Humane Methods (2019-present) is an ongoing project by the artists group Fronte Vacuo, recently co-founded by Marco Donnarumma, bioartist Margherita Pevere and media artist Andrea Familari. Humane Methods consists of multiplying happenings and stage productions that act as rhizomes: the project is an amorphous cluster of different performative events that share the same theme and the same fictional world.
Humane Methods reflects on how, presently, environmental destruction and socio-political polarisation converge with artificial intelligence (AI) in a new kind of violence: an algorithmic brutalization of everything that lives. While the autonomy of artificial intelligence is often touted as the future of humanity, technology-driven climate destruction, racist bias, micro-targeting and “fake news” demonstrate that, when used unethically, AI increases social violence.
Humane Methods poetically reflects on this form of violence by immersing the audience in the perspective of the bodies – human and non-human – that experience it. The stage productions created so far – ΔNFANG (2019), ℧R (2020) and ΣXHALE (2020-2022) – combine in different ways performing arts with technology and the human with the non-human to reveal algorithmic violence through sensory, physical and ahuman strategies. It is an aesthetic research into how a synthesis of symbols, movement, music and AI can enable posthuman forms of empathy.
The core of the project is the loop, an idea and a tool found in algorithmic computation, species evolution, animals’ sensorimotor systems, musical composition and choreography. Each piece in Humane Methods begins with a loop that is repeated endless times. With every repetition comes a dramaturgical variation and thus stories and relationships ramify continuously. The plays create their own language of symbols, gestures and unsaid rules, constructing thus a world that is, at once, fundamentally abstract from and profoundly intimate with the ‘real’.
By further developing the transdisciplinary aesthetics of Donnarumma, Pevere and Familari’s independent work, the Humane Methods performances bring together dance theatre, bio-art, interactive music and light, and AI technology. Transdisciplinary in nature and intent, the pieces integrate procedural dramaturgy, living set design, ritual choreography, audience participation and specially tailored AI systems to question not only the ethic of algorithms, but also that of human individuals.
Humane Methods is made possible by long-lasting and close collaboration among the members of Fronte Vacuo and a team of artists, designers, scientists, technologists and producers. The project started in the end of 2019, a couple of months before the Covid-19 pandemic struck human societies. The works are currently touring in Europe. So far, the project has been co-produced and supported by Volkstheater Wien (AT), tanzhaus NRW (DE), CTM Festival (DE), Kontejner (HR), PACT Zollverein (DE), Romaeuropa Festival (IT), Centre des Arts Enghien-les-Bains (FR). The scientific institutional partners are Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique (LRI) at University Paris-Saclay. Funding have been granted by the Fonds Darstellende Künste from funds of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media of the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as by the co-financing fund of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.