Research Catalogue

Operafrø / seed is a site-specific performance cycle with opera singers and improvisational performers in a ritual form, created for babies and parents together with seeds, plants and trees in a botanical garden. Through a playful and free improvisational musical approach to creating art for the little ones, we have, based on Vivaldi's Four Seasons, created a baby opera for the smallest seeds, both human and plant seeds. Babies have their own little big voice, which can be said to be a sprout for the adult big voice. In the span between the baby voice and the opera voice we can hear that a string is ringing! During the four seasons in Ringve Botanical Garden through 2023, and together with the audience of babies and parents, the artists have investigated seeds, sprouts, plants and trees through rituals, play and theater in sympoetic (Haraway) co-creation with nature, song, rhythms, babies, and parents.

This research investigates how local sourcing practices in the Netherlands can enable the reuse of secondary food-related materials for ceramic glaze production, and how the exploration of existing networks through material research can contribute to the development of new cross-sector collaborations. Through a practice-based approach that bridges ceramic production, design research, and the restaurant industry, the study explores the potential of locally available “waste” materials, such as bones, shells, charcoals, and discarded glass, as viable resources for glaze making. The research combines material experimentation with qualitative fieldwork, including interviews and informal discussions with chefs, ceramicists, suppliers, and material practitioners. By tracing the origins, processing, and transformation of these secondary resources, the study critically examines the environmental impact and opacity of conventional glaze supply chains, which often rely on imported raw materials and energy-intensive extraction and transportation processes. Central to the research is the creation of a material archive that documents locally sourced secondary materials and their behavior in glaze recipes. This archive functions not only as a technical tool for ceramic experimentation, but also as a framework for understanding relationships between material flows, human practices, and local infrastructures. Drawing on the concept of “working in the minor key,” the research emphasizes learning through direct engagement, observation, and collaboration rather than predefined systems. The findings suggest that material research can act as a catalyst for new circular practices and cross-sector networks between restaurants and ceramic industry, fostering shared responsibility, creative exchange, and reduced material consumption. By reframing waste as a site of value and knowledge, this study proposes an alternative, locally embedded approach to glaze production that integrates sustainability, and social engagement.

Transmutations seeks to redefine the term transformation through a staged concert — a concert conceived as a work of art in itself. The traditional concert format and conventional performance practices are showing signs of stagnation, thus calling for the emergence of a voice adapted to this transformation. The boundaries of music, especially within the classical realm, have gradually blurred in recent times. Increasingly, artists are exploring the concert as a form of expression that not only integrates other artistic disciplines but also embraces technological advancements. This approach challenges traditional aesthetic conventions and the notion of genre and musical style. The omnipresence of technology in contemporary society underlines the need for research that explores the many possibilities of the concert format. This staged concert aims to redefine the concept of transformation by avoiding any stylistic boundaries. The works of Richard Strauss, John Cage, and Alexander Schubert are included not only for their artistic value but also for their contribution to the very notion of transformation.

As interaction with corporate artificial intelligence increasingly becomes a precondition for contemporary life, artists need to see beyond Generative AI (GenAI) technology as a discrete tool that makes generic products. Instead, they can imagine combinatorial approaches and conceptual frameworks for AI-enabled artworks. Through my practice-based research, the act of prompting multimodal GenAI models has been informed by comprehending an assemblage as a “framework of instruction” held together through poetic alliances, within which the output from one component feeds the process of another. Practical experiments explored an interrelation of body, text, and predictive technology, where an algorithmic prediction of human action conjured “biometric poetry” that was used to stimulate a language model. Working with archival film footage and digital puppets animated with motion-capture files gave rise to the idea of a camera’s field of view – with its bounded contents acting like a key – eliciting value from a language model in a novel form of story making. Potential erroneous inferences were perceived as a new form of chance operation and a characteristic of algorithmic remix as defined by Steve F. Anderson. This method has been further developed in a project that combines performance, waste material, object recognition, and a language model to explore how the manipulation of garbage can be rationalised by a machine to produce poetic texts as a commentary to action portrayed on a screen.

This paper delves into the dynamics and dramaturgical specifications of ANA, a theatrical installation engineered for co-creating narratives in a dialogic process with individual users. ANA embodies a collaborative storytelling environment that is used to communicate narrative and emotional information through multiple modalities, thereby bringing into focus an unexpectedly human essence in a human-machine interaction. Integrating GPT-4, emotion-recognition algorithms and a simulation of its own affective state, ANA engages users in a 10-minute interaction, fostering an immersive narrative exchange where the affective dimension of collaborative storytelling takes precedence. This paper explores the specific challenges of prompt design in this setting, focusing on the concept of emotional attuning, the feeling of being “in sync” with a machine throughout the interaction. Through an analytical lens encompassing cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and prompting techniques, the authors describe and reflect practices of employing multimodal sensorial data such as emotion recognition, and dramatic considerations, into the process of designing prompts. They also describe and reflect on their attempts to establish a form of meta-communication with the machine about the emotional aspects of the experience. By focusing on dramaturgical and improvisational strategies, this paper underscores the pivotal significance of emotional attunement and multimodal communication in fostering intimate technological engagement.

How useful can AI be at this present moment to generate assignments or instructions to teach and train people to live more playful, creative and ethical lives? In this artistic research, I try to put aside fears of a dystopian future in which runaway AI assumes control over humanity, and suspend them long enough to play with the idea of reversing the usual dynamic: what if AI were to instruct us, instead of us instructing AI? What kind of positive outcomes could emerge? I borrow from traditions of instruction art and avant-garde art, and I employ discursive practices that alternate between techno-enthusiastic and techno-skeptical. The AI tool ChatGPT and I hold conversations in which we explore the research question together, and in which I prompt ChatGPT to issue me instructions, then I describe the process and result of executing the instructions.