Mar. 9th, 2018
Since our last Lab Days, the research team participated in the 5th Participatory Innovation Conference (PIN-C), 11-13th January 2018 at Mälardalen University (MDH). PIN-C is an interdisciplinary forum for innovation research, and the conference brought together research disciplines that rarely meet. Klas made a presentation of our project (read the paper here) in the morning, and there was lively discussion and enthusiastic interest, an attitude we continued to enjoy later in the afternoon when making our presentation in a joint session, with live music and practical examples. We introduced our work-in-process with the modular approach, focusing on how to bring ideas and materials together in an open and rhizomatic system. We also used a modular score for the presentation as a whole, with the aim of drawing the listeners into the process and thereby getting a feeling for what the modular approach might contribute in different kinds of collective processes.
Klas and Katt also presented our project at Interference #5, a laboratory for artistic research in music at the Inter Arts Center in Malmö, 16-18th January. This was a peer-reviewed and curated event, organized by the Malmö Academy of Music in collaboration with NKFM (Nationellt Nätverk för Konstnärlig Forskning i Musik). The aim of the series of events was to create a discourse within music research drawing from performative and material perspectives on musical creativity, and the session we participated in was “The creative process in free improvisation”, alongside Professor Per-Anders Nilsson. Our presentation included audio and video recordings from our artistic practice, interweaved with the concept-methods and analytical perspectives we were developing. Together with Nilsson’s presentation, this instigated a rewarding discussion concerning methods for artistic research in general, as well as collaborative and “problem-finding” creativity in particular. The other presentations during this three-day event also supplied highly valuable input for us!
Lab Days #9
This session was primarily about developing the modular approach that would be our focus for the remainder of the project. A new score was believed to bring together many of the ideas we had worked with and hopefully provide an imaginative, rhizomatic, abstract-yet-concrete improvisation power-map! We also decided to more clearly distinguish between our more practice-oriented “concept-methods” from the driving forces or ethos involved in the project (“Motivators”).
The fruitful work during this weekend brought us back to the initial points of departure for the project, not least as discussed in the session with Johan Petri. An interesting sense of continuity showed itself: the ways in which shared experiences, concepts and practices emerged over time, resulting in something akin to what psychiatrist Daniel Stern calls “affective atunement”, which philosopher Brian Massumi puts in terms of that which “finds difference in unison, and concertation in difference”. Our research questions were in one sense continuous throughout the project, but their very nature allowed for valuable diversification, working more as “enablers” or “catalyzers”.