Research Catalogue

This performance seeks to form visually narratives about gender fluidity, identity, vulnerability, and the sense of the fragmented self in this fast changing world monitored by cameras, frames and the feeling that we are constantly observed . Body is the main research tool, a moving diary. On its surface are imprinted all the stories, desires and fears experienced during the years. They are collected, and then, interpreted kinetically, blurring the boundaries between the material reality, and the reality of the unspoken. A keeper of all the intimate and domestic moments, trying to protect them from the external world. In this journey, Camera obscura is a companion and an opponent.

This research endeavours to reveal the transformative potential of artistic creativity by combining musical improvisation and yoga-based embodied listening practices. The study incorporates three listening practices: humming and self-observation, listening only with the right ear, and listening to the space within the heart. The effects of these experiments are documented in a journal and recorded as audio files. In addition to improvisation as a musical practice and embodied listening, this research also considers how yoga, - which has become an important part of Indian culture over the centuries with its roots in Vedic culture - can shape artistic identity through its philosophical understanding of sound, and its perspectives on the human body as a cosmos. The research emphasizes subjects such as the healing power of humming, chakra energy, collective consciousness, energetic centers of consciousness in the human body and their potential role in transforming the artist's identity. The thoughts and experiences in this research are personal, but the content of this article has been written based on these experiences as an attempt to present visions for global musicians to transition their musicianship into a more universal form, and to pose multifaceted questions to the reader. This paper draws attention to different improvisation techniques makam terminology and explores existing literature to open innovative doors based on holistic experience. The findings reveal the vibrant and energetic connections between the effects of music and vibrations on human life and the body, and the various philosophies that nourish the artist's identity and expression. This thesis encourages improvisation as a form of existence to establish deep spiritual connections with experiences from the past and present. Highlighting dimensions of music that are unnoticeable due to existing industrial structures and education models, the most importantly, esoteric knowledge of the body, inviting the reader to be open-minded for all sonic possibilities.

The context of generative processes encapsulates relevant data that influence the behavior of an algorithm including mental domains and 'internal' dimensions of a particular context such as goals and decision making. Of creative importance is how an algorithmic process reacts to the influence of its environment, the enclosing conditions from which it emerges. Given a clearly defined set of resources, a variety of processes can operate within the boundaries imposed by a certain context. Such a shared space can be seen as a composable structure, a space where both composition and generative activity take place. Contributing to the evolving properties of a certain situation, the persistence of state means that an environment behaves according to the previous activity that has occurred within it. Opposed to an amnesic situation, a persistent environment can resume previous developments, adapt to long-term interactions and evolve over time. Based on persistence and gradual change, the temporal unfolding of generative processes has an important impact on the becoming of compositional algorithms and the sound material they create.

This exposition comprises textual fragments (both written and voiced) produced through the act of returning to (in turn re-activating, re-configuring, even re-imagining) conversational transcripts generated within the artistic research project Dorsal Practices, a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker. Initiated in January 2021, Dorsal Practices is an artistic collaboration for exploring how the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude might shape and inform our embodied, affective and relational experience of being-in-the-world. Conceived at the threshold between choreographic-movement practices and language-based artistic research, Dorsal Practices explores how the experiences of listening, languaging, even thinking, might be shaped differently through this embodied tilt of awareness and attention towards the back, moreover, through a practice of coming back, the act of (re)turning. The original transcript material that forms the basis of this exposition was produced through a practice of conversation undertaken within six interrelated blocks of exploration, taking place over 18 months between October 2022 and February 2024. Within this period of enquiry, we — Brown and Cocker — focused our attention on the act of returning within our shared practice, re-imagined as a "dorsal turn". Through the intermingling of two registers of language-based practice, that is, through the performativity of both the written and spoken texts themselves, within this exposition we attempt to make tangible how the dorsal gesture of the turn and the circling principle of re- become operative as a spinal thread within our shared enquiry. Deviating from the straightforwardness of a strictly linear text, we invite a form of dorsal listening-reading that might engage through loops and returns. We conceive the research artefacts generated through the practice itself as the central focus within this exposition, alongside a supporting text where we introduce the wider enquiry of Dorsal Practices, reflecting on how we conceive the act of turning and of re-turning therein.

The term ‘Occupational Folklore’ refers to the social expressions of people, linked to the work that they do. This exposition explores the possibility of there being a common language of clay, a vernacular that can be used to story-tell, and how stories arise from the studio, from the intersection of making, thinking/talking and clay. Comprising three discrete projects, we move from a study of the materiality of voice to establishing a vocabulary of clay to a narrative collection of embodied experiences. Their combined knowledge leads to a fourth project, in the form of conversations held whilst making around a studio table. Passages from the exchange are filmed and analysed from the perspective of ‘small stories’, an oral history methodology that gives focus to the speculative, iterative and nuanced decisions often overlooked in a conventional account of a conversation. When applied to the making process, it begins to uncover a deeper understanding of the processual and implicit decisions that take place through the interaction of making, thinking and material properties. The passages allow us to witness the very emergence of storytelling taking place, the moment at which life experiences intersect with formations in clay. The aim of collecting all four projects together is not simply to document examples but, as with all modes of folklore, to use story to identify and share more resilient and connected ways of being in the world. Within these intersections lie the porous and mutable properties of clay practice, that are rapidly redefining the wider field of ceramics in terms of its social contribution. Contained within these social expressions of clay lies its ability to connect with and contribute to wider community and environmental issues. The term occupational folklore is used in recognition of the historic continuity of behaviours, actions and beliefs that arise from these interactions, if only we shift our focus from individual attainments to the collective knowledge and transferable learning these small stories contain.

Troubling the Ideal Landscape – A Visual Narrative critically examines possible intersections between imagination and physical landscape. Through a practice-based approach, this exposition explores the composition and decomposition of ideal landscapes, with a focus on Cannero Riviera, a small Italian village. Grounded in my doctoral research at PhDArts, a collaboration between ACPA, Leiden University, and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the project employs spatial montage as both a methodological tool and an artistic outcome. By fragmenting the landscape into moving images, I seek to disrupt conventional visual regimes and reflect on the ideological forces shaping the village and its environment. This approach is informed by Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, where fragmented images form unstable constellations that navigate multiple meanings, temporalities, and spaces. Engaging with Warburg’s method, I question crystallised, linear visualisations of the ideal, focusing on dynamic processes of spatial composition. The exposition aims to reframe landscape imagery not as a passive backdrop, but as an active force. It proposes a model of the ideal landscape that resists linearity, embracing a complex, shifting narrative that questions the visual regimes through which contemporary imaginaries of place are constructed.