donnarumma is based in Berlin since 2015.