Conference Schedule

If we look at the human body closely, consider its visceral processes of self-regulation and perception, we soon realise that the body is an incomplete object. It is incomplete because it is constantly shifting between one state and the other, attempting as it does routinely, to keep itself intact and make a sense of the surrounding world. From this viewpoint, the human body is unfinished. Always adapting, changing, mutating and evolving. With this work, I wanted to create a musical performance that is, in the same way as the human body, incomplete, unfinished, emergent.
Music for Unfinished Body (Marco Donnarumma, in progress) is a physical performance of emergent music.The player wears two different types of biosensors, over 4 input channels. One pair of sensors capture the muscle acoustic energy using the Xth Sense1, and the register their electrical tension using custom hardware. A dedicated software extracts a set of feature from each of the channels. The features set is a computational model of the high-level characteristics of the player's movement, namely, tension, strength, complexity, and activation. Rather than mapping the set of features to sound control parameters, the feature set is fed to an unsupervised machine learning algorithm. The algorithm does not merely classify the performer's physical gesture, it rather continuously model the variations between one gesture and the other, learning in real time, one gesture after the other. The algorhitm evolves by looking for differences and emeregent behaviours of my muscle tissues. It looks at the unfinished movements and attempts to foresees what the performer will do next. Then, the algorithm creates gesture-to-sound mapping according to the recurrent patterns in the gesture variations, and use that information to modulate a music system based on iterative scanned wave synthesis. One sinewave at a time, the performer is able to build an increasingly complex sonic world which cannot be planned beforehand, but it rather emerges through the entanglement of physicality, effort, musical intention and computational modeling.

One at a time, a visitor kneels down on a pedestal embedded with a computer, the visitor's head is resting on a pedestal. The computer is filled with digital viruses gathered from the net. The viruses are transduced into infrasounds and low frequencies oscillations that mechanically resonate the visitor's bones and skull by means of high-power skeletal resonance. While the viruses are spread inside the visitor's body, the unique nature of the raw data they are composed of alters the rhythm of the body internal organs.
"Septic" was commissioned by Transmediale / Art Hack Day for the recent 2014 exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.