Research Catalogue

Dérive (2017) for string quartet and live-electronics explores the aesthetic consequences of different ideas of the role of subjectivity in sonification processes, the concept of dérive (drift) and the notion of musical structure as a translation of a real physical space.

How do you imagine a new kind of theatre? Where terror is not a genre, but a collective and emotional ritual. At its core lies the relationship between character, costume, and monster. Starting from the concept of an art of the underground, the research explores how fear, trauma and memory shape creation. The character wears a costume to be seen, but it is the monster — emerging from the subconscious — that speaks the unspeakable. He work unfolds through drawing, material collection (feathers, petals), costume prototyping, 3D modeling, and the creation of a short videogame demo: this builds emotional attachment to the protagonist, who will later return in a theatrical performance, turning the stage into a ritual of recognition. Not a political theatre. Not a moral one. But a theatre of the deeply human — where the audience no longer watches, but witnesses.

The project develops as the creation of a virtual environment for the analysis of the technical characteristics of virtual reality as a medium. To support the possibility of using high-quality virtual reality for the creation of immersive worlds and the production of works of art. The case chosen to reproduce is the performance Imponderabilia by Marina Abramović.

Sounds created through reflection played a key role in the belief and ritual traditions of Fennoscandia up until recent times. The Indigenous Sámi considered echoing rocks and mountains to be sacred places where spirits could be met and conversed with. This article examines the role of sound reflections in these historical, little-known traditions using source material gathered from archives and old ethnographic accounts. We analyze the source material using concepts developed by sound studies and the philosophy of sound. We also apply a new materialist approach, which allows echoes to be regarded from a perspective more suitable to the source material: as sound energies transforming reflective material bodies into vibrant and interactive more-than-human beings. Moreover, the new materialist approach enables us to outline a philosophical basis for a materialist understanding of sound reflections and reflective material bodies, as well as the acoustic spaces associated with them. The concept of acousphere is proposed to understand this kind of space of correlation, confluence, and interchange between the human and more-than-human worlds.

This short essay opens ArteActa’s issue AI (and) Art: Poetics of Prompting by proposing to understand generative algorithms as fundamentally metabolic: a dynamic entanglement of data, energy, affect, attention, and ecology. It argues that, given their ubiquity, generative materials can no longer be understood primarily as representations or discrete outputs. Instead, they function as metabolic processes that devour cultural material, extract planetary resources, and reshape perception below the threshold of consciousness. Prompting itself is always an act of transformation rather than merely a symbolic command, and intentional artistic experiments represent only a fraction of a larger infrastructure. The essay thus advocates for a multiscalar understanding of generative media: every prompt is already an ecosystem; every image is already a node in a planetary metabolism.

Through a series of photographic assemblages that focus on texture, depth, and atmosphere, “The Oracle of Delphi” documents interactions between these assemblages and AI language models. The work demonstrates specific ways that current AI systems struggle to comprehend material qualities and contextual relationships in personal narratives, particularly when dealing with dimensionality, surface qualities, and emotional resonance. By analyzing these limitations, the work reveals the gap between human and machine perception of materiality and affect, while suggesting potential approaches for developing more nuanced human-machine encounters. Through these material encounters and a deliberate “kinking” of established patterns, the work demonstrates how algorithmic systems might be recrafted from processes of reduction into expansive sites of co-creation and possibility.