Research Catalogue

This artistic research investigates the timbre of the violin in Ottoman music from the perspective of a musician outside the tradition. Its goal is not only to understand how this distinctive sound is created but also to experience how cultural, historical, and stylistic influences shape it. Approaching the tradition as both learner and artist, I learn from master musicians, immerse myself in traditional musical environments, and engage in reflective creative practice. I explore how violinists trained in Western classical music can enter this tradition respectfully, embody its nuances, and remain true to its core. Using four guiding frameworks—tacit knowledge, meşk - oral transmission, cultural immersion, and instrument modification—I document a journey of listening, learning, and transformation. This process integrates literature review, conceptual framing, artistic methodology, and reflective analysis, turning the violin into a space where diverse musical traditions engage in meaningful dialogue. Key outcomes of this study show that timbre in Ottoman violin playing is not fixed but culturally constructed and personally shaped. Timbre is deeply contextual, influenced by cultural models like the human voice and traditional instruments, and expressed through subtle choices in vibrato, ornamentation, bowing, and instrument setup. The expressive identity of Ottoman music relies on sensitivity and subtlety, with small variations significantly affecting the emotional and modal character of the music. Learning in this tradition depends heavily on embodied, tacit knowledge passed down orally through the meşk system, where core concepts such as makam nuance and microtonality are absorbed through long-term listening, singing, and playing alongside masters. Deep listening and cultural immersion were essential for developing stylistic understanding, revealing nuances that notation alone cannot capture.

Abstract The incentive for this research was to explore ways of integrating the physicality of singing into vocal education by means of the Musicality of Movement (MoM) approach. Musicality of Movement is a physical performance training program designed for musicians. Traditionally the importance of the physicality of singing is recognized, yet it remains underexposed in vocal training, which eventually can lead to inhibited vocal freedom and wooden or awkward performances. The Musicality of Movement approach (MoM) opens ways to freer, more imaginative stage presence, better physical awareness and more expressive singing. The working hypothesis was: Integrating the Musicality of Movement approach into classical voice education will offer singers tools to enhance stage presence, imaginative expression, clarity of performative skills and can create ways to find physical and mental wellbeing on stage. The hypothesis was confirmed by the results of the three interventions—consisting of MoM lessons and workshops—that were executed during the academic year 2023-2024, with three groups of voice students, in three different settings. Interviews and questionnaires were analysed to give an impression of how working with the MoM approach supported performative skills and stage presence. Positive results were obtained from relatively small groups of students which shows a need for future research over a longer period and with a larger research population. Most mentioned keywords to indicate what the MoM-lessons brought the students were body awareness, better breathing, performance skills and playfulness. The practicality of the approach was shown by the fact that participants mentioned to use the exercises in their individual vocal practice.

A cross disciplinary artistic research project that departs from, and investigates several encounters and alignments between Contemporary Art and Archaeology. Its primary goal is to create a broad selection of autonomous and collaborative artistic, poetic and scientific expressions and responses to Prehistoric Art and its contemporary images. It will seek to stimulate a deeper understanding of contemporary and prehistoric artistic expression and the contemporary and prehistoric human condition. The participating artists and archaeologists will create autonomous projects, but also interact with each other in workshops, seminars and collaborative artistic projects. The secondary goal of Matter, Gesture and Soul is to establish an international cross disciplinary research network at the University of Bergen and strengthen the expertise in cross disciplinary artistic and scientific work with artistic research as the driving force. The project is financed by DIKU and UiB and supported by Global Challenges (UiB)

The Grand Tour Experiment: A Transformative Traverse of the Picturesque Landscape was a human-pulled carriage journey that re-envisioned the eighteenth-century traverse of the picturesque landscape, the subject-objectification of the view, and the imperialistic impulse behind the voyage pittoresque. This artistic experiment visually, kinaesthetically, and performatively explored the transformation from landscape to image that formed the basis of modern perception, as part of the colonial legacy inherent within the picturesque view. The Grand Tour carriage was pulled by human labour, evidencing the forced labour economy that impelled the European Enlightenment, while demonstrating in human terms, the use, abuse, and commodification of human and non-human animals. The Grand Tour proceeded from Binche to Brussels to Antwerp, Belgium in 2022. The Grand Tour experiment investigated the eighteenth-century picturesque gaze, which travelled unchecked over the landscape in industrialised Europe, a harbinger of the annexation and enclosure of land that had been commonly owned, traditionally used, or publicly accessible, while portending the colonisation of lands abroad. The picturesque gaze, an imperialist mechanism, still fragments the landscape, excising two-dimensional pictures from the three-dimensional world around us, a vestige and augur of the destruction of lands, cultures, and peoples. Shifting between early modern and contemporary perception, The Grand Tour bisected space and time in a cleaving manoeuvre, creating new fault lines in which multiple planes of space-time might co-exist. This experiment tested whether a new neo-picturesque framework could be forged in a dimension of space-time that alters according to the perception and orientation of the traverser, casting contingent new imaginaries into physical and psychic realms where they may or may not become realities, according to Arno Böhler’s philosophy as artistic research approach (2019). This experiment envisaged a plurality that did not exist in the eighteenth century but may have already been limned in its myriad contradicting, contrasting, and diverging modes of sensing and experiencing the world around us in a relational and now relative notion of space-time. Download Accessible PDF

This exhibition presents an investigation into the folk music and dance practice polska, involving a group of Swedish folk musicians and dancers. The investigation employs optical motion capture (mocap) to explore interactive music and dance performances and create innovative artistic expressions by merging traditional practices with contemporary media technology. As a musician working closely with the dancers he plays for, the author explores ways to mediate dance through the sonification and visualisation of movement data. The focus is on the fundamental connection between sound and movement in this performance practice, particularly showcased in the project's centrepiece, Dancing Dots. Documentations of this and other works included in the exhibition present live music and dance with sonic and visual displays derived from mocap data, asking how such multi-modal mediations can facilitate understanding of the interplay between movement and music and open new avenues for artistic expression in this folk music practice. The use of optical motion capture is contextualised as a means of mediating music-dance through narrow streams of movement data, and the exposition introduces a web tool for accessible sonification of folk dance. The exposition applies music and dance theoretical concepts in designing the movement mediations, examines their relevance in an artistic context, and grounds the results in a practice-based understanding of the rhythmic/metric framework of the Swedish polska. Download Accessible PDF

Improvising Time is a practice-led research project investigating embodied temporality in the performance of solo dance improvisation. It explores two temporal concepts in Japanese Noh theatre — the sequencing concept of jo-ha-kyū 序破急 and the notion of ma 間, defined as interval — investigating how jo-ha-kyū and ma can be embodied for the temporal organization of solo dance performance when improvised before an audience. Grounded in praxis where theory is imbricated in practice, Noh performance theory is brought into a dynamic interaction with the fundamental theory of time in physics and a phenomenological approach to intersubjectivity. Using a multi-voice dialogic approach as a key methodology, the studio research examines the experience of improvisation from both sides — as improviser and as watcher — in collaboration with solo dance practitioner Janette Hoe. The research shows how, in the act of improvising, an embodied temporality of the improviser is created not only by an awareness of embodied processes but also by the potentiality of unknown improvisational material. Culminating in a major project, Solo Dialogue (2021), the research proposes a new framework of embodied temporality offering an insight into how improvisation can be temporally shaped and organized by prioritizing attentiveness and attunement to diversify performance material and enhance the intersubjective experience between improviser and audience. Download Accessible PDF