Research Catalogue

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.

Design for interactive art installation with urban regeneration proposal, as well as video about environmentalism and our technologically mediated private and public lives; installation catalogue design with photography and textual collage, 2021-2023. "There is a massive abundance of goods that end up in landfills. With such abundance of goods, no one should be deprived." Visitors will have to leave an unwanted item of theirs and take another to collect the installation catalogue. The installation will be monitored for this purpose. Designed with Wi-Fi light technology for agility training, the interactive floor in the entrance will be controlled by the visitors through a tablet computer that will allow them to select the difficulty level. The exposition offers a critical viewpoint to the contemporary gallery-mediated commercial environment by making reference to the non-monetary economies of artistic and cultural production. Art "is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy". The enemy is whoever exploits their fellows out of egoism or personal interest (Pablo Picasso). With summary and questions about David Murakami Wood's article "The Global Turn to Authoritarianism", 'Surveillance and Society', (15), 3/4, 2017: 357-370.

Abstract This exposition investigates musically framed silence by extracting and analyzing auditory data and proposing new analytical strategies to deepen engagement with silence as a compositional element. It reontologizes ambient sound as capable of bearing musical and narrative significance. The study centres on Cageance (accessible at https://cageance.webflow.io)¹, the author’s web-based international collaboration extending John Cage’s 4′33″, exploring how chance-generated environmental sound may function ecologically, musically, and narratively. Using a Cageance performance recorded in Portugal as a case study, the research applies a multimodal analytical framework combining Schaferian soundscape theory, conventional musical analysis (including Schenkerian reduction), and dramatic analysis. Visual mapping methods classify sounds into soundmarks, signals, keynotes, and ecological categories (biophony, geophony, anthrophony), while revealing emergent musical and dramaturgical properties within the soundscape. The study proposes new notational and analytical approaches for non-composed sound, positioning silence not as absence, but as a generative site for compositional and narrative inquiry. These findings contribute to ongoing discourse in sound studies, ecological musicology, and practice-as-research methodologies. ¹ The Cageance platform functions best on tablet or desktop devices; headphones are recommended.

By combining text and three video essays, this contribution presents a multimodal ethnography of loudspeakers in the Roma neighborhood of a Romanian village. It is based on video recordings, which were left out of the analysis and editing of my documentary films because of sound distortion. Revisiting my fieldnotes and the “ethnographic rubbish,” here I establish a critical study of my initial position – for 15 years I wasn’t paying attention to loudspeakers as an object of study in their own right – and I argue how these sounds have become auditory markers of the neighborhood since, at least, the beginning of the 2000s. The article thereby contributes to the fields of both anthropology and sound studies. It shows how the use of loudspeakers is made up of rivalry, interference, fame, fraternity, and familism. Moreover, the analysis shows how the lines between public and private spaces, and between oblique listening and noise cancellation are continually reconfigured in a community obsessed with mutual acquaintance.

This article provides an overview and analysis of transformations of the Belarusian political soundscape. Based on the author’s archive of audio recordings made in Minsk and other Belarusian cities in 2016-2023, the article analyzes how protesters and the authorities used voices, noises, and music during the major political protests of recent years. The field recordings became the starting points for a further discussion on the multifaceted role of sound, music, and silence in contesting for urban and political space in Belarus. The “loudest” period in the country’s recent history is then put in a wider context of studying the clashing ideologies of the authoritarian regime and the democratic, pro-independence movement. The study of audio materials is accompanied by participant observations, interviews, and an extensive analysis of Belarusian and international media that reveal various sonic practices used by the country’s and its critics. The primary goal of this article is to address the gaps in studies of the contemporary Belarusian political soundscape and independent music scenes.