Exploring plurality of interpretation through annotations in the long 19th century: musician's perspectives and the FAAM project.
(2024)
author(s): Nicholas Cornia
published in: Research Catalogue
The quest of reconciling scholarship and interpretative freedom has always been present in the early music movement discourse, since its 19th century foundations. Confronted with a plurality of performance practices, the performer of Early Music is forced to make interpretative choices, based on musicological research of the sources and their personal taste.
The critical analysis of the sources related to a musical work is often a time-consuming and cumbersome task, usually provided by critical editions made by musicologists. Such editions primarily focus on the composer's agency, neglecting the contribution of a complex network of professions, ranging from editors, conductors, amateur and professional performers and collectors.
The FAAM, Flemish Archive for Annotated Music, is an interdisciplinary project at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp that wishes to explore the possibilities of annotation analysis on music scores for historically informed musicians.
Annotations are a valuable source of information to recollect the decision-making process of musicians of the past. Especially when original musical recordings are not available, the marks provided by these performers of the past are the most intimate and informative connections between modern and ancient musicians.
Contrary to a purely scholarly historically informed practice approach, based on the controversial concept of authenticity, we wish to allow the modern performers to reconcile their practice with the one of their predecessors in a process of dialectic emulation, where artistic process is improved through the past but does not stagnate in it.
I AM THE CAMERA: Designing a site-specific screen work
(2024)
author(s): Nathalie S. Fari
published in: Research Catalogue
The site-specific screen work I AM THE CAMERA proposes how a specific place, in this case, the Hasselblad Memorial at Götaplatsen (Gothenburg, Sweden) can serve as a basis for generating a performance and/or documentary material. Drawing from site-specific performance, performance documentation and filmmaking, it uses the framework of a performance laboratory to explore the relationship between embodiment and audio-visuality; especially by experimenting with how the interplay between three characters and their technological devices can contribute to develop a performative and cinematic language.
NUMB - exploring emotionally charged interactions to motivate reflection on non-fiction topics
(2023)
author(s): Elin Festøy
published in: University of Inland Norway
This PhD project in artistic research by Elin Festøy, research fellow at The Norwegian Film School, Innlandet University College, is situated in the field of interactive experiences. Festøy explores how emotionally charged interactions can be used to build trust and communicate non-fiction topics in a way that is more likely to motivate empathy and change. The artistic exploration consists of a consecutive row of conceptual VR experiences. The reflections turn to the role of freedom and agency in interactive experiences and how these can help build a trusting relationship between creator and participant.
Covered Mouths Still Have Voices
(2023)
author(s): Tom Western
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
overed Mouths Still Have Voices
Tom Western
UCL Geography – t.western@ucl.ac.uk
Abstract
The title of this essay is a political slogan. It borrows from the chant of medical workers in Greece, who have been asserting that covered mouths still have a voice (“Και τα καλυμμένα στόματα βγάζουν φωνή”) since long before the Covid-19 pandemic began at the start of 2020. The slogan has become politically useful on wider scales since then, and I take it as a jumping off point – a means of understanding political techniques of vocality that have been retuned in pandemic contexts. My focus is on forms of vocal-spatial resistance, hearing how people contest political hierarchies of vocality that have been tightened during Covid, and create new spatialities of voice through pandemic activisms. The essay listens to how voices signal and sound out multiple forms of mobilisation, and it outlines a global sense of voice that develops as a result. From this, ways of hearing mouths and voices emerge not just in terms of speaking and sounding, or only as forms of identity and agency, but as a gathering, a refusal, a resource, a navigational tool, a transformation.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to friends in Athens. To Kareem al Kabbani and Urok Shirhan, whose soundworks resound into these pages. To Fani Kostourou, Pasqua Vorgia, and John Bingham-Hall for organising and running ‘The City Talks Back’. To Fadia Dakka for her kindness and patience in waiting for this essay to be done.
The application of creative practice as a means of disrupting or re-defining the dynamics of power in, with or for different communities.
(2022)
author(s): Sabrin Hasbun, Gareth Osborne, Rachel Carney, Julika Gittner, Catherine Cartwright, agnes villette, Harry Matthews
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
In this exposition, seven research practitioners investigate how creative practice can be applied as a form of knowledge production in order to disrupt or re-define the dynamics of power in a range of different contexts. These applications of creative practice take varied and complex forms, often transferring creativity from the practitioner-researcher to their participants, increasing participant agency or re-defining existing hierarchies, as they form, empower, and enlighten real and conceptual communities. This collaborative exposition has been developed through presentations and discussions over the course of two years. Although each researcher applies different methodologies to their individual projects, our work as a group followed a pattern of creative practice, reflection, and reformulation, as we responded to each other’s research, creating a research community of our own. We want to emphasize that creative practice can not only disrupt or re-define the dynamics of power in a range of different contexts, but that it can do this in an infinite number of ways. In this variety and adaptability lies the potential of creative research.
