What can improvisation contribute to artistic research?

This presentation by Marcel Cobussen will deal with improvisation and what it can contribute to artistic research. How can artistic research benefit from improvisational strategies? How can artistic research be improvised, and what would that imply in terms of its methodology? Can improvisation, regarded as a process of continuous experimentation and exploration, become method through which artistic research is executed? Improvising as a research method implies opening up a field of possibilities and trying to keep it open – by allowing risks, misunderstandings, and ambiguity – instead of aiming at a clearly demarcated and pre-established endpoint, solution or answer. Perhaps this is what artistic research should be all about…

The workshop is facilitated by Prof Marcel Cobussen, Professor of Auditory Culture and Music Philosophy at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He is author of Engaging With Everyday Sounds (2022), The Field of Musical Improvisation (2017), Thresholds: Rethinking Spirituality through Music (2008), and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art (2016)