Research Catalogue

About this exposition

This conference will explore how emerging technologies—especially generative AI and blockchain—reimagine the current notions of creative agency. Conveners: Adam Łukawski, Martin Zeilinger Artificial intelligence (AI), with its learning algorithms operating at scale, can mimic human creative agency, and blockchain technologies, through smart contracts, can augment works of art with more or less autonomous behaviours that correspond to the agency of human participants in socio-economic interactions. While such developments can destabilise traditional notions of ownership, provenance, and agency in musical practices, they can also empower artists. Those working creatively with sound and music are today increasingly becoming system-builders and curators of musical ecosystems, turning their focus from the creation of singular, standalone musical works (in any traditional sense of the term) to the design of systems capable of generating artworks. This suggests an evolving role of music-producing systems today: from fixed intellectual constructs and creative expressions to dynamic, more-than-human technological networks that not only actively participate in the production of artworks with increasing levels of agency, but which can themselves be considered as artworks that constitute generative, expressive assemblages. This shift is further emphasised in distributed contexts, where varying levels of automation blur the boundaries between human and non-human contributions, creating environments where agency is negotiated and shared across diverse actants.

type	research exposition
keywords	AI, blockchain, agency, music, aesthetics, technology, ethics, philosophy, artistic research, conference, posthumanism, ecosystems, generative music, creativity, Algorithmic Composition, ownership, copyright, networks, assemblages, non-human agency, more-than-human
date	28/08/2025
last modified	04/09/2025
status	in progress
share status	public
affiliation	Orpheus Instituut, Gent
copyright	Adam Łukawski and Martin Zeilinger
license	CC BY-NC-ND
language	English
url	https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3840431/3840432
external link	https://orpheusinstituut.be/en/news-and-events/decentralised-creativity-conference

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Conference: Decentralised Creativity and Agential Systems in Music (Schedule) (last edited: 2025)