Everything else on this site is downstream of this page. The nine sections that follow are what happened after — the reading, the methods, the field notes. This one is what there was before any of it.
The practice
I work with sound, image and embodied interaction, in participatory and immersive settings. Real-time audiovisual systems, algorithmic composition, AI-driven generative visuals, sensor-based interactivity — assembled into responsive environments where the audience is not watching but doing.
What holds it together is not the technology. It is an interest in the materiality of sound, objects and space, and in what that materiality does to perception: how subjectivity forms, and what relations get set up between people, objects and the room they are in. The systems are built to encourage co-creation, and to dissolve the line between performer, audience and medium rather than stage it.
The themes the work keeps returning to are urbanization and displacement, the erasure of natural landscapes, embodied participation, and the politics of belonging.
The strands, and where each one went
The description above spans several research communities that do not normally read each other — a live coding paper and a relational aesthetics essay share almost no citations. Splitting them out is the only way to see which ones the thesis actually picked up, and which venues each one would have to be argued in.
| Strand | Research community | Where that community publishes | On this site |
|---|---|---|---|
| Real-time AV systems, algorithmic composition | Live coding · computer music | ICLC · NIME · Organised Sound | Phosphor · Game Engine as Instrument |
| Sensor-based interactivity, embodied participation | HCI — tangible & embodied interaction | TEI · CHI PLAY · DIS · MOCO | Tangible Affect · Embodied Metaphors |
| Participatory work, co-creation, audience as centre | Relational aesthetics · socially engaged art | Books over proceedings — Bourriaud, Bishop; October · Third Text | Wavy RGB · v2.5 in Evolution |
| Dissolving performer / audience / medium | Performance & digital media studies | IJPADM · Performance Research | Fused Spectatorship · Interactivity vs. Gamefulness |
| Materiality of the object in the hand | Game studies · material culture | DiGRA · Game Studies · Games and Culture | The Controller as a Cultural Symbol |
| AI-driven generative visuals | Computational creativity · generative art | EvoMUSART · xCoAx · ISEA | Not here yet. It is in the practice, not in the research. |
| Urbanization, displacement, politics of belonging | Media art & curatorial discourse — not a conference circuit | transmediale · Ars Electronica · Leonardo | Deliberately outside the thesis. See below. |
Two things this table makes visible. The top two rows are the only ones with a conference circuit that treats a peer-reviewed paper as the primary publication — everywhere else the argument lands in a journal or a book, on a much slower clock. And rows three and four are where the v2.5 direction would have had to be argued, which is part of why it did not hold: the reading that produced the gap was done almost entirely in rows one, two and five.
What the thesis takes, and what it leaves
The thesis takes one coordinate out of all of this: an ordinary person, a controller, a screen, and an audience whose body is involved. That is a narrow slice of the practice, and it is narrow on purpose — the readings point at it as an empty spot, and my own work keeps arriving at it from the other direction.
What it leaves out is the political and ecological material. Urbanization, displacement, the erasure of landscape — those drive the content of the work, and none of them are questions about how gameful design shapes embodied experience. Folding them in would make the thesis about everything. They stay in the practice, and they will outlast the thesis.
Where this starting point has since moved, and what is currently unresolved, is logged in Evolution.