The Witness Openlab: Worlding Through Socially Engaged Art Practice
(2025)
author(s): Iulia-Andreea Smeu
published in: Research Catalogue
This paper examines The Witness Openlab, a transdisciplinary artistic research project conducted in fall 2023 as part of the pilot phase for a new Master of Arts program at Basel Academy of Music/FHNW. Inspired by Pauline Oliveros' score The Witness, twelve emerging artists and students explored deep listening practices, embodiment, and community-building through two key projects: Urban Witnesses, investigating trans-border communities around Basel, and Soil Witnesses, exploring human-more-than-human relationships in urban gardens.
Drawing on concepts of "worlding" from Martin Heidegger and Donna Haraway, the project positioned the body as an active medium for understanding ecological and social interconnectedness. The methodology integrated ecosomatic practices, and community engagement, culminating in a public presentation at Tinguely Museum Basel that translated collaborative processes into immersive experiences.
While highlighting the transformative potential of embodied practices in fostering ecological consciousness, the paper critically examines the limitations of privileging somatic approaches, arguing for their integration with theoretical frameworks and systemic analysis to avoid aestheticizing ecological connection.
The Enchanted Forest : exploring the development of relations in artistic collaborations that combine individual and collective creative practices
(2025)
author(s): Birgitta Flick
published in: Research Catalogue
In this contribution, I reflect on the activity of listening as a prerequisite for the development of relations in creative processes in a composition collaboration. The creation process of my piece The Enchanted Forest (2023) with choir Musa Horti (cond. Peter Dejans) serves as example to shed light on some of the manifold aspects of the development of relations when combining individual and collective work. It is part of my artistic doctoral project, where I, based on an understanding of composing and improvising as conglomerates of entangled creative activities, investigate what activities a musical composition is part of, formed and transformed by and how the participants of creative situations are related through their interacting. Guided by asking how to listen to myself while listening to other(s), I describe my understanding of creative processes as contact processes and how listening engenders a transactional relation to the situation (Schön 2017:150), where my body interacts with the material and nonmaterial participants, thus creating the evolving sound and relations between all participants. A concept of listening inspired by listening’s etymological proximity to obeying, gives a key to grasping the tactile dimension of human interaction with sound and links it to Rosa's sociological concept of resonance (Rosa 2018). Through reflecting on The Enchanted Forest’s different stages of collaboration and my individual work with text and sound, I describe listening as something active that involves movement and transformation. Drawing on Rosa’s concept and the tactile dimension of improvising (Meelberg 2022), I trace the diversity of beginnings of developing relations between me, the choir and the musical material. Understanding thus listening to oneself as a premise for listening to other(s), I show its necessity for the development of tacit knowledge and the awareness of different forms of togetherness.
Polyphonizing as a Contemplative Practice
(2025)
author(s): Jakob Stillmark
published in: Research Catalogue
When composing with musical borrowings within repetitive structures, a dual perception often occurs, in which listening shifts its focus from the inherent representation of the borrowings to their immediate sonic presence. This shift in attention is frequently characterized as a form of aesthetic contemplation.
This paper demonstrates an artistic exploration of how the concept of aesthetic contemplation, along with contemplative practices, can inform the compositional process and what techniques this might require.
The research draws on a series of compositional experiments with repetition and fragmentation of musical borrowings as well as on experiences from meditative practice. A central insight of the project is that the aforementioned moments of dual perception are inherently polyphonic in nature. Building on this, a compositional approach of "polyphonizing" is developed.
Braced Under the Heating Sun: Embodied Listening Practices
(2025)
author(s): Melissa Ryke
published in: Research Catalogue
How can embodied listening be performed, from my ears (body) to yours? How are we (dis)oriented? ‘Braced under the heating sun’ is centred around listening to and documenting my childhood home and its aural particularities through processes of embodied listening. The project is based on my recordings and experiences there between February and March 2020 (bookended by the waning Australian black summer bush fires and the burgeoning COVID-19 pandemic). The house is made from wood and so bends with the weather. The wooden structure amplifies the sounds of our habitation. The house is located on the edge of a small town and next to a sugarcane farm in North Queensland. Although in a tropical climate it has no flyscreens, and air-conditioning in only one room. The windows are open all of the time to let a breeze through. Most evenings you can find green tree frogs, geckos and insects amongst other animals in or around the house. In this way nature (a wild exterior) pushes against and blurs into the home (an organised interior). It is never silent there, the sounds are a mix of all forces; human/animal, natural/industrial. For me, it resonates as a site that is connected to the world despite its rural location. In this house the “rhythms and cycles of the living and the immediate needs of every living being are highlighted and played out. It is where intensities proliferate themselves, where forces are expressed for their own sake, where sensation lives and experiments, where the future is affectively and perceptually anticipated” (Elizabeth Grosz 2008). In this audio paper, I discuss this installation work and my continued research on embodied listening.
tppt
(2025)
author(s): Catarina Almeida
published in: Research Catalogue
theory
practice
theorize practice
practice theory
...
By using any of these words I am establishing an order of importance among them. My body cannot vocalize two of them at the same time. How in the world can this terrible order of things be abolished? How can we relate to a possible merge of the dichotomy theory/practice through language?
"16"
(2025)
author(s): Catarina Almeida
published in: Research Catalogue
The theory & practice affair: this is piece "16" from the series "x out of 5448643200", and it is an arrangement of 16 possible combinations among 5448643200 available of the letters {p, r, a, c, t, i, c, e, t, h, e, o, r, y}. These letters make the word 'practicetheory', and also the word 'theorypractic'e. In fact, none of these two words exist, and yet are identifiable 'theory' and 'practice' as constitutive halves within them. Discourse not only describes the world but actually produces the world. We, as researchers and as artists - and particularly as artist-researchers - are in permanent tension with the two blocks, theory and practice, and despite our struggles to merge both, we are, through language, every time referring to one after the other. One after the other, in a hierarchy. We cannot speak the two words at the same time and, unless we invent a new word to refer to the crossbreed of the two, we are condemned to this limiting dichotomy. "x out of 5448643200" presents the hypothesis of billions of possibilities to re-write the productive merging of theory and practice. "16" shows sixteen of them
(Thanks to Steve Norton and Robert Stevenson for collaboration)
