Research Catalogue

Documentation of preliminary steps and collection of musical material and related reflections during the first Term of the Master's Program in Improvisation and World Music. December 2022

We live in an age of Symbolic Misery (Stiegler, 2014). In this era, we listen to the same music, scroll through the same Instagram feeds, and we immerse ourselves in daily lives that are the same as others, gradually losing the 'singularity (Stiegler, 2014)' of individual difference. This homogenized structure of perception continuously reshapes our subjectivity (Simondon, 1958; Hui, 2016), making individual desires no longer emerge from unique experiences or internal generative processes, but are increasingly induced and regulated by external technological and symbolic systems (Stiegler, 2015). In this context, the question is no longer 'What do we produce?' but rather, 'Do our desires still belong to ourselves?'. As Stiegler (2014) pointed out, in order to enter the market more effectively, marketing technologies have developed an industrial aesthetic system centered on audiovisual media. This industrial aesthetic re-functionalizes individual sensory experiences following industrial interests, aiming to produce a replicable and controllable unified taste through the standardized pleasure. This huge 'desire project (libidinal management)' manipulates human drives for externalization through a diversity of apparatus (Agamben, 2009; Foucault, 1977), generating a sense of 'participation' via formalized interaction, restricting the level of perception and expression (Stiegler, 2015). Through daily repetition, this process gradually weakens the individual’s ability for subjectivation, trapping them within a passive structure of desire (Stiegler, 2014). This exposition is based on an artistic research project titled 'I Don’t Know Who I Am', an installation game. It invites players to watch a five-minute monologue, the story of a cow (inspired by, for example, Lacan et al., 2001), to explore the secrets hidden within this cow’s desire. After watching the video, the player will face a plate of real grass with soya sauce, and be invited to make a choice: whether or not to eat the grass. This installation game encourages players to reflect on a critical question: At a time when industrial aesthetics and subjective experience standardize individual desire, is increasingly hollowed out, where do our desires truly come from? Do they still emerge from internal generative processes, or have they long been preconditioned and disciplined by technological objects and symbolic systems?

How can I, as a workshop facilitator, create inclusive, inviting and transformative spaces for sparking moments of joy around diversity? How does my training as an artist, researcher and teacher inform and enable my role as a workshop facilitator, such that I can support radical expressions of self-acceptance? What are the limitations to my role, and what possibilities may lie ahead through continued reflection and practice? I have worked through these questions by exploring the concept of vulnerability through a/r/tographic theories and practices, with the culmination of my research and reflections shared in this exposition. Though I have long hosted workshops in marginalised communities as a means for building resilience and kinship, only in the past year have I begun to analyse, from theoretical and methodological perspectives, how and why certain approaches work. Again and again, my reflective meanderings take me back to a single core concept, namely vulnerability. By being vulnerable, one becomes open and raw, which — in certain conditions — can lead to curiosity, risk-taking and remarkable creativity. With such an open and desiring mind, creative practices like crafting can evoke radical feelings of joy and appreciation around a topic that otherwise may tend to conjure conflicting or undesirable feelings. Vulnerability is particularly important in my work because the primary focus of my workshops has been bodily joy. Largely, I have hosted workshops wherein we have explored positive feelings of one’s gender diverse experiences, expressions or identity through paper crafting. Recently, I have also begun hosting crafting workshops, in which we forest bathe (friluftsliv) then craft on the joy one has felt in communion with nature. Crafting becomes an extension of the self, a temporary reincarnation of our own materiality in which we bring to life an alternative understanding of our own potential. In this exposition, I address the questions above by drawing on two example workshops, Crafting Gender Diverse Joy, and Crafting Joy in Nature -- hosted in April and May 2025, respectively. The organisation of this exposition is inspired by L. Balzi’s ice cracks metaphor (2023), Irwin's rhizomatic walking method (2013), and LeBlanc's The Wake (2019). The workshop process as a whole is a reverberation of impulses rippling outwards without end. I navigate these reverberations through a visual mapping of a rhizomatic system of roots sprawling from a tree in Bymarka. The roots are vast web of connections, largely hidden beneath the ground as points of potential. With our imaginations, we can appreciate the complexity of this web, just as we can trace the multiple invisible processes that lead us to our eventual a/r/tographic choices. I invite you to wander across these knots and walls, encountering the various descriptive concepts, or 'centres of vibration', to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari (1994; in Irwin & Springgay, 2008). The layout is roughly guided by the three stages of the workshop process (planning, workshop, aftercare), sprinkled with key concepts, theories, and practices. I also include documentation from the workshops, such as photos and crafts (with permission granted). Enjoy your own wandering. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

As artificial intelligence continues to advance, its role in the creation of music has raised profound questions regarding the nature of authorship and the ethical implications of algorithmic composition. Exploration of a fast-evolving relationship between music and AI broadens researches` horizons on the transformation of creative processes and the challenges it presents to traditional creativity. Delving deeper into the ethical considerations surrounding the ownership, originality, and emotional authenticity of machine-created music plays an important role in the understanding of modern music industry and helps to navigate creative development in today’s reality. Ongoing ethical aspects of AI presence in music and creative industry show the importance and actuality of this topic. This paper aims to provoke a deeper understanding of how AI is reshaping musical creativity and to encourage a critical dialogue about the future of art in a digitally driven world.

This thesis presents the outcomes of my artistic research conducted as a master’s student in the Improvisation and World Music Performance program at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The present study investigates how a musical identity is constructed and reshaped over time, drawing from my background as a Brazilian singer, guitarist, and songwriter, and examining how exchanges with musicians from different fields and exposure to new artistic inputs can influence my creative practice. Central to the research is finding tools to broaden my expressive possibilities within the song format, through the integration of improvisation, diverse ensemble instrumentation, and inventive strategies for communicating artistic intentions and political concerns through music and stage performance. This work also explores possible approaches for overcoming creative blocks and performance-related fears, especially those related to improvisation, seeking to cultivate a state of freedom, openness, fulfillment and joy while playing.

Music is bound to space; music happens in a space. There cannot be music without space, still, the vast majority of music throughout history has been mainly focused on "what happens when" rather than "what happens when and where.” Today, with the advent of Virtual Reality, Dolby Atmos, binaural recording, and surround systems musicians and listeners are developing a more refined sensitivity and creativity toward sound localisation and spatialisation. Space is gradually attaining greater significance in the way we perceive and conceptualise music. Moreover, the introduction of headphones into the audio market substantially affected the way we perceive music today. The present work describes the creative process and the results of two electronic music pieces for speakers and headphones which were composed for exploring the perceptual thresholds in which musical materials are perceived as connected or disconnected from each other. I hope this work ignites curiosity in the reader, inspires creation, and motivates reflection on the meaning of space, connection, and isolation. DISCLAIMER: The webpage takes some seconds to fully load.