CPPM GUEST ARTIST
Marco Donnarumma
Workshop
24.02-07.03.2025
Public lecture
28.02.2025 19:00
Open class
07.03.2025 19:00
EMTA black box
MARCO DONNARUMMA
Born in 1984 in Naples, Italy, and currently living and working in Berlin, Marco Donnarumma is a media/sound/performance artist, inventor, and theorist. He is a co-founder of the performance group Fronte Vacuo, and a composer, producer, and musician with Dadub and Leiche.
Donnarumma creates technological bodies to explore the boundaries of experience, aiming to provoke resonant aesthetic encounters that question how societal powers regulate the human body. Becoming late deafened has only intensified this approach. His transdisciplinary practice blends contemporary performance, new media art, and interactive computer music into solo performances, productions, installations, and films that defy categorisation. Rooted in performance art and movement research, he brings these disciplines into contact with sound, light, robotics, and AI to form a sensual, uncompromising aesthetic. To achieve this, he invents and handcrafts body technologies—such as AI-driven robotic prostheses and biophysical musical instruments—that explore visceral forms of interaction and generate music from the sounds of the human body. Close collaboration with scientific laboratories is often central to his artistic process.
Widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of performing arts and emerging technologies, Donnarumma has toured 36 countries with works spanning theatre and dance (Wiener Festwochen, European Theater Forum, Volkstheater Wien, Münchner Kammerspiele), media art (ZKM, Chronus Art Center, LABoral, Kontejner, Ars Electronica), contemporary music (IRCAM, World New Music Days, Sónar +D, musikprotokoll), and contemporary art (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Museo del Carme, CENART). He has appeared at numerous festivals (transmediale, CTM, Donaufestival, Panorama) and biennials (NEMO Biennale/HeK Basel, WRO, Meta.Morph).
His writing on music, performance, and technology integrates aesthetics, feminist studies, and critical theory with scientific research. It has been published in leading journals such as Performance Research, Computer Music Journal, and ACM Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, as well as cultural outlets including Hyperallergic and Furtherfield. His forthcoming book chapter, co-authored with Elizabeth Jochum, will feature in Robot Theaters (Routledge), and he is currently writing an essay for Frontiers in Computer Science.
Donnarumma’s work has received numerous accolades, including the Digital Award at Romaeuropa Festival 2018 for Eingeweide (with Margherita Pevere), two awards at the Bains Numériques Biennial 2018, and the Award of Distinction in Sound Art (second prize) at Prix Ars Electronica 2017 for Corpus Nil. He was named Artist of the Science Year 2018 by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education for Amygdala, and he also won first prize in the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition in 2012 for the XTH Sense.
He holds a Ph.D. in performing arts, computing, and body theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, serves as an Associate Researcher at the Intelligent Instruments Lab in Reykjavik, and has been a Medienkunst Fellow at medienwerk.nrw. Previous research posts include the Akademie für Theater und Digitalität and the Berlin University of the Arts. Donnarumma’s work has been funded by the European Commission, Goethe-Institut, the Berlin Senate, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others.
About the workshop
This workshop will focus on solo, contemporary performance practice with technology. The two weeks will be divided into theoretical/discursive and hands-on/bodily practice sessions. Key topics will be the senses, somatics, and the way technology can be used to interact with them, disrupt them, test them to their limits. We will study the way a body makes sense of the world and through which kind of sensory modalities. Each single body has different modes of perception, so we will delve into the differences among ourselves, by studying and sharing our somatic experiences and how technology interjects them. We will make experiments with electronic sounds, light and movement to test the boundaries of everyday experience and understand how to exploit the edges of perception towards aesthetic and dramaturgical goals. This will be our starting roadmap. Once together we will discuss each student’s particular interests and shape together the relevant aspects of the workshop.
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