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.
Bodies in Resonating Action: Strategies of Initiating Collaborative Creative Work
(2025)
author(s): Faidra Chafta-Douka
published in: Research Catalogue
Music-making often times based on a system of objectified sound representations delivered into a fixed, precise and descriptive notation, renders the score independent of the composer, while at the same time creating a gap of communication between composer and performer. The research project “Bodies in resonating action” re-examines two fundamental relations of music-making, namely the dynamics between composer and performer, and the relationship of the performer with their own body during performing by extending its materiality towards the body of their instrument. In this context the sense of togetherness is being reinforced throughout the whole creative process of making music. By initiating constant experimentation through improvisation with the performer’s body as a focal point of observation, both composer and instrumentalist—even though from a different perspective—develop a mutual dialogue and tune into physical and mental processes as they manifest during practice. Listening carefully to the performing body, how it behaves and reacts to specific tasks, how it breathes, moves, thinks, feels, while doing so in the unique way of a specific individual, creates a deeper understanding of what musicking actually involves, and in this way gives the composer important insights. The obtained knowledge through that process is individualised depending on the specific research partner, it can however be applied, or even enriched, when put into practice with other musicians. Two strategies are followed in order to achieve that; firstly, devising a methodical process of working with a musician so as to observe and research their own uniqueness, and developing tools that facilitate the (re-)initiation of the creative process. As a composer, that leads this process, one also has to develop strong reflexes to observe and react to whatever may spontaneously occur. Secondly, constructing notations that encapsulate concepts or even processes of research, and can reflect thought, while having the flexibility to expand and include further knowledge gained. The result of this kind of work is a musical idea which is constantly in flux, is being re-shaped, deconstructed and re-constructed. The idea is also being performed on each different stage, incorporating more knowledge along the way, however not striving for a final absolute artwork, but rather attempting to capture and perform the process.
Tending towards each other: between breath and inscription
(2025)
author(s): Thais Akina Yoshitake Lopez
published in: Research Catalogue
This research is grounded in the relation between listening and orientation through a kindred gesture: tending towards. Its object of inquiry is the dialogue between Paul Celan’s poems and Gisèle Lestrange-Celan’s etchings in the publication Atemkristall (Brunidor 1965, Vaduz). The choice of this pairing arises from the possibility of bringing together two elements: the breath and the ground. I follow the flux and exchange between breathing gestures and inscription across the poems and etchings, approaching the images not as illustrations or representations of the text but as spatial configurations of encounter—between readers, listeners, makers, and witnesses.
Attendance as a gesture of attention becomes palpable when the poet imagines that “the poem is pneumatically touchable” and that “the reader breathes into the poem.” In this turning-towards-the-poem, the etchings invite a reading of the poet’s gesture as it inclines toward another practice and medium. My interest lies in how, within this publication, both media affect and reorient one another, generating a shared space of reading. Extending this form of listening means approaching the relation between word and image as the opening of spaces of attention—listening as inclination, as stance, before any immediate attempt of translation.
Un Po di musica
(2025)
author(s): Martina Madini
published in: Research Catalogue
This artistic research explores the integration of the saxophone and its extended techniques with tape to address environmental issues, focusing on drought in Po River, Italy. Motivated by the severe drought that occurred in 2022 and the natural disasters that occurred the following years later in the region, the research aims to raise awareness of climate change through the creation of a piece for saxophone and tape.
The methodology used includes a combination of score and recordings analysis, interviews, case studies, and self-experimentation. The main sources that shaped the research include the analysis of pieces such as Earth and the Great Weather by John Luther Adams and The Great Animal Orchestra Symphony by Bernie Krause and Richard Blackford, along with the self-experimentation with saxophone extended techniques found in Mysterious Morning III by Fuminori Tanada. These works initiated the exploration of integrating natural sounds into music. Additionally, the analysis of the performance SO Rude, SO Fragile by Massimiliano Vizzini provided valuable insights into the development of a structured improvisation, combining solo instrumental music with tape. Finally, interviews with experts such as Porter Ellerman,Tim Kliphuis, and Agnese Valmaggia provided further perspectives on how music can incorporate environmental issues, offering important insights on the integration of activism and music.
The research outcomes include two interventions focused primarily on field recordings and saxophone, a third intervention that introduces speech-based media to enhance the sonic and narrative theme, and a final composition that synthesizes the findings of the entire two-year research process.
This final outcome represents the culmination of all gathered insights: a piece that combines tape with live saxophone performance and extended techniques, with the focus on the climate crisis and a particular emphasis on the Po River and the theme of drought.
Beyond the unnecessary self
(2025)
author(s): Henrik Frisk
published in: Research Catalogue
In my 2013 paper The (un)necessary self (Frisk 2013) I explored the idea of giving up of the self as an important step towards the dismantling of the romantic idea of creation, and approach an understanding of creativity that is more closely aligned with the other. The other should be understood as anything that affects the artistic practice: a co-creator, a listener, a participant or a remote collaborator as well as any non-human actor. The point was to move the focus from the creator to what is created and to understand the roles of the various agents involved. This idea is further developed in this paper through several new trajectories.
In music, hyper-capitalism of the twenty first century is eager to commodify the artistic output, the artist, as well as the listeners. This is not only a problem for the freedom of art (a concept equally complex), it also makes the role of the self difficult to understand. But in the radicalization of the role of the creator, both a new work concept and a review of the self become necessary, even beyond the notion of giving up of the self. The ethics in artistic practices, that is, the moral values that are expressed through artistic practices in music, specifically improvisation, may complement traditional views on ethics and form an important aspect when discussing the roles of the self. The notion of the Care of the Self, as discussed in Michel Foucault's Volume Three of the History of Sexuality, is used as a method to approach this complex area.
