praelocutio.exordium.prolusio I.

 

—

 

CONTEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

 

Throughout the residency, participants are invited to situate their work in relation to the conceptual framework of the upcoming edition:

 

GROUNDING, COMPOSITION OF MIND, AND [EMANCIPATORY PRACTICES]

 

These terms function as interdependent fields of inquiry rather than a thematic brief. They provide a vocabulary for examining how practices emerge from concrete conditions, how works organize perception and cognition, and how artistic processes distribute agency, authority, access, and responsibility.

 

Participants are not expected to adopt a unified interpretation. The framework supports divergent positions and methodological disagreement, renders artistic assumptions discussable, and connects projects to wider material, historical, technological, institutional, environmental, social, and philosophical contexts.

 

 

GROUNDING

 

Grounding directs attention to the conditions from which a work becomes possible. These conditions may be material, embodied, historical, infrastructural, economic, institutional, technological, environmental, or social. No artistic proposition emerges from an abstract or neutral field; each depends on resources, techniques, standards, sites, forms of labor, inherited concepts, and systems of circulation.

 

For sound artists and performers, grounding may involve bodies, instruments, acoustics, listening practices, spatial arrangements, memory, and transmission. For makers and technologists, it may concern components, energy, code, data, fabrication, networks, maintenance, ownership, or obsolescence. For collectives, it may include coordination, consent, attribution, care, and decision-making.

 

Grounding also operates as a critical method. It asks participants to identify what a work presupposes and what it renders invisible. A seemingly immaterial digital process may rely on extensive physical infrastructures. An interactive system may encode assumptions about bodies, abilities, languages, or behavior. A site-responsive intervention may reproduce rather than examine the histories and power relations of a place.

 

Participants may consider:

– From which materials, histories, infrastructures, and relations does the work emerge?

– Which embodied, technical, procedural, or tacit forms of knowledge sustain its realization?

– How do tools, interfaces, standards, sites, and institutions condition artistic decisions?

– Which resources, forms of labor, and ecological costs remain concealed by the work’s appearance?

– How can grounding function both as a condition of practice and as a method of critique?

 

 

COMPOSITION OF MIND

 

Composition of mind expands composition beyond the arrangement of sonic material. It addresses the organization of attention, perception, memory, expectation, imagination, decision, and relation. Any work, system, or situation composes conditions under which certain actions and interpretations become possible while others are discouraged, delayed, or excluded.

 

From the perspective of the maker, composition may involve the design of perceptual thresholds, temporal sequences, behavioral invitations, uncertainties, feedback loops, and relations between human and nonhuman agents. From the perspective of the performer or participant, realization involves anticipation, adaptation, embodied memory, listening, judgment, and response. From the perspective of a public, experience is formed through recognition, confusion, curiosity, association, effort, and reflection.

 

Technological systems are especially consequential in this context because they operationalize models of attention and action. Interfaces direct users toward particular gestures; algorithms prioritize certain relations; sensors define what can be registered; and protocols determine how participation is recognized. To design such systems is also to compose modes of perception, conduct, and intelligibility.

 

The residency asks whether a work merely captures attention or transforms its conditions, and how duration, repetition, interruption, opacity, friction, silence, feedback, and uncertainty may produce less habitual forms of listening and thought.

 

Participants may ask:

– How does the work direct, distribute, interrupt, or intensify attention?

– Which forms of memory, expectation, imagination, and decision does it mobilize?

– How are relations between designed structure and real-time experience negotiated?

– What cognitive or perceptual models are embedded in an interface, instrument, or system?

– Can experimental practice reorganize how sound, matter, technology, time, and relation are perceived?

 

 

[EMANCIPATORY PRACTICES]

 

The formulation [emancipatory practices] opens a critical inquiry into agency, authorship, hierarchy, participation, access, responsibility, ownership, and the distribution of artistic and technological decision-making.

 

The brackets indicate that emancipation is neither a stable category nor an automatic property of experimental, participatory, collaborative, or technologically mediated work. Claims to openness, interaction, horizontality, or innovation can conceal unequal access, unacknowledged labor, extractive infrastructures, or predetermined forms of participation. The term therefore remains provisional and subject to examination.

 

Within collaborative practice, this inquiry concerns who initiates a project, whose knowledge is recognized, how disagreement is negotiated, and where accountability resides. Within technological practice, it asks who designs, understands, or modifies a system; which data it collects; and whether it expands or restricts meaningful agency.

 

Emancipation is approached not as freedom from structure, but as a question of whether structures are perceptible, contestable, revisable, and collectively accountable. Participants consider whether their methods permit transformation or merely simulate choice within fixed parameters.

 

Participants may consider:

– Who is authorized to make, perform, design, decide, maintain, speak, and be heard?

– How are artistic, technical, interpretative, and organizational forms of agency distributed?

– Which forms of knowledge are acknowledged, and which remain implicit, devalued, or excluded?

– How do tools, protocols, institutions, and presentation formats organize authority?

– Can collaboration produce more reciprocal, accessible, and accountable artistic relations?

– What might emancipation mean within the concrete conditions of experimental production?

 

Taken together, grounding, composition of mind, and [emancipatory practices] enable participants to examine how works emerge, how they organize experience, and how they may critically engage with the conditions of their own production.