The Art of Resonance – The Resonance of Art

Jennifer Lucy Allan is a writer, researcher and broadcaster. She has acquired a PhD at CRiSAP (UAL) on the social and cultural history of the foghorn, which became the foundation of her first book, The Foghorn’s Lament (White Rabbit Books, 2021). She is also a presenter of BBC Radio 3's Late Junction, and is a freelance music journalist specialising in underground and experimental music. Previously she was online editor for The Wire, and now freelances for The Wire, The Quietus, The Guardian and others. She co-runs the record labels Arc Light Editions and Good Energy, and is a member of Laura Cannell’s Modern Ritual Collective, and the Cafe OTO Experimental Choir. She has recently published her second book, Clay: A Human History (Pegasus Books, 2024), and has been working on an essay on the soundtracks in the films of Sogo Ishii (forthcoming).

Since November 2024, the research cluster The Art of Resonance is regularly organising a series of informal listening sessions with international artists and researchers, with an eye (and ear) to cultivating a sonic sensibility and relationality.

On the occasion of the research days, we are very happy to have Maria Chávez as our guest. Born in Lima, Peru and based in NYC, Maria is best known as an abstract turntablist, sound artist and DJ. Coincidence, chance and failures are themes that unite her work across mediums, including improvised performance, sound sculpture, visual art, book objects and multi-channel installation.

During this session, she will introduce her groundbreaking improvisational turntabling practice, centered on connections between material and temporal failure, and experimentation, through the use of broken vinyl records. The session will draw directly from Chávez’s long engagement with Deep Listening, a practice developed by Pauline Oliveros, emphasizing embodied attention, improvisation, and responsiveness to environment and materials. Here, play operates as a method of research, where experimentation and risk-taking generate knowledge through action rather than instruction. 

Register for this activity

What if play were set at the heart of reseach, to become its driving force?

With Play as its central theme, KASK & Conservatorium announces the first edition of the Research Days: a three-day festival for researchers, artists, students and visitors to explore playfulness in thought and action — through performances, lectures, panel discussions, exhibitions, workshops and interventions.

Playfulness as a radical gesture

Playing is a fundamental way to engage with the world. How we play both reflects and shapes our ways of being and knowing. Playing also introduces instability and imagination, placing us in a fluid, indeterminate field of experience.

In artistic research, playfulness can function as a mindset and as a research method. Here, playing becomes a critical tool for exploring ideas, testing assumptions, and generating knowledge. When researchers and artists fully embrace play, they tap into its disruptive potential, using uncertainty and improvisation to challenge norms.

Yet play is never neutral. It is situated, embodied, and negotiated: shaped by movement, territory, materials, social structures, media, and the technologies through which it unfolds.

When does art or research in the arts become a playful proposition? Who is allowed to play, and who is excluded? And how might playfulness be understood as an attitude that opens up possibilities and moves beyond normative constraints?

Paul Abbott is a musician and drummer. He plays with the drum kit, synthetic sounds, performance and writing. He explores music as an ecology: in which the interaction of sounds, signs and the physical body grow real and imaginary music. His work is often concerned with creating practical and fictional structures to facilitate improvisation and experimental musical play. Projects include: XT with Seymour Wright; XT+Pat Thomas; Kavain Wayne Space (RP Boo) Trio with XT; XT+Anne Gillis; X Ray Hex Tet; yPLO with Micheal Speers; F.R.David, very good* & Rosmarie with Will Holder; film sound for Keira Greene and The Creaking Breeze Ensemble with Nathaniel Mackey. He was a co-founder and co-editor of Cesura//Acceso journal for music, politics and poetics, and completed Creative Music Practice PhD research at Edinburgh University, titled “Playing no solo imagination: synthesising the rhythmic emergence of sound and sign through embodied drum kit performance and creative writing.”

