Research Catalogue

Unni Løvlid (NMH) and Marianne Baudouin Lie (NTNU), from Norwegian traditional and classical/contemporary music backgrounds, collaborate to explore tonality's diversity, leveraging their distinct practices to enhance inner ear training and pedagogical methods. Their project aims to develop a shared verbal language and deepen collective understanding of varied tonalities, challenging the standardization of tonality in music. By internalizing diverse tonalities through the inner ear, they seek to freely interpret and create music, fostering new artistic insights for both composed and improvised works. In 2021, they partnered with five composers—Sven Lyder Kahrs, Lasse Thoresen, Karin Rehnqvist, Lene Grenager, Ole Henrik Moe, and Jon Øivind Ness—to create new compositions and improvisations centered on tonality, inspired by folk music. The duo investigates how folk singers and classical instrumentalists adapt to new listening and auditive methods, exploring microtonality, quarter tones, and pure intervals. Through artistic research and educational efforts, they aim to develop methods to embody microtonality naturally, benefiting performers, students, and the broader musical community. The project invites collaboration with composers, ear training experts, and music theorists to inspire new music and deepen tonal understanding, contributing to artistic development and a richer musical discourse.

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

Arts-based-philosophy is an emerging research concept at the cutting edge of the arts, philosophy and the Sciences in which cross-disciplinary research collectives align their research practices to finally stage their investigations in field-performances, shared with the public. Our research explores the significance of the HEART in artistic research and performance philosophy from a cross-cultural perspective, partially based on the concepts of the HEART in the works of two artist-philosophers, in which philosophy already became arts-based-philosophy: Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Aurobindo’s poetic opus magnum Savitri. We generally assume that the works of artist-philosophers are not only engaged in “creating concepts” (Deleuze), but their concepts are also meant to be staged artistically to let them bodily matter in fact. The role of the HEART in respect to this process of “bodily mattering” is the core objective under investigation: Firstly, because we hold that atmospheres trigger the HEART of a lived-body to taste the flavor of things it is environmentally engaged with basically in an aesthetic manner (Nietzsche). In this respect the analysis of the classical notion for the aesthete in Indian philosophy and aesthetics, sahṛdaya––which literally means, “somebody, with a HEART”––becomes crucial. Secondly, because the HEART is said to be not just reducible to one’s manifest Nature, but has access to one’s virtual Nature as well. The creation hymn in the oldest of all Vedas (Rgveda) for instance informs us that a HEART is capable of crossing being (sat) & non-being (asat), which makes it fluctuate among these two realms and even allows its aspirations to let virtual possibilities matter. Such concepts show striking similarities with contemporary concepts in philosophy-physics, e.g. the concepts of “virtual particles” and “quantum vacuum fluctuations” (Barad).

The theory & practice affair: this is piece "16" from the series "x out of 5448643200", and it is an arrangement of 16 possible combinations among 5448643200 available of the letters {p, r, a, c, t, i, c, e, t, h, e, o, r, y}. These letters make the word 'practicetheory', and also the word 'theorypractic'e. In fact, none of these two words exist, and yet are identifiable 'theory' and 'practice' as constitutive halves within them. Discourse not only describes the world but actually produces the world. We, as researchers and as artists - and particularly as artist-researchers - are in permanent tension with the two blocks, theory and practice, and despite our struggles to merge both, we are, through language, every time referring to one after the other. One after the other, in a hierarchy. We cannot speak the two words at the same time and, unless we invent a new word to refer to the crossbreed of the two, we are condemned to this limiting dichotomy. "x out of 5448643200" presents the hypothesis of billions of possibilities to re-write the productive merging of theory and practice. "16" shows sixteen of them (Thanks to Steve Norton and Robert Stevenson for collaboration)

White to Earth, 2020

All Tomorrow´s Parties: post pandemic dancing is an artistic research that undertakes the task of discovering how hiv and aids has affected the Norwegian dance scene in the 1980´s and 1990´s and all the way up until today. Many dancers got infected by the virus, lived with hiv, and died of aids. Who were they? What were they dancing? And what kind of dances would they have danced had they not died too early? By interviewing the survivors, this project aims to map out how the Norwegian dance scene was affected by this pandemic, outline the hole left behind by this generation that disappeared, and try to fill it by creating dances that they could have danced.