My research interests begin in my art practice. The sections that follow document how those interests develop through reading, making, interviews, and field observations.
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 just 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. Splitting them out is the only way to see which ones the thesis actually picked up, and which research area I will dig into.
in scope — what the thesis works with
- rules · dependency · the object in the handgame studies
- collective music-making · instruments for non-musicianscomputer music · NIME
- embodied interaction · sensor-based participationtangible & embodied HCI
- co-creation · audience as participantrelational aesthetics
- performer / audience / medium dissolvingperformance & digital media studies
set aside for now
- real-time AV systems · algorithmic compositionlive coding
- AI-driven generative visualscomputational creativity
- urbanization · displacement · politics of belongingmedia art & curatorial discourse
Current research direction
I am interested in how playing together creates opportunities for people to notice and respond to one another, and in the possibilities this opens for social exchange and care.
The research has since narrowed to one mechanism inside that interest — interdependence built out of rules — and to collective music-making as the setting.
The current main question, three subquestions, and research scope are collected in Research Question. The reasons for each change of direction are recorded in Log.