Research Catalogue

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.

This research is rooted in nihilism, exploring how the contrast between materiality and spirituality leads to a radical way of perceiving existence. What does it mean to be unable to believe in "what's beyond"? What role does the body play in such an issue? Starting from philosophy, this debate finds expression through art and different iterations, attempts to face the consequences of nihilism.

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.

Our Days of Gold (ODOG) is an ongoing, durational artwork staged on Instagram at @ourdaysofgold_film since April 2017. Over its eight-year duration, the work has accumulated new layers of memory and interpretation shaped by followers’ responses, shifting platform aesthetics, and changes to Instagram’s visual logic, including the disappearance of the square grid in January 2025. Alongside creative contributions, the project draws on a survey conducted with long-term followers, tracing how experiences of viewing, remembering, and interpreting the work unfold over time. This co-authored exposition includes videos, screen-recorded navigations, and writing produced by followers whose contributions reveal a form of polyvocality: multiple interpretive threads and associations that remediate the archive while shaping its evolving narrative. Within this distributed process, ODOG engages autofiction not as a singular self-narration but as a collective mode of authorship, emerging through dispersed readings, layered memories, and networked resonances. At the same time, the project foregrounds the precarity of social media archives, where redesigns, algorithmic shifts, and potential platform loss constantly reshape how the work circulates and persists. Drawing on debates around remediation and digital preservation, ODOG tests how meaning, memory, and narrative can be sustained within unstable infrastructures while acknowledging their continual transformation.

In this half paper, half soliloquy, I aim to propose re-enactment as a research method. Through textual analysis and situated reflections, I will explore the potential of re-enactments in performative returning to destabilize and reconfigure canonical understandings of the past, and consider any implications this understanding of re-enactment can have within research approaches