Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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  14. 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.
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  13. AI (and) Art: The Poetics of Prompting 13/2025 With the rise of generative AI systems, the term “prompt” has taken on a new role: as an interface through which we instruct “intelligent” machines to produce content across various modalities—text, image, video, and sound. While earlier systems combined specialized models (e.g., diffusion for images, transformers for text), newer architectures integrate these capabilities natively, allowing for seamless multimodal interaction. Prompt engineering continues to evolve as a discipline for refining these interactions, shaping model outputs toward higher consistency, predictability, and utility. Yet not all prompting seeks optimization. Many users engage playfully, pushing the system to surprise, amuse, or even fail. These prompt bricoleurs embrace improvisation and serendipity, exploring the generative system as both tool and toy. This issue of ArteActa, based on the open call “AI (and) Art: Poetics of Prompting”, features diverse approaches in artistic research that challenge conventional expectations of algorithmic generativity. The emphasis on the act of “prompting” calls for frameworks that privilege the process of interaction between the artist and the technology, instead of merely considering the output. In addressing this process, the contributions draw on established artistic strategies and aesthetic concepts, explore the structural limitations of algorithmic operations, reflect on the affective dimensions of prompting, or adopt the perspective of “thinking-with” (in Donna Haraway’s understanding) to tap into the inherently collective “making” of visual culture and systems of knowledge. Two additional submissions can be found on the ArteActa website: Administering (AI) Attention: Ekphrasis and the Poetics of Prompting by Rolf Hughes (EIT Culture & Creativity) explores how the act of prompting generative AI constitutes a new form of artistic authorship and aesthetic practice, grounded in historical frameworks of conceptual art, creative constraint, and ekphrasis. Drawing an analogy with Kafka’s messengers, the paper positions AI as a similarly enigmatic collaborator, interpreting human prompts through opaque, algorithmic processes. Accessible here: https://arteacta.cz/en/artkey/ara-202501-0008_administering-ai-attention-ekphrasis-and-the-poetics-of-prompting.php. The issue is closed by Zuzana Augustová´s Influences of Ernst Jandl in the Theatre and Radio Work of Jiří Adámek, a study of the experimental work of the current Czech theatre and radio director Jiří Adámek, tracing his sources and inspirations to Austrian authors like Ernst Jandl and Peter Handke. Accessible here: https://arteacta.cz/en/artkey/ara-202501-0001_jandlovske-vlivy-v-divadelni-a-rozhlasove-tvorbe-jiriho-adamka.php.
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  12. Corporeality, Disembodiment, Inter-Action (ArteActa 12/2024) Disembodied interaction is on the rise in contemporary society, requiring new forms of performativity in daily life and physical relationships and changing the way we experience and explore our immediate surroundings. How can the body be posited, felt, and researched vis-à-vis an increasingly virtual environment? What aspects of materiality and corporeality must be considered in interactions that are not necessarily physical? Does the gap between bodily experience and its virtual setting require closing, or does it conceal the possibility of a fresh kind of creativity?
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  11. ArteActa 11/2024 Issue n. 11/ 2024 with exposition from Tereza Reichová and Kateřina Krutká Vrbová in Research Catalogue as well as other open-access articles and a video essay.

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  HACKING SOUND SENSORIALITY (2025) author(s): Marie Rose Sarri published in: ArteActa – Journal for Performing Arts and Artistic Research
  HACKING SOUND SENSORIALITY_how to build embodied sound objects for electroacoustic music with lofi techniques Disembodiment is not new and does not only exist because of the current technological reality. It is an experience that various practitioners, in the field of music, experience constantly. The composer/producer/musician/sound designer moves the material. The listener only perceives its virtual representation. How to bridge the gap between the bodily experience of sound creation and its fruition and further (re)creation in the virtual world? By using synesthesia in the creation of an object-based sound method and vocabulary with the use of lofi techniques. A synesthesia of sensory roots to place the body-cosmos at the centre of sound, to make this simulacrum of identity a bridge between the articulate and the inarticulate, between the real and the virtual. Lofi thought, with its techniques for creating and modifying sound, has a new vision of technology, linked to knowledge and memories of the body. The aim is to design a new vocabulary of tools and methods for the creation of sound objects with different degrees of embodiment. These sound objects will be designed to live in two worlds: in the disembodied world of the virtual and in the material world of corporeal sonority. The article explores the use of a practical and philosophical hacking that does not colonise the new virtual sound territories, emptying them of resources and meanings, but amplifies them through the semiotics of the ancient territories of the body, in order to make them habitable and fertile.
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  Ruce v digitálním obraze: materialita tapisérií v autorském dokumentárním filmu (2025) author(s): Petr Vasku connected to: Janáček Academy of Performing Arts (JAMU) published in: ArteActa – Journal for Performing Arts and Artistic Research
  In this exposition, I invite you to the process of research carried out in the tapestry manufactory in Valašské Meziříčí. It aims to find out how to convey tapestries' craftsmanship, mediality and materiality through filming and post-production. The theme of transformation is essential: the transformation of the tapestry into a film image, but also the transformation of painting or graphics, which were the precursors of the tapestries woven in the manufactory. I am also looking for ways to use a primarily representational medium to achieve an effect of presence through materiality and corporeality. In my research, I interlace observational passages with stylized ones that emerge from a creative dialogue between the materiality of different media, artistic techniques, or post-production interventions. These methods can deepen not only the viewer's experience but also the documentary testimony and convey an almost tactile encounter with the filmed reality. Finally, based on practical experience, I distinguish working with materiality in film into three analytical cuts. V této expozici zvu do procesu výzkumu, jak skrze natáčení a postprodukci filmu o gobelínové manufaktuře ve Valašském Meziříčí zprostředkovat řemeslnost, medialitu a materialitu tapisérií a recipročně i filmové technologie. Podstatným je tedy téma proměny. Proměny tapisérie ve filmový obraz, ale i proměny malby či grafiky, které byly předobrazem v manufaktuře utkaných tapisérií. Paralelně hledám možnosti, jak pomocí média, které je primárně reprezentativní, docílit skrz materialitu a tělesnost účinku prezence. Ve výzkumu střídám observační pasáže se stylizovanými, které vzešly z tvůrčího dialogu materialit odlišných médií, výtvarných technik či postprodukčních zásahů. Tyto metody mohou prohloubit nejen divácký prožitek, ale i dokumentární výpověď a zprostředkovat až taktilní setkání s natáčenou skutečností. Nakonec na základě praktické zkušenosti rozlišuji práci s materialitou ve filmu do tří analytických řezů.
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  Vrstvy konstelace: poznámky ze střižny (2024) author(s): Tereza Reichová, Kateřina Krutská Vrbová connected to: Academy of Performing Arts in Prague published in: ArteActa – Journal for Performing Arts and Artistic Research
  Jak vyprávět filmem procesuální charakter systemických konstelací? Mým záměrem bylo prohlédnout si, jaké varianty jako filmaři máme k zobrazení komunikace vnitřních procesů a vícevrstevných dějů prostřednictvím audiovize. Snažila jsem se osahat hranici mezi prožitkem účastníků systemických konstelací a jeho záznamem. Hlavní otázkou pro mne bylo, zda je možné adekvátně zprostředkovat dění v konstelačním poli pomocí filmu, a spolu se střihačkou Kateřinou Krutskou Vrbovou jsme ve střižně zkoumaly, jaké filmové a střihové přístupy by byly pro zachycení této složité dynamiky nejefektivnější.
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