Please join us for a free public film screening + artist talk with Marco Donnarumma of NIRANTHEA, a hybrid short film combining documentary, audiovisual synaesthesia and AI hearing algorithms. The film is offered as part of the PhD Course on Biophysical Expression, Affect and Movement at Aalborg Univeristy.

NIRANTHEA offers a poetic reflection on the unlearning of normative conceptions of sound and body technology. It does so directly through the unscripted ideas, thoughts and experiences of a group of six d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. The dialogues were filmed after five months of communal research, during which the group had engaged in regular conversations and research sessions mediated by artist Marco Donnarumma – himself late-deafened.
This process of sharing, analysis and intimate reflection served to create a new voice that is one and multiple at once. The title symbolises this multiplicity: Niranthea is, in fact, an acronym of the letters found in the first names of the members of the working group, Adriane, Ann-Catrin, Mara, Martin, Wojciech. Through their different voices, Niranthea becomes a multiform identity, a pluripotent and plurisensitive body of perception. The knowledge embodied by Niranthea strives to describe an incredibly wide rage of sonic experiences that do not have anything to do with “hearing” as most commonly intended. Such experiences go well beyond the dominating audist understanding of sound perception and thus inevitably trigger urgent questions on the relationship between sites of power and disabled bodies, self-empowerment, misunderstanding and the role of technology in this ecology.

The film will be followed by a discussion with Donnarumma.

About the Artist. Marco Donnarumma (DE) is an artist, performer, inventor, stage director and theorist weaving together contemporary performance, new media art and interactive computer music since the early 2000s. To create his artworks, he manipulates bodies and invents machines, crafts choreographies and composes sounds, thus combining disciplines, media and technology into an oneiric, sensual, uncompromising aesthetics. He is internationally acknowledged for solo performances, stage productions and installations that defy genres, and where the body becomes a morphing language to speak critically of ritual, power and technology. Donnarumma’s latest series of artworks, I Am Your Body (2021-present), explores the relation between sound, AI and the embodied knowledge enshrined in d/Deaf and hard of hearing bodies. It does so through film, performance, creation of custom technologies and participatory research, reframing in the process the concepts of ‘prosthesis’ and ‘cyborg’.

For more info visit: https://marcodonnarumma.com