Research Catalogue

In the last few years museums and art galleries, as well as a growing number of artists embraced Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) as a new digital mode of exposing, producing, and distributing art. Based upon digitised assets, NFTs are embedded in blockchains: decentralised networks of information exchange on which different kinds of data can be stored without a centralised controlling entity. While commonly associated with cryptocurrencies and financial ledgers of transactions, blockchain technology can support many other types of data (including visual, audio, and video files). For the arts, blockchain might bring radical changes to the ways in which art is generated, communicated, disseminated, and transacted. Despite its vertiginous expansion, the blockchain revolution is happening under the radar of many people and institutions. With this seminar, the research group MetamusicX (at Orpheus Institute) launched research on NFTs in relation to artistic research. The seminar aimed at mapping the field, exploring the potential of blockchain for music creation, and launching the basis for a blockchain network at the service of artistic research.

A visual representation of the complete activities of MusicExperiment21 with hyperlinks to the most relevant events, performances, publications and meetings.

This exposition presents diverse materials related to, or inspired by Luigi Nono’s piece for piano and tape …..sofferte onde serene… (1975–77). Organised in seven modules, the exposition offers different perspectives on a vast collection of materials around the original work, its performative renderings, and its orchestral transformation. Without imposing any sequential logic of reading or listening, the seven modules are numbered following a scale ranging from a more scholarly approach (module 1) to a more creative perspective (module 7). In a non-prescribed journey they offer diverse insights into different facts, things, objects, and performances, which are presented as archaeological and problematising layers in a continuous process of aesthetic-epistemic cross-references. Some modules are more stable, dealing with what the original piece 'is' (context, sketches, editions, recordings, analysis), while others propose lines of flight, pointing to states of permanent becoming (renderings, transformations, transcriptions).

‘Nietzsche 5 : The Fragmentary’ is a collaborative research exposition, which presents a number of compositions by the young Friedrich Nietzsche (organised top to bottom) as well as various layers of reflection, interrogation, and speculation (organised left to right). It focuses on a moment of transformation around 1872 when Nietzsche moved from a serious interest in music composition to a career as a writer and philosopher. This period also coincides with the breakdown of Nietzsche’s friendship with Richard Wagner. The exposition suggests that Nietzsche’s own music as well as that of Wagner serves as a (negative) point of reference for the later Nietzsche, whose work, following Maurice Blanchot amongst others, can be characterised through the notion of the fragmentary, which places it also in relation to early Romanticism, in particular the writings of Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Friedrich Hölderlin. While Nietzsche’s more monumental compositions, such as his unfinished Mass (1860) and the symphonic poem Ermanarich (1861), may be more problematic, the exposition suggests that in some smaller pieces – in particular in So lach doch mal (1862) and Das ‘Fragment an sich’ (1871) – a sense of the fragmentary in Nietzsche may already be constructed. Beyond interpretations that focus more narrowly on Nietzsche’s work, this research exposition sets out to render the notion of the fragmentary productive for the wider context of artistic research. It does so with reference to Nietzsche’s notion of the untimely as a way to challenge both the dominant instrumentalisation of research and the notion of contemporaneity that seems central to present-day artistic practice. This not only provides perspectives into artistic epistemologies but also, more concretely, provides the methodology by which the research itself and its exposition have progressed. The overall mode is, thus, also that of the fragmentary, in which various media including text and image as well as audio and video recordings are distributed across a two-dimensional grid allowing multiple relationships and readings to emerge. The research exposition aims not only to discuss but ultimately also to employ the fragmentary so as to touch upon a specific artistic and intellectual motivation that we have come to identify with Nietzsche and which we suggest is also relevant today.

Raschx is a series of mutational performances based upon two fundamental materials: Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana op. 16 (1838), and Roland Barthes essays on the music of Schumann, particularly focusing on ‘Rasch’ (1979), a text exclusively dedicated to Schumann’s Kreisleriana. To these materials other components may be added for every single particular version: visual elements (pictures, videos), other texts, or further aural elements (recordings or live-electronics). The main goal is to generate an intricate network of aesthetic-epistemic cross-references, through which the listener has the freedom to focus on different layers of perception: be it on the music, on the texts being projected or read, on the images, or on the voices. Situated beyond ‘interpretation’, ‘hermeneutics’, and ‘aesthetics’ the series Raschx is part of a wider research on what might be labelled as experimental performance practices—practices that productively deviate from conventional (repetitive) performative strategies and that lend the audience to think during the performative moment, transforming familiar artistic objects into objects for thought.

Rasch 27: in-friction is a multimedia performance by Paulo de Assis, Lucia D'Errico, and Juan Parra C. that will happen in Barcelona, on the occasion of the ERC music conference, 11-13 June 2018. This exposition will be made in real time, during the performance, on 11 June 2018, 18:00-19:00.

