Tipping Points (Reflection Component)
(2023)
author(s): Tijs Ham
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
The Ph.D. project in Artistic Research, Tipping Points, conducted by Tijs Ham ('81), is situated in the field of live electronics and focuses on the exploration of chaotic processes within instrument design, compositional strategies, and performance. The unpredictable nature of chaos impacts many aspects of musicking. Artistic works emerge from the interferences between processes that are set in motion. Instruments are influenced and in turn influence the performer in return. The reflections turn to the notion of wondering as the performer and audiences alike encounter unforeseen sonic behaviors that are strangely musical despite their volatile and fragile chaotic origins.
The Performer-Composer: A Practice in Interrelation
(2023)
author(s): Thomas Aurlund Lossius
published in: Research Catalogue
A simultaneous role of performer and composer is crucial in a vast number of artistic praxises. In this artistic research project, I explore creative possibilities the performing composer role offers. I also discuss how my performing composer praxis has inspired my interpretation of compositions by others.
The project is situated in my own artistic praxis and has an auto-hermeneutical approach. My primary method has been to compose music for myself and to perform it. This has led me to create compositions which are more improvisational, orally conveyed and open to diverse interpretations. I have also performed with a more co-creative, personally engaged and holistically oriented mindset. I have further experimented in performing compositions by others while imagining myself to be the composer. This has offered an alternative interpretative approach that resound deeply with me on an aesthetic level. Finally, I have reflected on how a performing composer discourse can unsettle the hierarchical language of composition and interpretation.
The project builds on a broader movement in artistic research and musicology, problematising the apparent dichotomy between composers and performers [Leech-Wilkinson, 2016; Cornish, 2015; Cook, 2013], and investigating the role of the performing composer or composing performer [Spears, 2022; Beaugeais, 2020; Groth, 2017]. The project constitutes my master thesis in performing music at the University of Bergen with specialisation in jazz .
Sonic Complexion
(2022)
author(s): Jacob Anderskov, Niclas Hundahl
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen
The Sonic Complexion project has investigated from an artistic perspective the musical dimensions texture and ‘klang’ (harmony), with the aim of creating new music and new perspectives. The outcomes of the project are a number of new albums, methodologies and perspectives, coming from quite different starting point in terms of how to systematically-artistically investigate texture and harmony.
A case study of instrument design
(2022)
author(s): Rafaele Andrade
published in: KC Research Portal
While searching for a way to unify my creative process into an artistic practice, I was led to design a new instrument. This instrument resembles a cello in certain respects but also integrates important values and discussions from the current century, notably Communication, Integration, Representation and Autonomy. My goal has been to use the process of design development of the instrument as research for discovering new ways of practicing music and composing. For this research project, I am testing my 2021 release of the instrument: producing artworks with a diverse range of collaborators and multidisciplinary interactive concerts. At its core, this is a transdisciplinary case study combining instrument design, composition, and performance.
Aubiome: A Collaborative Method for the Production of Interactive Electronic Music
(2021)
author(s): Joel Diegert, Adrian Artacho
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Using a ‘performer-centric’ working method, artistic researchers Joel Diegert and Adrián Artacho investigate the potential of integrating the saxophone with real-time electronics. The musical work, 'aubiome', is used as a case study to demonstrate their collaborative co-creative approach. The six-stage, iterative working process that emerged during the aubiome project is broken down and described in detail.
***CLICK FOR MORE INFORMATION*** reading as performance / reading as composition
(2020)
author(s): Paul Norman
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
At the end of ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ (1969), Sol LeWitt states: “these sentences comment on art but are not art.” In the same work he also remarks, “If words are used and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature, numbers are not mathematics,” thus creating a paradigm. Is writing or talking about artistic ideas art or not?
… Let’s say for now that it could be.
John Cage famously defined music as the “organisation of sound” perhaps though, reflecting on the origin of the word composition as coming from the Latin componere meaning to “put together”, the ‘organisation of things’, may be a more suitable definition. Not only sound, but all elements of a performance could or perhaps should be organised, put together or composed.
