CONDUCTING THE AMPLIFIED BODY

an ensemble of electrically [de]controlled musicians

Michaela Davies

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Amplifying bodies: a historical perspective of electrical muscle stimulation on art & science by Pedro Lopes

When in 1780, Luigi Galvani experimentally discovered that the muscles of dead frogs legs twitched when struck by an electrical impulse, the idea of the electrical wiring of our body sparked. We've certainly come a long way from this earlier model of bioelectricity to our contemporary neuroscience assumptions. Remarkably, this idea of hacking into the human body by firing muscles cells using electricity to cause an involuntary motion stayed confined to medical domain for a long time, with great results in rehabilitation of patients with strokes, muscle injuries and so forth.

Interestingly, only in the last decade, artists and scientists pushed the boundaries of what involuntary control could provide beyond the sphere of disable bodies -- with most credit to Stelarc for his early explorations of "being under control" by the audience itself, which was achieved through attaching electrodes to his muscles and being stimulated during the performance.

Recently, the application of electrical muscle stimulation as a interface to interact with technology depicts how wired we are into machines -- or is it vice versa? These human-computer interfaces allow us to interact with the digital realm through the corporeality of our bodies, by having computer moving us to signal a change in data, such as forces from a video-game becoming real and moving your body involuntarily. Taking this further, researchers have used electrical stimulation to allow everyday objects to tell us how to use them best by providing motion instructions through the muscles instead of reading an instruction manual, allowing you operating a tool you've never seen before.

The nature of these art and research approaches reveals the paradox: who's the interface and who's the device? Michaela Davies' work on musical performances subverted by electrical stimulation to disrupt the musicians gestures, such as bowing a violin or playing a piano, illustrate that the question of agency does not live in the meta-phorical domain, but is, instead, a very meta-physical question. 

A conductors baton with attached accelerometer triggers a MIDI controlled EMS device via max/msp, which sends electrical impulses to the performers muscles to control their movement.

Conducting the Amplified Body was a development and presentation of a series of musical performances using electric muscle stimulation, with Michaela Davies, Pedro Lopes, Robert Lindenberg, Ian Douglas-Moore, and Jonathan Heilbron, at ACUD Macht Neu (Berlin). Curated by Desiree Förster