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.
Ybbs 4 Dimensionen
(2025)
author(s): Performatorium
published in: Research Catalogue
Performatorium has been following a performance in public space, which took place on the 21st September 2024 in the framework of ‘4 Dimensions Ybbs’.
When the Sea Invades the House
(2025)
author(s): Giselle Hinterholz
published in: Research Catalogue
When the Sea Invades the House displaces a real octopus from the ocean into bedrooms, windows, cars and ruins. Its tentacular body embodies ecological grief, dragging the sea into spaces where human life unfolds. Each photograph is an archival fragment of mourning, recording the dissonance between a body that belongs to the depths and the surfaces where it is forced to appear. The final image, marked by a black tear, crystallises this grief as wound and testimony. It is the ocean itself that mourns, silently infiltrating the everyday.
Motion Gesture Music – terminological explorations
(2025)
author(s): Jan Schacher, Germán Toro Pérez, Christian Strinning
published in: Research Catalogue
Exploring terminologies describing the relationships between music and gesture in composition, text (score), perfromance and re/perception
The dramaturgy of Conversation
(2025)
author(s): ingrid cogne
connected to: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
published in: Research Catalogue
The dramaturgy of Conversation aims to tackle different approaches, analyses, and practices of conversations. Several forms of conversations and various related knowledges are questioned from different positions and perspectives. The data studied come from personal, external, or created (for and within the project) archives. In this project, researcher Ingrid Cogne analyses, develops or transforms, re-articulates and re-structures the ways in which one creates, inhabits, and facilitates conversations.
The central question of The dramaturgy of Conversation as a methodology is HOW: How can the context, structure, location, and duration of existing or created situations of conversation support the (re-)articulation of the persons involved? How can one use or work with conversations? How can one read, inhabit, and embody the parameters of a conversation? How can one facilitate a conversation? How does a situation itself facilitate the meeting with knowledge? How can one create a situation of conversation that will be the facilitator itself?
The dramaturgy of Conversation proposes situations, settings, and protocols of conversations that involve, combine, or isolate various languages (spoken, bodily, and written), “in-between” and relational knowledge, and dialogical methods and processes as well as formats of communication.
The dramaturgy of Conversation is a methodology that focuses on “how” practical knowledge can be read, unfolded, and circulated within the “doing”. It is a research project that facilitates the access to the unknown and the inarticulable – navigating between quantity and quality, fiction and reality, material and immaterial, visible and invisible.
This research is aproached by the author as the context wherein a self-reflective process can be (re-)articulated and CO- and reciprocal activations of hardly articulable knowledges can be performed. With this re/search, Cogne insists on the need of “conversation” to be practiced and considered as knowledge.
Duration: 15.1.2019 – 14.1.2025
Project leader: Ingrid Cogne (IKW)
Funded by: FWF - Austrian Science Fund | Elise-Richter PEEK (V709)
Institution: IKW, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria
RESPONSIVE SPACE – SOUNDING INTO MATERIALITY
(2025)
author(s): Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen
published in: Research Catalogue
RESPONSIVE SPACE – SOUNDING INTO MATERIALITY (2014–2020) is an in-depth research project into the interrelationship between us and our surroundings.
The artworks can be described as large sculptural sound installations which blur the lines between visual art, performing arts and sound art. The works explore space, material, sound, body and time as equal parts in a composition.
The main artworks of the research INTERFERENCE, RESONANCE, SEDIMENT, PLACE 1 and PLACE 2 are in a variety of ways inquiries towards an expanded experience of the dialogue between presence and materiality. The artworks are composed environments which respond and take shape and form from their surroundings, seeking to touch proximity zones where we as humans can sense aspects of being closely intertwined with our surroundings.
The act of listening is of central importance in the artistic survey. Olaussen stages space utilising the mediums of sound, minimalistic sculpture and dramaturgical structures.
This exposition is part of Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen’s artistic research project Responsive Space – Sounding into Materiality (2014–2020) at the Norwegian Theatre Academy, Østfold University College. The project complies with the guidelines for the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme from 2019. Artistic practice and reflection are at the heart of the research programme.
Originally published in Norwegian in 2020, this work has now been translated into English by Peter Cripps, with the support of the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills.