In the making

This study rests on two premises. First, the conditions of contemporary composition are intrinsically post-human. This claim holds both from the “classical” post-human perspective—where digitality, embodied in code, networks and algorithms, challenges anthropocentric notions of subjectivity—and from the earlier media-philosophical stance of McLuhan, Clark and Chalmers, who regarded even inorganic tools such as notebooks or pencils as extensions of the human mind. 

The second premise is that the post-human predicament created by these conditions foregrounds memory within the specific artistic practice of contemporary composition. Music still depends on memory and expectation of temporal structures, and post-conceptual composition, in which reflection on mediality is internalised, will continue, perhaps for a long time, to treat memory not as a problem to be dispensed with but as the primary locus where mediality is negotiated. Under post-human circumstances the question of memory is posed in forms such as: What shall we call memory? Who remembers? How is remembering enacted?

Grounded in these premises, this artistic research asks how musical temporal structures—how music exists as form in time—can engage the memory-related questions that arise in contemporary composition. Through the artefacts themselves and an autoethnographic
record of the working process, the project makes visible the tacit, practice-based knowledge it produces, aiming to contribute to both compositional practice and scholarly discourse.

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Noh Seung Ju, born in Seoul, South Korea in 1997, is a composer currently based in Austria. His work has earned the International Stiftung Mozarteum’s Paumgartner Medal, selection for the Lucerne Festival Composer Seminar (leading to a performance in Ensemble Modern’s Happy New Ears series), and second prize at the Bartók World Competition. Among all musical parameters he is especially drawn to rhythm; influenced by 'pungmul-nori', he explores rhythmic textures and contrapuntal interplay. This focus has led him to the broader architecture of temporal form, a subject he is now pursuing in a doctoral artistic-research programme at the Mozarteum.

Supervisors: Laure M. Hiendl, Johannes Maria Staud

Drawing on agential realism and posthuman knowledge, my research builds a cartography of the implicit axioms and normative-perceptual structures embedded within aesthetic capitalism. As legal governance increasingly yields to AI infrastructures and market dynamics, regulation no longer operates primarily through law or democratic processes. Instead, it unfolds through algorithms, economic self-regulation, and affective economies, transforming perception itself into a site of governance—modulated by circulation, visibility, and emotional resonance.
My focus lies on the aesthetic and perceptible dimensions of these emergent assemblages, attending to how power and normativity are felt, embodied, and materialized—both in physical spaces and dematerialized domains such as institutions, data infrastructures, and entertainment ecosystems. In this context, I position myself as both observer and observed, tracing how such mechanisms inscribe themselves onto my body, thoughts, and emotions—shaping not only my actions and decisions, but my very becoming. Enmeshed in consumerism, I embody the ideal subject of aesthetic capitalism: too sensitive to remain untouched, too immersed to resist.
My practice centers on capturing what I call “patterns trouvés” through molding, casting, and other inscription techniques. Through experimental mapping and trace-oriented processes, I construct a situated cartography of these formations by identifying perceptible residues—cracks where latent structures surface. This cartography is unstable, contingent, and often born of fortuitous encounters. In these cracks, I trace the silence where power has passed—always ready to return and remap the same spot anew.
What forms of cartography are needed to critically engage with the dispersed mechanisms of control? How might these operations be made traceable?

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I am Francesco Pizzocchero, a multidisciplinary artist living and working between Padua, Venice, Milan, and Salzburg. My practice involves a wide range of materials such as wax, iron, wood, ceramic, and plaster, as well as sound and natural elements. I work across various techniques, including sculpture, casting, drawing, coding, performance, and sound installation.
My academic background began with a degree in law, followed by several years of work as a legal professional. However, it soon became clear that I needed to dedicate myself fully to artistic research and practice. I therefore attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, where I graduated with honours in Decoration. Since 2024, I have been admitted to the practice-based PhD in the Arts programme at the Institute for Open Arts - Mozarteum University in Salzburg, where I continue to refine my artistic practice and deepen my research.

