The Sonic Atelier #9 – A Conversation with Arnold Kasar
(2025)
author(s): Francesca Guccione
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition is part of The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, a series dedicated to examining the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators navigate hybrid identities across composition, performance, production, and technological craft.
This interview features Arnold Kasar, German composer, pianist, producer, and mastering engineer, whose work spans improvisation, ambient sound worlds, classical heritage, and studio-based experimentation. Moving fluidly between the piano, prepared piano techniques, and digital production environments, Kasar constructs musical landscapes where acoustic gesture, electronic texture, and spatial depth coexist as a single expressive field.
In the conversation, Kasar reflects on improvisation as the generative core of his practice, on the piano as both an instrument and a source of raw sonic material, and on the studio as an expanded compositional space. He discusses the continuum between writing, producing, and mixing; the role of technology as a creative partner; and the influence of spatial audio, room acoustics, and Dolby Atmos on his musical language. The interview also touches on collaborations, the aesthetics of ambient music, the cultural impact of streaming platforms, and the challenges and possibilities posed by artificial intelligence.
Kasar’s reflections reveal a vision of music grounded in human presence and intuitive creation, yet deeply attuned to technological and spatial possibilities—where composition, sound design, and performance converge into a fluid, embodied process of listening, resonance, and transformation.
Artistic Connectivity Unfolding
(2025)
author(s): Falk Hubner, walmeri ribeiro, Elisavet Kalpaxi, Marike Hoekstra, Eleni Kolliopoulou, Jessica Renfro, Isil Egrikavuk, Reyhaneh Mirjahani, Katy Beinart, Lizzie Lloyd, Chrystalleni Loizidou, Xenia Tsompanidou, Juriaan Achthoven
published in: Fontys Academy of the Arts
This publication presents the outcomes of the Connective Symposium, which took place at Fontys Academy of the Arts in Tilburg, in November 2022. The symposium was the first time that the professorship and research group Artistic Connective Practices, initiated in 2021, opened its work to the international field: We invited practitioners from all over the world to share their work and exchange about the concept of "artistic connectivity".
"Artistic Connectivity Unfolding" is an attempt to share the experiences during the symposium with the broader artistic research audience, and to contribute to the body of artistic research work that is socially engaged. The exposition is potentially many things: In part, it is a piece of documentation of the symposium, in part reflections on and proceedings of it. It is also an explorative contribution to our emerging and unfolding discourse of artistic connectivity, — unfinished, fluid and moving — and thus a springboard for our future work on artistic connectivity.
In Good Company. Think We Must.
(2025)
author(s): Falk Hubner
published in: Fontys Academy of the Arts
This publication/exposition is the extended version of Falk Hübner's inaugural lecture as professor of Artistic Connective Practices at Fontys Academy of the Arts. The text offers an introduction to the work of the professorship, to the ideas and concepts underpinning it and to its projects and research lines. Rather than presenting finished research, the text seeks to open ideas, insights and imagination and offer a sense of where the journey is heading. With an explicit emphasis on collectively working and thinking together, the core of the publication introduces and elaborates on the concept of artistic connective practices through the notion of three "conceptual clouds": practices, the artistic, and connectivity.
Listening to the sounds of war
(2025)
author(s): Razumeiko Illia
published in: Research Catalogue
The project intertwines personal memory, sound studies, and artistic practice to explore how war transforms both landscape and perception. Beginning with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the author reflects on the Dnipro River as a literal and symbolic frontline, where silence and explosions shape the sonic environment. Through the creation of operas such as Chornobyldorf, Genesis, and GAIA-24, in cooperation with composer Roman Grygoriv and artistic collective Opera Aperta author investigates how art can transmute trauma into collective listening and ecological reflection. The text ultimately proposes sound and water as metaphors for resilience and continuity—liquid archives that carry both the memory of destruction and the possibility of regeneration.
How to Facilitate Careful Listening and Non-Coercive Participation in Artistic Research? LED Tickers and Love Letter Writing as Research Tools
(2025)
author(s): Joonas Lahtinen
published in: Research Catalogue
In this contribution, I introduce and outline productive possibilities that LED ticker displays and love letter writing can offer for facilitating careful listening and non-coercive participation in artistic research, and in research-driven artistic practice. Briefly put, by the term “careful listening” in this context, I refer to modes of listening that are attentive to the contents of what is being said, but that also allow for and encourage the reflection of the subjective and “intra-active” (Karen Barad) dimensions inherent in, and the material-performative and situated conditions of, listening. The term “non-coercive participation”, for its part, refers here to participative art-based practices that are careful – or caring – in the sense that they leave room for different modes or “degrees” of participation, and in that they aim to take the potential processes of exclusion and coercion rooted in the practical decisions and material circumstances regarding the devising and realization of the given project into account.
Operating on the premiss that reading can be considered as a form of listening and attending to the text and its contents (Michelle Boulous Walker), and drawing on two recent endeavours I was part of in different yet cross-pollinating roles – as an advisor and collaborator in the artistic research project ‘TACTICS for a COLLECTIVE BODY’ (AP Schools of Art Antwerp, 2020–22), and as the artist-initiator of the installation ‘Love Letters’ in public space (Kunstzelle, WUK Vienna, 2023–24) – I discuss and present, first, ways in which love letter writing can function as a tool for – or mode of – careful listening, thereby fostering democratic and attentive dialogue between investigators within the frames of an artistic research project, and as a tool for offering a caring and accessible starting point for non-coercive participatory art practice. Secondly, I aim to show how the use of seemingly simple LED ticker displays can promote careful listening and non-coercive participation both in research workshops, showings, and artistic practice while, in the Rancièrean sense, also making the material-performative, “intra-active”, situated and auditive qualities of text and reading visible and sensible.
Mind Wandering During Lectures
(2025)
author(s): Magda Stanová
published in: Research Catalogue
Lectures, panel discussions, and conferences are formats for collective listening, but they took on conventions that make listening difficult: reading aloud complicated texts, speaking quickly in order to squeeze as much material as possible, showing slides with long texts, sitting for a long time without moving. Silence is considered awkward, so there is little time to think about what has been said.
In this video paper, I dissect the decorum of oral presentation formats in academia and outline how the attention of the members of an audience diverges and converges with that of the speaker. I also share some observations about verbalizing non-verbal ideas, in particular about how a text description at the beginning of a project can tie its loose ends too tightly.
At the end of my talk at the Klagenfurt conference, I handed out questionnaires, in which I asked the audience members to mark the sentences which they remembered from my talk. Then, while another presenter was speaking, I drew a graph of mind wandering of the audience members based on the questionnaires and showed it at the end of the session. In the second part of this video paper, I explain the process of evaluating the responses and present the resulting graph.
