Research Catalogue

Artistic Research "I speak from a body that dances its multiple voices, layers and identities. A body entwining information networks, updating its memories. Surfing traces, always in a state of becoming”. As a performance artist I work from the perspective of the body as a living archive that carries with it history, culture, ancestry, memories and temporalities. These archives are dynamic, moving along time in coexistence and permanence. Searching for a hybrid body, the work unfolds the aesthetic expressions of Afro-Brazilian rituals and folk dances; through somatic - practices and movement research, to discover the exciting possibilities that lie in the abstraction of codified dance forms. In dialogue between physicality, metaphors and symbols the body becomes a vehicle of communication, a place of events and images generated by the interaction between the performer and the viewer in real time. Reflecting on the Black Atlantic history and the Afro-Diaspora that results from it. The research searches for a new path, a new journey inside of history, archives, legacy, and cosmologies. An Afro-Present body; an Afro-Diasporic body entangled in the transatlantic slave trade history. A being; belonging to traces. Dialoguing with collective memories and archives that were carried by the body and expressed in culture, symbols, philosophy and ways of living. Generating co-narratives; co-creations; call-responses in a spiral temporality.

Operafrø / seed is a site-specific performance cycle with opera singers and improvisational performers in a ritual form, created for babies and parents together with seeds, plants and trees in a botanical garden. Through a playful and free improvisational musical approach to creating art for the little ones, we have, based on Vivaldi's Four Seasons, created a baby opera for the smallest seeds, both human and plant seeds. Babies have their own little big voice, which can be said to be a sprout for the adult big voice. In the span between the baby voice and the opera voice we can hear that a string is ringing! During the four seasons in Ringve Botanical Garden through 2023, and together with the audience of babies and parents, the artists have investigated seeds, sprouts, plants and trees through rituals, play and theater in sympoetic (Haraway) co-creation with nature, song, rhythms, babies, and parents.

I have collaborated with the composer David Matthews for over thirty years. This exposition focuses on the ideas and insights that result from our long-term work together on music for violin (and viola alone. Matthews's output in this arena is prolific, and 2/3rds of his solo works have been written for me.

This essay examines the challenges of generative AI in composing ‘new’ music. The focus is on the commercial generative AI applications (i.e. AI music generators) due to their prominence in the mainstream cultural and technological discourse. The essay adopts a philosophical rather than a technological approach, situating the use of generative AI in music within a broader societal, cultural, and environmental context. If AI and music (understood as normative practices) are majoritarian, molar, and arborescent entities, then the approach taken here is Deleuzian: minoritarian, molecular, and rhizomatic. By engaging with their fault lines, disassembling and reassembling their structures, and connecting them to the wider world, the essay presents an alternative way of thinking about AI and music – and AI in music – and proposes one such possible application.

Vanessa Theme Ament’s "The Foley Grail" was, for a long time, the only publication to discuss in detail the art of film sound effects (foley). In this issue, we review the third edition of the book while in dialogue with the author herself.

Norths: Navigating Instability By Ear exposes a diversity of transdisciplinary artistic research threads within Norths, a growing body of environmental sound art practice at an intersection of data and listening experience. By rendering intangible data representations physically perceptible, ‘northness’ - understood as location, place, idea, and fiction - becomes a site for material interrogation of ‘standards’ applied to measurement, perception, being, knowing, and acting. Critical phenomenological and ecological issues emerge from the noise encountered when sonifying (near) real-time seismic and geomagnetic data, as well as data from communication systems. In the present exposition conceptual corollaries from my experience making, reflecting on, and exhibiting these works are diffracted through language in a project to expose the material propositions of these works themselves. Cross-modulation (feedback) loops established within this exposition connect artistic practice to philosophical-linguistic expression, providing both an explication and an exploratory continuation of my ongoing research practice.