The project Sensory Cartographies is an ongoing collaboration between artists Sissel Marie Tonn and Jonathan Reus. In this project we explore the relationships between consciousness, body and environment, as mediated by the filtration mechanisms of the senses. At the center of the project is a process-driven approach to creating worn instrumentations which rethink modes of collecting, categorizing and mapping from the perspective of lived experience. They will present the outcome of the workshop together with the participants.

Jonathan Reus-Brodsky is an American composer-performer working at the intersections of applied science, electronic music and digital cultures. His work explores alternative formations of instruments and instrumentations and their capacities to challenge and reshape traditional and contemporary experiences of performed sound.

Sissel Marie Tonn is a Danish artist living in The Hague. She works with multi-media installation, drawing and writing, and her processual approach is driven by a great deal of curiosity and the possibilities of building relationships across fields. Her work builds upon an interest in ‘presence’ within ecologies undergoing subtle or profound changes. Within this discourse the work explores these environmental (often humanly induced) changes, extending the public debates towards epistemological issues connecting these events to the body and its sensing of presence.

Corpus Nil is a ritual of birth for a modified body, a tense and sensual choreography between a human performer and an autonomous machine exploding through sound and light.

Corpus Nil is a performance for a human body and an autonomous machine. A naked body, partly human and partly machine, lies on stage. It is an amorphous cluster of skin, muscles, hardware and software. As the performance begins, the body slowly evolves into a unfamiliar being. It reconfigures its parts through a sensuous choreography pushing the limits of muscular tension, limbs torsion, skin friction and equilibrium.

Biophysical sensors attached to the performer`s limbs capture bodily electrical voltages and corporeal sounds and feed them to an autonomous machine. Thanks to a sophisticated set of algorithms, the physical mutation of the body on stage sets off a synaesthetic play of sound and light which impacts and submerges the audience, inducing a trance-like experience. The spectators feel as if the heartbeat of the new being on stage was beating within their own bodies.

The biological signals of the human body influence the choices of the machine, but cannot control what the machine will do. Despite being intimately linked to the human body, the machine is autonomous and chooses on its own how to respond to the performer`s movements. The corporeal sound frequencies are spatialised using a multi-channel sound system surrounding the audience, while bioelectrical flashes of light rhythmically illuminate the space. The body and the machine form a novel kind of being, unknown and partial, disturbing and graceful.

A unique presence in contemporary performance, Marco Donnarumma distinguishes himself by his use of emerging technology to deliver body performances that are at once intimate and powerful, oneiric and uncompromising, sensual and confrontational. Working with biotechnology, biophysical sensing, and more recently artificial intelligence and neurorobotics, Donnarumma expresses the chimerical nature of the body with a new and unsettling intensity. He is renown for his skill in using sound, whose physicality and depth he exploits to create experiences of instability, awe, shock and entrainment.