Editorial
Moments of wonder: looking at the introductory pages of the booklet produced for the three day symposium held last year in summer, and trying to locate the entry point for this editorial, those three words caught my attention. Those moments are perhaps the greatest reward for conducting research and creating art. And while you can be on your own, filled with wonderment, only in shared and collaborative situations, encounters of wonder unfold their true consequences.
In retrospect, moments of wonder were the intrinsic motivation to create the symposium, and the given title can be read as their generator: Listen for beginnings… The imperative, to listen, was understood both at face value—directly connecting to practices in music and sound—and as the general posture of being attentive and sensitive, avoiding the filter of already established conceptions. How do we notice something new or different is about to happen?
The event would bring together artists-researchers who, responding to the call, were at the same time like-minded and practising different disciplines (or working across the boundaries of disciplines). Their encounter itself would recursively, such was the hope, create a wonderful beginning and an occasion to listen to others. We are now in the middle of November 2025, two years after the symposium’s conception and over a year after its implementation. The memory is still fresh and the closing ceremony felt like that hope was fulfilled. Several factors were responsible for the fertile situation, of which I want to mention a few.
One factor was size and composition: over the course of three days, 29 contributions were presented by 38 artists-researchers. These included people from music, sound, fine arts, language and performance practices, architecture, and any practice in-between and across. It felt like a critical mass, still small enough to conduct all sessions in a plenary assembly. People with institutional affiliation and different career stages—pre- and post-docs, as well as professors—mixed with independent artists-researchers, something we will strive for again in the second edition of the Forum. For many, the symposium came at crucial moments in their lives, and a year and a half later, several then doctoral candidates have completed or are just about to complete their degree.
Another factor was the continued development at the hosting institution, the Gustav Mahler Privatuniversität für Musik (GMPU) in Klagenfurt. The symposium was a major stepping stone in the establishment of its Department of Artistic Research; another moment of beginning. At the time, the department had only three professors and research assistants, making Listen for beginnings particularly precious, as we relied on the attention of the community outside of Klagenfurt, throughout Austria and Europe. Some people even travelled from other continents. Today, the department comprises nine members, increasing the support for the final stages of the proceedings.
A last factor that warrants mentioning is the project Simultaneous Arrivals (simularr), for which the symposium provided a punctuation right in the middle of its lifespan (2022–2026). simularr is an artistic research project on novel and different forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. While we originally planned for simularr to have its own dedicated symposium, it felt so much more useful to embed the topics of the project into a symposium with a broader context. As such, we framed the call for Listen for beginnings by many of the research questions pertaining to simularr. To mention just three:
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What forms of togetherness occur in artistic research, and how are they related to the spaces and rhythms of creation and research?
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How can strategies be distributed or translated to others and how can shared concepts and materials facilitate a common beginning or arrival?
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How do you attend to the adjacent / marginal / tangent / simultaneous?
These and other questions created resonance and critical cohesion within the diverse responses to the call.
Instead of summarising the contributions, which speak for themselves, I would like to discuss the genesis and challenges of collating these proceedings. The symposium’s original call was for abstracts of projects and presentations. We deliberately refrained from asking for what is commonly called “full papers”. Not all contributions to a symposium of artistic research are well captured in the form of “papers”, particularly because “practice sharing” is often an essential and irreducible part of the contributions. Clearly, more traditional article-based proceedings require a substantial transformation of many of the original contributions, which may have relied on live presence, interaction, gesture, space and atmosphere.
Given that many of the contributions did not have a straight forward translation to text, we knew assembling the proceedings would be a challenge for both the participants and the editorial team. Nonetheless, the vast majority of participants responded positively. We chose to publish the proceedings through the open access Research Catalogue platform as sound and moving image are easily integrated. For the editorial process, we sought a solution that, on the one hand, enabled anyone who wanted to participate to be able to do so—ruling out a “curatorial” selection among the contributions—and that, on the other hand, provided a sort of peer review and quality assurance. The process was based on the submission of a draft, followed by one cycle of editorial review with the aim that suggestions for change, development or improvement would be incorporated by the authors in their final articles. This process provided a compromise on the effort and time put into the development of each text and on the amount of adjustment for the readership. It allowed 18 contributions to make it to the final stretch and appear in the proceedings here.
Although the layout of the proceedings follows a rather classical approach, a broad range of styles is preserved in the texts. Instead of trying to edit them into a homogeneous use of language, the goal was to make sure that each text, within its own style and way of thinking, can speak to a broad range of readers from different disciplines. To bring together and allow the readers to compare texts at the same time divergent but sprung from a common interest. A quote by Isabelle Stengers comes to my mind:
“Learning from” requires encountering, and encountering may indeed imply comparison, but there is no comparison if the encountered others are defined as unable to understand the point of the comparison. We are returned here to the Latin etymology of “comparison”: compar designates those who regard each other as equals—that is, as able to agree, which means also able to disagree, object, negotiate, and contest.1
I want to conclude by thanking the many people who made the symposium and the proceedings possible. First of all, this of course includes all the contributors/presenters/authors.2 Next, I thank the symposium’s organising team: Nayarí Castillo, Daniele Pozzi, Luisa Valeria Carpignano, Hakan Ulus, Eber García Condes. They are part of the larger group of original reviewers who also include: Teresa Carrasco, Ludvig Elblaus, Sophie Fetokaki, Thomas Grill, Rose-Anne Gush, Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka, Anna Morgoulets, Eckehard Pistrick, Elena Redaelli, Charlotta Ruth, Fulya Uçanok, Christopher Williams, and Jeremy Woodruff. And I thank the reviewers, editors and proof-readers for the proceedings: Luisa Valeria Carpignano, Daniele Pozzi, Christopher Williams, Michael Winter, and Ana Velinovska.