Supervisors: Artemi-Maria Gioti, Lucia D'Errico (external), Thomas Ballhausen, Alberto Cammozzo (external)

The PhD project explores how generative real-time media can evoke a felt sense of connection between human and non-human entities by staging ecological and temporal transformation as immersive, perceptual experience. It aims to create a performative “media-organism” that reflects the interdependence of living systems and challenges the separation between nature and human subjectivity. Through a series of audiovisual experiments, the research investigates how motion, rhythm, and real-time image-sound processes can generate somatic resonance—a bodily response to temporal and geological forces. The project intertwines generative animation, motion tracking, and code-based image production with fieldwork-based physical movement practices as methods of sensory data collection and embodied reflection. By emphasizing perception beyond language and linear narrative, the work seeks to reconstruct a sense of presence and ecological kinship. It reflects on how audiovisual media can move beyond representation to activate an awareness of vitality and interconnection within a shared biosphere.

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Claudia Rohrmoser is a video artist working at the intersection of visual music, expanded cinema, and media scenography. Her practice explores the fusion of animation, live cinema, and immersive media, often in collaboration with composers and theatrical set designers. Her work includes audiovisual performances, and large-scale video installations for opera, concerts, and contemporary music. Her installations and performances have been showcased internationally at venues such as Stanford University’s CCRMA (Palo Alto, CA), the Eastman School of Music (Rochester, NY), and Teatro Real (Madrid), as well as at major music and arts festivals like MUTEK Festival Tokio, Salzburger Osterfestspiele, Ars Electronica, and Inventionen Festival Berlin. She is the founder of Cinema Vertigo, a platform for artistic research in media spaces. She has been awarded multiple prestigious grants and scholarships in the field of multimedia composition, including the Salzburg State Prize for Media Art, the Bourges Electroacoustic Music Award, and a scholarship-supported Banff Leighton Artist Residency. Claudia studied Computer Animation at FH Salzburg and Experimental Film and Media Arts at UdK Berlin. Currently, she is a Professor of Motion Design and Media Scenography at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSBI). Born in Austria, Claudia lives and works in Berlin and Bielefeld.

Supervisors: Artemi-Maria Gioti, Jürgen Hagler (external)

Re-enacting a Collection: On Art Brut, Sanism, and Mad Storytelling critically examines the persistent marginalization of artists associated with "Art Brut" who are labeled as mentally ill. Despite widespread recognition that art is embedded within societal contexts, works associated with this term are still portrayed as apolitical, isolated, and mystical—an outlook deeply rooted in sanism. The project seeks to challenge these contextualizations by developing counter-narratives grounded in Mad, situated perspectives that reclaim cultural and social memory of (ex-)patients. 

Within the scope of the project, I will engage with historical artworks and archival material from the Prinzhorn Collection (established in 1919)—a key foundation for the collection and study of pathologized art in the European context. At the same time, I will critically examine the collection itself. The project employs strategies such as speculative storytelling, re-enactment, and exhibition-making. A central research question guiding the inquiry is: In what ways can engaging with the socio-political dimensions of historical artworks and archival materials enable the construction of (ex-)patient-led narratives that challenge the authority of archival and psychiatric power?

Rather than interpreting the artworks—and “mental illness” more broadly—as expressions of inner worlds detached from reality, they are explored as forms of artistic knowledge shaped by social, political, and institutional conditions. Influences from (ex-)patient movements inform the project’s aesthetic strategies, emphasizing collective storytelling, fragmentation, and deconstruction—proposing a Mad perspective as both critique and method.

