‘(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics’ is an interdisciplinary, practice-oriented research project funded by the Austrian Science fund (FWF, grant ZK93). Over four years, the researchers will investigate the improvised nature of ethical behavior, using live encounters with musical ensembles as case studies.

Improvisation and ethics are everywhere. People improvise in so many practices – from cooking to sports to migration policy – that it often goes unnoticed. The same is true of ethics; as self-interpreting animals, humans reveal and develop ethical values in practices as diverse as democracy, empirical science, and punk rock.

But the role of improvisation within ethics is often overlooked. Instead, many people and institutions tend to characterize ethics as a matter of consciously, rationally adhering to known norms and rules. Disputes over the content of such rules manifest as the ideological tribalism of our era.

In this project, we pursue an alternative understanding of ethics as an ongoing process. We take as our starting point an understanding of this process as a combination of habitual actions and the spontaneous refinement of those very actions, all driven by a sensitivity to social and environmental context: in a word, improvisation.

To test and develop this idea, we will engage with a practice in which improvisational qualities of ethics are unmistakable: experimental improvised music. The framework is a series of seven, 10-day-long sessions – a ‘musical ethics laboratory’ (Lab) – in collaboration with three leading improvising ensembles: the Splitter Orchester (Berlin), the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra (Norway), and the klingt collective (Vienna). Each ensemble will first participate alone, then in subsequent Labs with each of the others in turn, and finally all together.

In the Lab, musical ensembles improvise with and against given situations, structures, and interventions, in private and public settings. We will design the Lab collaboratively, drawing on our backgrounds in philosophy, anthropology, critical improvisation studies, and artistic research in music and theatre. Musicians will also shape the Lab, proposing their own ideas and reflecting on the work as it unfolds. We will interact with the musicians creatively, and through interviews and observation. Each session will result in public concerts and talks.

Our analysis of documentation from the Lab will focus on three things: (1) the evolution of musicians’ own materials and practical working methods; (2) their ‘improvising mindset’, including values, habits, and senses of self; and (3) the way they attend to each other and to other-than-human elements in their environments. This analysis will both inform future Lab sessions and ground a new, holistic conceptual framework for understanding the ethical significance of improvisation across a range of human activity. We hope this framework will be of interest to artists, scholars, and lay people alike.

The project is based at the Doctoral School for Artistic Research at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at University of Graz, and the Department of Philosophy at the the University of Vienna.



Research team

Joshua Bergamin
Co-PI
Phenomenologist and Philosopher of Mind
University of Vienna

Joshua Bergamin is a philosopher at the University of Vienna. His scholarly work has been guided by the question: (How) can we think without language?, leading to explorations on such diverse topics as skill acquisition, psychological disorders, animal cognition, and of course, improvisation.

Josh was awarded a PhD from Durham University, for a thesis written in the Philosophy Department’s ‘Applied Phenomenology’ research cluster. His work is highly interdisciplinary, combining analytic philosophy of mind with insights from continental phenomenology, supported by rigorous interpretations of empirical evidence from psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, as well as anthropology and ethnomusicology.

Josh’s philosophical work forms part of a broader engagement with the political and ethical concerns that inspire it. In various former lives, he has worked as an advisor in the Parliament of New South Wales, and as a performance artist and percussionist in Edinburgh.

His artistic training and practice, particularly in improvised music and dance, complement his research themes and have inspired elements of his published work, which has appeared in both scholarly and literary journals.

