Research Catalogue

Jenny Sunesson (b. 1973) is a Swedish artist predominantly working with sound. Her practice ranges from field recording and live collages to conceptual sound art and video. Sunesson uses her own life as a stage for her dark, tragic and sometimes comical re-contextualised work where real and invented characters and derogated stereotypes, collaborate in the alternate story of hierarchies and normative power structures in society.

PERFORMING PROCESS is a research group within the Artistic Research Centre at Nottingham Trent University, co-led by Emma Cocker and Danica Maier, both Associate Professors in Fine Art. We ask: what is at stake in focusing on the process of practice — the embodied, experiential, relational and material dimensions of artistic making, thinking and knowing. What is the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity within artistic research? How might a process-focused exploration intervene in and offer new perspectives on artistic practice and research, perhaps even on the uncertain conditions of contemporary life? PERFORMING PROCESS has origins in a number of critical precedents: Summer and Winter Lodges originating within the fine art area (practice-research residencies or laboratories dedicated to providing space-time for making-thinking and for exploring the process of practice), collaborative artistic research projects such as No Telos, for exploring the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity; the DREAM seminar series with PhD researchers which focuses specifically on the ‘how-ness’ of practice research by asking - How do we do what we do?

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 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.

Gestaltology Encoded is an experimental research article in the form of an exposition, centered around the development of an artificial organism, Arcana, coming to life through the artistic research project Gestaltology (2020–2023). The project aims to explore AI and robotics in a way that challenges Cartesian dualism, by investigating the interplay between mind, body, and environment. By engaging a transdisciplinary team, the project delves into evolutionary biology, AI, and robotics, creating an artificial organism that evolves through symbiosis with its environment. Arcana’s artistic process, rooted in these conditions, emerges through its ability to create visual outputs that transcend human-centric perspectives. This research proposes a posthuman approach to AI development, emphasizing an ecocentric and performative perspective that reshapes the relationship between technology, art, and ecology. The article reflects on the project's iterative nature, where failure is viewed as an inevitable and creative catalyst, guiding the project toward unforeseen futures.

“Docks and Dramas: Artificial Intelligence as a Storytelling Tool in an Archipelago Setting” is an critical exploration of my screenwriter and TV dramatist practice. Through various AI models, I try to generate an episode synopsis for The Sandhamn Murders, a series I have previously written for. Through these AI-generated texts, I seek a deeper understanding of creativity, artificial intelligence, and dramaturgical mechanisms.