Eingeweide / Marco Donnarumma x Margherita Pevere from the 7 Configurations cycle by Donnarumma
Fronte Vacuo presents: Eingeweide / by Marco Donnarumma x Margherita Pevere from the 7 Configurations cycle by Donnarumma
What does it mean to create a truly autonomous machine, independent from human control? And what happens when organs live outside of a body? Perhaps the human body’s only real power is to take on ever changing forms and identities.
“Eingeweide” is the staging of a ritual of coalescence. Inhabiting a desolated, surreal landscape, two human bodies become violently entangled with an artificially intelligent (AI) prosthesis, out-of-body organs, relics from computer server farms and animal remains.
The prosthesis uses AI algorithms to learn in real time how to move, exist and perform on stage. The organs pulsate, leak and crawl on the floor, bearing traces of the microbial cultures which created them. Sounds from the performers’ muscular activity are amplified and transformed by AI algorithms into a powerful and visceral auditive experience, submerging the spectators.
The performers’ bodies become, thus, one and multiple, at times asserting, at times misplaced. They are the means of a drastic form of bodily experimentation, where alternate identities emerge from the convergence of human, machine and micro-organisms. In such a configuration, each element drastically affects the other. Physicality and psyche are meshed up, shaken and probed.
A far cry from trans-humanist ideals or techno-phobic claims, Eingeweide creates its own vocabulary of symbolic meaning, manifesting the relationship between humans, technology and living-others as a harsh, poetic and humbling form of intimacy.
Artistic direction, performance, staging Donnarumma, Pevere Music, programming, AI robotics Marco Donnarumma Wearable biofilm, robot skin Margherita Pevere Scientific partner Neurorobotics Research Laboratory, Beuth Hochschule Robotics visual design and costume Ana Rajcevic Robotics 3D modelling and engineering Christian Schmidts Light design, stage production Andrea Familari Production Claudia Dorfmueller Tour management René Dombrowski Photography Manuel Vason Live photography Giovanni De Angelis, Nada Zgank
A production by Marco Donnarumma in collaboration with Margherita Pevere. Commissioned by CTM Festival (DE) and realised in the context of the Graduiertenschule, Berlin University of the Arts.
Fronte Vacuo is the performance group founded by Marco Donnarumma, Andrea Familari and Margherita Pevere. This time they presents the piece that inspired the three artists to found the group.
The transdisciplinary performance group is born and based in Berlin. Fronte Vacuo combines body art, dancetheater, audiovisual performance and technology. Its works are defined by unexpected methods of audience interaction, radical bodily performances and rigorous work on symbolism. Their materials are human and nonhuman bodies, organic symbionts, artificial intelligence machines, spatial sounds and images interwoven into tumultuous biomes. In Italian, “Fronte” means military or political front, and “vacuo” means vacuous, without contents. “Fronte vacuo” refers thus to a militant front empty of meaning, a cynic reference to today’s blind belief in techno-capitalism.
Marco Donnarumma (DE) is an artist, performer, stage director and scholar weaving together contemporary performance, new media art and computer music since the early 2000s. He manipulates bodies, creates choreographies, engineers machines and composes sounds, thus combining disciplines, media and emerging technologies into an oneiric, sensual, uncompromising aesthetics. He is internationally acknowledged for genre-defying solo performances, stage productions and installations where the body becomes a morphing language to speak critically of ritual, power and technology.
Margherita Pevere (DE) is an internationally renown artist and researcher whose practice glides across biological arts and performance with a distinctive visceral signature. Her transdisciplinary inquiry hybridizes biolab practice, biotechnology, ecology, environmental politics, gender and death studies, with a healthy dose of hacking attitude to create arresting installations and performances that hunt today’s surging ecological complexity. Her body of work is a blooming garden crawling with genetically edited bacteria, her own cells, sex hormones, microbial biofilm, bovine blood, slugs, growing plants and decomposing biological remains.
Andrea Familari is a multimedia artist working across theatre, music and contemporary art, and an active agent in the international live audio/visual scene. Experimenting since 2011 with images and their technologies, he developed his practice within the underground media art scene. Today, his research develops through observations of generative processes, analysed through “noise” intended as a concept as well as a technological phenomena. His work is realized by means of diverse media, such as video screenings, interactive installations and prints. His repertoire tours regularly from theaters to concert halls, festivals and museums, and has been presented in 23 countries worldwide.