Marco Donnarumma

Salon with Marco Donnarumma #

On 11 June 2025 we will discuss with Marco Donnarumma about human body, performing arts, machine learning and politics.

Marco Donnarumma is a media, sound and performance artist, inventor, stage director and theorist blending contemporary performance, new media art and interactive computer music since the early 2000s. His artistic and scholarly work is grounded in feminist body theory, critical theory and critical disability studies. His practice takes performance art and movement research into strange encounters with sound, light, robotics and AI to create a sensual, uncompromising aesthetic. Marco has a Ph.D. from Goldsmiths, University of London and is an Associate Researcher at the Intelligent Instruments Lab, Reykjavik. He held Fellowships at medienwerk.nrw and the Berlin University of the Arts in partnership with the Neurorobotics Research Laboratory.

Marco’s website: https://marcodonnarumma.com/

Watch the video #

Look at the participation #

Notes #

  • [notes from the presentation]
  • A focus on the body as an interface (for AI and tech)
  • Explore tech through the body and vice versa
  • Technologies as signs, devoid of intention - eerie detachment from actual experience
  • Indifference through repetition
  • “Learn to be affected” Viciane Despret (2004)
  • Notion of control in new interfaces for musical expression : through the hands
  • (abjection) To unsettle the body - perturb an identity, an order
  • Prosthesis - performance - constructor of body
  • Intention as willingness - to technology has none?
  • The devaluation as culture as a people’s construct

Questions #

  • [questions from the presentation]
  • Are technologies truly devoid of intention? Is their use?
  • Embodiment connects one to the world - is the way forward for more human-centered technologies to embody them?
  • In these Salons, we want to find out more about how artists work with AI, and discuss ways of regaining power over it. This may mean regaining agency, which means certain modes of action and, in your case, regaining corporeality over technology. What do you think is missing in the current conception of AI to enable corporeality?
  • If the things that these systems create are interesting, does it mean that there is something like “intention”, a course of actions, that makes it interesting?
  • Affected, linked to a form of agency?
  • What is your interpretation of control or agency in a human & tech/ai pair?
  • What insights do you distill from the work you showed that we can leverage on other domains/contexts?
  • You talked about “a duet” with technology in Corpus Nil, would say a “collaboration”, or even co-creation, which is a term widely used in human-ai interaction?
  • What is your relationship with your audience? Since you are working on a topic such as “abjection”, as a critical perspective of shiny clean tech, how do audiences react?
  • As a craftsperson that works with technology - what aspects of it have you found pushing back at you? Is it its capabilities? Is it our understanding of it?
  • In your work, machine “learning” does not seem to “learn anything” but the way they learn is interesting. Do you see any agencies there?
  • What is your desired future for people + technology?
  • How do you see that AI constructs the body?
  • Your work bares the body and technology (figuratively, and not so) naked; i.e., projecting a form of transparency. Most technology today, especially AI is the opposite - opaque. What do you think is the role of transparency and understability about technology for both creators and users?
  • Prostheses are conventionally used to assist people with functioning “normally” within society, AI systems are placed as a tool to support and enhance their functioning, in your work how might challenging the conceptions of protheses and normativity influence their development? Who should decide when AI systems are used or not?
  • The idea of a “collective prosthesis” makes me wonder what other forms of “collective AI” might be, or how those might be deployed?
  • You mentioned that you choose not to use generative AI in your practice on principle. Can you share more about why you make that choice? (+1)