Consider the situation where your (yes, you the readers) organisational decisions matter. Maybe it’s as simple as ‘do I read the text or look at the given example first?’ These decisions matter, they effect what is communicated and when, what knowledge or assumptions are carried and for how long. These decisions are thus meaningful and potentially compositional in nature, establishing a new question. Is all reading compositional?…
…Let’s say for now that it could be.
Eight to Infinite
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Alex Jovcic-Sas
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Eight to Infinite is an exciting collaborative project between electronic artist Afrodeutsche and PhD researcher, Alex Jovčić-Sas. The aim is to revise two unknown historical composers, Gertrud Grunow (Bauhaus) and Daphne Oram (BBC), by writing, recording, and performing a new work that uses their archival materials combined with contemporary digital compositional tools. Grunow and Oram worked with optical sound as a process for composing music, specifically focusing on colours and shapes as compositional tools. They both have been largely overlooked within their respective institutional histories and this project will bring to life their unique and rich compositional practices.
Eight to Infinite took place on the 7th of October 2021, at the Space at Nottingham Contemporary. Eight to Infinite was generously funded by Arts Council England, Midlands4Cities, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham Contemporary, and PRS Foundation.
Gian Majidi Singing Journey
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Gigi Gian
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Who am I? Kuka minä olen? Do I have any answer for this? I do not know yet and maybe whole of this long trip will remain the same. Uncertainty will be the cause and the result.
Should I try to be someone else or something else? Can I do that? How? What's happened to me? Why I am here and now?
This is question which i am looking to give some answer. If I do not know who I am, how you want to know about me?
I give you some pictures and feelings to make you happy about me, to make you at ease about me. let's walk and recall some memories together.
I have been writing poems and novels, screenplays and theaters, I was writing about music and movies. I have been playing and acting. I have loved performances and always communicating with people.
From Singer to Reflective Practitioner: Performing and Composing in a Multimedia Environment
(last edited: 2016)
author(s): Aleksandra Popovska
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exegesis comes as result of performing, composing and researching in a multimedia environment over
the past few years. I started working on my projects with the following question in my mind: how can I
improve my own practice?
Asking this led to identification of the problems related to making a live media performance, as well as prompting discussions about the types of knowledge necessary for producing a work of art that includes more than one medium.
Rather than attempting to draw definitive conclusions regarding topics as broad as live media
performance, I summarize and reflect upon the creation process as I experienced it, elucidating my personal
contemplations regarding my experience and practice in multimedia environment.
I will present three projects: ’Bukefalus’, ’Tribute to Morty’, and ’Every. When’, all designed as electroacoustic pieces with video displays. I shall take a
closer look at how the pieces were developed, discuss their cross-disciplinary character, and good and
bad practices involved in them. Finally, I shall focus my attention on how things go in practice when
one is composing and designing an interactive piece using improvisation and different media. In all three
projects I have been involved in different roles, as a performer, composer or designer, and in all of them
collaboration played important role. I made particular choices, sometimes blending my roles and the roles
of the participants.
I hope that my experience as a musician, having passed through both classical and technology-based
educational systems and participating in them in different roles – as performer, concept designer, composer, producer and teacher – will be useful for all creative people coming from the conservatory and wanting towork in the field of multimedia performance.
With this exegesis I would also like to make my own contribution to reflective practice and living theory
(Whitehead, 1998), by exploring improvisation and experimenting in my projects. I will write about how
it has enhanced my own identity as performer, composer and designer, and why and how I have been
committed to sharing its transformational potential with people I collaborate with. Its claim to originality
is that it arrives at a living concept of knowledge transformation through multidimensional reflection; as
a singer who is a composer, as a composer who is a researcher, as a student who has been a teacher, as an
artist who has lived in an imaginative world creating her works, and as a researcher dealing with institutional
policy and educational change. “I am my own informant into different perspectives, and will try through
these personae to have a dialogue between several positions and arrive at a concept that is tested and lived
from several perspectives.” (Spiro, 2008, p. 29)