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Elina Saalfeld is an artist-researcher. Her interdisciplinary, lens-based practice explores power structures in image and narrative production. After completing her B.F.A. at HFBK Hamburg in 2020 (class of Broomberg & Chanarin), she receivedearned her Master’s degree in Art in Context at the UdK Berlin in 2023. Since 2018, Saalfeld has been a member of the Young Valley Soil artist collective.
Her individual and collaborative works have been exhibited at, among others, M.1 of the Arthur Boskamp Foundation (2024), CCA Berlin (2023), the Triennial of Photography Hamburg (2022 and 2018), and the Museum of Photography Berlin (2021).

Supervisors: Iris Laner, Rafal Morusiewicz (external), Jasna Russo (external)

This research project will develop an artistic methodology that engages with organisational structures and planning processes within the built environment. The built world can be considered a material record of human affairs, as 'built documents' which are physical manifestations of the policies, economic incentives, displays of power and technologies of their time. Planning processes reflect material, real-world issues that simulateously carry an ideological and representational weight. By turning to fiction, mimicry and conjecture, the aim is to reveal underlying structures within these processes that would otherwise be inaccessible.

A fictional enterprise, 'Public Programme GmbH', will serve as the site through which these forces and processes are accessed. Rather than identifying a pre-existing site and tracing its entanglements, this project uses a fictional framework as the site itself. This is an attempt to distort or invert the notion of site-specificity by moving away from particular site conditions towards an echo or reflection of the underlying issues. Within this invented context, the service phases of the building industry — the 'Leistungsphasen' or 'Plan of Work' — will be used to trace these world-making processes. These standardised guidelines, which are intended to organise outcomes and define the flow of information, will be reimagined as tools for speculative enquiry. The languages of planning will serve as an offbeat script from which to consider the built environment as man-made, not something that simply exists, but as an act of creation. Using artistic methods and processes that mimic or attach to the structured systems in place in the built environment, this research project seeks to models the conditions that shape our physical world.

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Sunette L. Viljoen, (b. South Africa) is a visual artist living and working in Berlin. Her sculptural installations are frequently site-specific and informed by literature and architecture references. She earned her MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2012. Viljoen was a participant at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, (2014-2015); a fellowship recipient at Braunschweig University of Art (2012-2013); and at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (2020-2021). She has exhibited at Sonsbeek 20→24 in Arnhem, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, Goodman Gallery Cape Town, Die Raum, Berlin, and the 13th Dakar Biennale in Senegal.

Supervisors: Karen Nicole Werner, Susanne Hefti (external)

This research aims to explore the potential of sound as a tool within design process, understood as a structured system of values, principles, knowledge, and methodologies. It reconsiders the role of the musician as a possible interlocutor and mediator in interdisciplinary processes that operate beyond the boundaries of musical performance. Positioned between historical memory and contemporary perspectives, the project draws on a range of experiences - from the Venetian coro spezzato to contemporary sound installations - that demonstrate how sound does not merely occupy space, but actively contributes to its intelligibility, its experiential dimension, and its design methodology. From this standpoint, the research seeks to investigate a project culture that recognizes sound and musical knowledge and practice as generative dimensions, capable of opening new operational and imaginative possibilities. The project seeks to create a platform for reflection and experimentation through dialogue, documentation, collaborative practices, and case studies - allowing sound and musical culture to emerge as modes of thought, communication, and critical engagement. It aims to reconsider the role of musicians in the design of auditory spatial concepts, while simultaneously exploring the interrelation between aesthetics and design strategies, between space and sound.

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Valeria Zane is a musician currently pursuing a PhD at the Mozarteum University. She holds degrees in harp from the Conservatories of Venice and Padua, and a specialization at the Norwegian Academy of Music. She earned an MSc in Management from Ca’ Foscari University and ESCP Business School. Co-founder of studio Pase, her work explores music and creative research projects and processes. She collaborates with the Ugo and Olga Levi Foundation, is a board member of the UIA – Università Internazionale dell'Arte, and has worked with institutions such as La Biennale di Venezia, Oslo Opera House, and Opéra National de Paris.

Supervisors: Laure M. Hiendl, Anamarija Batista, Lucia D'Errico (external), Alessandro Colombo (external)