The Sonic Atelier #8 – A Conversation with Rafiq Bhatia (and Son Lux)
(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 Rafiq Bhatia, American guitarist, composer, and producer, and member of the experimental trio Son Lux. Bhatia’s work dissolves the boundaries between jazz, electronic, and contemporary classical music, exploring sound as a sculptural and spatial material. His practice embodies a deep integration of composition, production, and performance—where the studio becomes an instrument, and the act of shaping sound is inseparable from the act of composing.
In the conversation, Bhatia reflects on the interdependence between the roles of composer, performer, and producer, on the DAW as a generative and compositional environment, and on the emergence of sonic identity through timbre, space, and texture. He discusses collaboration within Son Lux, his process of scoring for film, and the relationship between abstraction and precision in communicating musical ideas to orchestras and ensembles.
Bhatia’s reflections reveal an artistic vision in which technology and human expression coexist symbiotically: music as a living, evolving ecosystem of gestures, resonances, and spaces—an art of listening, translation, and transformation.
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.
The Sonic Atelier #6 – A Conversation with Bryan Senti
(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, production, performance, and technology.
This interview features Bryan Senti, American composer, violinist, and producer, whose work bridges classical tradition, Latin American heritage, and cinematic experimentation. His music, ranging from solo albums such as Manu to film scores and collaborative projects, combines impressionistic harmony, acoustic warmth, and electronic texture, shaping a distinct post-classical voice that is both intimate and expansive.
In the conversation, Senti reflects on the integration of composition and production within the digital environment, the evolving relationship between notation and sound, and the ways in which tools like the DAW and immersive formats such as Dolby Atmos redefine musical form and spatial perception. He also discusses authorship in film music, the ethics of technology, and the need to preserve a human, performative presence in an increasingly algorithmic landscape.
Senti’s reflections reveal a vision of music as a living craft, an art of listening, shaping, and reimagining sound, where composition becomes a dialogue between emotion, material, and space.
The Sonic Atelier #5 – A Conversation with Eydís Evensen
(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, production, performance, and technology.
This interview features Icelandic composer and pianist Eydís Evensen, whose work bridges classical tradition, improvisation, and post-classical minimalism. Her music draws on the landscapes of her homeland, translating memory, nature, and emotion into a cinematic and introspective sound world. In the conversation, Evensen reflects on the hybrid role of today’s composer, the fluid boundaries between writing, producing, and performing, and the ways in which technology and collaboration shape her creative process.
Evensen’s insights reveal a practice rooted in both discipline and intuition, a music that moves between solitude and dialogue, the organic and the digital, embodying a poetic vision of creation where sound becomes a mirror of place, memory, and human resilience.
The Sonic Atelier #4 – A Conversation with Iosonouncane
(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, production, performance, and technology.
This interview features Iosonouncane (Jacopo Incani), who reflects on the influences that shaped his formation, the balance between composition, production, and mixing, and the challenges of navigating today’s algorithm-driven music industry. He also discusses his approach to film scoring, the role of spatialization as a compositional parameter, and his views on new technologies such as artificial intelligence and immersive formats. His insights highlight the tensions between experimentation and market logic, as well as the need to preserve complexity and diversity as essential values in contemporary music-making.
Drawing in the In-Between – ma, Intelligens and the Sketch&Draw Method
(2025)
author(s): Tanja K. Hess
published in: Research Catalogue
On drawing as a practice of the in-between in the sense of the Japanese concept ma. Using the Sketch&Draw method, it is shown that drawing is neither mere representation nor pure invention, but a dialogical process between perception, memory, hand, and world. Neuroscientific models such as Predictive Coding demonstrate that each line is a proposal by the brain of how the world might be, which is then fed back and refined in the process of drawing. The hand appears not as a mere tool, but as a thinking organ, tightly coupled with perception and memory.
Referring to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s theory of Flow, it is shown that the immediacy of hand drawing – in contrast to digital procedures – is decisive for entering a state in which perception and action seamlessly merge. Philosophical perspectives from Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Tim Ingold highlight that the line is not merely a boundary, but a resonance space in which the invisible can become manifest.
Drawing thus proves to be a process of knowledge, one that unfolds slowly, comparable to a species-rich meadow: unplannable, yet not random. In the in-between of world and subject, line and gaze, a form of knowledge emerges that can be understood as Intelligens – a creative third way beyond control and helplessness.
