Research Catalogue

This conference will explore how emerging technologies—especially generative AI and blockchain—reimagine the current notions of creative agency. Conveners: Adam Łukawski, Martin Zeilinger Artificial intelligence (AI), with its learning algorithms operating at scale, can mimic human creative agency, and blockchain technologies, through smart contracts, can augment works of art with more or less autonomous behaviours that correspond to the agency of human participants in socio-economic interactions. While such developments can destabilise traditional notions of ownership, provenance, and agency in musical practices, they can also empower artists. Those working creatively with sound and music are today increasingly becoming system-builders and curators of musical ecosystems, turning their focus from the creation of singular, standalone musical works (in any traditional sense of the term) to the design of systems capable of generating artworks. This suggests an evolving role of music-producing systems today: from fixed intellectual constructs and creative expressions to dynamic, more-than-human technological networks that not only actively participate in the production of artworks with increasing levels of agency, but which can themselves be considered as artworks that constitute generative, expressive assemblages. This shift is further emphasised in distributed contexts, where varying levels of automation blur the boundaries between human and non-human contributions, creating environments where agency is negotiated and shared across diverse actants.

This exposition is a documentary project on the artistic research project Neither Fish nor Fowl. The research project consists of theater making, film making, workshops, performances and writing, and explores the wondrous worlds of becoming in theatre for early years. Together with my theater company Teater Fot, I have been investigating the significance of affect as philosophical, emotional, and material inspiration in the creative process, and in relation to young children in Theater for Early Years. Neither Fish nor Fowl was conducted as a performance project from April 2017 to March 2020. During this period, the research process was documented in RC, presenting methods, writings, and reflections along the way. The pre-production performance (for babies 0-2) was shown at the festival Olavsfestdagene in Trondheim, Norway, summer 2017 and at Trondheim Kunsthall autumn 2017. The full production, Begynnelser (for 3-5 years), was presented in april 2018 in co-production with the venue Teaterhuset Avant Garden in Trondheim. Baby Becomings (0-2 years), was presented at festivals and for kindergartens in Trondheim autumn 2018, and the final version Himmel & Hav / Sky & Sea was presented at Rosendal Teater in in March 2020, touring kindergartens for one week. Animalium (2019) was a a kind of spin-off with film making, workshops, visiting exhibition spaces and eventually article writing with an exposition in VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research #2 on the theme Estrangement. In 2020-22 Animalium has become a new research project, looking at post humanist approaches to different sites such as kindergarten spaces, libraries and art exhibition spaces. We are developing new performance strategies with deepening our improvisational and listening skills into a more-than-human sympoietic intra-playfulness. Trying to perform these concepts, we might understand more of what they actually mean to our artistic practice.

Olskroksmotet Blues är den avslutande delen i mitt autoetnografiska projekt som i olika former pågick mellan 2014-2021, och där jag bland annat publicerat två artiklar (Kroon 2015 och 2016). RC expositionen består av tre delarbeten - arkivblad, arkivmönster och göteborg grid – jämte bakgrund och teori & metod. Utifrån min historia som fosterbarn söker jag fånga såväl mina egna erfarenheter och uttryck, som att sätta dessa i ljuset av större samhälleliga skeenden. Olskroksmotet Blues var också del av Mikrohistoriers fysiska grupputställning på Konstfack, Stockholm i september 2021.

Projektet avser att lyfta fram betydelsen av skådespelarens kroppsliga kunskap i förhållande till repetitionsarbete. Som regissör och pedagog och i samarbete med professionella skådespelare ville jag fånga och kommunicera mina arbetsmetoder. Detta med förhoppning om att generera ny kunskap i frågan om skådespelarens fördjupade gestaltningsarbete av dramatisk text med och via kroppen som instrument. Kroppen är skådespelarens instrument. Jag ser kroppen som ett kärl, en källa att hämta från och ösa ur. Ett instrument som har förmågan förbinda de analytiska tankegångarna med det undermedvetna, med instinkterna och det öppna hjärtat. Min ursprungliga forskningsfråga för detta projekt var att undersöka det glapp som uppstår mellan kroppsliga impulser i ett undersökande led i arbete/improvisation och när det ska överbryggas till en ”färdig” gestaltning av ett dramatiskt verk. Denna frågeställning tog mig vidare till att undersöka en repetitionsteknik som skulle öppna möjlighet för skådespelarna till att öppna sig för och omfamna sin kroppsliga kunskap och kreativitet. Utan att bortcensurera sina uttryck genom textanalys och det logiska tänkandet. Möta en text på kroppsliga villkor. Jag kallar det för ”kroppslig läsning”.

