Research Catalogue

Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2025 BA Interior Architecture and Furniture Design Summary (8968)

Through an artistic research process, I examine the ethical issues that arise in transcultural music composition, a context familiar to the students of the Global Music department at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. Through reflexive autoethnography and musical analysis of the composition used for my Bachelor concert, I look at the questions of cultural appropriation vs. appreciation, and imitation vs. plagiarism. In the discussion I use a reflexive and investigative process for navigating these questions, and in the conclusion I expose my reflections and ideas on how to tackle this elusive yet important subject.

Audience reactions such as “Oh, doom is coming” reveal the emotional weight of eco-anxiety and highlight the need for approaches that go beyond fear. During the first year of understanding eco-anxiety, I explored how eco-anxiety manifests in daily life and how it shapes collective processes within a developing neighbourhood. I also explored how integrating qualitative audience research with artistic research can deepen our understanding of eco-anxiety and contribute to the development of artistic coding as a method. The artistic interventions: 1. The Birds, 2. Bring Back the Birds, 3. Omgaan met Water, 4. Stay Safe in the Media Atmospheres, 5. Artist Residency Oba Next Sluisbuurt, 6. Kunstenaarskennis and 7. Participatiewensen, combined with conceptual reflections of them, demonstrated that understanding eco-anxiety involves questioning, prompting and exploring the affect and emotions that emerge in relation to eco-anxiety.

This paper discusses a creative collaboration between two design researchers using text-to-image prompts as a way to think across a range of ideas including the relationships between collage practices and AI image generation – both modes of image-making that create images with images – as well as taking an ‘anarchival’ approach to addressing absence in historical archives. Initial experimentation with prompt-based model DALL-E 2 involved writing multiple prompts to generate images of the extinct King Island dwarf emu; specifically, an emu taken to live in Empress Josephine’s estate outside Paris. There is little visual record of the dwarf emus, and what remains is ambiguous and factually inaccurate. The scarcity of visual reference material provides an interesting case study for how a generative image model might attempt to elaborate a new image about a historical event. The results provide material to help think about how image generation models work, and also how we might visualise the experience of an extinct species. Reflecting on the initial experiments, we began to consider prompting with large-scale image generation models as a way to think-with and speculate, rather than to merely generate. We employ two methods to critique the resulting images: visual content analysis and comparative analysis across image-generation models. We conclude that at a time of both deliberate and accidental miscommunication, it is important for those with expertise in how images ‘work’ to critique and analyse image-generating tools, and consider how working with generative AI might be included as part of an anarchival practice.

Sounds created through reflection played a key role in the belief and ritual traditions of Fennoscandia up until recent times. The Indigenous Sámi considered echoing rocks and mountains to be sacred places where spirits could be met and conversed with. This article examines the role of sound reflections in these historical, little-known traditions using source material gathered from archives and old ethnographic accounts. We analyze the source material using concepts developed by sound studies and the philosophy of sound. We also apply a new materialist approach, which allows echoes to be regarded from a perspective more suitable to the source material: as sound energies transforming reflective material bodies into vibrant and interactive more-than-human beings. Moreover, the new materialist approach enables us to outline a philosophical basis for a materialist understanding of sound reflections and reflective material bodies, as well as the acoustic spaces associated with them. The concept of acousphere is proposed to understand this kind of space of correlation, confluence, and interchange between the human and more-than-human worlds.

This short essay opens ArteActa’s issue AI (and) Art: Poetics of Prompting by proposing to understand generative algorithms as fundamentally metabolic: a dynamic entanglement of data, energy, affect, attention, and ecology. It argues that, given their ubiquity, generative materials can no longer be understood primarily as representations or discrete outputs. Instead, they function as metabolic processes that devour cultural material, extract planetary resources, and reshape perception below the threshold of consciousness. Prompting itself is always an act of transformation rather than merely a symbolic command, and intentional artistic experiments represent only a fraction of a larger infrastructure. The essay thus advocates for a multiscalar understanding of generative media: every prompt is already an ecosystem; every image is already a node in a planetary metabolism.