Marco Donnarumma, Hypo-Chrysos, 2011 - 2013
The sound of absent body in Marco Donnarumma’s artworks Arianna Forte «The invisibility of the eye within its own visual field, the diaphanous embodiment of language, the inaccessibility of the visceral organs: these all exhibit their own principles of absence, which can only be teased apart by a careful investigation». (Drew Leder, The Absent Body, 1990) Humans shape every single experience through the body yet the body itself tends to disappears since it normally works. To understand the paradoxical nature of our existence, the American philosopher Drew Leder bases is own theory on this statement: while in one sense the body is the most abiding and inescapable presence in our lives, it is also characterized by its absence.1 The body within escapes from both control and perception. Human beings find in themselves an unknown part of their body that acts independently from their will. This is the strength from which the existence of their body depends. A strength that wriggles into the veins twists and turns, hidden behind dark organic tissues and membranes and called by Leder with the term foreign-meness2 . So, the inner being has an ambiguous and contradictory connotation: it is obscure and unreachable and at the same time it is essential and vital. This body absence, that constitutes the organic itself, has a new relevance in Marco Donnarumma artistic practice. Here, his works come directly from his organic functions: from the pulsing blood flow to vibrating muscle tissues. Thanks to specific technological processes that he has named biofisical media, he succeeds in figure out inner body sounds and whispers generally incomprehensible and translate them in musical performances or installations. The digital artist Donnarumma is also a PhD researcher at the Goldsmiths University Of London and his work is the outcome of a theoretical and practical whole knowledge and awareness. His research is based on a new technology that the artist himself has created through the elaboration of the biofeedback principles: the Xth Sense, which is a biophysical system specifically made for interactive musical performances 3 . The hardware is 1
Drew Leder, The Absent Body, Chicago-London, The university of Chicago press, 1990, pp.10-11;
2 Leder, ivi, p.48; 3
Marco Donnarumma, Xth sense: recoding visceral embodiment, In Proceedings of the CHI workshop on Liveness, 2012;
made up of wearable biosensors-microphones that capture inner sounds, without any contact with the skin. In order to elaborate and process income data during his performances, he uses an open source software on Pure Data: a programming language that allows him to develop the audio-video signal in real time 4 . Last January, during the event CTM-Festival for the Adventurous Music and Art in Berlin, he performed Ominous employing the above-mentioned biophysical system: Marco Donnarumma was the creator, the performer and the vehicle itself of his own musical composition. In a half-lighted room, the artist made his debut with sloppy and convulsive gestures that turned soon in a choreography of fluctuating arms in an empty space. Two sensors placed on his forearms were catching the slight vibration of his muscle contractions 5 . The sound of his flesh was synthesized, live sampled and reproduced by loudspeakers. At first metal creaks emerged and gradually became more intense in an hypnotic and essential resonance: at that point organic vibrations turned into clear and audible sound waves. In this way the public senses were totally saturated. As a concertmaster who does not need instrumentalists, Donnarumma perfectly conducts the harmony of his body tissues. Leder's absent body becomes a source of music. The artist releases the interoceptive flow that has always been silent and mysterious and in this way it becomes a concrete experience, sonic material and primordial expressiveness. Donnarumma introduces a new way of creating electronic music based on muscular sounds provided by gestures. The sound capacity of human tissues in Ominous, and also other works, is made possible only through the Xth sense. In fact, this new innovative and peculiar technology has been considered as «the world’s most innovative new musical instrument».6 4
ibidem;
5
Marco Donnarumma, Music for Flesh II: informing interactive music performance with the viscerality of the body system. Proceedings of the 2012 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME-12), Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2012;
6
In 2012 Marco Donnarumma won the first prize at Margaret Guthman New Musical Instrument Competition of Georgia Tech, one of the most important technological research centre in United States. In occasion of the award Xth Sense (XS) has been nominated “world’s most innovative new musical instrument;
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