Research Catalogue

"My Public Stage" is not merely an artistic practice; it is a dynamic fusion of performance art and civic engagement that transcends conventional boundaries. At its core, this practice navigates the intricate relationship between the artist and the public sphere, offering an unconventional perspective on how art can reshape our understanding of the world. The essential aspect of this artistic journey lies in the intentional placement of artistic interventions and performances within public spaces, where the encounter with viewers is not a predetermined spectacle but a meeting. This deliberate approach seeks to dissolve the traditional separation between the artist and the individual, fostering a unique connection that is spontaneous and genuine. I view public space as not only a material but also a social environment that is produced, reshaped and restructured by the citizens through their experiences, their intentions for action and the relations they develop in it. My project draws on Lefebvre’s (2019) approach to urban public space not as a neutral container of social life, but as a fluid entity, both constructed and produced by social practices. Lefebvre’s approach confirms and expands my view that public space is not fixed, yet it requires a conscious effort to intervene in its production. The philosophy driving "My Public Stage" aligns with the concept of civic engagement. By presenting long durational performances in the heart of everyday life, the artist consciously assumes the role of a creator, using performance art as a medium to unveil the interconnected elements that bridge art with life. This philosophy echoes the sentiment of Joseph Beuys, who believed that everyone is an artist, actively sculpting the intricate sculpture we call life. In embracing the public sphere as its canvas, this practice transcends the conventional boundaries of art and daily reality. It becomes a catalyst for a different perspective on how individuals perceive and engage with their surroundings. The transformative power of performance art is harnessed to reveal the latent artistic potential within each person, emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between art and life.

Timelessness and temporality (Kruse, 2011) are widely studied topics in the classical music of the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century, mainly concerning the perspective of musical composition and auditory perception of music. But what is the perspective of temporal layeredness in the performer’s experience? This quote offers a starting point (Noble, 2018): “music whose temporal organisation optimises human information processing and embodiment expresses human time, and music whose temporal organisation subverts or exceeds human information processing and embodiment points outside of human time, to timelessness .” Specialized in the repertoire of Karlheinz Stockhausen, I want to investigate the role of temporality in music from the perspective of a performer. I will delve into the richness of different layers of temporal awareness in an artistic experience through experiential, embodied, and sensorial knowledge, using different temporal compositions by Stockhausen as case studies: HARMONIEN (2006) for flute solo,, Xi (1986) for flute solo and STOP (1969) for ensemble.

This exhibition documents the process of filming excerpted passages from Christopher Marlowe's The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus as a series of monologues and tableaux. The resulting film, Scene's from the Tragicall History of D. Faustus, is here uploaded in its entirety, accompanied by supplementary materials related to its creation.

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.