Listening and Mediation: of agency and performative responsivity in ecological sound art practices
(2022)
author(s): Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir, Stefan Östersjö
published in: Research Catalogue
Published as part of: Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir and Stefan Östersjö, ‘Listening and Mediation: of agency and performative responsivity in ecological sound art practices’ in ‘Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research’, (eds.) Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Erika Goble, Juha Himanka, Phenomenology & Practice, Volume 17 (2022), No.1, ISSN 1913-4711. See here: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/pandpr/index.php/pandpr/index
Composing Technique, Performing Technique
(2021)
author(s): Scott McLaughlin, Zubin Kanga, Mira Benjamin
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Technique as the entanglement of composition and performance as an epistemic object (Knorr Cetina) emergent from contingent materiality. Two pieces by Scott McLaughlin—respectively for Zubin Kanga (piano) and Mira Benjamin (violin)—are discussed as case studies of strategies for entwining the specific embodied techniques of instrumental performance with the material agency (Pickering) of the instrument as a 'material indeterminacy' in which knowledge inheres through practice (Spatz). This exposition situates the artistic research as a novel conceptualisation of 'technique' that treats composition and performance not as separate domains but as an Ingoldian 'meshwork' where virtual structures in the performance technique are amplified through processes of listening and through compositional structures into open-ended local feedback loops.
Enacting Agential Cuts - Notes on the Untitled 1-3 (2014)
(2018)
author(s): Heidi Tikka
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
The exposition is a visual-textual essay in which I explore Karen Barad’s agential realism in conversation with my installation “”Untitled 1-3” consisting of three interactive artifacts: knitted dress-like objects, responding to touch. An installation is understood here as an ongoing process of materialization which assumes different instantiations over time. I will approach these in dialogue with Barad’s concept of the “agential cut”, inquiring into three “cuts” in which the installation is enacted in three different configurations.
images and their agency
(2017)
author(s): glad fryer
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition Images and their Agency presents a text alongside a group of paintings. The text is a reflection on the practice-based research being carried out across a number of paintings concerning images and there agency. This project is ongoing.
We need to grasp both sides of the paradox of the image: that it is alive but also dead; powerful but also weak; meaningful but also meaningless. (wjt Mitchell, what do pictures want)
In the text I respond to W.J.T Mitchell’s suggestion to consider the aliveness and the deadness of images. I take a phenomenological perspective and consider how we experience their power and weakness, their meaning and meaninglessness - how we experience their agency. I do this by critically reflecting on a group of paintings I begun making in 2004; I enquire into the capacity of these paintings to address the agency of the image and how it is felt or experienced.
I am concerned with a common ontological or moral proposition that they as a group of images pose. This proposition of the image is the focus of my practice-based research.
I frame the enquiry into this group of painting through three sets of questions. The first set of questions concerns the image, which is explored through Badiou’s ideas on the truth process. The second concerns the body, which is explored through J. Bennett’s research into affect and trauma. The third concerns Flesh, which is explored through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflections on the relations between eye and mind.
The Agenda Group
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): FJ
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The Agenda Group is a research group based at KMD, connecting artistic practices "with an agenda". The group enables crossover methods rather than media specificity, allowing space for different participants. "An agenda" is here understood as an aspect of socially engaged art practices. This relates to people, narratives and history alike and is about our shared values and contribution to society as artists. The engagement relates to issues outside of the artistic context and investigates how these issues might be mediated and moderated with
artistic means.
The Agenda Group is open for all kinds of artistic practices, but the focus of the discussions will be on artistic practice "as crucial to both individual and societal change and development" (KMD
Strategic Plan). The relationality between art and society is never as simple as it seems and these reflections involves the thinking of intensity in addition to formats, translation and displacement.
In this sense the agenda of an artistic project is crucial to the understanding of its implications.
The Agenda Group is a pragmatic platform to connect various members of staff at KMD (artistic-researchers, post-docs, PhD’s and maybe even MA-students). The main purpose is to meet
regularly, presenting and discussing the artistic research of each of the group members. An internal critical agenda.
Research group initiator: Professor Frans Jacobi
The Polyphonic Touch. Coarticulation and polyphonic expression in the performance of piano and organ music
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Andrew Wright
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Performances of solo keyboard repertoire can sound more or less polyphonic depending on the performer’s use of divergence in expression. Rather than being a purely cerebral experience, this expressive divergence is situated in an ecological relationship between keyboard and player where the gestural dynamics of technique and musicianship overlap. Specific body schemata relating to expressive divergence are therefore foundational to the interpretive freedom of the performer in creating polyphonic expression, and feature transparently in the musical result. This dissertation of Andrew Wright
theorises expressive divergence by examining the embodiment of single voices through the hierarchical structuring of coarticulation, and by showing how these multi-layered gestures combine in the polyphony of expression. This performative view of polyphony is contextualised not only in musical practice, but also in the wider interdisciplinary use of polyphony as a metaphor. Single-player polyphonic expression is shown to enact or demonstrate an inner experience of the plurality of subjective agency, an experience made possible by its embodied dimension. Besides verbalising and theorising polyphonic expression, this dissertation provides experiments and exercises useful for developing such a practice, as well as examples of its application in concert.