Sculpting Music Performances: About Choreomania and the Process of Shaping a Performance
(2025)
author(s): Silvia De Teresa Navarro
published in: KC Research Portal
This research explores how choreomania - the historical phenomenon of uncontrollable, communal dance “plagues” that emerged in the Middle Ages - can inform and shape my artistic practice. Central to this inquiry is the question: how does choreomania influence my creative process and the way I shape my performance practice as a classically trained pianist? The study unfolds three main blocks. First, an essay examines the conceptual formation of choreomania, its contemporary relevance, and its impact on my artistic work. Simultaneously, I observe and document the creative processes of artists-in-residence during my internship at the residency programme "Choreomania - Bodily Excess, Collective Unrest". The thrid block involves an experimental playground consisting of several performance try-outs, each rigorously documented, analysed, and reflected upon. Adopting a rhizomatic approach, I explore performance-making as a fluid, irregular process. The resulting performances weave together classical piano, improvisation, movement, voice, collaboration, live-electronics, audience engagement, and the submerged elements of choreomania. The research culminates in a synthesis and reflection of the entire process, offering new insights into performance-making.
What can a process do? A passage from ritual to rituality
(2019)
author(s): Usoa Fullaondo
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
In this exposition I try to build new relationships between different creative processes arising from nature, life, and art. This is done by setting up visual, textual, and affective analogies through superimpositions of layers of images, sound, and text based on the book Un Atletismo Afectivo (An Affective Athleticism) (publication on paper, 116 pp, 2016) and the audiovisual work Trenza (Braid) (HD video, 55', 2017).
These two works were developed around a particular space, the fields of Aixerrota in Algorta (Bizkaia, Basque Country). The book is an attempt to translate my habitual experience of running through this space into art, while the film mainly focuses on observing and experiencing how the landscape was turned into a space for a festive event. Three separate narrative strands, each referring to a particular process, intertwine. The first of these is filmings of young people's actions as they prepare the space for the International Paella competition. A second strand consists of fragments of a voice-over by David Attenborough from the documentary Bowerbirds: The art of seduction (2000), which shows male bowerbirds building the bowers where they will court the female bird. The third strand includes sequences from my own work, which outline emerging processes of artistic creation and research.
The aim of this exposition is to share the singularity of processes in which the need to bond or to attach (Juan Luis Moraza, 2009) instigates a conscientious preparation of space that will allow an event to succeed. It also highlights the way in which some of these processes may interrupt the normal course of things and the self-absorption born from habit by opening up from the individual towards the collective, by confronting the tension resulting from an indeterminate end result, and by re-enacting aesthetic experience through the production of an audiovisual and sculptural landscape. The underlying question of the work relates to the potential of new arrangements of materials to open up new creative processes.
Basic Bitch, a theatrical midlife crisis introspective
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Nanna Gunnarsdóttir
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This is an overview of the research behind the making of a final project by Nanna Gunnars, an MA student in Performing Arts at Iceland University of the Arts. The final project culminates in a stage performance titled Basic Bitch in January 2026, but this research is presented a month earlier.
The research shows the continuous change that takes place during the creative process. How many tumbles and changes does the creative process go through during the making of a devised theatre performance?
The performance is yet to be finished, so readers are placed in the midst of the thought process and given an insight into the author's thinking process and devising methods.
Creative Practice PhD Research: A Wine-Dark Sea
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Ali Williams
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A collection of documentation and research branches as I navigate my PhD journey.
Transart Institute / College of Art + Design, Liverpool John Moores University
Advisors
LJMU: Prof. Joasia Krysa
(https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/staff-profiles/faculty-of-arts-professional-and-social-studies/liverpool-school-of-art-and-design/joasia-krysa)
TT: Sarah Bennett (http://www.sarahbennett.org.uk)
TT: Dr. Tracey Bensen (https://traceybenson.com/about/)
Algorithms in Art
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Magda Stanová
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
People interested in artificial intelligence usually ask whether computers could become as intelligent and creative as humans. I decided to think about it the other way around: I'm interested in the extent to which the creative process of artists is algorithmic. It's not difficult to create something that will look like art; you just need to imitate an already existing genre or style. The challenge is to create something that will be able to trigger an art experience.
In this visual essay, I'm studying where, in a spectrum of different kinds of experiences (jokes, magic tricks, pleasure from solving a mathematical or scientific problem), there are thrills triggered by art. All of these experiences depend on a sufficient amount of novelty. Therefore, the creators of experience triggers face the same problem: the impact of a joke, a magic trick, or an artwork tends to diminish when heard/seen repeatedly. The human brain has evolved in a way that it is able to distinguish repeating patterns, formulas, schemes, algorithms. Uncovering an algorithm causes pleasure. But once an algorithm is uncovered, it does not cause pleasure any more. To trigger an experience of the same intensity, we need a new trigger. In this work, I also address the question of why certain types of triggers wear off more slowly than others.
