The space is completely dark. The player, whose body is partly naked and partly painted in black, performs a tense choreography that gradually morphs his body.

Two types of wearable biosensors transmit data from the performer’s body to the software: microphones capture sounds from muscles and internal organs, and electrodes capture muscle voltages. Using particular audio-analysis algorithms, the instrument re-synthesizes the bodily sounds by orchestrating a network of digital oscillators. Further, the instrument learns the nuances of the performer’s movement and thus chooses whether to activate particular oscillators, how to regulate volumes, glissandos and multi-channel diffusion, and how to adjust feedback amounts within the network.

The player cannot control the instrument, but only learn how to affect it and be affected by it. The piece discards conventional performer-instrument relationships—founded on the performer’s full control of the instrument—in favor of an unstable corporeal engagement between the two. Through the rhythm of sound, vibration and light, the performer’s body and the instrument mutate, physically and conceptually, into something “other”; an unfamiliar creature defying the common definition of the human.

Author, research, concept, music, choreography, light design, performance, programming: Marco Donnarumma
Additional programming and research: Baptiste Caramiaux
Stage production: Margherita Pevere
Photography: Onuk and ZKM
Supported by: EAVI, Goldsmiths, University of London
Research funding: European Research Council

Uwe Rieger (DE), Carol Brown (NZ)

Singularity s a two part performance blending data, dance, music and architecture in a 360-degree haptic-digital environment. Marked with tracking devices, three performers become an experiential interface, transforming virtual and physical movement into mutable architectural spaces.

Large 3D holographic constructions are interactively drawn and moved by the dancers in a space defined by a live-render program, motion-tracking cameras, projection, and haze particles. A digitally augmented world materializes as wormholes, kites, watery walls and magnetic particles. Audience and performer experience an intermixing of techno sound, movement and data through immersive transforming arcs of light.

Credits

Creative Directors: Uwe Rieger (architecture), Carol Brown (choreography)
Design and programming: Yinan Liu
Design and graphics: Ying Miao
Music: Jérome Soudan (Mimetic)
Performers: Zahra Killeen-Chance, Adam Naughton, Solomon Holly-Massey
Lighting Consultant: Margie Medlin

The project is supported by Creative New Zealand, and the University of Auckland.

This work constitutes a new stage in the artists’ researches. They carried out new investigations, each within their own domain, on plastic and sound organicity in order to combine them into this fascinating object: a return to life operated by means of mechanics and sound processing. The approach is a long-term analysis culminating in an advanced and complex minimalism.

Nyloïd is a rudimentary structure. Often extreme, its movements are at the junction between mechanical perfection and raw material. Its impressive sounds, which seem to emanate from the material itself, are the result of an extremely sophisticated vocal research. The combination of raw material, mechanical and sound perfection results in a kind of hypnotic and dramaturgic choreography from which, in a paradoxical way, perfectly random kinetics arise.

Credits

Cod.Act is André and Michel Décosterd