Research Catalogue

Building-Sound Compositions in (half-)public places: Starting from Graz, six vacant buildings in different European cities were researched as aural architectures and understood and experienced as an integral part of building-sound compositions. Techniques and strategies ​​were developed how sound art can react systematically to site-specific architectual conditions or how these environmental acoustic characteristics can become part of a previously non-existent composition.

"Expanding horizons" is an Artistic research project carried out between 2021 (August) and 2024 (November) at NTNU, Trondheim. The objectives were to contribute to knowledge on how different kinds of departure points can be useful for musicians when approaching 20th-century Western classical music through improvisation, an understanding of how one can navigate and negotiate the musical language of this repertoire, and insights into how the tension between different performance values can be navigated in this process. The research questions were: When applying improvisation to works of 20th-century classical music, 1. What role does the choice and preparation of musical representations play? 2. How can we navigate and negotiate musical structures such as melody, harmony and form? 3. How can we navigate the tension between fidelity to the work and creative expression? Based on selected pieces from this repertoire and practical explorations together with participating musicians, various approaches to creating improvisational frameworks were then explored. These included a wide range of scores, including lead sheets and indeterminate notation, as well as ear-based methods. From the perspective of integrating improvisation into the performances, approaches such as repeating elements, working with layers, creating transitions, and introducing open sections were examined. A key point was to use melodic material as a way of building strong connections with the source material, rather than relying on harmonic representations of the music. In terms of balancing respect for the original work with creative freedom, a “healthy dose of disrespect” pervaded much of the explorations, allowing deviations from the originals when they were musically justified. Throughout the work processes, an idea of focal points emerged, as aspects to focus on when reworking a classical work into an improvisational version. These focal points included the score, historical and performative contexts, expressive qualities, and the improviser’s personal voice.

Artist, actress and writer Nina Goedegebure conducts artistic research into the polyphony of a disease process at the Master Crossover Creativity @HKU, with two transdisciplinary projects; Fertility and 'Will You Carry Me?!' Starting from the question: How are we carried within a disease process? she investigates the effect of art during a disease process, and/or treatment. She is driven by the idea that in destruction lies creation. 'Through Research Catalogue I want to provide an open insight into this artistic process including my sources of inspiration, questions and finds.'

This research project explores how theatre can contribute to democratic engagement. The starting point was artistic probes investigating aspects of democracy: participation, deliberation and inclusion. The probes resulted in three productions presented at theatre institutions in Sweden. In Skapa Demokrati (Creating Democracy), participation was promoted by encouraging the audience members to create a democracy together. The performance thus allowed participants to experience a democratic process by actively engaging in the making of a constitution. In Öva Demokrati (Practicing Democracy), deliberation was in focus. The performance allowed the audience to deliberate on suggestions for strengthening Swedish democracy. Through methods inspired by political science, the audience was invited to speak and listen to arguments for the different proposals. In the performance, they were also presented with a variety of ways of voting to illustrate how different electoral systems can encourage engagement and give minorities a chance to be heard. In Monument, different strategies were used to promote inclusion. The project started with the idea that monuments say something about society. The monuments were used as vehicles to include voices from the residents of Helsingborg. The artwork presented these different experiences through a multi-perspective script. Other outreach activities also helped enable inclusion. Narrative analysis for theatre was used to reflect on these probes, allowing for a deeper understanding of how performances were conceptualised and structured, and how they made meaning for the audience. Lastly, the performance Ibsendekonstruktion II: Brand was written and staged to reflect on how the research has changed the artistic practice. The research has resulted in strategies for inclusion and a novel theatre format, the conversational theatre, which encourages participation and deliberation. These outcomes provide the theatre with methods to be in dialogue with society.

Psychoanalysis is always targeted in theory with armchair theorizing. A very distorted sense of the phenomena from the armchair introspection and speculation and almost-limited theorizing in behavioral psychologies and even in psychoanalysis invests itself in human experiential stances instead of objective observation. To construct a theory based upon these phenomena, however, there’s too much data. What psychoanalysts do is to demonstrate to the people, through self-experiments, how simple it is to misunderstand what is actually in their consciousness and in their first-person data. What’s remarkable about consciousness is that it is not continuous. There are countless voids in the information of consciousness, some of which work in the psychoanalytic experience of diagnosing symptoms in first- person data, the beliefs about the experiences to which individuals have exclusive access. Its discontinuity, the voids and the holes are limited to these beliefs. For the fact that language works discursively, humans may renounce their privileged access to these experiences and shift their focus from what they believe to what actually is the case. In the end, there will be a scientific narrative in which the conscious self will not be a character. A living body, a living brain, and everything else is all that exists. The first-person narrative would be extracted from that third-person account. The conscious self never exists in any other sense. Thinking that it would exist is the illusion.

“Havana Syndrome” has so far been shrouded in a controversial secret as a medical condition and reluctantly made available in the scientific discourses. In spite of the reluctance, global availability of technologies to conduct the violations reported by the US diplomats was never a hidden agenda for conspiracies. US and various NGO accounts illustrate the deployments of these high-tech tools in warfare and beyond, targeting both diplomats and civilians.