Artist and scholar.
Born in Naples, Italy, 1984. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
A unique presence across contemporary performance and media art, Marco Donnarumma distinguishes himself by his use of emerging technology to deliver artworks that are at once intimate and powerful, oneiric and uncompromising, sensual and confrontational. Working with biotechnology, biophysical sensing, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and neurorobotics, Donnarumma expresses the chimerical nature of the body with a new and unsettling intensity. He is renown for his focus on sound, whose physicality and depth he exploits to create experiences of instability, awe, shock and entrainment.
Since the early 2000s, Donnarumma has been developing a deeply transdisciplinary expertise, drawing equally from live art, music, biological science, computation and cultural studies. He holds a Ph.D. in performing arts, computing and body theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently a Research Fellow at the Berlin University of the Arts in partnership with the Neurorobotics Research Lab Berlin. His newest performance for human dancers and AI prostheses, Alia: Zǔ tài, was recently awarded the Goethe Institut’s International Coproduction Fund, and will be co-produced in 2018 by CTM Festival (Berlin) and Chronus Art Center (Shanghai) during a year of exchange across Germany and China.
Writing regularly on body, music, technology and performance studies, Donnarumma is published by MIT Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge and Springer. His artworks received several awards, including the second prize (Award of Distinction) in Sound Art at the Prix Ars Electronica (2017), the first prize at the Cynetart Award for Computer Based Art (2014), the second prize at TransitioMX Award for New Media Art (2013), and the first prize at the Guthman New Musical Instrument Competition (2012), among others. Articles and interviews featuring his work appear on BBC, The WIRE, Forbes, Reuters, ARTE.TV, Wired, IEEE, RTVE, El Pais, CreativeApplications, ResonanceFM and The Creators Project.
Donnarumma’s arresting visions of the body toured more than 60 countries worldwide with shows at Venice Biennale (Venice), Steirischer Herbst (Graz), ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe), Sónar+D Advanced Music Festival (Barcelona), ISEA International Symposium on Electronic Art (Albuquerque), FILE Electronic Language Festival (Sao Paulo), RPM: Ten Years of Sound Art in China (Shanghai), Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City), Némo Biennal of Digital Arts (Paris), transmediale Festival for Art and Digital Culture and CTM Festival for Adventurous Music and Art (Berlin). He was granted fundings from the European Commission, Goethe-Institut, British Council, Creative Scotland, New Media Scotland, and the Danish Arts Council, and received commissions from CTM, transmediale, 4DSOUND, European Conference of Promoters of New Music and STEIM.
