Research Catalogue

This exposition gathers all the essential information needed to get started with the Research Catalogue (RC) platform at the Iceland University of the Arts (IUA). It offers a clear overview of how to create a profile, start an exposition, and navigate the basic functions of the platform. The goal is to provide staff with a central reference point for working with RC in the context of artistic research and institutional use.

This artistic research exposition serves as a virtual presentation of the sound art installation, 'Welcome Children (Stay Small)', on view at 'The WaveCave: An Experimental Sound Space' at California Institute of the Arts within the Herb Alpert School of Music from September 14 - 20, 2025. Works: Welcome Children Color video with sound 14 minutes 19 seconds (loop) 2025 Stay Small Color video with sound 3 minutes (loop) 2025 Artist Statement: Welcome Children (Stay Small) is a multimedia installation exploring a series of manipulated Google Search images of diverse children, which are juxtaposed with moving images of a children’s night lamp. The images are concurrent with drones and reverberated audio samples, which sonically collide. Through the symbolism that sound and image provide, this installation highlights the inevitable reality of children losing their innocence in an imperfect world and the longing of so many of us to protect them from the harm of life and adulthood. Welcome Children (Stay Small) was inspired by the song “Stay Small” by former North American post-rock band, The Receiving End of Sirens, and the New Testament theological essay, “Jesus Loves the Little Children: A Theological Reading of Mark 9:14-29 for Children with Serious Illnesses or Disabilities and Their Caregivers”, written by Dr. Melanie Howard. It is important to note that from 2004 - 2018, I worked with children as a music teacher and Christian educator. I dedicate Welcome Children (Stay Small) to those who also work with children and seek to help them become resilient in the face of life’s pain and ambiguities.

Raschx is a series of mutational performances based upon two fundamental materials: Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana op. 16 (1838), and Roland Barthes essays on the music of Schumann, particularly focusing on ‘Rasch’ (1979), a text exclusively dedicated to Schumann’s Kreisleriana. To these materials other components may be added for every single particular version: visual elements (pictures, videos), other texts, or further aural elements (recordings or live-electronics). The main goal is to generate an intricate network of aesthetic-epistemic cross-references, through which the listener has the freedom to focus on different layers of perception: be it on the music, on the texts being projected or read, on the images, or on the voices. Situated beyond ‘interpretation’, ‘hermeneutics’, and ‘aesthetics’ the series Raschx is part of a wider research on what might be labelled as experimental performance practices—practices that productively deviate from conventional (repetitive) performative strategies and that lend the audience to think during the performative moment, transforming familiar artistic objects into objects for thought.

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.

This virtual exposition partially concentrates the experimental works developed during the doctorate in musical performance. Based mainly on the theory of transcreation of Haroldo de Campos (1962-2003), the topic of virtuosity is approached from artistic gestures trying to raise the discussion on what it means to be a virtuoso in the contemporary musical world. Paradoxically, iconic piano technique studies were chosen as the main material,this transcreationist interpretation allows traditional material to be permeated not only by contemporary means and aesthetics, but also questions that reflect on the tradition that made the emergence of these studies possible.

Taking as a departure point my experience working with war survivors in Peru, this project investigates how art can enable the collectivization of mourning. I connected my interest in the act of mourning human losses with my experiences living in Athens, Greece, where I encountered depression as a common diagnosis on both the individual and collective levels. If being depressed relates to unresolved mourning processes, what are the objects of loss caused by economic crisis and political disillusion? How can art help us to mourn an abstract loss, such as a political project, a certain sense of dignity, a particular relation with time and nature, or a fixed role in the familial structure? How could mourning be shared to allow communities to reframe and re-signify those objects of loss, towards transforming our relation to the economic and political? Lost and Shared creates dialogue between theory and affective labour, through collective experiences that connect emotions, critical thinking, body and space. The intuitions and questions brought by conversations with Greek activists and artists are the core of the project. Later on, facing the impossibility of working as planned due to the pandemic, Lost and Shared was adapted to the new socializing conditions and to acknowledge how crisis and mourning had become a global concern. Thus, the project ends up proposing the idea of “fertilizing mourning” as a concept in the making - an open invitation to collectively create practices that help us reconsidering the entanglements between life, death, and regeneration. Urgent practices we need today in order to contest the increasing, global processes of loss caused by capitalism.