When
Thematic Session 3: Modeling and Analysis (Tuesday, 09:40)
Abstract
In music making, be it with traditional musical instruments or new interfaces for musical expression, the performativity of certain bodily thresholds enables forms of human–instrument co-dependence. Here body and instrument affect each other in iterative feedback loops. I refer to this relation as a 'configuration' (2017), an assemblage of human and machine parts that, through discipline, training and relational construction of vibrational forms, shape not only music but embodiment itself. In the past ten years, an interest in these forms of human-machine configurations drove me through the physical, musical and computational exploration of alternative forms of embodiment, where the body is pushed towards sensorial and corporeal edges via AI systems, prosthetics, sound and choreography. Witnessing the recent 'AI' race towards ever larger models based on recombination or imitation of pre-existent sound or visual material, it would appear that development is increasingly leaning towards a black-box approach that leaves little room for the exploration of intimate forms of human-machine configurations. What are the strategies needed to create embodied approaches to AI that can open up new areas of corporeal knowledge? How is it possible to create musical AI systems that offer the possibility to transgress musical and bodily borders, systems that allow to learn at the edges of corporeal experience?
Bio
Marco Donnarumma is an artist, performer and scholar weaving together contemporary performance, new media art and interactive 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. Marco has a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, was a Research Fellow at the Academy for Theater and Digitality, Dortmund, and at Berlin University of the Arts in partnership with the Neurorobotics Research Laboratory. He is currently Research Associate at the Intelligent Instrument Lab, Reykjavik. His writings embrace performance studies, body theory, aesthetics, human–computer interaction and unconventional computing.