Marco Donnarumma | Universität der Künste Berlin / University of the Arts Berlin (original) (raw)
Cultural Studies by Marco Donnarumma
International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media, 13(2). London: Routledge, 2017
Body technologies, such as prostheses and biosensors, are active means of lived experimentation: ... more Body technologies, such as prostheses and biosensors, are active means of lived experimentation: they enable forms of hybrid embodiment such as the cyborg, whose diverse representations by artists and performers have infiltrated our societal normative regime. To talk about body politics is therefore to talk about the technologies the body incorporates, how they probe its alleged integrity. Performance theories and practices offer a fertile ground of experimentation with this issue. Yet, there is a tendency to frame body technologies as either material extensions of one’s body or external objects one perceives with. Such approaches support technocratic systems of beliefs by eliding immaterial and pre-conscious aspects of technological incorporation, I argue.
Beyond Borders – Processed Body – Expanded Brain – Distributed Agency, 2019
Amygdala reflects the human need for catharsis back to the human. The ambiguity of the robot’s ac... more Amygdala reflects the human need for catharsis back to the human. The ambiguity of the robot’s actions, coupled with the popular and subjective knowledge those actions conjure up, entrust the visitor with the responsibility of defining what they are seeing: Is the machine learning a ritual, mutilating itself, surgically operating on its own body, or adorning it? Is it perhaps a metaphor for capitalistic societies, as they drive themselves and the whole planet to a catastrophic end of civilization? Rather than trying to make a statement on the symbolic meaning or value of purification rituals, I see Amygdala as a mirror which can reveal he belief and cultural background of those who encounter it.
The interface is the point of junction between things. In computation these things can be made of... more The interface is the point of junction between things. In computation these things can be made of code (software), circuits and sensors (hardware) as well as human bodies and their economy of desire (users). The design, aim and use of a computational interface is fundamentally a question of language, and not any kind of language but the specific language utilised by developers and users (Cramer, 2008). This language is made not only of words and programming conventions but also of personal desires, prejudices, cultural assumptions and social beliefs. Computational interfaces thus have a strong tendency to embody a whole set of personal, cultural and social notions; and they do so in rarely overt ways. For all its importance, the question of language and its underpinning personal and social economies often lets slip through our analytics another equally important question: embodiment, or better, the forms of embodiments which are normalised through particular interfaces. Conjoining the linguistic and the embodied basis and implications of computational interfaces affords for an interesting viewpoint on the subject matter.
If dance becomes dance only by way of thought, as Stamatia Portanova suggests in her new book Mov... more If dance becomes dance only by way of thought, as Stamatia Portanova suggests in her new book Moving Without a Body, what happens to movement and the body, when they’re abstracted into the digital? A review by Marco Donnarumma.
Music & Body by Marco Donnarumma
How to define the relationship of human bodies, sound and technological instruments in musical pe... more How to define the relationship of human bodies, sound and technological instruments in musical performance? This enquiry investigates the issue through an iterative mode of research. Aesthetic and technical insights on sound and body art performance with new musical instruments combine with analytical views on technological embodiment in philosophy and cultural studies. The focus is on corporeality: the physiological, phenomenological and cultural basis of embodied practices.
The thesis proposes \emph{configuration} as an analytical device and a blueprint for artistic creation. Configuration defines the relationship of the human being and technology as one where they affect each other's properties through a continuous, situated negotiation. In musical performance, this involves a performer's intuition, cognition, and sensorimotor skills, an instrument's material, musical and computational properties, and sound's vibrational and auditive qualities.
Two particular kinds of configuration feature in this enquiry. One arises from an experiment on the effect of vibration on the sensorimotor system and is fully developed through a subsequent installation for one visitor at a time. The other emerges from a scientific study of gesture expressivity through muscle physiological sensing and is consolidated into an ensuing body art performance for sound and light. Both artworks rely upon intensely intimate sensorial and physical experiences, uses and abuses of the performer's body and bioacoustic sound feedback as a material force.
This work contends that particular configurations in musical performance reinforce, alter or disrupt societal criteria against which human bodies and technologies are assessed. Its contributions are: the notion of configuration, which affords an understanding of human-machine co-dependence and its politics; two sound-based artworks, joining and expanding musical performance and body art; two experiments, and their hardware and software tools, providing insights on physiological computing methods for corporeal human-computer interaction.
