ArteActa – Journal for Performing Arts and Artistic Research
ArteActa 14/2025
Issue 14 of ArteActa – Journal for Performing Arts and Artistic Research, contains five artistic research expositions on the Research Catalogue platform (“AI gave me an assignment, and I did it. Now what?”, “In Sync With A Machine”, “Demolish Monsters on the Rocks: Prompting Through an Ensemble”, “Acoustic Plein-air: a Spacesound Listening Experience as the Basis of the Musical Composition”, “Norths: Navigating Instability By Ear”). There is also a study by John Franek “Rhizomatic Abstraction: Composing Music to Investigate Memory Patterns Among Listeners”, and a comprehensive collection of Czech translations of texts by the renowned theatre scholar Patrice Pavis published on the journal’s website. The issue is accompanied by an introductory essay by Martin Pšenička (“Unsettled Subject: From Emancipation to Separation”) and a review of Vanessa Ament’s book The Foley Grail by Sara Pinheiro (“Sound, Performance, and Technology: Considering The Foley Grail”) and an interview with Ament. In his essay, Martin Pšenička draws inspiration from the contributions in this issue, which seem to share a common theme: the changing nature of authorship and the position of the author as a subject, reflecting the broader topic of the position of the subject in today’s world. Three authors analyse the changing conditions of artistic work with AI, examining the possibilities of how to situate creativity in the context of communication with large language models. Brett Ascarelli explores the inverted relationship between humanity and machines. The central question of her study is as follows: how useful can AI be at this present moment to generate assignments or instructions to teach and train people to live more playful, creative, and ethical lives? Ilja Mirsky, Leonid Berov, and Gunter Loesel, in their exposition “In Sync With A Machine”, create an environment in which the user comes into contact with ANA, an environment integrating GPT-4, emotion-recognition algorithms, and a simulation of its own affective state. ANA engages users in a 10-minute interaction, fostering an immersive narrative exchange in which the affective dimension of collaborative storytelling takes precedence. The authors then address the challenges of prompt design in this setting, focusing on the concept of emotional attunement, the feeling of being “in sync” with a machine throughout the interaction. Bruce Gilchrist, in the exposition “Demolish Monsters on the Rocks: Prompting Through an Ensemble”, conducts a series of practical experiments that link human actions labelled as “biometric poetry”, which stimulates a language model. This project, combining performance, waste material, object recognition, and a language model, explores how the manipulation of garbage can be rationalised by a machine to produce poetic texts as a commentary on the action portrayed on a screen. Three articles in this issue are focused on the analysis of perceived sounds and music – by listeners and by authors. Czech composer Slavomír Hořínka presents his exposition “Acoustic Plein-air: a Spacesound Listening Experience as the Basis of the Musical Composition”, in which he analyses the perception and the origins of musical ideas while observing the soundscape of nature. Five composers – one teacher and four students – set out to listen to the soundscape of the Polish foothills of the Giant Mountains in order to explore the influence of subjective perception on the final shape of a composition. Jorge Boehringer, in the exposition “Norths: Navigating Instability By Ear”, states that critical phenomenological and ecological issues emerge from the noise encountered when sonifying (near) real-time seismic and geomagnetic data, as well as data from communication systems. John Franek’s study, “Rhizomatic Abstraction: Composing Music to Investigate Memory Patterns Among Listeners”, asks what makes an experience memorable. What do we, as listeners, recall after a listening experience? The text provides a brief exposition of research on expectation, consonance, dissonance, rhythm, and time, and presents the details of the listening experiment and the composition of Rhizome. The issue concludes with the Czech translations of texts by Patrice Pavis and the article “Sound, Performance, and Technology: Considering The Foley Grail” by Sara Pinheiro, which includes her interview with foley artist Vanessa Ament. Pavis’s artistic-research contribution offers one possible approach to the phenomenon of theatrical adaptation. It is based on practice, specifically on the author’s novel Poème toi-même (Poem yourself), and presents his adaptation of one of the chapters. Pinheiro’s text puts the art of film sound effects into focus.
Unsettled Subject: From Emancipation to Separation
(2026)
Martin Pšenička
This essay is inspired by the contributions to this issue, whose common denominator seems to be the transformation of the nature of authorship and the position of the authorial subject, reflecting the broader theme of the position of the subject in the contemporary world. Some authors, responding to ArteActa’s previous call for submissions, “AI (and) Art: The Poetics of Prompting,” explore the changing conditions of artistic work with AI, while others focus on the interaction between materiality and human perception. All raise urgent questions related to the concept of the subject and the connection between the perceiving mind and the surrounding world. Through a historical reflection of poetics as the art of “prompting,” the text addresses theoretical conceptualization of the subject, in which emancipation at the level of the perceiver plays an increasingly important role. With the advent of AI as a “separate intellect” (Agamben 2025), the emancipation and transformation of (creative) subject raises questions stemming from today's paradox, in which all important and necessary emancipation efforts seem to be distorted or lead to tendencies that brutally contradict them. In this context, does AI bring about the final stage of the emancipation of the subject, or does this autonomous intellect enable hedonistic ochlos-authorship? Without reviving the laments of the past, the essay attempts to point out the fragility and uncertainty of the subject facing unprecedented pressure.
AI gave me an assignment, and I did it. Now what?
(2026)
Brett Ascarelli
How useful can AI be at this present moment to generate assignments or instructions to teach and train people to live more playful, creative and ethical lives? In this artistic research, I try to put aside fears of a dystopian future in which runaway AI assumes control over humanity, and suspend them long enough to play with the idea of reversing the usual dynamic: what if AI were to instruct us, instead of us instructing AI? What kind of positive outcomes could emerge? I borrow from traditions of instruction art and avant-garde art, and I employ discursive practices that alternate between techno-enthusiastic and techno-skeptical. The AI tool ChatGPT and I hold conversations in which we explore the research question together, and in which I prompt ChatGPT to issue me instructions, then I describe the process and result of executing the instructions.
