Ex Silens: From the series ‘I Am Your Body’
Ex Silens is an experience into a radically alternative sensorium through the entanglement of multiple bodies, multiple agencies.
About Ex Silens: From the series ‘I Am Your Body’
Ex Silens is part of the series I Am Your Body (2022-present), a project investigating deafness, sound and (artificial) intelligence through participatory research driven by d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people.
What is deafness if not another mode of perception? What is a cyborg if not an exploded mirror of today’s corporeal experience? What is the fear of the other if not a prelude to isolation? The instability and interdependence of human bodies are the core of their existence.
Ex Silens is an experience into a radically alternative sensorium through the entanglement of multiple bodies, multiple agencies. One body is made of diverging limbs and flesh, another of resonating bones and cables. Together with the bodies of the audience members, they sound and vibrate, entering thus in material, sonic and conceptual feedback with one another; they become one, but not for long.
An exacting and sinuous ritual of sensory reorganization, Ex Silens delves into the corporeal knowledge hiding at the edges of experience. It is a dreamlike encounter, yet raw and real. It is a reminiscence, a reverie surging through real-life accounts of modes of perception that are systematically rejected by the imperative of the normal.
Here, cochlear implants, AI hearing algorithms and amplifiers are extracted from their capitalist chain of production and subverted to create sonic prostheses with their own agencies. Radically intimate, the prostheses are organs of sharing: they amplify sounds from the performer’s muscle, heartbeat and blood flow, diffuse vibrations through the bodies of audience and performer and in doing so they resonate sensible forms of being.
Technology is, by its nature, normative, but it doesn’t have to be. In Ex Silens, hearing algorithms, AI and cochlear prostheses are not what they are supposed to be. They are morphed into new means of sensing; they do not try to repair a loss with a gain, but rather magnify a kaleidoscopic sound world that’s always been there.
The interactive music of Ex Silens was composed by Donnarumma in ways that offer a complete experience to the d/Deaf public as well as the non-d/Deaf. Audience members who are d/Deaf, hard of hearing, or hearing can all experience the performance each according to their sensory configurations. There is no “normal” way of listening to it.
This event is part of the Edinburgh Futures Institute's free public events series Learning Curves, taking place from October-December 2024. Tickets are free but booking is essential.
Image Credit: Underskin Photography
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