MARCO DONNARUMMA: MUSIC FOR FLESH II

MARCO DONNARUMMA: MUSIC FOR FLESH II
05.10.2012 21:00

Marco Donnarumma: Music for flesh II (interactive music performance)

October 5, 2012 at 9 pm: Opening performance of Robots and avatars exhibition and (DA)(NE)S
Marco Donnarumma (UK): Music for flesh II
Date: 5th of October 2012, 9 pm
Venue: KIT KIBLA, Glavni trg 14, Maribor, Slovenia
After: social gathering/open communication between artists and audience

Marco Donnarumma (UK)
Music for flesh II, 2011
Interactive music performance for enhanced body (Xth Sense Bionsensing Technology)

The work is a seamless mediation between human biosonic potential and algorithmic composition. It defines a temporary cognitive time-zone in which the performance space is augmented, stretched, enlightened, obscured, dominated by a real-time reconstruction of a human body primal expressiveness.
Body is no longer silent, and the embodied interaction which was so far kept mute, now acquires a new textural layer, a tangible and profound level of interpretation and representation which can be at the same time intimately experienced by the performer, and audibly and visually externalized so to embrace the audience.
By enabling a computer to sense and interact with the muscular sonic potential of human tissues, the work approaches the biological body as a means for computational artistry.
"I stand in a dark room, hit with two spotlights. When the visitors enter the room the performance begins. During my performance muscle movements and blood flow produce subcutaneous mechanical oscillations, which are nothing but low frequency sound waves. Two microphone sensors capture the sonic matter created by my limbs and send it to a computer. This develops an understanding of my kinetic behaviour by 'listening' to the friction of my flesh. Specific gesture, force levels and patterns are identified in real-time by the computer; then, according to this information, it manipulates algorithmically the sound of my flesh and diffuses it through an octophonic system.

Complete video: vimeo.com/20889787
Trailer: vimeo.com/28417521
Webpage: marcodonnarumma.com/works/music-for-flesh-ii/

Biography
New media and sonic artist, performer and teacher, Marco Donnarumma was born in Italy and is based in London. Weaving a thread around biomedia research, musical and theatrical performance, participatory practices and subversive coding, Marco looks at the collision of critical creativity with humanized technologies. His biophysical system Xth Sense won the first prize in the Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition and was named the 2012 “world’s most innovative new musical instrument” by the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, US. Recently, he curated the publication Biotechnological Performance Practice (eContact!, 14.2).
Marco has performed and spoken in 30 countries including US and South America, Europe, India, China, South Korea and Australia. His works have been selected at leading art events (ISEA, Venice Biennale, WRO Biennale), specialized festivals (FILE, Sonorities, Némo, Mapping, Piksel, Re-New, Laboral, EMAF) and major academic conferences (NIME, ICMC, Pure Data Convention, Linux Audio Conference@Stanford CCRMA, SICMF).
Currently, Marco is a ERC-funded PhD student for the Embodied Audio Visual Interaction (EAVI) Research Group at Goldsmiths University, supervised by Professor Atau Tanaka.

marcodonnarumma.com
res.marcodonnarumma.com
www.liveperformersmeeting.net The exhibition is part of the RACIF project, coordinated by body>data>space, London (UK) and partners AltArt, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and KIBLA, Maribor, Slovenia. The project is supported by Programme Culture of the European Union. The Slovenian version is financially supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia and co-produced with Maribor 2012 – European Capital of Culture.