In Eduardo R. Miranda (Ed.), Guide to Unconventional Computing for Music. Berlin: Springer, 2017
Biophysical music is a rapidly emerging area of electronic music performance. It investigates the... more Biophysical music is a rapidly emerging area of electronic music performance. It investigates the creation of unconventional computing interfaces to directly configure the physiology of human movement with musical systems, which often are improvisational and adaptive. It draws on a transdisciplinary approach that combines neuromuscular studies, phenomenology, real-time data analysis, performance practice and music composition. Biophysical music instruments use muscle biosignals to directly integrate aspects of a performer’s physical gesture into the human–machine interaction and musical compositional strategies. This chapter will introduce the principles and challenges of biophysical music, detailing the use of physiological computing for musical performance and in particular the musical applications of muscle-based interaction.
Youn Kim and Sander Gilman (Eds.) Oxford Handbook on Music and the Body. Oxford: Oxford University Press,, 2015
This text explores the possibility of thinking of the human body as musical instrument. It builds... more This text explores the possibility of thinking of the human body as musical instrument. It builds on the philosophy of phenomenology to discuss body schemata that might be considered “instrumental” and discusses the diversity of bodies proposed by body theory to consider the incorporation of digital technology. Concepts of embodied interaction from the scientific field of human–computer interaction are discussed with an eye toward musical application. The history of gestural musical instruments is presented, from the Theremin to instruments from the STEIM studio. The text then focuses on the use of physiological signals to create music, from historical works of Lucier and Rosenboom to recent performances by the authors. The body as musical instrument is discussed in a dynamic of coadaptation between performer and instrument in different configurations of body and technology.
Leonardo Electronic Almanac (Touch and Go) , 2012
Think about your body. Consider its capability of channeling articulate information with a single... more Think about your body. Consider its capability of channeling articulate information with a single gaze, the dramatic force of a gesture propulsed by muscle tissue contractions, the sympathetic rhythmic changes in the heartbeat when listening to someone else’s palpitations, the meaningful shifting patterns of the brain wave cycles when drifting from relaxation to heightened mental activity. These are nothing but physiological and intimate processes that become externalized to affect the people and the space surrounding us. Once tangible, those processes can be captured, observed, strumentalized or augmented through technology, and become therefore informative (or shall we say informatic) media that are biological in nature. In contemporary electronic music performance this paradigm has exposed creative strategies that had been overlooked so far. This article places the biological media in the ‘broken ground’ where body and computational system interact musically with each other. It questions and defines the qualities of a gesture in the context of biologically sensitive musical instruments, providing therefore a framework to introduce a visceral model of electronic music performance; one in which the sonic matter incarnated within the tissues of the body rises and breaks through the skin to become tangible and shared experience
eContact! Biotechnological Performance Practice / Pratiques de performance biotechnologique, 2012
Hypo Chrysos is a work of action art for vexed body and biophysical media. Here the term biophysi... more Hypo Chrysos is a work of action art for vexed body and biophysical media. Here the term biophysical addresses audio and visual media that emerge as a joint result of biological and physical mechanisms of the body. Hypo Chrysos is based on the Xth Sense (XS), a biophysical musical instrument I have been developing and performing with since March 2011. As opposed to other biosensing controllers such as the Biomuse (Knapp and Lusted 1990), that deploy electrical signals released by the body, the XS uses a microphone that picks up subcutaneous mechanical vibrations, or better, sounds that originate within the muscle fibres of the performer’s body (Fig. 1). The XS uses these sonic vibrations as sound material to be processed using the same data stream. The performer controls the live sampling and spatialization of the muscle sounds, which the computer diffuses through the loudspeakers. This a model I refer to as visceral embodiment. (1) Hypo Chrysos exasperates the viscerality of the body, so as to to critically explore the territory in between biosciences, music technology, performance art and human affect. Whereas in previous works for the XS I explored the body as a source of musical meaning, with silence and sonic events constructing an aural architecture, this piece has a different scope: to vex my own body and materialize its strain in the outer world. There is no score, and musicianship is purposely deterred by the condition of the performance.
Proceedings of the Conference on New Interface for Musical Expression (NIME-12), May 2012
Performing music with a computer and loudspeakers represents always a challenge. The lack of a tr... more Performing music with a computer and loudspeakers represents always a challenge. The lack of a traditional instrument requires the performer to study idiomatic strategies by which musicianship becomes apparent. On the other hand, the audience needs to decode those strategies, so to achieve an understanding and appreciation of the music being played. The issue is particularly relevant to the performance of music that results from the mediation between biological signals of the human body and physical performance.
The present article tackles this concern by demonstrating a new model of musical performance; what I define biophysical music. This is music generated and played in real time by amplifying and processing the acoustic sound of a performer’s muscle contractions. The model relies on an original and open source technology made of custom biosensors and a related software framework. The succesfull application of these tools is discussed in the practical context of a solo piece for sensors, laptop and loudspeakers. Eventually, the compositional strategies that characterize the piece are discussed along with a systematic description of the relevant mapping techniques and their sonic outcome.
Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), 2011
"A newly edited report of previous findings, outlining new methods and considerations. This ... more "A newly edited report of previous findings, outlining new methods and considerations.
This paper seeks to outline methods underlying the development of the Xth Sense project, an ongoing research which investigates exploratory applications of biophysical sound design for musical performance and responsive milieux.
Firstly, I describe the development and design of the Xth Sense, a wearable hardware sensor device for capturing biological body sounds; this was implemented in the realization of Music for Flesh I, a first attempt at musical performance. Next, the array of principles underpinning the application of muscle sounds to a
musical performance is illustrated. Drawing from such principles, I eventually describe the methods by which useful features were extracted from the muscle sounds, and the mapping techniques used to deploy these features as control data for real time sound processing."
Proceedings of the CHI workshop on Liveness, 2012
This paper seeks to weave a discourse around musical embodiment drawing on the idea of biological... more This paper seeks to weave a discourse around musical embodiment drawing on the idea of biological media in cultural studies, Information Technology (IT) and musical performance practice. The perspective outcomes of a widely diffused instrumentalization of biological signals can be as much seducing for a technologist as for an a musician; I focus my analysis on what can be lost in the process of encoding expressive, living matter into mere binary code. In order to evaluate this question in the frame of my own musical research, I introduce the Xth Sense (XS), a novel biophysical system which I'm developing and performing with since March 2011. Eventually, some perceptual and aesthetic benchmarks of the XS are assessed in the context of Music for Flesh II. This is the first of an on-going series of works that explore a new paradigm which I call biophysical music: the design of live sound performances that use a performer's muscle sounds to substantiate an authentic sonic vocabulary and uncharted sound forms.
Proceedings of the Linux Audio Conference (LAC), 2011
This paper seeks to outline methods underlying the development of the Xth Sense project, an ongoi... more This paper seeks to outline methods underlying the development of the Xth Sense project, an ongoing research which investigates exploratory applications of biophysical sound design for musical performance and responsive milieux. Firstly, an exploratory study of the acoustics of body sounds, namely muscle sounds is illustrated. I describe the development of an audio synthesis model for muscle sounds1 which offered a deeper understanding of the body sound matter and provided the ground for further experimentations in signal processing and composition. Then follows a description of the development and design of the Xth Sense - a wearable hardware sensor device for capturing biological body sounds, this was implemented in the realization of Music for Flesh I - a first attempt at musical performance. Eventually I elaborate on the relations between the role of sound in cognitive experience and the acoustic capabilities of biologic body sounds and try to establish an array of principles which will provide the backbone of the next stage of my inquiry.
Aesthetics by Marco Donnarumma
Meat, Metal & Code: Contestable Chimeras. STELARC / Mięso, metal i kod: rozchwiane chimery. STELARC, edited by Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej / Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk 2014
It is with great delight that I intro- duce the reader to Computer Music Journal’s 2015 Sound and... more It is with great delight that I intro- duce the reader to Computer Music Journal’s 2015 Sound and Video An- thology. I have curated a series of diverse, yet interrelated, works on the theme of biophysical music.With this term, I refer to live music pieces based on a combination of physi- ological technology and markedly physical, gestural performance. In these works, the physical and physi- ological properties of the performers’ bodies are interlaced with the mate- rial and computational qualities of the electronic instruments, with varying degrees of mutual influence. Musical expression thus arises from an inti- mate and, often, not fully predictable negotiation of human bodies, instru- ments, and programmatic musical ideas
eContact! Biotechnological Performance Practice / Pratiques de performance biotechnologique, 2012
Stelarc explores alternate anatomical architectures. He has performed with a Third Hand, Stomach ... more Stelarc explores alternate anatomical architectures. He has performed with a Third Hand, Stomach Sculpture and Exoskeleton, a 6-legged robot. Fractal Flesh remotely actuates the body with electrical stimulation, while Ping Body and Parasite explore the body choreographed by internet data streams. Prosthetic Head is an embodied conversational agent that speaks to the person who interrogates it. It became the research platform for the Thinking Head, one of three Thinks Systems Special Initiatives jointly funded by the Australian Research Council and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council. The project was centred at the MARCS Labs at the University of Western Sydney. Ear On Arm is a surgical and cell-grown construct that will be internet-enabled, for people in other places. Stelarc: The Monograph, edited by Marqand Smith, was published in 2005. Between 2007–2011, Stelarc was Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Artist at the University of Western Sydney’s MARCS Labs and he is presently Chair in Performance Art at Brunel University West London. In 2010 he received a Special Projects Grant from the Australia Council and was also awarded the Ars Electronica Hybrid Arts Prize. Stelarc’s artwork is represented by Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne.
