Research Catalogue

Exploring methods of connecting thinking to space and embodiment in a research that looks at the connection between mental images, language and the body through felt experience.

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.

The Art of Preluding was once common practice but more or less disappeared during the last century. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in reviving this artform. The content found on the website is the result of years of research in the artistic and pedagogical field, and an academic research project at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp in Belgium. It relies on historical didactic instructions to make preluding at the piano accessible and up-to-date again, and promotes the development of a contemporary approach.

This essay examines the subjective perception of time during the performance of long musical forms from the perspective of the performer. The starting point is the composition "Haltezeit", which works specifically with the stretching of time. Two improvisational performances without an audience will be used to explore how the perception of time changes in the course of performances lasting several hours and how this influences improvisational behavior. Practical experience is combined with concepts from the fields of philosophy, performance studies and musical improvisation research. The artistic experiments show that physical states such as tiredness or tension as well as external disturbances significantly influence the subjective perception of duration. While inner restlessness led to an extended experience of time and more frequent improvisational interventions, calmness and concentration favored a condensed, meditative experience of time with less frequent changes. Artistic practice thus becomes an experiential space for a qualitative perception of time beyond measurable structures. The essay sees itself as an open research gesture that invites us to perceive time more consciously as a flowing continuum in a performative context.

This article explores the shifting temporality of John Cage’s 4’33” as it propogates through the digital landscape of YouTube. Originally conceived as a timed, almost site-specific performance of shared presence and ambient listening, 4’33” can function surprisingly well online in an environment dedicated to speed, repetition, and distraction. Drawing on seven diverse video performances—ranging from the historically grounded to the amateur and experimental—I examine how silence and time are embodied, marked, framed, and performed in online space. These performances inhabit a paradox: they are situated within a system designed to fragment attention, yet they demand stillness and duration. In doing so, they unsettle the assumptions of immediacy that govern digital spectatorship. Rather than treat 4’33” as a fixed score, I argue that each video becomes a site of temporal negotiation. The performers use silence as a gestural and visual act, creating tension between embodied time and platform time. They foreground listening not only as acoustic attention but as a durational stance—an insistence on presence within an artwork that privileges absence. The result is a form of quiet resistance to algorithmic rhythm, the embracing of non-playing, a reclaiming of boredom. These online performances suggest that 4’33” has not lost its edge. Instead, it has adapted, becoming a mirror for contemporary conditions of time, presence, and attention. Silence here is not absence, but an expanded field—where listening, duration, and performance are reimagined in and against the temporal asynchronicities of the digital. (painting by Morna McGoldrick, 1964)

This article examines an expanded conceptualization of time-based art beyond artworks that unfold consecutively over measurable durations. Typical time-based art was characterized with clear beginning and ending such as performance, cinematic art, moving image, sound art, and computational installation. In contrast, this analysis investigates how static art possesses temporal qualities through alternative means. With the incorporation of “time-based materials” - substances that transform their external forms over time – we establish an alternative time-based art characterized by an imminent temporality. Historical paintings like Goya’s "The Third of May 1808" and Bruegel’s "The Fall of the Rebel Angels" reveal early attempts to the depiction of time through compositional arrangement and juxtaposition of events. The author extends this tradition by exploring how certain materials possess intrinsic “temporal directionality” – a predictable but fluctuating transformation process. Examples include oxidation of metals that undergo the process of rusting and patination, creating visual changes that occur gradually and unpredictably, embodying what the author terms an imminent quality - known to happen but uncertain in exact duration. The author makes use of his own artworks as case studies: "Simulacra" (2015), a juxtaposition of photographs of copper armors against the actual deteriorating objects; "The Fall of the Rebel Angels" (2022), a translation of Pieter Bruegel’s painting into an installation using patinated copper; and "Public Cemetery" (2023), an incorporation of natural phenomenon like rain and typhoons as temporal agents. These works demonstrate how materials that vulnerable to intrinsic transformation can create temporal experiences that transcend conventional time-based art definitions, offering new possibilities for expressing time through the interplay of possibility, impossibility, and imminence.