Research Catalogue

This exposition presents the audio recordings produced within the ESP Duos project, a series of remote improvisations performed by long-term collaborators under conditions of complete acoustic and visual separation. Each duo was recorded simultaneously in isolated spaces, without any form of real-time interaction, and later combined into a single auditory perspective available only to the listener. Rather than testing whether musical interaction can be sustained at a distance, the project explores how residual traces of collaboration continue to shape improvisatory behavior when the other performer is imagined rather than perceived. The recordings foreground imagined co-presence as an enacted orientation grounded in embodied memory, shared history, and relational expectation. As artistic outputs, the ESP Duos invite listening not for coordination or synchronization, but for emergent coherence arising from contingency, alignment, divergence, and retrospective sense-making. The exposition situates these recordings as both documents of a research process and autonomous aesthetic artifacts, offering access to a mode of togetherness that persists beyond physical co-presence.

This article "Cartesian Doubt" critiques René Descartes' foundational method of systematic doubt by drawing on the analysis of French philosopher Michel Serres, who likens the Cartesian enterprise to the predatory logic found in La Fontaine’s fable "The Wolf and the Lamb". Serres argues that Cartesian doubt is not a neutral search for truth but rather an "absolute irreversibility doctrine" that functions as a one-way mechanism to destroy all prior beliefs and sensory data to reach the predetermined outcome of the cogito. This process creates a permanent structural gap between the subject and the world, establishing a "foundational violence" in Western thought. Furthermore, the article challenges Descartes' metaphor of sorting a finite basket of apples, asserting that it fails to account for the infinite and dynamic nature of error and decay in a complex, modern scientific reality.

1º objeto: dispositivo para facilitar o ver e o sentir. 2º objeto: portal (ponte entre a cidade de Kuldiga e a floresta)

As interaction with corporate artificial intelligence increasingly becomes a precondition for contemporary life, artists need to see beyond Generative AI (GenAI) technology as a discrete tool that makes generic products. Instead, they can imagine combinatorial approaches and conceptual frameworks for AI-enabled artworks. Through my practice-based research, the act of prompting multimodal GenAI models has been informed by comprehending an assemblage as a “framework of instruction” held together through poetic alliances, within which the output from one component feeds the process of another. Practical experiments explored an interrelation of body, text, and predictive technology, where an algorithmic prediction of human action conjured “biometric poetry” that was used to stimulate a language model. Working with archival film footage and digital puppets animated with motion-capture files gave rise to the idea of a camera’s field of view – with its bounded contents acting like a key – eliciting value from a language model in a novel form of story making. Potential erroneous inferences were perceived as a new form of chance operation and a characteristic of algorithmic remix as defined by Steve F. Anderson. This method has been further developed in a project that combines performance, waste material, object recognition, and a language model to explore how the manipulation of garbage can be rationalised by a machine to produce poetic texts as a commentary to action portrayed on a screen.

This paper delves into the dynamics and dramaturgical specifications of ANA, a theatrical installation engineered for co-creating narratives in a dialogic process with individual users. ANA embodies a collaborative storytelling environment that is used to communicate narrative and emotional information through multiple modalities, thereby bringing into focus an unexpectedly human essence in a human-machine interaction. Integrating GPT-4, emotion-recognition algorithms and a simulation of its own affective state, ANA engages users in a 10-minute interaction, fostering an immersive narrative exchange where the affective dimension of collaborative storytelling takes precedence. This paper explores the specific challenges of prompt design in this setting, focusing on the concept of emotional attuning, the feeling of being “in sync” with a machine throughout the interaction. Through an analytical lens encompassing cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and prompting techniques, the authors describe and reflect practices of employing multimodal sensorial data such as emotion recognition, and dramatic considerations, into the process of designing prompts. They also describe and reflect on their attempts to establish a form of meta-communication with the machine about the emotional aspects of the experience. By focusing on dramaturgical and improvisational strategies, this paper underscores the pivotal significance of emotional attunement and multimodal communication in fostering intimate technological engagement.

How useful can AI be at this present moment to generate assignments or instructions to teach and train people to live more playful, creative and ethical lives? In this artistic research, I try to put aside fears of a dystopian future in which runaway AI assumes control over humanity, and suspend them long enough to play with the idea of reversing the usual dynamic: what if AI were to instruct us, instead of us instructing AI? What kind of positive outcomes could emerge? I borrow from traditions of instruction art and avant-garde art, and I employ discursive practices that alternate between techno-enthusiastic and techno-skeptical. The AI tool ChatGPT and I hold conversations in which we explore the research question together, and in which I prompt ChatGPT to issue me instructions, then I describe the process and result of executing the instructions.