Edward George is a writer, broadcaster and photographer. A founding member of Black Audio Film Collective, he wrote and presented, among others, the seminal essay film Last Angel of History (1996), which helped pave the way for contemporary thinking around Afro-futurism. George was part of the multimedia duo Flow Motion and the electronic music project Hallucinator. His ongoing radio series The Strangeness of Dub and The Strangeness of Jazz intertwine a broad musical selection with different geographical musical histories, African/Afro-diasporic knowledge and critical theory from queer and black studies. His recent work includes Dub Housing, a project exploring how dub music articulates a different consciousness of people and place, time and geography, history and architecture, race and metropolis, and Black Atlas, a moving-image essay exploring the Image of the Black archive which was recently exhibited at the Warburg Institute.

Irene Revell and Sarah Shin are both curators, writers, editors and researchers who work with artists across sound, text, performance and moving image. In 2022 Irene Revell completed her practice-based doctoral thesis, Live Materials: 'Womens Work', Pauline Oliveros and the Feminist Performance Score, with a focus on the curatorial challenges posed by text instruction scores and related live ephemera. She is currently developing a long-term project that attends to artists working with text/instruction/scores in areas that span queer-feminist and decolonial listening, disability justice and expanded forms of practice that might be termed "score-thinking".

Sarah Shin co-founded Silver Press in 2017, and the experimental platform Ignota a year later, after a decade at Verso. Dedicated to collaboration, Shin is also a founder of Standard Deviation, a collective exploring the coincidence of psychic, geometric and inhabited spaces, and New Suns, a curation and storytelling project from feminist perspectives and practices. In 2024 they launched the anthology book project Bodies of Sound: Becoming a feminist ear, which offers a resonant exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening. Bodies of Sound will be presented the day after, 28 November, at Rile Books in Brussels.

This event is supported by the Doctoral School for Humanities and Social Sciences, KU Leuven, and LUCA School of Arts, in collaboration with VUB and the research cluster The Art of Resonance. It is made possible through OJO funding, with the support of the Flemish Government.

Marla Hlady and Christof Migone each have long-standing individual artistic practices.

Marla Hlady’s work moves across and in-between sculpture, site, performance, kinetics, sound art and music performance. She is interested in how media variously function, systematically and culturally, and how these functions can be critically and productively re-imagined.

Christof Migone works as an artist, teacher, curator, and writer. His research delves into language and voice, bodies and performance, intimacy and complicity, sound and silence, rhythmics and kinetics, translation and referentiality, stillness and imperceptibility, structure and improvisation, play and pathos, pedagogy and unlearning, and failure and endurance. They started to collaborate in 2015 in joint projects that combine pre-existing solo concerns and recurring strategies into works that accent site and sound space.

Max Eastley and Rie Nakajima each have long-standing individual artistic practices centered around sound and sculpture. 

Max Eastley is an internationally recognised artist who combines kinetic sculpture and sound into a unique art form. His sculptures exist on the border between the natural environment and human intervention and use the driving forces of electricity, wind, water and ice. 

Rie Nakajima creates sounds using combination of motorised devices and daily objects, either in installation form or during performances. Fusing sculpture and sound, her artistic practice is open to chance and the influence of others. Both artists have performed with numerous other artists and musicians, and started playing together in February 2025. The day after this listening sessions they will be performing at STUK, Leuven.

From November 2024 onward, the research cluster The Art of Resonance – The Resonance of Art is organising a series of informal listening sessions with international artists and researchers, with an eye (and ear) to cultivating a sonic sensibility and relationality.