In Sync With A Machine
(2026)
Ilja Mirsky, Leonid Berov, Gunter Loesel
This paper delves into the dynamics and dramaturgical specifications of ANA, a theatrical installation engineered for co-creating narratives in a dialogic process with individual users. ANA embodies a collaborative storytelling environment that is used to communicate narrative and emotional information through multiple modalities, thereby bringing into focus an unexpectedly human essence in a human-machine interaction. Integrating GPT-4, emotion-recognition algorithms and a simulation of its own affective state, ANA engages users in a 10-minute interaction, fostering an immersive narrative exchange where the affective dimension of collaborative storytelling takes precedence. This paper explores the specific challenges of prompt design in this setting, focusing on the concept of emotional attuning, the feeling of being “in sync” with a machine throughout the interaction. Through an analytical lens encompassing cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and prompting techniques, the authors describe and reflect practices of employing multimodal sensorial data such as emotion recognition, and dramatic considerations, into the process of designing prompts. They also describe and reflect on their attempts to establish a form of meta-communication with the machine about the emotional aspects of the experience. By focusing on dramaturgical and improvisational strategies, this paper underscores the pivotal significance of emotional attunement and multimodal communication in fostering intimate technological engagement.
Demolish Monsters on the Rocks: Prompting Through an Ensemble
(2026)
bruce gilchrist
As interaction with corporate artificial intelligence increasingly becomes a precondition for contemporary life, artists need to see beyond Generative AI (GenAI) technology as a discrete tool that makes generic products. Instead, they can imagine combinatorial approaches and conceptual frameworks for AI-enabled artworks. Through my practice-based research, the act of prompting multimodal GenAI models has been informed by comprehending an assemblage as a “framework of instruction” held together through poetic alliances, within which the output from one component feeds the process of another. Practical experiments explored an interrelation of body, text, and predictive technology, where an algorithmic prediction of human action conjured “biometric poetry” that was used to stimulate a language model. Working with archival film footage and digital puppets animated with motion-capture files gave rise to the idea of a camera’s field of view – with its bounded contents acting like a key – eliciting value from a language model in a novel form of story making. Potential erroneous inferences were perceived as a new form of chance operation and a characteristic of algorithmic remix as defined by Steve F. Anderson. This method has been further developed in a project that combines performance, waste material, object recognition, and a language model to explore how the manipulation of garbage can be rationalised by a machine to produce poetic texts as a commentary to action portrayed on a screen.
Akustický plenér: zvukoprostorová poslechová zkušenost jako východisko hudební kompozice
(2026)
Slavomír Hořínka
Pětice skladatelů – pedagog, tři studenti a jedna studentka se vydali naslouchat zvukové krajině polského předhůří Krkonoš, aby zkoumali vliv subjektivní percepce na výslednou podobu skladby. Nejdříve zaznamenávali své zvukoprostorové poslechové zkušenosti graficky do skicáků. Vzápětí formulovali tvůrčí záměry skladeb pro komorní ansámbl, které z těchto zkušeností vycházejí. V následujících čtyřech měsících zkomponovali studie s vědomím, že jsou určeny ke studiové realizaci. Kompoziční studie poté sami nahráli a celý proces společně reflektovali. Předložený text vstupuje do kontextu akustické ekologie, instrumentální syntézy a počítačem podporované skladby. Navazuje na kontinuální umělecký výzkum na katedře skladby HAMU v oblasti zvuku a prostoru a tvůrčích aplikací výsledků. Jeho cílem je prozkoumávat vztahy mezi subjektivní zvukoprostorovou zkušeností, volbou kompozičních strategií a výslednou podobou skladby.
Five composers – one teacher and four students – set out to listen to the soundscape of the Polish foothills of the Giant Mountains in order to explore the influence of subjective perception on the final shape of a composition. First, they noted down their sound-spatial listening experiences graphically in sketchbooks. They then formulated creative ideas for chamber ensemble compositions based on these experiences. Over the next four months, they wrote compositional studies with the intention of recording them in the studio. They then recorded the studies themselves and reflected on the entire process together. The presented text enters the context of acoustic ecology, instrumental synthesis, and computer-assisted composition. It builds on continuous artistic research at the Department of Composition at HAMU in the field of sound and space and the creative application of the results. Its goal is to
explore the relationships between subjective sound-spatial experience, the choice of compositional strategies, and the resulting shape of the composition.
Norths: Navigating Instability By Ear
(2026)
Jorge Boehringer
Norths: Navigating Instability By Ear exposes a diversity of transdisciplinary artistic research threads within Norths, a growing body of environmental sound art practice at an intersection of data and listening experience.
By rendering intangible data representations physically perceptible, ‘northness’ - understood as location, place, idea, and fiction - becomes a site for material interrogation of ‘standards’ applied to measurement, perception, being, knowing, and acting. Critical phenomenological and ecological issues emerge from the noise encountered when sonifying (near) real-time seismic and geomagnetic data, as well as data from communication systems.
In the present exposition conceptual corollaries from my experience making, reflecting on, and exhibiting these works are diffracted through language in a project to expose the material propositions of these works themselves. Cross-modulation (feedback) loops established within this exposition connect artistic practice to philosophical-linguistic expression, providing both an explication and an exploratory continuation of my ongoing research practice.
Sound, Performance, and Technology: Considering The Foley Grail
(2026)
Sara Pinheiro
Vanessa Theme Ament’s "The Foley Grail" was, for a long time, the only publication to discuss in detail the art of film sound effects (foley). In this issue, we review the third edition of the book while in dialogue with the author herself.