Fronte Vacuo: Humane Methods [℧R]

arebyte presents ℧R, a solo performance by Fronte Vacuo, as part of arebyte's 2022/23 programme Sci-Fi which looks at fictioning and alternative futures through a series of exhibitions, live performances, online experiences and educational activities.

℧R is a performance for a faceless body, AI algorithms, lights and the vibrational force of sound, developed and produced by the Performance-Theatre group Fronte Vacuo (Marco Donnarumma, Margherita Pevere and Andrea Familari), as a new rhizome of their project Humane Methods. ℧R reflects on violence as a foundation of current algorithmic societies: a violence of instructions, of systems, of infrastructures created with the specific purpose of abusing all living beings. Such systems work through loops, organised repetitions. Humans make instructions, machines repeat instructions, living things suffer instructions, on and on and on. The piece takes the loop as a starting point to combine multi-sensorial stimulation with human-computer interaction and somatic practices to test the seeming impossibilities of bodily articulation and repetition. Embodied in Marco Donnarumma’s musical instrument XTH Sense, an interactive, machine learning algorithm transforms the inner sound of muscles, blood, and bones into a real-time choreography of movement, sounds and light.

Gazeless, a faceless figure walks and prays, walks and prays, walks and, entranced, pries into the darkness. Its red cloth sanctifies it. Its missing face alienates it. The walk is a loop, a prayer, an aggression, an annihilation and a transformation. An AI computer vision system watches over the body, attempting to distinguish the body from the ‘noise’ surrounding it. The AI wants to represent what it sees, but the system works against itself in a paradoxical loop; the more the algorithm learns to see, the brighter the light becomes. In the eyes of the algorithm, the body is eaten by the storm of light. The flesh of the nameless’ limbs is amplified: microphones onto the muscular tissue magnify the inner sonic tumult of the body. The inner tension resounds in the rising brightness. Movement is sound, repeat; sound is vibration, repeat; vibration is pressure, repeat; pressure is released. A grinding howling grows ominously, repetition turns into dysfunction, brightness turns into blindness. Is the unnamed going to reach the light and burn, just as moths do?