Marco Donnarumma is an Italian performance artist and scholar who exists on the fringes of experimental noise. ‘Music for Flesh II’, a previous work, uses muscle spasms to make music, and as Donnarumma writhes and contorts his body his motions build ambient soundscapes that are equal parts euphoric and unsettling.
This became a framework of sorts for his 2016 piece Corpus Nil. Biophysical sensors are attached to a person’s body that feed body voltage to a machine, setting of various light and sound signals that morph over time. Both the performer and the artificially intelligent machine are independent but speak to one another through a constant feedback loop of noise that builds as muscle tension and skin friction trigger sensors. This creates an entity that is part human and part machine.