Jonathan Impett – Artistic research in music: knowledge and technicity: Kammermusiksaal, 18-19h 26. Mai
In this talk, Jonathan Impett will present the role of artistic research in current music culture, practice and education, for music of all kinds. He will address the fundamental question of the nature of knowledge in the context of artistic research. Discussion of modes of knowledge production and their relationship with artistic action and reception highlights their essentially creative character.
As a case study, Impett will present research on the technicity of music, and on the need to find critical and technical models and metaphors for shaping and discussing music that are resonant with our contemporary cultural and technological context. This is embodied in the project Three States of Wax which will feature in the evening concert.
Three States of Wax – Neue Aula 19.30 26. Mai
Three States of Wax takes its name from an early work of philosopher of science Michel
Serres, l’Interférence. Serres asks what should be the material, the object of study of the
natural sciences in the digital age. He returned to Descartes’ thought experiment: is a piece
of wax, under all its possible deformations, still the same piece of wax? Serres describes
three approaches though history: firstly the ‘geometric’ description of early natural
philosophers, then the analytical ‘scientific’ study of its properties. Now, says Serres, such
an object of study should be considered a nexus of information. It bears all the traces of its
own history and interactions with its environment – human or otherwise – including all the
questions that have been asked of it.
The paradigmatic contemporary hybrid practice of improvising with technology requires
constant decisions to be made about the identification, role and elaboration of material
– decisions that may be intuitive or technical, improvised or structural. The musicians
bring their own traces; they generate materials with their own histories and implications.
Performance is a continuous interrogation of this process in which memory and
imagination become inextricable. Wax is the first medium for the inscription of sound. With
the incorporation of digital technologies, every action is inscribed, has potential echoes or
transformations, can become part of a new structure or bring a previous action into the
present.
Three States of Wax emerges from a research project at Orpheus Instituut, Ghent.