Cultural Criticism by Marco Donnarumma
Works and conversations by Marco Donnarumma, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Lisa Glauer, Bnaya Halperin-Kad... more Works and conversations by Marco Donnarumma, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Lisa Glauer, Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari, Darsha Hewitt, Kiran Kumar, Clarissa Thieme, Zeynep Tuna, and Nino Klingler. Coming from dance, music, film, performance, visual art, and critical theory, nine artists from the UdK Graduate School in Berlin get together to talk concepts and share work. They respond to the sense of despair spreading in times of political backlash: What if it won’t stop here? How are we to dispel the air of gloom that clouds the horizon for imagining change today? And how do we reckon with dire realities but stretch the parameters of space and time enough to find some marge de manoeuvre? Based on artistic experience, the artists in this book access macropolitical concerns via micropolitical practices. They outline what art could do now to face up to the bleak mood and still speak through media, data, and the body.
We are no strangers to the use of computational, physiological and sensing technology in today’s ... more We are no strangers to the use of computational, physiological and sensing technology in today’s art practises. In performances, installations or participatory artworks, performers’ and visitors’ bodies are increasingly integrated into technological systems. Bodies and
machines become linked through wearable sensors, signal amplifiers, transmitters and transducers. For those who can afford it, body technologies have become easy to attain and operate; artists can experiment freely with the coupling of human and machine. This is not only an opportunity to enrich the palette of artistic
tools available, but, more importantly, it is a chance to foster a more widespread understanding of the cultural and political aspects involved in the interaction of humans and technologies.
Google is breeding the young minds of the next generation of artists. Don't take me wrong, it's n... more Google is breeding the young minds of the next generation of artists.
Don't take me wrong, it's not my opinion, it's simply what Google states in the marketing campaign (see the heading image) that is accompanying the infamous DevArt exhibition at the Barbican in London.
HCI by Marco Donnarumma
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2015
International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media, 13(2). London: Routledge, 2017
Body technologies, such as prostheses and biosensors, are active means of lived experimentation: ... more Body technologies, such as prostheses and biosensors, are active means of lived experimentation: they enable forms of hybrid embodiment such as the cyborg, whose diverse representations by artists and performers have infiltrated our societal normative regime. To talk about body politics is therefore to talk about the technologies the body incorporates, how they probe its alleged integrity. Performance theories and practices offer a fertile ground of experimentation with this issue. Yet, there is a tendency to frame body technologies as either material extensions of one’s body or external objects one perceives with. Such approaches support technocratic systems of beliefs by eliding immaterial and pre-conscious aspects of technological incorporation, I argue.
Beyond Borders – Processed Body – Expanded Brain – Distributed Agency, 2019
Amygdala reflects the human need for catharsis back to the human. The ambiguity of the robot’s ac... more Amygdala reflects the human need for catharsis back to the human. The ambiguity of the robot’s actions, coupled with the popular and subjective knowledge those actions conjure up, entrust the visitor with the responsibility of defining what they are seeing: Is the machine learning a ritual, mutilating itself, surgically operating on its own body, or adorning it? Is it perhaps a metaphor for capitalistic societies, as they drive themselves and the whole planet to a catastrophic end of civilization? Rather than trying to make a statement on the symbolic meaning or value of purification rituals, I see Amygdala as a mirror which can reveal he belief and cultural background of those who encounter it.
The interface is the point of junction between things. In computation these things can be made of... more The interface is the point of junction between things. In computation these things can be made of code (software), circuits and sensors (hardware) as well as human bodies and their economy of desire (users). The design, aim and use of a computational interface is fundamentally a question of language, and not any kind of language but the specific language utilised by developers and users (Cramer, 2008). This language is made not only of words and programming conventions but also of personal desires, prejudices, cultural assumptions and social beliefs. Computational interfaces thus have a strong tendency to embody a whole set of personal, cultural and social notions; and they do so in rarely overt ways. For all its importance, the question of language and its underpinning personal and social economies often lets slip through our analytics another equally important question: embodiment, or better, the forms of embodiments which are normalised through particular interfaces. Conjoining the linguistic and the embodied basis and implications of computational interfaces affords for an interesting viewpoint on the subject matter.
If dance becomes dance only by way of thought, as Stamatia Portanova suggests in her new book Mov... more If dance becomes dance only by way of thought, as Stamatia Portanova suggests in her new book Moving Without a Body, what happens to movement and the body, when they’re abstracted into the digital? A review by Marco Donnarumma.
How to define the relationship of human bodies, sound and technological instruments in musical pe... more How to define the relationship of human bodies, sound and technological instruments in musical performance? This enquiry investigates the issue through an iterative mode of research. Aesthetic and technical insights on sound and body art performance with new musical instruments combine with analytical views on technological embodiment in philosophy and cultural studies. The focus is on corporeality: the physiological, phenomenological and cultural basis of embodied practices.
