Research Catalogue

This artistic research investigates what kind of music arises from multiple musical identities. The answer is the album III, a collaborative work with guitarist Juhani Silvola, supported by a research exposition that documents and reflects upon the creative process, and an extensive timeline showing it as it unfolded. The main argumentation within the work revolves around the importance of distinguishing between musical identities (plural) and personality (singular). The rationale behind this is to generate productive creative friction – to use the knowledge of multiplicity as a tool – to identify and push against boundaries and have knowledge from one identity inform, and expand, another. Identities are multiple, situational, and enacted through doings: (in my case) the drummer, the singer, the producer, the programmer, et al. They coexist, each with its own expectations, vocabulary, and criteria for success. Personality, by contrast, is shown as the continuous thread – the container in which all identities meet and negotiate, providing coherence without dissolving difference. The research unfolds across three phases: SStartup, Deconstruction, and Assemblage. Methods include archival listening (revisiting accumulated recordings as material to draw from, either through self-gratification or analysis), physical and material constraints, custom software tools, and playing my instruments. In some cases, peripheral projects became ‘methodological sites’, allowing for focused and longer-term exploration and research. Spirit of Rain, Be Like Water, and a duo with Hans Martin Austestad, all function as experiments where methods combine and generate knowledge. A central concern is the role of machines in creative practice. Noting, but not necessarily drawing on, philosopher John Searle's (1980) Chinese Room Argument and the concept of procedural agency, this work follows a line of thought in which machines may exhibit tendencies, but not personality. What emerges from human-machine collaboration is shaped by this asymmetry. The exposition, built using HTML and hosted in the Research Catalogue framework, is not a linear argument entirely, but rather a pathway through sounds, texts, videos, and fragments – organized semi-chronologically and tagged by function. It demonstrates that answering a question about musical identity requires both artistic result and theoretically aligned reflection.

In the Mirror of Care Work researches skills within Nordic interactive performance practices. Using the mirror as a metaphor for visualisation and connection, artist Inga Gerner Nielsen brings into conversation the work of nurses and interactive performers. By inviting in the perspectives of care workers and looking into the history of their profession, Inga engages in discussions about the politics, mythologies and poetics of her own field. What do we see when we look in the mirror, and when that mirror is a nurse? Do we, as performers – like the nurses were once said to – abide by the feeling of a calling? Does this involve a kind of spiritual care for our audience? And what of the nurses’ working conditions should we perhaps try to adopt as (care giving) performers? The project visited Stockholm (MDT) in September 2023 and Helsinki in January 2024 in a two-day symposium to meet and exchange with local artists about the aspect of care work in their artistic practice . The project is based in a long-term collaboration with the nursing school at UCN Hjørring & Thisted in the north of Denmark. Together with teacher of the History of Nursing, Helle Kronborg Krogsgaard, Inga gerner Nielsen is developing ways of integrating interative performance excersices and visual art into the teaching of 1.st, 4th and 7th semester nursing students.

Research Portal of Janacek Academy of Performing Arts in Brno

As interaction with corporate artificial intelligence increasingly becomes a precondition for contemporary life, artists need to see beyond Generative AI (GenAI) technology as a discrete tool that makes generic products. Instead, they can imagine combinatorial approaches and conceptual frameworks for AI-enabled artworks. Through my practice-based research, the act of prompting multimodal GenAI models has been informed by comprehending an assemblage as a “framework of instruction” held together through poetic alliances, within which the output from one component feeds the process of another. Practical experiments explored an interrelation of body, text, and predictive technology, where an algorithmic prediction of human action conjured “biometric poetry” that was used to stimulate a language model. Working with archival film footage and digital puppets animated with motion-capture files gave rise to the idea of a camera’s field of view – with its bounded contents acting like a key – eliciting value from a language model in a novel form of story making. Potential erroneous inferences were perceived as a new form of chance operation and a characteristic of algorithmic remix as defined by Steve F. Anderson. This method has been further developed in a project that combines performance, waste material, object recognition, and a language model to explore how the manipulation of garbage can be rationalised by a machine to produce poetic texts as a commentary to action portrayed on a screen.

This paper delves into the dynamics and dramaturgical specifications of ANA, a theatrical installation engineered for co-creating narratives in a dialogic process with individual users. ANA embodies a collaborative storytelling environment that is used to communicate narrative and emotional information through multiple modalities, thereby bringing into focus an unexpectedly human essence in a human-machine interaction. Integrating GPT-4, emotion-recognition algorithms and a simulation of its own affective state, ANA engages users in a 10-minute interaction, fostering an immersive narrative exchange where the affective dimension of collaborative storytelling takes precedence. This paper explores the specific challenges of prompt design in this setting, focusing on the concept of emotional attuning, the feeling of being “in sync” with a machine throughout the interaction. Through an analytical lens encompassing cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and prompting techniques, the authors describe and reflect practices of employing multimodal sensorial data such as emotion recognition, and dramatic considerations, into the process of designing prompts. They also describe and reflect on their attempts to establish a form of meta-communication with the machine about the emotional aspects of the experience. By focusing on dramaturgical and improvisational strategies, this paper underscores the pivotal significance of emotional attunement and multimodal communication in fostering intimate technological engagement.

How useful can AI be at this present moment to generate assignments or instructions to teach and train people to live more playful, creative and ethical lives? In this artistic research, I try to put aside fears of a dystopian future in which runaway AI assumes control over humanity, and suspend them long enough to play with the idea of reversing the usual dynamic: what if AI were to instruct us, instead of us instructing AI? What kind of positive outcomes could emerge? I borrow from traditions of instruction art and avant-garde art, and I employ discursive practices that alternate between techno-enthusiastic and techno-skeptical. The AI tool ChatGPT and I hold conversations in which we explore the research question together, and in which I prompt ChatGPT to issue me instructions, then I describe the process and result of executing the instructions.