Research Catalogue

Design, 1995-96, 2023. Design, 1996-97. Photography, 2010, 2011. Essay, 2015. Collage Text, 2022. The exposition serves as commentary and guide on the place of art, in a gradually environmentally and technologically challenged world. I further make a commentary on outgrown conceptions of the foreign, in terms of the so-called "exotic', and the non-foreign,within the context of contemporary globalisation. This, to raise open questions on the impact of the aforementioned on global politics. The re-design proposal, inspired by De Stijl, illustrates the modernist historical view that art appears to be regressive, rather than progressive: as soon as a movement or a school becomes established, reaching its culmination, it starts declining. Finally, I have included a graduate school architectural design project in the archaeological site of Eleusis accompanied by new commentary. With essay about experimental film making in the British avant-garde, published in "Architecture and Culture" journal, 2015, which is about the environmental challenges of the urban environment. The reference to the TV show "Alone", a competitive prize show of sole or two-person players, is a reminder that humans can live in the natural environment developing survival tactics already applied by their ancestors. About how to navigate this exposition: Scroll from top to bottom, then from bottom to top, then scroll to the top right, then scroll to the bottom right. For Luke, with respect and care.

The quest of reconciling scholarship and interpretative freedom has always been present in the early music movement discourse, since its 19th century foundations. Confronted with a plurality of performance practices, the performer of Early Music is forced to make interpretative choices, based on musicological research of the sources and their personal taste. The critical analysis of the sources related to a musical work is often a time-consuming and cumbersome task, usually provided by critical editions made by musicologists. Such editions primarily focus on the composer's agency, neglecting the contribution of a complex network of professions, ranging from editors, conductors, amateur and professional performers and collectors. The FAAM, Flemish Archive for Annotated Music, is an interdisciplinary project at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp that wishes to explore the possibilities of annotation analysis on music scores for historically informed musicians. Annotations are a valuable source of information to recollect the decision-making process of musicians of the past. Especially when original musical recordings are not available, the marks provided by these performers of the past are the most intimate and informative connections between modern and ancient musicians. Contrary to a purely scholarly historically informed practice approach, based on the controversial concept of authenticity, we wish to allow the modern performers to reconcile their practice with the one of their predecessors in a process of dialectic emulation, where artistic process is improved through the past but does not stagnate in it.

This project aims to develop transcultural approaches of inspiration (which we regard as mutually appreciated intentional and reciprocal artistic influence based on solidarity) by combining approaches from contemporary music composition and improvisation with ethnomusicological and sociological research. We encourage creative (mis)understandings emerging from the interaction between research and artistic practice, and between European art music, folk and non-western styles, in particular from indigenous minorities in Taiwan. Both comprehension and incomprehension yield serendipity and inspiration for new research questions, innovative artistic creation, and applied follow-ups among non-western communities. The project departs from two premises: first, that contemporary western art music as a practice often tends to resort to certain degrees of elitism; and second, that non-western musical knowledge is often either ignored or merely exploited when it comes to compositional inspiration. We do not regard inspiration as unidirectional, an “input” like recording or downloading material for artistic use. Instead, we foster artistic interaction by promoting dialogical and distributed knowledge production in musical encounters. Developing inter­disciplinary and transcultural methodologies of musical creation will contribute on the one hand towards opening up the—rightly or wrongly supposed—“ivory tower of contemporary composition”, and on the other hand will contribute towards the recognition of the artistic value of non-western musical practices. By highlighting the reciprocal nature of inspiration, creative (mis)understandings will result in socially relevant and innovative methodologies for creating and disseminating music with meaning. The methods applied in the proposed project will start out from ethnographic evidence that people living in non-western or traditional societies often use methods of knowledge production within the sonic domain which are commonly unaddressed or even unknown among western contemporary music composers (aside from exotist or orientalistic appropriations of “the other”). The project is designed in four stages: field research and interaction with indigenous communities in Taiwan with a focus on the Tao people on Lanyu Island, collaborative workshops in Vienna, an artistic research and training phase with invited indigenous Taiwanese coaches in Vienna, and feeding back to the field in Taiwan. During all these stages, exchange and coordination between composers, music makers, scholars and source community experts will be essential in order to reflect not only on the creative process, but also to analyse and support strong interaction between creation and society. Re-interaction with source communities as well as audience participation in the widest sense will help to increase the social relevance of the artistic results. The University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (MDW) will host the project. The contributors are Johannes Kretz (project leader) and Wei-Ya Lin (project co-leader, senior investigator) with their team of seven composers, ten artistic research partners from Taiwan and six artistic and academic consultants with extensive experience in the relevant fields.

Thesis of the Royal Art Academy, The Hague, 2024 BA Fine Arts In the landscape of modern society, alienation is a common denominator to the experience of individuals. Whether this is due to society’s perpetual acceleration, or the experience of life through the ever-present lens of consumerism, alienation is an unmissable part of the contemporary human experience. This extends to the art world, where the chasm separating an ever-booming global market for the arts, and institutions struggling to get their pre-covid-19 visitor numbers highlight the disparities in the experience of art today. These disparities will ultimately transpire in the experience of the viewer. But how, and why can art be a catalyst for alienation in late-contemporary society? This Graduation Research Paper is an attempt at exploring the relationship between the artwork, the audience, and the artist, so as to attempt and provide a comprehensive notion of the ways in which relationships form around artworks, notably through communication theory. This GRP will also explore examples of elements of influence in the formation of communicative structures between the art and the audience. Notably, this paper will discuss the myth of the artist, and its influence as an authority in the experience of art, as well as the influence of spatial context on the reception of art. The paper will conclude that the artist possesses limited agency in the reception of their artworks, and that in order to provide an honest experience to a contemporary audience, the artist must seek to understand and deconstruct the codes which surround the audience's consumption of art.

This paper investigates the development of the production of High Fidelity (Hi-Fi), audios and the emergence of an accompanying audiophile culture in late state socialist Poland of the 1970s. My case study offers a discussion on the re-negotiating of the cultural values of a specifically marketed technology that was used as a status symbol in affluent market economy countries. In state-socialist Poland, a host of social actors appropriated Hi-Fi audios technologies and audiophile culture to be part of a nationwide project of technological and social modernization. I investigate how in this specific historical setting the mass-scale development and the production of Hi-Fi audios emerged, and how this was embedded into the government policy of building “consumer socialism.” This development also corresponded with a state-sponsored program of technological modernization, in which the electronics industry was identified as a flagship sector that received substantial government investment. I also discuss the emergence of a local audiophile culture, which was redefined by intermediary actors, from being a Western elitist “consumption microculture” into an accessible form of cultural uplift for working-class youth.

Envision a mobile application focusing on music discovery via operationalized and interrelated metadata. Imagine that this application builds on a certain record collection developed under the auspices of a public service institution. Then visualize the application as a vehicle for telling forgotten and neglected histories of recorded music, and you have DR DJ. This article reads the digital music archive of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) through the media archaeological notion of imaginary media by discussing a proposal for music discovery that never came to be. This proposal is a discarded idea for a mobile application called DR DJ, which the article assesses through Siegfried Zielinski’s concept of variantology. The article provides an analysis of DR’s actual digital music archive by viewing the unfulfilled potentials and desires of DR DJ as imaginary media co-constituting the realized technologies of DR’s music communication. The article evolves a speculative scenario where an actualized DR DJ potentiates experiences of concurrent lines in the history of recorded music, while also highlighting structural limitations and a reaffirmation of Western modalities.