The thesis proposes \emph{configuration} as an analytical device and a blueprint for artistic creation. Configuration defines the relationship of the human being and technology as one where they affect each other's properties through a continuous, situated negotiation. In musical performance, this involves a performer's intuition, cognition, and sensorimotor skills, an instrument's material, musical and computational properties, and sound's vibrational and auditive qualities.
Two particular kinds of configuration feature in this enquiry. One arises from an experiment on the effect of vibration on the sensorimotor system and is fully developed through a subsequent installation for one visitor at a time. The other emerges from a scientific study of gesture expressivity through muscle physiological sensing and is consolidated into an ensuing body art performance for sound and light. Both artworks rely upon intensely intimate sensorial and physical experiences, uses and abuses of the performer's body and bioacoustic sound feedback as a material force.
This work contends that particular configurations in musical performance reinforce, alter or disrupt societal criteria against which human bodies and technologies are assessed. Its contributions are: the notion of configuration, which affords an understanding of human-machine co-dependence and its politics; two sound-based artworks, joining and expanding musical performance and body art; two experiments, and their hardware and software tools, providing insights on physiological computing methods for corporeal human-computer interaction.
In Eduardo R. Miranda (Ed.), Guide to Unconventional Computing for Music. Berlin: Springer, 2017
Biophysical music is a rapidly emerging area of electronic music performance. It investigates the... more Biophysical music is a rapidly emerging area of electronic music performance. It investigates the creation of unconventional computing interfaces to directly configure the physiology of human movement with musical systems, which often are improvisational and adaptive. It draws on a transdisciplinary approach that combines neuromuscular studies, phenomenology, real-time data analysis, performance practice and music composition. Biophysical music instruments use muscle biosignals to directly integrate aspects of a performer’s physical gesture into the human–machine interaction and musical compositional strategies. This chapter will introduce the principles and challenges of biophysical music, detailing the use of physiological computing for musical performance and in particular the musical applications of muscle-based interaction.
Youn Kim and Sander Gilman (Eds.) Oxford Handbook on Music and the Body. Oxford: Oxford University Press,, 2015
This text explores the possibility of thinking of the human body as musical instrument. It builds... more This text explores the possibility of thinking of the human body as musical instrument. It builds on the philosophy of phenomenology to discuss body schemata that might be considered “instrumental” and discusses the diversity of bodies proposed by body theory to consider the incorporation of digital technology. Concepts of embodied interaction from the scientific field of human–computer interaction are discussed with an eye toward musical application. The history of gestural musical instruments is presented, from the Theremin to instruments from the STEIM studio. The text then focuses on the use of physiological signals to create music, from historical works of Lucier and Rosenboom to recent performances by the authors. The body as musical instrument is discussed in a dynamic of coadaptation between performer and instrument in different configurations of body and technology.
Leonardo Electronic Almanac (Touch and Go) , 2012
Think about your body. Consider its capability of channeling articulate information with a single... more Think about your body. Consider its capability of channeling articulate information with a single gaze, the dramatic force of a gesture propulsed by muscle tissue contractions, the sympathetic rhythmic changes in the heartbeat when listening to someone else’s palpitations, the meaningful shifting patterns of the brain wave cycles when drifting from relaxation to heightened mental activity. These are nothing but physiological and intimate processes that become externalized to affect the people and the space surrounding us. Once tangible, those processes can be captured, observed, strumentalized or augmented through technology, and become therefore informative (or shall we say informatic) media that are biological in nature. In contemporary electronic music performance this paradigm has exposed creative strategies that had been overlooked so far. This article places the biological media in the ‘broken ground’ where body and computational system interact musically with each other. It questions and defines the qualities of a gesture in the context of biologically sensitive musical instruments, providing therefore a framework to introduce a visceral model of electronic music performance; one in which the sonic matter incarnated within the tissues of the body rises and breaks through the skin to become tangible and shared experience
eContact! Biotechnological Performance Practice / Pratiques de performance biotechnologique, 2012
Hypo Chrysos is a work of action art for vexed body and biophysical media. Here the term biophysi... more Hypo Chrysos is a work of action art for vexed body and biophysical media. Here the term biophysical addresses audio and visual media that emerge as a joint result of biological and physical mechanisms of the body. Hypo Chrysos is based on the Xth Sense (XS), a biophysical musical instrument I have been developing and performing with since March 2011. As opposed to other biosensing controllers such as the Biomuse (Knapp and Lusted 1990), that deploy electrical signals released by the body, the XS uses a microphone that picks up subcutaneous mechanical vibrations, or better, sounds that originate within the muscle fibres of the performer’s body (Fig. 1). The XS uses these sonic vibrations as sound material to be processed using the same data stream. The performer controls the live sampling and spatialization of the muscle sounds, which the computer diffuses through the loudspeakers. This a model I refer to as visceral embodiment. (1) Hypo Chrysos exasperates the viscerality of the body, so as to to critically explore the territory in between biosciences, music technology, performance art and human affect. Whereas in previous works for the XS I explored the body as a source of musical meaning, with silence and sonic events constructing an aural architecture, this piece has a different scope: to vex my own body and materialize its strain in the outer world. There is no score, and musicianship is purposely deterred by the condition of the performance.
