Ex Silens

Music and light generate trance-inducing sound waves. Cochlear implants and AI-powered hearing algorithms become bio-machines that amplify sounds from the performer’s body to propagate them through the bodies of the audience. These new organs, designed and handcrafted by the artist, amplify a kaleidoscopic soundscape that has always been there. ‘Ex Silens’ offers deaf and hard-of-hearing audience members, as well as those with normal hearing, an audiovisual experience that completely rethinks concepts such as deafness and cyborgs.

Marco Donnarumma is an artist, theatre director, inventor and theorist. His work confronts normative body politics with uncompromising counter-narratives, in which bodies exist in a tension between control and agency, between presence and absence, grace and monstrosity. He is best known for creating body-machines that utilise sound, AI, biosensors and robotics to transform the body into a site of resistance and transformation. Marco Donnarumma has presented his work in 38 countries across Asia, Europe and the Americas and is the recipient of numerous awards, most notably the Prix Ars Electronica’s Award of Distinction in Sound Art 2017, the title of ‘Artist of the Year of Science 2018’ from the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education, and a Hyundai ZER01NE Creator grant in 2024. Donnarumma has been described by the Austrian national newspaper *Der Standard* as a pioneer in the performing arts using cutting-edge technology. His writings have been published in *Frontiers in Computer Science*, the *Computer Music Journal* and the *Performance Research Journal*, amongst others.

As part of the NO LIMITS Disability & Performing Arts Festival.

Co-produced by PACT Zollverein and with academic support from the Intelligent Instruments Lab at the Iceland University of the Arts in Reykjavík.

Funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia as part of a media art grant.

No spoken language.

• The performance on 13 November will feature audio description (in German).