Research Catalogue

Conceived and co-organised by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin, this Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG) provides contexts for coming together via the exchange of language-based research. The intent is to support developments in the field of expanded language-based practices by inviting attention, time and space for enabling understanding of/and via these practices anew.

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.

This exposition is a documentary project on the artistic research project Neither Fish nor Fowl. The research project consists of theater making, film making, workshops, performances and writing, and explores the wondrous worlds of becoming in theatre for early years. Together with my theater company Teater Fot, I have been investigating the significance of affect as philosophical, emotional, and material inspiration in the creative process, and in relation to young children in Theater for Early Years. Neither Fish nor Fowl was conducted as a performance project from April 2017 to March 2020. During this period, the research process was documented in RC, presenting methods, writings, and reflections along the way. The pre-production performance (for babies 0-2) was shown at the festival Olavsfestdagene in Trondheim, Norway, summer 2017 and at Trondheim Kunsthall autumn 2017. The full production, Begynnelser (for 3-5 years), was presented in april 2018 in co-production with the venue Teaterhuset Avant Garden in Trondheim. Baby Becomings (0-2 years), was presented at festivals and for kindergartens in Trondheim autumn 2018, and the final version Himmel & Hav / Sky & Sea was presented at Rosendal Teater in in March 2020, touring kindergartens for one week. Animalium (2019) was a a kind of spin-off with film making, workshops, visiting exhibition spaces and eventually article writing with an exposition in VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research #2 on the theme Estrangement. In 2020-22 Animalium has become a new research project, looking at post humanist approaches to different sites such as kindergarten spaces, libraries and art exhibition spaces. We are developing new performance strategies with deepening our improvisational and listening skills into a more-than-human sympoietic intra-playfulness. Trying to perform these concepts, we might understand more of what they actually mean to our artistic practice.

Reworking the archival estate of the Turkish-born poet Semra Ertan, who has lived in West Germany as a so-called “guest laborer” from 1971 until her death by self-immolation in 1982, Cana Bilir-Meier’s film Semra Ertan (2013) pursues representational concerns via material means: in particular, via the materialities of sound cuts and tape hiss. This article brings Bilir-Meier’s sound work in dialogue with Tina M. Campt’s “listening to images” (2017) and Salomé Voegelin’s “sonic methodologies of sound” (2021) in order to develop a sonic method that accounts for the situatedness of historically and socially differently positioned listening subjects.

This article discusses sonic materiality through Alfred North Whitehead’s organicist materialism. The sonic materiality that is here outlined is not related to sound vibration. Materiality should here be understood in the sense of actuality and concreteness. Anything that produces an effect bears a qualitative difference. The actualization of qualitative difference is concreteness. It is in this sense that sonic materiality is developed in parallel with spatiality. The liveliness of this space emergence is that of affect; its concreteness is that of affect. It is based on Affect theory that we may understand its experience as an immersion in a concrete but abstract qualitative difference, an abstract materiality. Thus, the sonic materiality departs from a conventional conception of objects to foster a sonic object that constitutes itself through relationality and extensive connections. The empirical concept of affective territory speculatively attempts to grasp the spreading out of affect expressiveness through these connections to track its effects in experience.

Petromusicality. On the Sonic Culture of (Plastic) Material and Beyond explores the fossil fuel-based history of music media, focusing on vinyl records and their environmental impact. This Audio Paper examines historical production processes, material consumption, and the resurgence of vinyl culture. Through artistic research projects and expert perspectives, it discusses the political and ethical dimensions of sound reproduction. By highlighting sustainable alternatives and exploring the connections between extraction, mass production, and materiality, the study encourages a deeper engagement with the physical aspects of sound and their global implications.