Le forme del gesto. Corporeità e dispositivi tecnologici

This intervention notably offers an opportunity to reflect upon the various means and modalities adopted by artists and researchers to inscribe the mediated body and its manifestations within the spectrum of current artistic production. This inquiry adopts a multimodal, three-stranded methodological approach (in particular physiology and philosophy), which reveals – as with a prism – and re-interprets existing theoretical perspectives concerning the status of corporeality within contemporary performing arts and performance integrating technology. From this central axis, the impact of technology in the body-based arts and, specifically, relationships between the body and technology that imply intermodality, will be examined. One example might be the analysis of practices which generate «sound bodies», whereby the electronic sound of the scene is an acoustic material, but also, the body becomes a medium for the production of sound. Pitozzi firstly considers a range of contemporary experimentation which demonstrates a new understanding of multimodality: from the organic dimension of the body seen onstage in the works of artists such as Myriam Gourfink/Kasper T. Toeplitz, Ginette Laurin/Martin Messier, Angelin Preljocaj/Granula Synthesis or Isabelle Van Grimde and Hiroaki Umeda. This proposal further questions existing understandings of performative presence and other effects of presence through an analysis of multisensory devices and scenographies which produce sensory destabilization, while also examining the consequences of synesthesia in empathic relationships they develop between performers and spectators.