℧R is a walk in the dark. A thin body walks while a dim light shines. A path covered in soil is between them. Gazeless, the figure walks and prays, walks and prays, walks and, entranced, pries into the darkness.

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?

The performance is followed by a conversation between Fronte Vacuo and Nimrod Vardi (arebyte’s creative director) unfolding the ideas, research and artistic methodology behind the Humane Methods saga (2019-ad infinitum).

The only project of the group, Humane Methods exemplifies the group's conception of live art as a social experiment. The saga consists of happenings, living installations and stage productions where dance, theatre, bioart, interactive music, living scenography and AI technology integrate into pulsating ecosystems. Each work in the saga acts as a branch of a rhizome: each dives into different facets of the same theme and world, with an ever growing cast of human and non-human characters. The works in the series – ΔNFANG (2019), ℧R (2020), ΣXHALE (2021-22) and δISSOLUTION (in progress) – combine in different ways performing arts with technology and the human with the non-human to reveal the violence of algorithmic societies through sensory, physical and human strategies. The conversation will be followed by a Show & Tell session where Fronte Vacuo will invite visitors to discover the inner working of the machines used in the performance, interact with <dmb>, the group's custom-made, computer vision AI, and talk face to face with the artists about the multiple technological, artistic and theoretical layers of the group's practice.

The performance is preceded by Science Fiction Squared, a one day symposium exploring the future of science fiction

The performance contains nudity and strobe lighting that may potentially trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy. (18+)

Fronte Vacuo was founded in 2019 by artists Marco Donnarumma, Margherita Pevere and Andrea Familari. Witnessing the convergence of ecological disruption, socio-political polarization and technological advance, they chose to combine their individual practices into a single artistic entity. Fronte Vacuo, thus, speaks a language that, by combining their expertise in media art, performance, interactive music, video art and bioart, sidesteps delimitations of genre.

The group’s works can be understood as social experiments aimed at deconditioning audiences’ preconceptions through uncanny methods of interaction and rigorous work on symbolism. Their working materials are human and more-than-human bodies, organic symbionts and artificial intelligence machines, spatial sounds and morphing images interwoven into tumultuous biomes.

Their only project, Humane Methods (2019-ad infinitum) consists of durational productions, street performances and hybrid live installations that unfold the saga of a society out of time. Inspired by the myriad methods of violence found in algorithmic societies, the project questions the concepts of responsibility, autonomy, harm, ritual and power by plunging audiences into more-than-real chains of events.

Fronte’s research emerges from shared and dynamic authorship: any member of the group may direct or initiate a project and creative roles are shuffled around in ever-changing ways. This ensures the group’s creative limits are constantly challenged, while resisting the conventional notion of artistic authorship. Fronte would not exist without its allies and its research network – a local and international community for artistic and scientific research in the performing arts, art & science and technology.

Marco Donnarumma
Marco (DE) is an artist, performer, stage director and scholar weaving together contemporary performance, new media art and computer music since the early 2000s. He manipulates bodies, creates choreographies, engineers machines and composes sounds, thus combining disciplines, media and emerging technologies into an oneiric, sensual, uncompromising aesthetics. He is internationally acknowledged for genre-defying solo performances, stage productions and installations where the body becomes a morphing language to speak critically of ritual, power and technology.

Margherita Pevere
Margherita (DE) is an internationally acknowledged artist and researcher whose practice glides across biological arts and performance with a distinctive visceral signature. Her transdisciplinary inquiry hybridizes biolab practice, biotechnology, ecology, environmental politics, gender and death studies, with a healthy dose of hacking attitude to create arresting installations and performances that hunt today’s surging ecological complexity. Her body of work is a blooming garden crawling with genetically edited bacteria, her own cells, sex hormones, microbial biofilm, bovine blood, slugs, growing plants and decomposing biological remains.

Andrea Familari
Andrea (DE) is a multimedia artist working across theatre, music and contemporary art, and an active agent in the international live audio/visual scene. Experimenting since 2011 with images and their technologies, he developed his practice within the underground media art scene. Today, his research develops through observations of generative processes, analysed through “noise” intended as a concept as well as a technological phenomena. His work is realized by means of diverse media, such as video screenings, interactive installations and prints. His repertoire tours regularly from theaters to concert halls, festivals and museums, and has been presented in 23 countries worldwide.