This artistic doctoral research approaches art, not as a variety of artworks or performances, but as a variety of collective bodies that are summoned. It addresses the subordinate and complicit way collective audience bodies form in relation to artistic performances. The commentary introduces the concept of an “audience body”, emerging when individual bodies gather to become an audience. Audience bodies are described through preconditions that are needed for one to appear, conditions that contribute to its subsistence and variables that determine the primary qualities and the degree of actuality of that audience body. More specifically, the commentary addresses the local genre of “esitystaide”, developed especially in the Helsinki-area during the last 30 years. Neologism “beforemance art” is introduced due to a lack of an English equivalent. Esitystaide/beforemance art is the artistic context of this study and is presented as a genre of art, in which the complicity of audience bodies is a fundamental material of artistic creation. The Finnish word “esitys”, being the medium of the genre of esitystaide, is defined as the sum of a performance and an audience body. The theoretical approach towards audience bodies is presented as impartial with regard to different genres of art, but the practice of research favours esitystaide/beforemance art. This leads to political conclusions that defend the exposed complicity of and the experimental relation to audience bodies which are characteristic for this specific genre. This theoretical argumentation has been developed through an iterative series of 30 drafts and two examined artistic parts, made by the author, as well as through a parapractice of audience membership. The drafts and examined parts are works of esitystaide/beforemance art, in which printed or digital texts are staged in different ways for audiences to read. The works and the thinking developed in them have been significantly affected by dialogues with audience members and their feedback. The commentary discloses how the process of thinking, resulting in the main arguments of the work, has evolved through this artistic research practice and how temporal, spatial, textual and material design of the events has been developed to address more adequately the phenomenon of an audience body. The parapractice of audience membership is introduced as a term describing the attendance of artworks made by others—a way of accumulating knowledge parallel to and yet different from practicing art. The arguments made in the commentary aim to provide conceptual tools for artists, scholars and pedagogues who attend the phenomenon of audience in their work. They can also serve as a basis for further research on the political significance of esitystaide/beforemance art and related art forms. Methodologically, the research offers an example of an iterative and dialogical artistic research practice and its presentation; the relationship between art and theory unfolds as both fruitful and troubled. Through the introduction of the parapractice of audience membership, it argues for using art, equally to the use of bibliographical materials, as reference material of artistic research. Through the use of a Finnish term and its local context as part of concept-creation in English, the work defends the importance of local thinking, which links artistic research to the land upon which it takes form.

This project was born from an old discomfort, but only found form when the body — finally — began to speak. A body that, for years, was shaped by obedience, guilt, and restraint. A body that served more to please than to exist. The Body That Never Was is not merely a visual installation. It is a passage. Each frame carries fragments of a story interrupted, silenced, violated — but once told, it becomes a material of resistance. These pieces are not illustrations of pain. They are gestures of defiance. They are symbolic bodies constructed from layers of memory, lived experiences, open wounds, and poorly healed scars. Within them, there are traces of abandonment, escape, abuse, and the absence of protection. But there is also something else: the impulse to persist. The project arises from deeply personal stories, yet it offers a mirror in which other women may recognise their own paths — without fear, without shame, without the guilt inherited from centuries of silence. Here, art does not seek to console. It seeks to expose what was hidden, to name what was smothered, and to open space for other possible forms of existence. More than a healing process, this project is a rite of insurgency against the mechanisms that perpetuate pain as destiny. Here, the wounded matter rises as discourse.