Mark Peter Wright

Mark Peter Wright is an artist, researcher and writer working at the intersection of sound arts, experimental pedagogy and critical theory. His book Listening After Nature is published by Bloomsbury, 2022/23. Wright’s practice investigates relations between humans and animals, geographies and technologies, observers and subjects. Ongoing questions include: how does environmental sound convey complex geopolitical meaning? How can technology be practiced with an eco-critical sensitivity and how might listening operate beyond the human? Working between the field and lab, site and gallery, he is committed to amplifying forms of power and poetics within the creative use of sound and documentary media. In addition to his own practice-based research he collaborates extensively. With Helena Hunter he works under the name Matterlurgy on cross disciplinary projects and exhibitions. With Salomé Voegelin he co-convened Points of Listening, a series of public events exploring listening and sound-making as an artful form of pedagogy. With Angus Carlyle he works on projects and performances that explore the relations of listening and recording, nature and aesthetics, site and studio.

From November 2024 onward, the research cluster The Art of Resonance – The Resonance of Art is organising a series of informal listening sessions with international artists and researchers, with an eye (and ear) to cultivating a sonic sensibility and relationality.

Juliette Volcler

Juliette Volcler is an independent researcher, writer, sound artist and gardener. Her work focuses on the history of sound and radio art, the uses of sound by states and industries in public spaces, and the way those two fields intertwine. She considers and practices critical listening as a way to advance social justice. She published Extremely Loud: Sound as a weapon (The New Press, 2013) and Contrôle: Comment s’inventa l’art de la manipulation sonore (La Découverte / La rue musicale, 2017). In her latest book, L’orchestration du quotidien : design sonore et écoute au 21e siècle (La Découverte, 2022), she raises the political question of listening in the 21st century through an investigation into sound design and its current development as a tool for social engineering. This book invites readers to make a shift in the way they listen to everyday life, and to awaken a critical ear.

From November 2024 onward, the research cluster The Art of Resonance – The Resonance of Art is organising a series of informal listening sessions with international artists and researchers, with an eye (and ear) to cultivating a sonic sensibility and relationality.

Kate Carr

Kate Carr’s practice explores the encounters, textures and technologies entangled with field recording using movement, objects and experimental recording techniques. She creates intimate, delicate and hybrid soundworlds which centre the interactions and collectivity which generate soundscapes. She works across composition, performance and installation. Everything from vibrations caused by cars and footfalls, to overheard murmurs, public speeches, music in public space, and the roar of distant sporting events has found its way into her compositions, and live performances. Inspired by the layers, minglings and silences in our collective soundscapes, Carr is interested in composing works probe the soundscape for clues as to how we negotiate living together. She is particularly focused on hybrid soundscapes: where forest meets town, nuclear power plant meets wetland, booming car stereo meets residential street.

From November 2024 onward, the research cluster The Art of Resonance – The Resonance of Art is organising a series of informal listening sessions with international artists and researchers, with an eye (and ear) to cultivating a sonic sensibility and relationality.

Dushume

Amit Dinesh Patel, aka Dushume, is an experimental noise and sound artist, influenced by Asian underground music and DJ culture. His work focuses on performing and improvising with purpose built do-it-yourself instruments, and recording these instruments incorporating looping, re-mixing and re-editing techniques. Lack and loss of control are central to his work. He has a PhD in Music, Studio Bench: the DIY nomad and Noise Selector (2019), from the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He is a Senior Lecturer in Music and Sound and an active member of the Sound/Image Research Centre at the University of Greenwich, London, and Principal Investigator for the AHRC Research Grant Exploring Cultural Diversity in Experimental Sound (2021-23).

From November 2024 onward, the research cluster The Art of Resonance – The Resonance of Art is organising a series of informal listening sessions with international artists and researchers, with an eye (and ear) to cultivating a sonic sensibility and relationality.

Mo'min Swaitat 

Mo’min Swaitat is a London-based Palestinian artist, theatre and filmmaker who trained at the Freedom Theatre (Jenin) and arthaus (formerly LISPA) in London/Berlin, specializing in the Jacques Lecoq method of physical theatre, mask work and mime. He is the founder of Majazz Project, an archival platform and record label focused on reissuing Palestinian cassette and vinyl albums and field recordings, with a particular focus on sounds from the 1960s through to the 1990s. As part of the Majazz Project, Swaitat has initiated the Palestinian Sound Archive, which has been shared through NTS radio and was recently subject of an exhibition held at the Southbank Centre. Swaitat comes from a long line of Bedouin musicians and storytellers, and the archive references his rootedness in music as a means of celebrating one’s culture and sense of belonging.