Searching for a Soul of Things
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Maria Komarova
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Through exploring different ways of relating to things, surprising connections appear. The research catalogue
"Searching for a Soul of Things" introduces strategies for rethinking the materiality of everyday objects and revealing the multiplicity of narratives behind them. It tends to verify theoretical concepts from the field of new materialism and object-oriented ontology in the context of scenographical practice. The research analyzes practical experiments and transforms them into an interactive 2D environment.
Hosting Togetherness as a Tool for Future Resistance. Research format Testing in Performance,
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Liz Rech
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Between 2012 and 2017, two cultural institutions and two universities in Hamburg collaborated in an experiment in the growing field of artistic and art-based research: Within the programmes Assemblies and Participation (2012-2014) and Performing Citizenship (2015-2017), they explored forms and formats of research in between art, academia and society. PABR (Participatory Art Based Research) understands research first and foremost as a triangular relation and interaction between art, science and society. This field of art-based research experiments with formats that involve not only artists and researchers, but also members of other communities such as children, neighbors, activists, experts, (non-)citizens. Artistic practices are thereby the crucial resources to change the relationship between research and the public and to create research practices in and for society. Fifty research projects have been designed and conducted so far to weave participatory research, participatory art, and cultural studies into a methodology that could be called the "Hamburg School" of participatory art-based research (Peters et al. 2020). In PABR, other forms of knowledge, which, for example, come from everyday practices, or exist as body or experiential knowledge, are valued as equal to academic or artistic knowledge.
Methodologically, the research setups that have been used by Liz Rech in the context of her performative research projects can be assigned to the field of PABR.
The text "Hosting Togetherness as a Tool for Future Resistance. Research format Testing in Performance" is part of the online publication on PABR https://pab-research.de.
CALL ME WHEN YOU'RE HOME
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Francesco Collavino
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
L’idea di questo lavoro è quella di utilizzare l’immagine degli astronauti e delle loro esplorazioni come metafora di un rapporto umano che si realizza nella spazio di una separazione.
Il titolo infatti è una frase che viene detta sulla soglia, nella partenza, è una formula di protezione che ci accompagna per tutto il viaggio come una grande dichiarazione d’amore.
In un altro livello riflettiamo sulla crisi del linguaggio di situazione satura, dove la comunicazione si è ormai rappresa, il linguaggio crolla su se stesso e cessa il dialogo. Si parla, ma non ci si comprende più perciò è necessario partire, lasciarsi per trovare modalità di comunicazione più efficaci.
In scena saranno presenti due interpreti, due individui, tra i quali non ci sarà una vera e propria interazione, se non la relazione che si viene a creare tra i loro corpi sospesi in uno spazio comune.
Il lavoro è impostato come fossero due soli distinti, ma che muovendosi possano creare un’unica opera d’insieme e magari questo porterà anche a un incontro.
This PhD project in artistic research by Elin Festøy, research fellow at The Norwegian Film School, Innlandet University College, is situated in the field of interactive experiences. Festøy explores how emotionally charged interactions can be used to build trust and communicate non-fiction topics in a way that is more likely to motivate empathy and change. The artistic exploration consists of a consecutive row of conceptual VR experiences. The reflections turn to the role of freedom and agency in interactive experiences and how these can help build a trusting relationship between creator and participant.open exposition comments (0)
Technique as the entanglement of composition and performance as an epistemic object (Knorr Cetina) emergent from contingent materiality. Two pieces by Scott McLaughlin—respectively for Zubin Kanga (piano) and Mira Benjamin (violin)—are discussed as case studies of strategies for entwining the specific embodied techniques of instrumental performance with the material agency (Pickering) of the instrument as a 'material indeterminacy' in which knowledge inheres through practice (Spatz). This exposition situates the artistic research as a novel conceptualisation of 'technique' that treats composition and performance not as separate domains but as an Ingoldian 'meshwork' where virtual structures in the performance technique are amplified through processes of listening and through compositional structures into open-ended local feedback loops.open exposition comments (0)
The exposition is a visual-textual essay in which I explore Karen Barad’s agential realism in conversation with my installation “”Untitled 1-3” consisting of three interactive artifacts: knitted dress-like objects, responding to touch. An installation is understood here as an ongoing process of materialization which assumes different instantiations over time. I will approach these in dialogue with Barad’s concept of the “agential cut”, inquiring into three “cuts” in which the installation is enacted in three different configurations.open exposition comments (0)
Through exploring different ways of relating to things, surprising connections appear. The research catalogue "Searching for a Soul of Things" introduces strategies for rethinking the materiality of everyday objects and revealing the multiplicity of narratives behind them. It tends to verify theoretical concepts from the field of new materialism and object-oriented ontology in the context of scenographical practice. The research analyzes practical experiments and transforms them into an interactive 2D environment.open exposition comments (0)