Proceedings of the Conference on New Interface for Musical Expression (NIME-12), May 2012
Performing music with a computer and loudspeakers represents always a challenge. The lack of a tr... more Performing music with a computer and loudspeakers represents always a challenge. The lack of a traditional instrument requires the performer to study idiomatic strategies by which musicianship becomes apparent. On the other hand, the audience needs to decode those strategies, so to achieve an understanding and appreciation of the music being played. The issue is particularly relevant to the performance of music that results from the mediation between biological signals of the human body and physical performance.
The present article tackles this concern by demonstrating a new model of musical performance; what I define biophysical music. This is music generated and played in real time by amplifying and processing the acoustic sound of a performer’s muscle contractions. The model relies on an original and open source technology made of custom biosensors and a related software framework. The succesfull application of these tools is discussed in the practical context of a solo piece for sensors, laptop and loudspeakers. Eventually, the compositional strategies that characterize the piece are discussed along with a systematic description of the relevant mapping techniques and their sonic outcome.
Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), 2011
"A newly edited report of previous findings, outlining new methods and considerations. This ... more "A newly edited report of previous findings, outlining new methods and considerations.
This paper seeks to outline methods underlying the development of the Xth Sense project, an ongoing research which investigates exploratory applications of biophysical sound design for musical performance and responsive milieux.
Firstly, I describe the development and design of the Xth Sense, a wearable hardware sensor device for capturing biological body sounds; this was implemented in the realization of Music for Flesh I, a first attempt at musical performance. Next, the array of principles underpinning the application of muscle sounds to a
musical performance is illustrated. Drawing from such principles, I eventually describe the methods by which useful features were extracted from the muscle sounds, and the mapping techniques used to deploy these features as control data for real time sound processing."
Proceedings of the CHI workshop on Liveness, 2012
This paper seeks to weave a discourse around musical embodiment drawing on the idea of biological... more This paper seeks to weave a discourse around musical embodiment drawing on the idea of biological media in cultural studies, Information Technology (IT) and musical performance practice. The perspective outcomes of a widely diffused instrumentalization of biological signals can be as much seducing for a technologist as for an a musician; I focus my analysis on what can be lost in the process of encoding expressive, living matter into mere binary code. In order to evaluate this question in the frame of my own musical research, I introduce the Xth Sense (XS), a novel biophysical system which I'm developing and performing with since March 2011. Eventually, some perceptual and aesthetic benchmarks of the XS are assessed in the context of Music for Flesh II. This is the first of an on-going series of works that explore a new paradigm which I call biophysical music: the design of live sound performances that use a performer's muscle sounds to substantiate an authentic sonic vocabulary and uncharted sound forms.
Proceedings of the Linux Audio Conference (LAC), 2011
This paper seeks to outline methods underlying the development of the Xth Sense project, an ongoi... more This paper seeks to outline methods underlying the development of the Xth Sense project, an ongoing research which investigates exploratory applications of biophysical sound design for musical performance and responsive milieux. Firstly, an exploratory study of the acoustics of body sounds, namely muscle sounds is illustrated. I describe the development of an audio synthesis model for muscle sounds1 which offered a deeper understanding of the body sound matter and provided the ground for further experimentations in signal processing and composition. Then follows a description of the development and design of the Xth Sense - a wearable hardware sensor device for capturing biological body sounds, this was implemented in the realization of Music for Flesh I - a first attempt at musical performance. Eventually I elaborate on the relations between the role of sound in cognitive experience and the acoustic capabilities of biologic body sounds and try to establish an array of principles which will provide the backbone of the next stage of my inquiry.