From November 2024 onward, the research cluster The Art of Resonance – The Resonance of Art is organising a series of informal listening sessions with international artists and researchers, with an eye (and ear) to cultivating a sonic sensibility and relationality.

Salomé Voegelin

Salomé Voegelin is a writer, researcher, and practitioner, who works from the relational logic of sound to focus on the in-between and the liminal, where different disciplines meet to deal with contemporary issues, and where feminist, decolonial, and postanthropocentric demands can engender different and plural knowledge possibilities. She is engaged in the transversal and transdisciplinary potential of the sonic - to listen across disciplines and processes in order to develop a hybridisation of research where music, arts and humanities skills and methodologies can generate a contemporary response to climate, health and social emergencies. As an artistic researcher she focuses on the possibilities of sound and music for knowledge and pedagogy, and is invested in its scope to re-vision the aesthetic to reveal hidden slices of the real. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), Sonic Possible Worlds (2014/21), The Political Possibility of Sound (2018) and Uncurating Sound [2023]. Voegelin is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.

Cathy Lane established the department of Sound Arts and Design at London College of Communication (LCC) and previously directed and co-directed, with Angus Carlyle, Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP). She is interested in how sound relates to the past, our histories, our environment and our collective and individual memories. This informs her current work as a composer, sound artist, lecturer and researcher. 

Books include In the Field (Uniformbooks, 2013), a collection of interviews with eighteen contemporary sound artists who use field recording in their work and On Listening (2013) a collection of essays about some of the ways in which listening is used in disciplines including anthropology, community activism, bioacoustics, conflict mediation and religious studies, music, ethnomusicology and field recording.

The work of Jacob Kirkegaard explores ways to reflect on complex, unnoticed or unapproachable conditions and environments. His works have treated themes such as radioactivity in Chernobyl, melting ice in the Arctic, border walls in global and metaphorical contexts, immersive acoustic explorations into global waste management, and processes related to when a human being dies. Using his recordings of firearms, grenades and tanks his recent work explores the sound of warfare orchestrated for the Royal Lifeguard's Music Corps. Another recent work unfolds the mechanical elements of agriculture and food production. Since 2006 Kirkegaard has also been extensively researching, recording and creating works using otoacoustic emissions; tones generated from the actual human ear. The core element and method of Jacob Kirkegaard's work derive from the use of sound recordings of the tangible aspects from its intangible themes.

On the morning of 28 October, Jacob Kirkegaard will also lead an otoacoustic workshop at the media arts programme of KASK & Conservatorium.

Peter Cusack is a field recordist, sound artist, and musician with a long interest in the environment. He initiated the Favourite Sounds Project to discover what people find positive about soundscapes where they live and Sounds From Dangerous Places (sonic journalism) to investigate major environmental damage in areas such as the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the Azerbaijan oil fields, brown coal mining in Germany and the Czech Republic and the Bialowieza Forest in Poland. He is currently working on Aral Sea Stories, about the destruction and subsequent partial restoration of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan - a much-needed positive example in today’s climate change debate.

Hannah Kemp-Welch is an artist and researcher based in London. Working across sound and transmission arts, her practice takes the form of audio works, analogue films and community workshops that foreground collective listening as both a creative and critical method. Hannah teaches sound arts, collaborative practice and curation at University of the Arts London. She is an active member of the feminist radio art group Shortwave Collective, with whom she develops research projects and facilitate workshops. She edited the book Listening Glossary (Silver Press, October 2026), gathering over two hundred terms from art, ecology, activism, psychology, education and philosophy across nine decades of thinking about listening as a way of relating to others, environments and structures of power.