Research Catalogue

This is the working document of a six-month residency with the Sound and Image Research Centre at the University of Greenwich, summer 2025, funded by the Arts Council England DYCP program. As an exposition, it records the field trip element of the project and begins to explore the role of spatial audio composition and installation in forging deeper relational connections with place. Ultimately, it asks whether the spatial audio encounter alters the subjective position of the human listener towards a more posthuman subjectivity. As the project evolves more will be added with the hope of an eventual live performance of selected compositions and a broader exposition on the role of field recording as a compositional method.

This exposition or archive is a work in progress, under construction, for gathering material of encounters with junipers.

Exploring methods of connecting thinking to space and embodiment in a research that looks at the connection between mental images, language and the body through felt experience.

Desire Machine is an artistic research project that examines collaborative creation through the conceptual framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblage and desiring machines. Developed as part of the Atlas of Smooth Spaces research initiative, the project explores how movement, sound, and algorithmic systems can function as heterogeneous components within a non-hierarchical and non-representational assemblage. Real-time body data, generative soundscapes, and responsive lighting are integrated via a recursive feedback structure, allowing for emergent behaviours and dynamic modulation across media. Rather than focusing on disciplinary integration, Desire Machine proposes a co-functional space defined by distributed agency, where artistic production unfolds through competencies and material relations. The project offers a methodological proposition for rethinking compositional practice as a site of continuous negotiation, transformation, and becoming.

RESPONSIVE SPACE – SOUNDING INTO MATERIALITY (2014–2020) is an in-depth research project into the interrelationship between us and our surroundings. The artworks can be described as large sculptural sound installations which blur the lines between visual art, performing arts and sound art. The works explore space, material, sound, body and time as equal parts in a composition. The main artworks of the research INTERFERENCE, RESONANCE, SEDIMENT, PLACE 1 and PLACE 2 are in a variety of ways inquiries towards an expanded experience of the dialogue between presence and materiality. The artworks are composed environments which respond and take shape and form from their surroundings, seeking to touch proximity zones where we as humans can sense aspects of being closely intertwined with our surroundings. The act of listening is of central importance in the artistic survey. Olaussen stages space utilising the mediums of sound, minimalistic sculpture and dramaturgical structures. This exposition is part of Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen’s artistic research project Responsive Space – Sounding into Materiality (2014–2020) at the Norwegian Theatre Academy, Østfold University College. The project complies with the guidelines for the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme from 2019. Artistic practice and reflection are at the heart of the research programme. Originally published in Norwegian in 2019, this work has now been translated into English by Peter Cripps, with the support of the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills.

In this exposition, I explore my artistic practice based on collaborations between female folk singers in Finland and Bulgaria from 2018 to 2022. The artistic material of the exposition consists of a music video trilogy (2019, 2020 and 2022) based on my compositions and arrangements in the solo album Nani (2020), produced in cooperation with the younger generation of the Bulgarian women's choir, Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. In addition to the collaborative artistic practice, I interviewed six of the Bulgarian singers. Insights from the data gathered in these ethnographic interviews are intertwined with the analysis of the artistic practice. Throughout the artistic and ethnographic research processes, I applied a feminist intersectional pedagogical approach by focusing particularly on the power relations and the question of female agency in the arts and wider society. In this exposition, I argue that the incorporation of intersectional feminist perspectives in transnational artistic work can contribute to both artistic practice and transnational interactions in ways that may strengthen women's agency in the folk music field of their respective cultural and social environments. Feminist folk music composition was applied at all stages of the artistic and research work. By highlighting the stories, voices, and bodies of women of different ages and cultural locations, the artistic practice represented the construction of counter-myths and transgenerationality. In addition, an intersectional feminist approach helped to identify the power relations involved in transnational collaboration, particularly regarding economic inequality and the roles and different opportunities of women musicians in Finland and Bulgaria. Download Accessible PDF