Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
![Academy of Creative and Performing Arts](https://media.researchcatalogue.net/rc/cache/0c/33/19/87/0c331987ef31f53a68c102d63113afad.png?t=48a21b239ebe72324cca61e9db19a134&e=1725312300)
About this portal
The portal is used for the presentation of dissertations, papers, essays, artistic work, and work-in-progress of the ACPA PhD candidates. Furthermore, it is used by supervisors and other coaches to insert comments on the work of these candidates.
contact person(s):
Marcel Cobussen ![](/rc/images/email.gif)
,
Gabriel Paiuk ![](/rc/images/email.gif)
url:
http://www.hum.leiden.edu/creative-performing-arts/
Recent Activities
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Poiesis and the Performance Practice of Physically Polyphonic Notations
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This dissertation commences from the concept of poiesis, informed
chiefly by Hannah Arendt’s use of the term in The Human Condition (1958) to indicate a form of
creativity married to craftsmanship. This poietic framework will then be used throughout the
dissertation to inform a practice-based analysis of the learning process involved with physically
polyphonic notations (herein defined as notations of dissynchronous physical actions within a single
performative body). Despite polyphonic asynchrony, the unifying performative demands of these
pieces are the learning strategies necessary to accomplish this eventual reassembly of instrumental
practice within a single, performing body. The following essays will explore the physically
polyphonic repertoire of the trombone specifically as a laboratory for problematizing this poietic
approach to the learning process.
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Sonic Peripheries: Middling With/In the Event
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Petra Klusmeyer
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition showcases select parts of the doctoral dissertation from which it derives its title. To access the full thesis, follow the link to Leiden University Scholarly Publications (http://hdl.handle.net/1887/77342). The purpose of this exposition is to present a non-linear reading experience featuring a range of materials, including artifacts from a course of research events (see/visit Online Addendum) and individual experimental chapters (see/click, e.g., Experimenting Sound/Non-Sound).
About the research and dissertation
The research explores what and how sound does in certain art practices; it lends an ear to so-called ‘material-discursive’ events that come into expression as in/determined sonic occurrences through aesthetic practices. Likewise, the research done in and through the arts attunes to the vibrational immanence that underlies all experience. This view considers the sonic as a vibrational force and an affective, affirmative, albeit paradoxical event: oscillating between matter and matter-mattering, intuited as intensive force and apprehended as ‘aesthetic figure’ through sensation. This ambiguity or sense of betweenness is felt throughout the thesis and lies at the heart of the inquiry, which asks, among other questions: How do the material conditions of a sonic artwork-performance (the content) and the ensuing sensations (the form of expression) co-emerge; how are they produced in one another?
The dissertation has three main objectives. Firstly, it describes sonic art practice as experimental research and makes a case for curating such practices as a form of research; it positions this type of research as a contribution to new forms of knowledge and provides a resource for future research-creations and (reform of) evaluation practices. Secondly, it brings together philosophy and art to elaborate a genuine manner of working with sonic matter (mattering); it conceptualizes and materializes novel ways of thinking, and creates a case for writing itself as practice and curating/producing art as theory; that is, it seeks to practice what it theorizes and vice versa. Thirdly, it advocates a certain transformation of self that lets us side-step ourselves, intervene and invent possible worlds or future fabulations. Practicing a process-oriented exploration complexifies as it advances; it creates resonances between theory and practice, between audience and sound art, between the written thesis – inclusive of presented artifacts – and the reader. It wants not to reduce but foster awareness of the ongoing complexity of life.
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Tactile paths : on and through notation for improvisers
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Christopher Williams
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Tactile Paths: on and through Notation for Improvisers is an artistic research project that articulates and expands the nexus of notation and improvisation in contemporary and experimental music. The project interweaves direct artistic experience with insights from improvisation studies, the social sciences, philosophy, and various scholarship in the arts to reveal methodological connections among diverse artists such as Richard Barrett, Cornelius Cardew, Malcolm Goldstein, Lawrence Halprin, Bob Ostertag, Ben Patterson, and the author. By focusing on how notation is used, rather than on what it represents in an abstract sense, the author shows how written scores emerge from and feed back on ongoing improvisational processes. Thus, it is argued, they are not fixed texts whose primary purpose is to prescribe and preserve, but rather tactile paths in the improviser’s ever-crescent musical and social environment. This practice-based approach aims to lay the conceptual groundwork for theorizing and broadening the creative relevance of work whose importance to practitioners belies its marginal presence in academia and institutions.
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The magic of projection : augmentation and immersion in media art
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Sophie Ernst
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Sophie Ernst’s doctoral thesis is an artist’s contribution to media art theory. It focusses on the role of projection as material for sculpture. Her research addresses the question in what manner are projections applied in contemporary art and what image traditions does this relate to. She considers projections to be either immersive, like a cinematic experience, or augmentative, in the sense of a mixed reality. Immersions, the dominant mode in projection art and large parts of the theoretical discourse, presuppose a willing suspension of disbelief. Augmentation, on the other hand, can be seen as ‘magical’. It is a technique in art to ‘make strange’ by creating a distance that can be either pleasant or unsettling. Ernst argues that augmenting projections are persuasive, not because they are materially ‘real’, but rather since they make visible what we could imagine as real.
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Propaganda Art from the 20th to the 21st Century
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Jonas Staal
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This study by artist Jonas Staal explores the development of propaganda art from the 20th to the 21st century.
Staal defines propaganda as the performance of power by means of the equation propaganda = power + performance. Through his work as a propaganda researcher and practice as a propaganda artist, he argues that different structures of power generate different forms of propaganda and therefore different forms of propaganda art.
Whereas in the context of the 20th century Staal discusses the differences between avant-garde, totalitarian, and modernist propaganda art, in the 21st century he proposes the categories of War on Terror Propaganda Art, Popular Propaganda Art, and Stateless Propaganda Art. By means of concrete examples of artists and artworks within each of these categories, he attempts to show how the performance of power in the 21st century translates into different visual forms, and how they shape and direct our reality.
Staal’s study shows that power and art exist in continuous interaction. Propaganda and propaganda art are not terms that only refer to the past, but concepts and practices through which we can understand the construction of reality in the present.
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Mediating from within: Metaxical amplification as an alternative sonic environment for classical music performance
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Heloisa Amaral
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This doctoral dissertation explores classical music performance from a curatorial perspective, reflecting upon and challenging the traditional configuration of performance environments. Beginning with a consideration for the historical origins of absorbed attention and silence as the dominant mode of performing and hearing classical music, the subsequent chapters of this dissertation investigate alternatives to this mode by exploring artistic creations developed during this research. Informed by my combined experience as a curator and performer in the contemporary music field, these artistic creations use what I call ‘metaxical amplification’: the amplification of environmental sounds that are generally considered noise in the context of classical music performances, and that are therefore rarely considered in relation to the artistic experiences generated by these performances. Metaxical amplification proposes a reconfiguration of the performance environment and the ways in which attention unfolds within it. It also challenges traditional notions of musical interpretation within a work-centred performance culture, since the performance mode emerging from this form of amplification is not oriented towards the interpretation of musical works, but rather to the sonic exploration of musical environments through these works. More broadly, it propels the development of a practice in which musical interpretation, improvisation, and curatorial thinking are tightly interwoven. I discuss these findings in close dialogue with literature from various fields including sociology, philosophy and media theory, as well as through related examples from the fields of music, theatre, and the visual arts. Engaging in such wide-ranging dialogues generates theoretical and artistic insights that may prove useful for other performers, curators, and teachers in the fields of classical and contemporary music, and beyond.