Meat, Metal & Code: Contestable Chimeras. STELARC / Mięso, metal i kod: rozchwiane chimery. STELARC, edited by Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej / Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk 2014
It is with great delight that I intro- duce the reader to Computer Music Journal’s 2015 Sound and... more It is with great delight that I intro- duce the reader to Computer Music Journal’s 2015 Sound and Video An- thology. I have curated a series of diverse, yet interrelated, works on the theme of biophysical music.With this term, I refer to live music pieces based on a combination of physi- ological technology and markedly physical, gestural performance. In these works, the physical and physi- ological properties of the performers’ bodies are interlaced with the mate- rial and computational qualities of the electronic instruments, with varying degrees of mutual influence. Musical expression thus arises from an inti- mate and, often, not fully predictable negotiation of human bodies, instru- ments, and programmatic musical ideas
eContact! Biotechnological Performance Practice / Pratiques de performance biotechnologique, 2012
Stelarc explores alternate anatomical architectures. He has performed with a Third Hand, Stomach ... more Stelarc explores alternate anatomical architectures. He has performed with a Third Hand, Stomach Sculpture and Exoskeleton, a 6-legged robot. Fractal Flesh remotely actuates the body with electrical stimulation, while Ping Body and Parasite explore the body choreographed by internet data streams. Prosthetic Head is an embodied conversational agent that speaks to the person who interrogates it. It became the research platform for the Thinking Head, one of three Thinks Systems Special Initiatives jointly funded by the Australian Research Council and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council. The project was centred at the MARCS Labs at the University of Western Sydney. Ear On Arm is a surgical and cell-grown construct that will be internet-enabled, for people in other places. Stelarc: The Monograph, edited by Marqand Smith, was published in 2005. Between 2007–2011, Stelarc was Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Artist at the University of Western Sydney’s MARCS Labs and he is presently Chair in Performance Art at Brunel University West London. In 2010 he received a Special Projects Grant from the Australia Council and was also awarded the Ars Electronica Hybrid Arts Prize. Stelarc’s artwork is represented by Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne.
Works and conversations by Marco Donnarumma, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Lisa Glauer, Bnaya Halperin-Kad... more Works and conversations by Marco Donnarumma, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Lisa Glauer, Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari, Darsha Hewitt, Kiran Kumar, Clarissa Thieme, Zeynep Tuna, and Nino Klingler. Coming from dance, music, film, performance, visual art, and critical theory, nine artists from the UdK Graduate School in Berlin get together to talk concepts and share work. They respond to the sense of despair spreading in times of political backlash: What if it won’t stop here? How are we to dispel the air of gloom that clouds the horizon for imagining change today? And how do we reckon with dire realities but stretch the parameters of space and time enough to find some marge de manoeuvre? Based on artistic experience, the artists in this book access macropolitical concerns via micropolitical practices. They outline what art could do now to face up to the bleak mood and still speak through media, data, and the body.
We are no strangers to the use of computational, physiological and sensing technology in today’s ... more We are no strangers to the use of computational, physiological and sensing technology in today’s art practises. In performances, installations or participatory artworks, performers’ and visitors’ bodies are increasingly integrated into technological systems. Bodies and
machines become linked through wearable sensors, signal amplifiers, transmitters and transducers. For those who can afford it, body technologies have become easy to attain and operate; artists can experiment freely with the coupling of human and machine. This is not only an opportunity to enrich the palette of artistic
tools available, but, more importantly, it is a chance to foster a more widespread understanding of the cultural and political aspects involved in the interaction of humans and technologies.
Google is breeding the young minds of the next generation of artists. Don't take me wrong, it's n... more Google is breeding the young minds of the next generation of artists.
Don't take me wrong, it's not my opinion, it's simply what Google states in the marketing campaign (see the heading image) that is accompanying the infamous DevArt exhibition at the Barbican in London.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2015
Proceedings of the 9 th Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology – CIM14, Nov 1, 2014
The design of and performance with sensor-based musical instruments poses specific opportunities ... more The design of and performance with sensor-based musical instruments poses specific opportunities and challenges in the translation of the performer's physical gestures into sound. The use of muscle biosignals allows directly integrating aspects of a performer's physical gesture into the human-machine interaction and compositional strategies which characterise a digital musical instrument (DMI). The highly personal musical techniques of a few instrument-builders and performers has the potential to evolve into more general musical performance practice, used by a range of artists, composers and students. In order to meet this challenge, there is a need to address the issue of usability of those musical techniques and to clearly specify the advantages that physiological computing offers. This paper describes the principles and challenges of physiological computing for musical performance with DMIs, focusing on muscle-based interaction. This approach is presented through the discussion of two musical interaction modalilties, biocontrol and biophysical. We report on three recent studies looking at multimodal muscle sensing and feature extraction to explain the potential of those methods to inform DMI design and performance. Opportunities for future research are delineated, including the implementation of gesture recognition and gesture variation following for the creation of adaptive DMIs.
