Marco Donnarumma
Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies / Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst / Conference April 20 / Curator: Zane Cerpina
Insurmountable: Of Bodies, Machines, and their Configuration
It is the year 2024. Climate catastrophe is – let us admit it clearly for once – inevitable. There is though no impetus, no revolt, no grave disruption of business in Western societies, despite the defilement of those social movements that combat daily, and rightly so, the powers of the status quo. It is the year 2024.
What seem to be powerful AI systems are embedded in most aspects of social, legal, and creative life anywhere an internet connection is available. There are great talks of quantum computers and general artificial intelligences, of humanoid robots and dumbly arrogant CEOs. None of this has proven critically useful to humanity or to the other inhabitants of the planet. It is the year 2024.
Are our white bodies perhaps uploaded to a parallel dimension where we can’t see this state of affairs? What is truly stopping the majority of white people from acting or even just ‘seeing’? I obviously do not have an answer, and this is obviously a provocative lecture. What I do have is a view on how the hybridization of human bodies and machines creates states of being that may or may not encourage care and attunement, conditions of being that may or may not fit the criteria of dominant regimes of knowledge.
Human bodies and machines enter daily into asymmetrical conformations that allow their respective parts to develop simultaneously, sometimes in unison, other times through divergences, but always touching and permeating each other. This is what I call a ‘configuration.’ These configurations can be made, can be passively experienced, or can be actively conceived and created. And by creating new configurations, by experimenting with various conformations, one may find that there is something to learn at the edge of that experience. There, maybe, one may find some insight into the underlying reasons for the seemingly insurmountable inability of white societies to act for others and some motivations to keep trying nevertheless.
Marco Donnarumma (DE) is an artist, performer, inventor, stage director and theorist weaving together contemporary performance, new media art and interactive computer music since the early 2000s. He manipulates bodies and invents machines, crafts choreographies and composes sounds, thus combining disciplines, media and technology 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.
Touring consistently for the past fifteen years across major and independent theaters, concert halls, parking lots, squats, festivals, and museums worldwide, Donnarumma’s work has been shown, among others, at Volkstheater Wien (AT), Münchner Kammerspiele (DE), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (DE), NRW Forum (DE), Ming Contemporary Art Museum (CN), Laznia Center for Contemporary Art (PL), Chronus Art Center (CN), ZKM (DE), IRCAM (FR), LABoral (ES), Kontejner (HR), tanzhaus nrw (DE), Romaeuropa Festival (IT), Ars Electronica (AT), Donaufestival (AT), Nemo Biennale/HeK Basel (FR), musikprotokoll (AT), CTM Festival (DE), Transmediale (DE), Panorama Festival (BR).
Donnarumma holds a Ph.D. in performing arts, computing and body theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. Currently, he is an Associate Researcher at the Intelligent Instruments Lab, Reykjavik, while recently he was a Medienkunst Fellow at medienwerk.nrw and PACT Zollverein, Essen. He has held research positions at the Akademie für Theater und Digitalität, Dortmund, and at the Berlin University of the Arts in partnership with the Neurorobotics Research Laboratory. His work was funded by the 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, amongst others.
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Header graphics: “Eingeweide” , Marco Donnarumma. Photo Manuel Vason.