Humane Methods

Humane Methods (2019-ad infinitum) is – and will be – the only project of the performance group Fronte Vacuo. It is the saga of a broken, future society seeking how to respectfully coexist with nature and technology, oscillating between new forms of algorithmic violence and posthuman empathy. The stories of this fictional society become stage productions, street performances and hybrid live installations where audiences live hyper-real science fiction scenarios. By experiencing the world of Humane Methods, audiences are brought to reflect on empathy, violence, communal action and power structures in ways that are rewarding and challenging, sensorially charged and evocative.

In Humane Methods, dancetheatre, bioart, interactive music, living scenography, and AI technology integrate into pulsating ecosystems. Each work in the series is a rhizome: each dives into different facets of the same theme and world and characters shift interchangeably from one story to the other. The works created so far – ΔNFANG (2019), ℧R (2020) and ΣXHALE (2021-22) and δISSOLUTION (2022) (now touring) – combine in different ways live art with technology and the human with the non-human to create an alternative artistic language. It is an aesthetic research into how a synthesis of symbols, movement, music and technology can ignite a politics of poetic engagement.

The world of Humane Methods owns its own language, mythology, writing, gestures and unsaid rules. Existing beyond distopia and utopia, that of Humane Methods is a parallel world that is, at once, fundamentally abstract from and profoundly intimate with the ‘real’. Transdisciplinary in nature and intent, the pieces integrate procedural dramaturgy, living set design, ritual choreography, audience participation and specially tailored AI systems to question not only the ethic of algorithms, but also that of human individuals.

You can browse through the pieces below (swipe left or click the arrows to navigate. Click on a piece to read more).