Expressivity is a visceral capacity of the human body. To understand what makes a gesture express... more Expressivity is a visceral capacity of the human body. To understand what makes a gesture expressive, we need to consider not only its spatial placement and orientation, but also its dynamics and the mechanisms enacting them. We start by defining gesture and gesture expressivity, and then present fundamental aspects of muscle activity and ways to capture information through electromyography (EMG) and mechanomyography (MMG). We present pilot studies that inspect the ability of users to control spatial and temporal variations of 2D shapes and that use muscle sensing to assess expressive information in gesture execution beyond space and time. This leads us to the design of a study that explores the notion of gesture power in terms of control and sensing. Results give insights to interaction designers to go beyond simplistic gestural interaction, towards the design of interactions that draw upon nuances of expressive gesture.
Proceedings of the International Workshop on Movement and Computing (MoCo), 2014
This article offers an overview of a musical performance instrument that leverages bimodal muscle... more This article offers an overview of a musical performance instrument that leverages bimodal muscle sensing for the sonification of motion. Namely, the instrument a) captures the sound produced by a performer's muscles and makes it available for real-time audio processing, and b) enables a performer to drive the processing parameters using high-level features extracted from muscle activity. This enables the performer to produce and finely shape sound with gestures that do not need to be specified beforehand as a vocabulary of a finite number of movements. This allows the performer and the software to create an open-ended range of sonified movements which arise from the interplay of bodily mechanisms and software processes.
Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME-2013), 2013
We present the first combined use of the electromyogram (EMG) and mechanomyogram (MMG), two biosi... more We present the first combined use of the electromyogram (EMG) and mechanomyogram (MMG), two biosignals that result from muscular activity, for interactive music applications. We exploit differences between these two signals, as reported in the biomedical literature, to create bi-modal sonification and sound synthesis mappings that allow performers to distinguish the two components in a single complex arm gesture. We study non-expert players’ ability to articulate the different modalities. Results show that purposely designed gestures and mapping techniques enable novices to rapidly learn to independently control the two biosignals.
Work in Progress accepted at the Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI2013)
This paper presents work in progress on applying a Multimodal interaction (MMI) approach to stud... more This paper presents work in progress on applying a
Multimodal interaction (MMI) approach to studying
interactive music performance. We report on a study
where an existing musical work was used to provide a
gesture vocabulary. The biophysical sensing already used
in the work was used as input modality, and augmented
with several other input sensing modalities not in the
original piece. The bioacoustics-based sensor,
accelerometer sensors, and full-body motion capture
system generated data recorded into a multimodal
database. We plotted the data from the different
modalities and offer observations based on visual analysis
of the collected data. Our preliminary results show that
there is complementarity of different forms in the
information. We noted three types of complementarity:
synchronicity, coupling, and correlation.
Proceedings of the 4th Pure Data Convention (PdCon), 2011
The Xth Sense is an interactive system for the biophysical generation and control of music. It ma... more The Xth Sense is an interactive system for the biophysical generation and control of music. It makes use of muscle sounds produced by a performer as both raw sonic material and control data. Presently the Xth Sense (XS) technology consists of low-cost, wearable biosensors and a Pure Data based application for capture, analysis, real time processing and playback of human muscle sounds. The technical implementation of the XS biosensors has been recently illustrated in [2].
This paper describes the design of the XS software; it is a program that enables a computer to “listen” to the MMG signals transduced by the XS biosensors, to understand the performance main features, and therefore to interact with the performer. After a brief introduction on the nature of the interaction fostered by the XS technology, I focus on the framework main features such as: the XS library, a tabbed dynamic interface (TDI), a MMG features extraction unit, and a graph-on-parent3 (GOP) routing system for dynamic
mapping of gesture to sound.
[2] Donnarumma, M., “Xth Sense: researching muscle sounds for an experimental paradigm of musical performance” in Proceedings of the Linux Audio Conference (LAC), Maynooth, 2011.
![Research paper thumbnail of [OA] Crossing the Border of Humanity: Cyborgs in Ethics, Law, and Art. Proceedings of the International Online Conference December 14–15, 2021, Medical University of Łódź, Poland. (ed. M. Michałowska)](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/78408857/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](The volume Crossing the Border of Humanity: Cyborgs in Ethics, Law, and Art features contribution... more The volume Crossing the Border of Humanity: Cyborgs in Ethics, Law, and Art features contributions that explore various aspects of cyborgs in philosophical, bioethical, and legal discourses as well as in artistic projects. The goal of this volume is to offer a place for a passionate interdisciplinary debate on the dimensions of the cyborg and the process of cyborgization that we are witnessing in the 21st century. By presenting this volume to readers, we aim to blur the borders between human (mind and flesh) and machine, as well as to cross the boundaries of various disciplines (professions) and passions (e.g., hobbies) of art, science, technology, law, and humanities. By pointing out its multidimensional character, we wish to provide a forum for mutual inspirations.