Career
2004–2010
Originally a musician and sound designer, [14] Donnarumma's early artworks include sound and video compositions for fixed media, [15] web-based sound installations [16] [17] and participative concerts. In 2007, a collaboration with a butoh project by Latvian dance company I-Dejas [18] created the foundations for his shift to body performance. Between 2007 and 2010, he explored hybrid forms of performance with computers and new musical instruments, playing multimedia performances with an augmented electric bass guitar, interactive software and live visuals in various configurations. [19]
XTH Sense
In 2010, feeling increasingly constrained by the conventional ways of interacting with computers on stage, such as digital interfaces and hand-held instruments, Donnarumma began exploring wearable body technologies. [20] In 2011, for his Master in sound design at the Edinburgh College of Art, he created the XTH Sense as a new instrument for music and body performance. [21] The XTH Sense is a wearable electronic musical instrument that amplifies and manipulate muscle sounds (known as mechanomyogram), blood flow and bone crackles from within the human body to make music and sound effects. As a performer moves, the sounds from within the body are captured by a chip microphone worn on arm or legs. Those sounds are then live sampled using a dedicated software program and a library of modular audio effects driven by physical gestures; the performer controls the live sampling parameters by weighing force, speed and articulation of the movement. [22]
In 2012, the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology named the XTH Sense the "world's most innovative new musical instrument" and awarded Donnarumma with the first prize in the Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition. [23] He later released the schematic and the software of the XTH Sense to the public under open source licenses (GPL and CC similar to the ones used by the Arduino project) sparking widespread interest in the international media and the artistic scene. [24] [25] [26] Since then, several artists and researchers have been adopting the XTH Sense as a creative and learning tool in different field of practice, such as dance, music, theatre and engineering. [27] [28] [29] [30]
2011–2015: The Body Series
Donnarumma gained international recognition with a series of works entitled The Body Series, which focuses on the interaction between human body, sound and technology, [31] [32] and includes Music for Flesh II (2011), Hypo Chrysos (2012), Ominous (2012), Nigredo (2013) and 0-Infinity (2015). Key to the series is the new kind of human-computer interaction afforded by the XTH Sense and the other technologies developed by the artist himself, such as interactive algorithms, artificial intelligence software and psychoacoustic systems. [33] These custom technologies allow the artist to use the human body as an instrument by amplifying human bodily sounds and capturing physiological and corporeal activity. [34]
Aesthetically, Donnarumma's body series integrates performance art, computer music, light and sound design into surreal, intense and confrontational performances. [35] Conceptually, they are influenced by a critical approach to technology, which emphasises the relations of machines to ritualism and body politics. [36] These works are based on a combination of choreographed and improvised movements exploring physical tension and bodily constraint. The series marked a new step in performance and new media art, paving the way for a new, transdisciplinary form of live art known as biophysical music, [37] [38] and contributed to the field of human-computer interaction, by creating unconventional computing techniques to physically interface human and machine. [39]
In Hypo Chrysos (2012), a work inspired by Dante's Inferno, [40] Donnarumma pulls two heavy concrete blocks in a circle for twenty minutes. His blood flow, muscle sound bursts and bone crackles produced during the action are amplifyed as surround sound through an eight-channel sound system and visualized as abstract organic forms through a panoramic video projection. The extreme strain of the body is thus diffused in the space and forces the audience to participate in the performer's vexation. "This process encourages tuning in to the inner state of the other and finding resonating states in one's own body." [41]
The interactive installation Nigredo (2012–2013) offers a private experience in a black booth. The visitor's body is fastened to a chair and wired to biosensors; the acoustic signals from her own heart, muscles and veins are captured and feed back to her body in the form of new sounds, vibrations and light patterns. Light and sound dynamics vary according to the unique properties of the visitor's body, thus providing an individual experience of the work. The feedback creates an acoustic phenomena known as standing waves inside the visitor's body thus altering self-perception, body & mind awareness and experience of the self. [42]
2015–2019: 7 Configurations
In Corpus Nil (2016), the performer's tattooed body slowly mutates from an amorphous shape to an animal-like form by contracting and quivering as if struggling against powerful constraints. The body is wired to an artificial intelligence software which autonomously generates light and sound patterns in response to the performer's body signals. As a result, white pulsing lights illuminate the scene while synchronised computer-processed sound fill the theatre space. "The performance evokes a sense of a psychedelic and alien reality, at the border between physical and virtual." [43]
Collaborations
Donnarumma collaborated with a range of artists across disciplines including performance art, cyberart, spatial sound, and live cinema. In 2012, together with cyberfeminist artists Francesca da Rimini (of VNS Matrix collective) and Linda Dement, Donnarumma performed in the 12-hour saga The Moving Forest, conceived by new media artists Shu Lea Cheang and Martin Howse. The work expanded the last 12 minute of Kurosawa's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, Throne of Blood (1957), into a sonic performance saga. [44] In 2014, he collaborated with computer science researcher Baptiste Caramiaux to create a new work, Septic, commissioned by transmediale festival's Art Hack Day. [45] In 2015, the spatial sound collective 4DSOUND commissioned him a new monumental work, 0-Infinity, which premiered at TodaysArt Festival in The Hague within the program Circadian. [46] In 2016, he collaborated with experimental filmmaker Vincent Moon in a series of live shows during the Michelberger Music event in Berlin. [47]
Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting. Video art can take many forms: recordings that are broadcast; installations viewed in galleries or museums; works either streamed online, or distributed as video tapes, or on DVDs; and performances which may incorporate one or more television sets, video monitors, and projections, displaying live or recorded images and sounds.
