This is not my U******E: The use of film and A/V elements as a pivot role in contemporary opera.
(2025)
author(s): Massimiliano Vizzini
published in: Codarts
This research explores the integration of film as a dramaturgical element within contemporary opera, with a specific focus on its role in shaping narrative, character development, and audience perception. Over the course of two years, I have investigated the compositional and theatrical possibilities that emerge when opera, A/V elements and film interact, aiming to expand the expressive potential of these mediums.
Structured in three different cycles, this paper examines the evolving relationship between live musical performance, electronic music composition, and visual storytelling. Through a combination of desk research, artistic experimentation, and practical composition—drawing insights from the creative processes of composers such as Michel van der Aa, Richard Ayres, Sivan Eldar, and others—this research highlights the challenges and opportunities of hybrid opera-film formats. The findings demonstrate that film can serve not only as an aesthetic addition but as a fundamental component of dramaturgy, capable of deepening character psychology and reinforcing musical structures. Additionally, the research reveals the complexities of balancing digital and organic elements in opera, contributing to a broader understanding of contemporary music-theater composition.
Through this process, I gave myself the freedom to experiment as much as possible and learn by observing from composers and artists who stimulated and inspired my creativity.
As a result, this paper has culminated in the development of This is not my U******E (2024-2025), a new opera production for soprano, baritone, sinfonietta and A/V elements.
The dramaturgy of Conversation
(2025)
author(s): ingrid cogne
connected to: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
published in: Research Catalogue
The dramaturgy of Conversation aims to tackle different approaches, analyses, and practices of conversations. Several forms of conversations and various related knowledges are questioned from different positions and perspectives. The data studied come from personal, external, or created (for and within the project) archives. In this project, researcher Ingrid Cogne analyses, develops or transforms, re-articulates and re-structures the ways in which one creates, inhabits, and facilitates conversations.
The central question of The dramaturgy of Conversation as a methodology is HOW: How can the context, structure, location, and duration of existing or created situations of conversation support the (re-)articulation of the persons involved? How can one use or work with conversations? How can one read, inhabit, and embody the parameters of a conversation? How can one facilitate a conversation? How does a situation itself facilitate the meeting with knowledge? How can one create a situation of conversation that will be the facilitator itself?
The dramaturgy of Conversation proposes situations, settings, and protocols of conversations that involve, combine, or isolate various languages (spoken, bodily, and written), “in-between” and relational knowledge, and dialogical methods and processes as well as formats of communication.
The dramaturgy of Conversation is a methodology that focuses on “how” practical knowledge can be read, unfolded, and circulated within the “doing”. It is a research project that facilitates the access to the unknown and the inarticulable – navigating between quantity and quality, fiction and reality, material and immaterial, visible and invisible.
This research is aproached by the author as the context wherein a self-reflective process can be (re-)articulated and CO- and reciprocal activations of hardly articulable knowledges can be performed. With this re/search, Cogne insists on the need of “conversation” to be practiced and considered as knowledge.
Duration: 15.1.2019 – 14.1.2025
Project leader: Ingrid Cogne (IKW)
Funded by: FWF - Austrian Science Fund | Elise-Richter PEEK (V709)
Institution: IKW, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria
RESPONSIVE SPACE – SOUNDING INTO MATERIALITY
(2025)
author(s): Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen
published in: Research Catalogue
RESPONSIVE SPACE – SOUNDING INTO MATERIALITY (2014–2020) is an in-depth research project into the interrelationship between us and our surroundings.
The artworks can be described as large sculptural sound installations which blur the lines between visual art, performing arts and sound art. The works explore space, material, sound, body and time as equal parts in a composition.
The main artworks of the research INTERFERENCE, RESONANCE, SEDIMENT, PLACE 1 and PLACE 2 are in a variety of ways inquiries towards an expanded experience of the dialogue between presence and materiality. The artworks are composed environments which respond and take shape and form from their surroundings, seeking to touch proximity zones where we as humans can sense aspects of being closely intertwined with our surroundings.
The act of listening is of central importance in the artistic survey. Olaussen stages space utilising the mediums of sound, minimalistic sculpture and dramaturgical structures.
This exposition is part of Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen’s artistic research project Responsive Space – Sounding into Materiality (2014–2020) at the Norwegian Theatre Academy, Østfold University College. The project complies with the guidelines for the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme from 2019. Artistic practice and reflection are at the heart of the research programme.
