Research Catalogue

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.

Olskroksmotet Blues är den avslutande delen i mitt autoetnografiska projekt som i olika former pågick mellan 2014-2021, och där jag bland annat publicerat två artiklar (Kroon 2015 och 2016). RC expositionen består av tre delarbeten - arkivblad, arkivmönster och göteborg grid – jämte bakgrund och teori & metod. Utifrån min historia som fosterbarn söker jag fånga såväl mina egna erfarenheter och uttryck, som att sätta dessa i ljuset av större samhälleliga skeenden. Olskroksmotet Blues var också del av Mikrohistoriers fysiska grupputställning på Konstfack, Stockholm i september 2021.

"Wat heeft mijn leven nog voor zin?" In dit onderzoek neem ik je mee in mijn zoektocht naar hoe theater als kunstvorm én leermiddel studenten kan helpen om deze ontmoetingen met moed en empathie aan te gaan. Ik heb verhalen verzameld. Van studenten die zoeken, patiënten die worstelen, en van professionals die laveren tussen nabijheid en afstand. Die verhalen heb ik verweven tot een theatervoorstelling. Een levend leerlandschap waar zorg en kunst elkaar raken.

“No one knows what the experiment is worth, but I imagine it’s better than sitting on your own hands.” Possible and barely possible moves is inspired by the kung-fu film Drunken Master, where simulated intoxication is used as a way to confuse the opponent. 
In the project, I used sketches of the movements in the film as a starting point for physical improvisations and looped GIF animations. Imbalance and loss of control have been used as a consistent method – both to generate material and as a way to surprise myself.
 Failing at something you've set out to do can sometimes generate new ideas.

What if failure is not collapse but recalibration? This research reconsiders seismic activity as a speculative site of vibratory instability, adjustment, and relational tension, rather than disaster. Drawing on seismic data from the most significant Romanian earthquakes between 1977 and 2023, the project translates magnitudes into an immersive sound installation that renders the inaudible perceptible through algorithmic processing and low-frequency vibration. The resulting sonic environment invites discomfort and disorientation as productive states, reframing failure as a mode through which we may interpret stability itself differently. The work draws from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Jung’s archetypal theory, Bohm’s field theory, Deleuze’s pataphysics, Priest’s aesthetics of failure, and Eshun’s sonic fiction to position seismic resonance as a speculative and unstable threshold between sensing and knowing. Rather than presuming to represent the Earth’s voice, the installation critically engages with the ethical implications of translating geophysical data into sound, acknowledging the gaps, distortions, and interpretive acts involved. Instead of breakdown, failure becomes a condition of listening – one that resists mastery and opens a dialogue between human and more-than-human temporalities through sonic practice.

This exposition explores the paradox of rendering visible a research that seeks to remain unseen. It examines concealment, obfuscation, and selective disclosure as strategies of resistance and protection, questioning the ethics and politics of visibility in academic and artistic inquiry. Absence, silence, and ambiguity are explored as ways of invoking presence, challenging dominant paradigms of transparency and access, and proposing alternative modes of engaging with hidden or fugitive research. Central to this inquiry is the operatic prompter, an unseen presence that feeds lines to the performer, ensuring continuity while remaining hidden. The prompter’s role complicates the link between knowledge and articulation, shaping the performance without claiming authorship. Like other fugitive voices in history, the prompter embodies a marginal agency, whispering from the wings.