Ex Silens
What is deafness if not another mode of perception? What is a cyborg if not an exploded mirror of today’s corporeal experience? Ex Silens combines movement, sound, space and technology to dive into the corporeal knowledge at the edges of experience.
The piece invites audiences to a radically alternative sensorium. They encounter an alien, ingenuous creature and a bare, posthuman totem. With the audience as accomplices, they touch and fuse with one another, in a material, sonic, and conceptual feedback. Tender and extreme, Ex Silens is a ritual of sensory reorganization. Subwoofers and lights produce trance-inducing seismic waves, while touch, caresses and improvised interactions build up a strange and engrossing intimacy.
Cochlear implants and AI hearing algorithms become sonic prostheses with their own agencies. They respond to the creature’s movement, mingle with the public and amplify sounds from muscles and heart to physically diffuse them through the bodies of audience. These prostheses are organs of sharing; they do not repair a loss but magnify a kaleidoscopic sound world that has always been there.
Ex Silens is part of the series I Am Your Body (2022-present), a project investigating deafness, sound, and (artificial) intelligence through participatory research driven by d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people.
The piece offers a complete audiovisual experience to d/Deaf and non-d/Deaf audiences. Each individual can participate according to their sensory configurations.
Biography
Marco Donnarumma creates technological bodies to navigate the boundaries of experience. Since the early 2000s he has been blending performance, new media art, and interactive music. Born hearing and then become late-deafened, he creates work that, through resonating aesthetic encounters, challenges how powers of society regulate the human body.