Orpheus Festival 2014 / ME21-3. Rasch_11: Loving Barthes. Paulo de Assis, concept and piano 1 | Juan Parra C., Sound & video projection | Bobby Mitchell, piano 2 (improvisations) | Jan Schacher, Sound, images & speech | Lucia D’Errico, Intertitles // Catherine Laws, Darla Crispin, Bob Gilmore & Bill Brooks, pre-recorded voices.

Rasch interventions in DA TA rush, Vienna, May 2016

Rasch 5 for helmut [performance] for piano, 4-channels tape and video projector // Rasch 6 | Schumann's somathemes #3 [lecture] // [ORCiM Festival, October 3 2012.

Diabelli Machines is a series of performances, lectures, articles, or installations that operate different forms of problematisation of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, op. 120. Every single instantiation of this research project questions the original work, disclosing its ruptures, and reconfiguring it in a different regime of perception and signification. Beyond historiographical, philological, organological, or sociological investigations, this project aims at creatively, yet rigorously, engaging with the historically available materials related to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and its compossible futures.

Simulation of the 1819 version of the Diabelli Variations.

Diabelli Machines 6 is a new instantiation of the research project "Diabelli Machines", specifically conceived for the Orpheus Institute’s twentieth anniversary. More than a musical performance, it offers a staging of the artistic research conducted by the research cluster MusicExperiment21 (ME21), conveying its general approach, methodologies, and outputs.

Diabelli Machines 2 — Deleuzabelli Variations I was produced by ME21 at the Orpheus Institute (Ghent), in collaboration with the Royal Antwerp Conservatoire and HERMESensemble. The subtitle is a triple homage: to Beethoven, Gilles Deleuze and Anton Diabelli. Beethoven’s music functions as the backbone structure of the performance, while Deleuze’s idea of differential repetition provides a sort of method related to processes of continuous transformation and permanent becoming; and Diabelli’s name must be highly praised, for without him none of this would ever have happened.

Between 1854 and 1874 Friedrich Nietzsche composed a substantial number of musical compositions, including fragmentary pieces for solo piano, several songs and even a sketched opera. His activity as a composer remains essentially unknown and his music pieces are rarely performed. Moreover, they are usually considered, in the best case, as juvenilia. Indeed, when Nietzsche decided to be first a philologist, then a philosopher, he stopped composing music. However, and beyond aesthetical judgments, his musical compositions disclose a character and a personality quite different from the far better-known Nietzsche-the-philosopher. Nietzsche-the-composer understands himself as a “medium”, an agent dominated by transcendent powers of inspiration and creation submitting him to pre-existing values; whereas Nietzsche-the-philosopher was a destabilising constructor, the inventor of new images of thought, the active operator of a fundamental redefinition of values. For Nietzsche music had the problematic potential of carrying an “oppressive weight”—an expression he openly used to refer to one of his compositions, and, later on, to Wagner’s music in general. A weight he increasingly associated with the idea of “swimming”, to which he proactively opposed the notion of “dancing”. In this performance, the ME21 Collective presents musical compositions by Nietzsche in dialogue with fragments of his texts, exposing some of the tensions between Nietzsche-the-composer and Nietzsche-the-philosopher.

Two screens video installation

The Dark Precursor: International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research (DARE 2015) explores possibilities, uses, and appropriations of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophy in the field of Artistic Research. As references to Deleuze’s philosophy, alone or in collaboration with Guattari, have become frequent across the varied expressions of artistic research, the conference aims to identify, trace, and map concepts and practices that connect artistic research projects to their philosophy, both from the scholar’s and from the practitioner’s perspectives. DARE 2015 takes place from 9 to 11 November 2015 in three different venues: the Orpheus Institute, De Bijloke Muziekzentrum, and the Sphinx cinema, all in walkable distance from one another and within the city centre of Ghent (Belgium). The conference is hosted by the Orpheus Institute, the leading European centre for artistic research in music, which is home to the docARTES doctoral programme, the Orpheus Research Centre in Music (ORCiM), and the MusicExperiment21 project funded by the European Research Council.

The Dark Precursor: International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research (DARE 2015) explores possibilities, uses, and appropriations of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophy in the field of Artistic Research. As references to Deleuze’s philosophy, alone or in collaboration with Guattari, have become frequent across the varied expressions of artistic research, the conference aims to identify, trace, and map concepts and practices that connect artistic research projects to their philosophy, both from the scholar’s and from the practitioner’s perspectives. DARE 2015 takes place from 9 to 11 November 2015 in three different venues: the Orpheus Institute, De Bijloke Muziekzentrum, and the Sphinx cinema, all in walkable distance from one another and within the city centre of Ghent (Belgium). The conference is hosted by the Orpheus Institute, the leading European centre for artistic research in music, which is home to the docARTES doctoral programme, the Orpheus Research Centre in Music (ORCiM), and the MusicExperiment21 project funded by the European Research Council.