The outcomes of this project are a book—a visual essay in which drawings and texts form one line of an argument—and a series of lecture-like events, in which I combine sincerity and directness of lectures, panel discussions, and guided tours with richer ways of expression typical for object theatre, performances, and magic shows.
Guiding Inner Journeys: Choreographing Inner Conflict in a Diverse Group of Dancers
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Marjolijn Breuring
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This research was conducted with a diverse group of dancers, varying in age, background, and dance experience, and was guided through somatic embodiment and artistic articulation. Through a somatic approach, the body was explored as both an archive of lived experience and an oracle for emergent knowledge, offering a strong gateway into authentic dance material.
The creative process unfolded through four phases: somatic exploration and improvisation, composition, structuring, and refinement. Throughout, leadership shifted fluidly between an open, facilitative mode, amplifying the dancers’ voices, and a more directive mode, articulating the artistic vision.
The methodology highlights how initial somatic explorations were gradually shaped into choreographic form, maintaining a dialogue between internal embodiment and external composition throughout the process.
Key insights include that this process proved particularly effective within a diverse group context, demonstrating that, regardless of formal dance training, each individual, when guided somatically, can access embodied memory and, through compositional shaping, transform authentic movement into coherent choreographic structure.
Both the research and the resulting performance, Equilibrium, do not seek to offer resolution, but rather to evoke recognition and the possibility of coexisting with tension.
Lexicon | Attention+Creative Process
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Ali Williams
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A growing lexicon of words and phrases related to attention and creative process.
Developed for PhD in creative practice.
Transart Institute / College of Art+Design, Liverpool John Moores University
“Lasciatemi morire” o farò “La Finta Pazza”: Embodying Vocal Nothingness on Stage in Italian and French 17th century Operatic Laments and Mad Scenes.
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This music research drama thesis explores and presents a singer’s artistic research process from the first meeting with a musical score until the first steps of the performance on stage. The aim has been to define and formulate an understanding in sound as well as in words around the concept of pure voice in relation to the performance of 17th century vocal music from a 21st century singer’s practice-based perspective with reference to theories on nothingness, the role of the 17th century female singer, ornamentation (over-vocalization) and the singing of the nightingale. The music selected for this project is a series of lamentations and mad scenes from Italian and French 17th century music dramas and operas allowing for deeper investigation of differences and similarities in vocal expression between these two cultural styles.
The thesis is presented in three parts: a Libretto, a performance of the libretto (DVD) and a Cannocchiale (that is, a text following the contents of the Libretto). In the libretto the Singer’s immediate inner images, based on close reading of the musical score have been formulated and performed in words, but also recorded and documented in sound and visual format, as presented in the performance on the DVD. In the Cannocchiale, the inner images of the Singer’s encounter with the score have been observed, explored, questioned, highlighted and viewed in and from different perspectives.
The process of the Singer is embodied throughout the thesis by Mind, Voice and Body, merged in a dialogue with the Chorus of Other, a vast catalogue of practical and theoretical references including an imagined dialogue with two 17th century singers.
As a result of this study, textual reflections parallel to vocal experimentation have led to a deeper understanding of the importance of considering the concept of nothingness in relation to Italian 17th century vocal music practice, as suggested in musicology. The concept of je-ne-sais-quoi in relation to the interpretation of French 17th century vocal music, approached from the same performance methodology and perspective as has been done with the Italian vocal music, may provide a novel approach for exploring the complexity involved in the creative process of a performing artist.
Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Performance in Theatre and Music Drama
at the Academy of Music and Drama,
Faculty of Fine, Applied, and Performing Arts,
University of Gothenburg
ArtMonitor dissertation No 25
ArtMonitor is a publication series from
the Board for Artistic Research (NKU),
Faculty of Fine, Applied, and Performing Arts,
University of Gothenburg
A list of publications is added at the end of the book.
ArtMonitor
University of Gothenburg
Faculty Office of Fine, Applied, and Performing Arts
Storgatan 43
PO Box 141
SE 405 30 Gothenburg
Sweden
www.konst.gu.se
ISBN: 978-91-978477-4-2
A collection of documentation and research branches as I navigate my PhD journey. Transart Institute / College of Art + Design, Liverpool John Moores University Advisors LJMU: Prof. Joasia Krysa (https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/staff-profiles/faculty-of-arts-professional-and-social-studies/liverpool-school-of-art-and-design/joasia-krysa) TT: Sarah Bennett (http://www.sarahbennett.org.uk) TT: Dr. Tracey Bensen (https://traceybenson.com/about/)open exposition comments (0)
A growing lexicon of words and phrases related to attention and creative process. Developed for PhD in creative practice. Transart Institute / College of Art+Design, Liverpool John Moores Universityopen exposition comments (0)