Marco Donnarumma

The installation consists of a set of robotic, AI-driven prostheses conceived, designed, engineered and handcrafted by Marco Donnarumma. The prosthesis are part of his 7 Configurations cycle (2015-2019): performances and installations that reflect on the conflicts surrounding the human body in the era of artificial intelligence. Through combined research on movement, dramaturgy, sound and engineering, each of the works in the cycle combines human bodies, robotic hardware, machine learning software and microorganisms into a particular ‘configuration’, that is, a specific assemblage of human and machine parts capable of performing through each other.

The prostheses of the 7 Configurations embody uncanny combinations of the machinic with the organic. They are useless prostheses, paradoxical objects designed for the body, but not to enhance it, rather to subtract or upend some of its functions: Amygdala is a skin-cutting robot with a steel metal knife; Re-I is a facial prosthesis which blocks the wearer’s gaze with a mechanical arm (as seen in Eingeweide); Ran and Ren are two robotic spines that function as additional limbs without a body (performing in Alia: Zǔ tài).

The robots were fabricated from the ground up by the artist using custom components and techniques, so as to avoid off-the-shelf technologies and their limitations. Amygdala served as a blueprint for Re-I, Ran and Ren, which can be understood as conceptual and physical offspring. Each of them was designed according to the anatomy and performative skills of the human performer that would engage with it on stage. The prostheses’ morphologies, their materials and functions are, thus, the embodiment of individualised somatic relations between a robot and a performer.

The prostheses have been created to act as performers with their own agency and interact with their human partners without being controlled externally. The machines are therefore not instructed to perform predetermined movements, nor do they follow a score. Instead, they possess an artificial sensorimotor system that senses its environments and guides how the machine “perceive” the world and how it can react to a range of possible interactions.

This is possible thanks to an architecture of biomimetic neural networks and machine learning algorithms – programmed by the artist – that perform in tandem with the mechanical body and the haptic sensors of each robot. Inspired by biological nervous systems, biomimetic networks are information processing algorithms that can self-generate movement and alter a machine’s behaviour in response to real-time, sensory data. This technique endows the machines with basic, artificial cognitive and sensorimotor skills.

With these skills, the prostheses perceive their own bodies in space, as well as the bodies of other human performers and improvise movements in response to external stimuli such as touch, pressure, pull and torsion. As they move, the prostheses learn about their partners and environments, constantly adapting and reacting to them.

The project benefited from the scientific advice of the Neurorobotics Research Lab at Beuth Hochschule, Berlin and was supported by an interdisciplinary team of collaborators.