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.

Troubling the Ideal Landscape – A Visual Narrative critically examines possible intersections between imagination and physical landscape. Through a practice-based approach, this exposition explores the composition and decomposition of ideal landscapes, with a focus on Cannero Riviera, a small Italian village. Grounded in my doctoral research at PhDArts, a collaboration between ACPA, Leiden University, and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the project employs spatial montage as both a methodological tool and an artistic outcome. By fragmenting the landscape into moving images, I seek to disrupt conventional visual regimes and reflect on the ideological forces shaping the village and its environment. This approach is informed by Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, where fragmented images form unstable constellations that navigate multiple meanings, temporalities, and spaces. Engaging with Warburg’s method, I question crystallised, linear visualisations of the ideal, focusing on dynamic processes of spatial composition. The exposition aims to reframe landscape imagery not as a passive backdrop, but as an active force. It proposes a model of the ideal landscape that resists linearity, embracing a complex, shifting narrative that questions the visual regimes through which contemporary imaginaries of place are constructed.

In this paper I propose to re-visit the outcome of a research trip I made a few years ago to the island of Sardinia in order to capture stills and video of a dilapidated villa, La Cupola, once belonging to the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. The research output took the form of an essay video using a film studies methodology to critically re-assess Antonioni’s classic 1960 film L’Avventura. The research took the form of what I would term an occularcentric-cognitive approach whereby my analysis was based primarily on my visual interpretation of the villa. My mental image of La Cupola on first hearing about it was replaced by the online image in my research process, which in turn was replaced by the real image when I arrived at the site, and ultimately by the mediated images of my audio-visual essay. But what wasn’t included in this original research was an unexpected opportunity to enter inside La Cupola, which I retrospectively realised offered an entirely new understanding of the space. With reference to both film and architectural theory, this paper will seek to understand my encounter with the villa according to a primarily sensory and embodied interpretation rather than a sighted one.

Among classical musicians, there is a tendency to define our profession more by craftsmanship than artistry. In our artworld, we often focus on reproducing: A musical performer becomes a transparent medium for the composer’s supposed intentions (Leech-Wilkinson, 2020, chapter 6). How can we reclaim agency and liberty in the process of shaping music? In this exposition, a storytelling approach is applied to the performance interpretation of Luciano Berio's classic flute solo Sequenza I from 1958, with the aim of becoming a more daring interpreter. The storytelling in focus was recorded in the 1950s, echoing even older times. However, in my explorations, the archival storytelling serves as a tool for reimagining a musical score and creating something new.