Software art is a work of art where the creation of software, or concepts from software, play an important role; for example software applications which were created by artists and which were intended as artworks. As an artistic discipline software art has attained growing attention since the late 1990s. It is closely related to Internet art since it often relies on the Internet, most notably the World Wide Web, for dissemination and critical discussion of the works. Art festivals such as FILE Electronic Language International Festival, Transmediale (Berlin), Prix Ars Electronica (Linz) and readme have devoted considerable attention to the medium and through this have helped to bring software art to a wider audience of theorists and academics.
Electronic art is a form of art that makes use of electronic media. More broadly, it refers to technology and/or electronic media. It is related to information art, new media art, video art, digital art, interactive art, internet art, and electronic music. It is considered an outgrowth of conceptual art and systems art.
Nicolas Collins is a composer of mostly electronic music, a sound artist and writer. He received his BA and MA from Wesleyan University, and his PhD from the University of East Anglia. Upon graduating from Wesleyan, he was a Watson Fellow.
Transmediale, stylised as transmediale, is an annual festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, usually held over three to five days at the end of January and the beginning of February. transmediale takes the form of a conference, an exhibition, and a film and video programme that often contain or support performances and workshops. Throughout the year, transmediale is also involved in a number of long- and short-term cooperative projects. From its initial focus on video culture, it came to cultivate an artistic and critical dialogue with television and multimedia, emerging as the leading international platform for media art.
Thomas Köner is a multimedia artist whose main interest lies in combining visual and auditory experiences. The BBC, in a review of Köner's work in 1997, calls him a "media artist," one who works between installation, sound art, ambient music and as one half of Porter Ricks dub techno. A noted characteristics of Köner's dark ambient style are low drones and static soundscapes evocative of desolate, Arctic places.
Trimpin is a German born kinetic sculptor, sound artist, and musician currently living in Seattle and Tieton, Washington.
Alexei Blinov was a London-based electronic engineer and new media artist working out of Raylab in Hackney. As founder of experimental new media organisation "Raylab" he has collaborated with a number of creative artists including Jamie Reid.
A biosignal is any signal in living beings that can be continually measured and monitored. The term biosignal is often used to refer to bioelectrical signals, but it may refer to both electrical and non-electrical signals. The usual understanding is to refer only to time-varying signals, although spatial parameter variations are sometimes subsumed as well.
Aleksander Kolkowski is a British musician and composer whose work combines instruments and machines from the pioneering era of sound recording and reproduction to make live mechanical-acoustic music. He lives and works in London, England.
Scott Kildall is an American conceptual artist working with new technologies in a variety of media including video art, prints, sculpture and performance art. Kildall works broadly with virtual worlds and in the net.art movement. His work centers on repurposing technology and repackaging information from the public realm into art.
Antoine Schmitt is a French visual artist and programming engineer who revolves in the fields of digital art and digital design, especially in the field of the connected objects.
The Free Art and Technology Lab a.k.a. F.A.T. Lab was a collective of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers, and musicians, dedicated to the merging of popular culture with open source technology. F.A.T. Lab was known for producing artwork critical of traditional Intellectual Property Law in the realm of new media art and technology. F.A.T. Lab has historically created work intended for the public domain, but has also released work under various open licenses. Their commitment is to support "open values and the public domain through the use of emerging open licenses, support for open entrepreneurship and the admonishment of secrecy, copyright monopolies and patents. F.A.T. Lab's mission has been approached through various methods of placing open ideals into the mainstream popular culture, including work with the New York Times, MTV, the front page of YouTube and in the Museum of Modern Art permanent collection."
Laetitia Sonami, is a sound artist, performer, and composer of interactive electronic music who has been based in the San Francisco Bay area since 1978. She is known for her electronic compositions and performances with the ‘’Lady’s Glove’’, an instrument she developed for triggering and manipulating sound in live performance. Many of her compositions include live or sampled text. Sonami also creates sound installation work incorporating household objects embedded with mechanical and electronic components. Although some recordings of her works exist, Sonami generally eschews releasing recorded work.
Holly Herndon is an American artist and composer based in Berlin, Germany. After studying composition at Stanford University and completing her Ph.D. at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, she pursued a music career internationally. Herndon's music often includes human singing voices, is primarily computer-based, and regularly uses the visual programming language Max/MSP to create custom instruments and vocal processes. She has released music on the labels RVNG Intl. and 4AD. Her third full-length album, Proto, was released on May 10, 2019.
MTF Labs is a series of festivals and events encouraging innovation through creative work, particularly music.
Suguru Goto is a Japanese composer and new media artist who lives in Paris. He performances using new technology such as projection mapping, Kinect, motion capture and robotics and programming which he invented himself. He integrates dances, sounds and images into the performance, highlighting boundaries between human and machine, reality and virtual. He was also a researcher and invited composer at IRCAM. He is currently assistant professor at Tokyo University of the Arts.
Thom Kubli is a Swiss-German composer and artist known for installation art and sculptures that often deploy sound as a significant element, using digital technologies and material configurations that increase the viewers' spatial perception.
Jocelyn Robert is a Canadian post-modern interdisciplinary artist from Quebec City, Quebec. In 1993, he co-founded the collective Avatar in Quebec City, which became the province's flagship in sound and electronic art. He was its first President and from 2004 to 2009 its artistic director. He also participated in the founding of the Méduse cooperative.