Originally published in Norwegian in 2020, this work has now been translated into English by Peter Cripps, with the support of the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills.
Composing with samples
(2025)
author(s): Agnese Valmaggia
published in: Codarts
In this research I investigated the process of composing music starting from pre-recorded samples as a source of inspiration. I explored different approaches and consulted several experts, among which JacobTV, Vaague and Chassol.
The whole work can be divided into three steps:
In the first cycle I started trying to translate into pitches the samples I had: the result is a very rhythmic musical idea, quite connected and ‘locked’ with the sample but lacking some freedom.
In the second cycle I explored the completely opposite direction: I used the pre-recorded audio material in the background of the piece, creating a sort of soundscape, a ‘cloud of sounds’, less central for the audience but still essential in the composition process. I also experimented with ‘floating pulse’ and isorhythm technique.
In the last cycle I tried to blend the two previous approaches, searching for a balance in between the two.
In general, apart from the artistic exploration and outcomes, I also experimented a lot with technical tools and programming techniques I didn’t know or didn’t have before, like Max patches, Ableton midi mapping, drums triggers, multipad.
I came up with three different outcomes, each one focused on one of the three main approaches (rhythmical, ‘floating’ and a mix of the two), involving different kinds of samples and different line-ups (from the drums solo to the quintet). In addition to that, a lot of small experiments have been carried out.
Nomadic Aesthetics — Travelling Installations as Moral Geography
(2025)
author(s): Dorian Vale
published in: Research Catalogue
This essay explores Nomadic Aesthetics as a post-disciplinary ethical philosophy grounded in movement, displacement, and moral geography. Through the lens of travelling installations, Dorian Vale interrogates how contemporary art carries not only material form but migratory conscience. Installations by artists such as Francis Alÿs, Mona Hatoum, Chiharu Shiota, and Khalil Rabah are examined not as static works, but as mobile testimonies—witnesses to border regimes, global inequality, and spiritual unbelonging. The essay argues that when art moves, it inherits moral weight: the crate becomes a coffin, the gallery a customs post, and the viewer a pilgrim. Nomadic aesthetics reframes mobility not as logistics, but as liturgy. It positions the travelling installation as a modern secular relic—bearing not truth as monument, but truth as residue. This is a theology of movement: truth that survives only by circulation.
Title: Nomadic Aesthetics — Travelling Installations as Moral Geography
Keywords:
Post-Interpretive Criticism, Nomadic Aesthetics, Installation Art, Moral Geography, Migrant Artworks, Travelling Exhibitions, Globalization, Francis Alÿs, Mona Hatoum, Ai Weiwei, Chiharu Shiota, Khalil Rabah, Ethics of Movement, Conscience in Contemporary Art, Aesthetic Displacement, Witnessing, Museum Critique, Portable Truth, Moral Cartography
License:
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Publication Year:
2025
Movement / Framework:
Post-Interpretive Criticism (The Museum of One)
DOI (Placeholder until generated):
[To be automatically assigned by Zenodo]
Journal / Series:
The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (ISSN 2819-7232)
Volume: III
Publisher: Museum of One (Registered with Library and Archives Canada)
Persistent Identifiers:
ORCID: 0009-0004-7737-5094
ISNI: 0000000537155247
Wikidata: Q136308879 (Museum of One)
The Sonic Atelier #7 – A Conversation with Caroline Shaw
(2025)
author(s): Francesca Guccione
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition is part of the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, performance, production, and technology.
This interview features Caroline Shaw, American composer, violinist, singer, and producer, whose work moves fluidly between concert music, studio production, and film scoring. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Partita for 8 Voices, Shaw combines historical sensibility with experimental curiosity, creating sound worlds that merge the human voice, instrumental gesture, and digital texture into a single expressive continuum.
In the conversation, Shaw reflects on the interconnectedness of composing, producing, and performing; on the role of technology as both a creative and tactile medium; and on the shifting perception of time, form, and space in contemporary music. She also discusses the relationship between notation and sound, the dialogue between acoustic and digital realms, and the value of presence, collaboration, and shared listening as vital counterpoints to digital mediation.
Shaw’s reflections reveal a vision of music as a living organism, at once human, technological, and emotional, where composition, sound design, and performance converge into an embodied act of imagination and connection.
