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.
You and Me and Everything Around Us
(2020)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Single channel video, 3’, 2008
The probe for the work was the philosophical question what it is to exist in the world: in environments, with others, people, objects, surfaces; and whether the answer can be intuited.
The work evokes the temporality of such experiences, which is contingent upon the ever-changing nature of things. Objects have often had multiple owners, and so they carry traces of previous worlds. When encountering objects new to us, we may find ourselves appropriating them through affective attachment to assimilate them into our world. Inspired by the everyday lives of the house's occupants, the work is also about the affective bonds developed during and because of their temporary co-existence.
Experimentation with overlaying resonates with the artistic expression of overlapping materials, textures, spatial qualities, and reflected images. Photographs, film footage and sounds were recorded in an improvised way over a one year period in an old house in Walthamstow, East London. The artistic treatment of the subject matter as a time-based media assemblage, which exploits the home style video format, critiques popular staged presentations of everyday life, while exploring the house as an evolving over time system.
The slippery trail: The mollusc as a metaphor for creative practice
(2015)
author(s): Karen Savage
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition documents several years of process-driven practice-as-research. The work explores themes of womanhood, embodiment, and autobiography.
Throughout the exposition I argue that the embodiment of process is key to understanding practice-as-research. I propose that practice-as-research projects don't always begin with a ‘final output’ in mind. Instead, the practice of practice-as-research should be reconsidered throughout its development; it should use its potential for liminality. It is the demonstration of a ‘living process’ – living in process. However, what becomes key within the practice is a clear articulation of process, and how the research is recorded as part of that process. In this work, 'writing about practice' and performative practices are integrated, enabling a dialogue between various creative responses as well as offering access points to the research in a variety of forms.
This exposition explores ways in which we live in process through a presentation of text, visual essays, and short film and video pieces.
The work develops from creative artefacts and critical text into a piece of responsive writing, 'A Play of Characters'. This playtext reconsiders some of the influences in the work and explores the imagery of the whole project in a performative context.
The notion of embodiment and a 'living body of work' is developed further through the use of metaphor, in particular the metaphor of the mollusc. I use this to consider how practice evolves alongside process, 'housing' both the work and the process in both material form (the shell) and trace (the snail trail).
Different combinations of this work have been presented as performance installations, both at the University of Portsmouth, as part of my PhD examination in 2010, and at the University of Lincoln, as part of the Gnarlfest in 2014. However, by the very nature of 'living in process' this is a work that continues to evolve and 'live' in different forms. The purpose of this exposition is to explore the work in an accessible online form – one that offers alternative platforms and sequences, creating different possibilities and readings of the practice.
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.