ArteActa 2025, 14
This essay is inspired by the contributions to this issue, whose common denominator seems to be the transformation of the nature of authorship and the position of the authorial subject, reflecting the broader theme of the position of the subject in the contemporary world. Some authors, responding to ArteActa’s previous call for submissions, “AI (and) Art: The Poetics of Prompting,” explore the changing conditions of artistic work with AI, while others focus on the interaction between materiality and human perception. All raise urgent questions related to the concept of the subject and the connection between the perceiving mind...
ArteActa 2025, 14
How useful can AI be at this present moment to generate assignments or instructions to teach and train people to live more playful, creative and ethical lives? In this artistic research, I try to put aside fears of a dystopian future in which runaway AI assumes control over humanity, and suspend them long enough to play with the idea of reversing the usual dynamic: what if AI were to instruct us, instead of us instructing AI? What kind of positive outcomes could emerge? I borrow from traditions of instruction art and avant-garde art, and I employ discursive practices that alternate between techno-enthusiastic and techno-sceptical. The AI tool...
ArteActa 2025, 14
This paper delves into the dynamics and dramaturgical specifications of ANA, a theatrical installation engineered for co-creating narratives in a dialogic process with individual users. ANA embodies a collaborative storytelling environment that is used to communicate narrative and emotional information through multiple modalities, thereby bringing into focus an unexpectedly human essence in a human-machine interaction. Integrating GPT-4, emotion-recognition algorithms and a simulation of its own affective state, ANA engages users in a 10-minute interaction, fostering an immersive narrative exchange where the affective dimension of collaborative...
ArteActa 2025, 14
As interaction with corporate artificial intelligence increasingly becomes a precondition for contemporary life, artists need to see beyond Generative AI (GenAI) technology as a discrete tool that makes generic products. Instead, they can imagine combinatorial approaches and conceptual frameworks for AI-enabled artworks. Through my practice-based research, the act of prompting multimodal GenAI models has been informed by comprehending an assemblage as a “framework of instruction” held together through poetic alliances, within which the output from one component feeds the process of another. Practical experiments explored an interrelation...
ArteActa 2025, 14
Five composers – one teacher and four students – set out to listen to the soundscape of the Polish foothills of the Giant Mountains in order to explore the influence of subjective perception on the final shape of a composition. First, they noted down their sound-spatial listening experiences graphically in sketchbooks. They then formulated creative ideas for chamber ensemble compositions based on these experiences. Over the next four months, they wrote compositional studies with the intention of recording them in the studio. They then recorded the studies themselves and reflected on the entire process together. The presented text...
ArteActa 2025, 14
"Norths: Navigating Instability By Ear" exposes a diversity of transdisciplinary artistic research threads within Norths, a growing body of environmental sound art practice at an intersection of data and listening experience. By rendering intangible data representations physically perceptible, ‘northness’ - understood as location, place, idea, and fiction - becomes a site for material interrogation of ‘standards’ applied to measurement, perception, being, knowing, and acting. Critical phenomenological and ecological issues emerge from the noise encountered when sonifying (near) real-time seismic and geomagnetic data, as...
ArteActa 2025, 14
What makes an experience memorable, and what is it exactly that we recall when we remember a moment in time? What do we, as listeners, recall after a listening experience? To understand this question, one must become acquainted with how we process aural stimuli. In recent history, there have been inspiring developments in the realm of music and memory, including neurocognitive experiments that might not have been possible earlier. These experiments and research have opened the door to a common thought: Can composers utilize the information from this research in their compositional process, and, if so, to what degree? The implications of psychoacoustic...
ArteActa 2025, 14
"It's a question of adaptation," they say in French—and surely in other languages as well—meaning: "Do what you want, it's up to you, adjust to the circumstances, adapt." This friendly instruction, useful for understanding the concept of adaptation in its literal, literary, and theatrical sense, is the key to the following essay. This artistic-research contribution offers one possible approach to the phenomenon of theatrical adaptation. This often requires a certain amount of imagination when we test it and perceive it through directing and acting techniques. Adaptation cannot do without at least a basic knowledge of the staging practices...
ArteActa 2025, 14
Vanessa Theme Ament’s "The Foley Grail" was, for a long time, the only publication to discuss in detail the art of film sound effects (foley). In this issue, we review the third edition of the book while in dialogue with the author herself.