Selected publications
Joshua A. Bergamin
'An Excess of Meaning: Conceptual Over-Interpretation in Confabulation and Schizophrenia'
Topoi (39) 1
2020
URL
Joshua A. Bergamin
'Being-in-the-flow: expert coping as beyond both thought and automaticity'
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (16) 3
2017
URL
Joshua A. Bergamin
'To Know and To Be: Second-Person Knowledge and the Intersubjective Self, A Reply to Talbot.'
Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (6) 10
2017
Joshua A. Bergamin
'Bridging the Abyss: Re-interpreting Heidegger’s animals as a basis for inter-species understanding.'
The Human-Animal Boundary, ed. Nandita Batra, Mario Wenning
Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield
2019
Joshua A. Bergamin
'An Excess of Meaning: Interpretation and the Cut-Up'
Beatdom (21)
2021
Joshua A. Bergamin
'Kurt Cobain: Martyr of Authenticity'
Overland
2021
Caroline Gatt
Co-PI
Anthropologist, performer
University of Graz

Caroline Gatt is Senior Postdoctoral Research, Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, University of Graz and Co-Investigator on the project ‘(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics’ funded by the Austrian Science Fund.

Gatt is an anthropologist and performer focusing on ontological politics, laboratory theater and song, co-design, and collaborative processes. Her publications include ethnographic and theoretical texts, practice-based multimodal essays, and experimental and collaborative projects exploring the potentials of printed ‘books’. Her book ‘An Ethnography of Global Environmentalism: Becoming Friends of the Earth’, published by Routledge, based on her doctoral research is the first in-depth ethnographic study of an international environmental organization. The book presents an account of the daily life and the ethical strivings of environmental activist members of FoEI, exploring how a transnational federation is constituted and maintained.

Drawing on her laboratory theater practice and anthropology, Gatt developed a research project entitled ‘Crafting Anthropology Otherwise’ (a subproject of ‘Knowing from the Inside’, Tim Ingold PI, European Research Council). This project focused on the ethical and political potential of responsive attentional practices developed in laboratory theatre for anthropology. As part of this project, Gatt organised five international workshops exploring collaborative processes across different ways of knowing. The scholarly outputs included anthropological texts in international journals, as well as experimental publications such as the edited volume ‘The Voices of the Pages’ (2017) and collaborative multi-modal essays such as ‘A Video Triptych: Genesis, Kavana, Sabbath’. Through this project, Gatt developed a form of performance lecture exploring an ethical/decolonizing approach to bring together different ways of knowing through anthropology and laboratory theater improvisation, with presentations in Cambridge (2014), Aberdeen (2016, 2017, 2018), Huddersfield (2016), Irvine (2016), London (2018), and Mainz (2019). In collaboration with Valeria Lembo, Gatt edited the special section for American Anthropologist entitled ‘Knowing by Singing’.

In the (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics project Gatt is focusing on four intertwined threads: 1) the relation of different skilled practices to what these make knowable, and how what comes to be known is valued. In other words, what happens to processes of ethical striving when these encounter difference? How does difference come into perception? 2) the relation of humans with other-than-humans in ethical striving, and in this I am interested in mutual ethical relations not only human behaviour and consideration towards non-humans; 3) how are personal life history specifics, local histories, and wider transational histories implicated in the sorts of questions and matters related to ethics and politics in the context of contemporary improvised music? What are the micro and macro level politics that inform recurrent ethical processes and debates? 4) reflexive analysis: what are the ethical matters that jostle for space in the (M)IE research project itself? What ethical matters and struggles emerge in such research projects? More broadly, what are the ethical/political implications of understandings of ‘research’ in the ambit of contemporary improvised music? What absences and silences frame the (M)IE project, and why?

Selected publications
Gey Pin Ang, Caroline Gatt
'Collaboration and Emergence: The Paradox of Presence and Surrender'
Collaborative Anthropologies (10) 1
2017
URL
Gey Pin Ang, Caroline Gatt
'Crafting Anthropology Otherwise: Alterity and Performance'
Who are 'We'? Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology, ed. L Chua, N Mathur
Berghahn Books
2018
Caroline Gatt
'The Anthropologist as Member of the Ensemble: Anthropological Experiments with Theatre Makers'
Theatre as change: The Transformative Potential of Performance, ed. Alex Flynn, Jonas Tinius
Palgrave
2015
Caroline Gatt
'Breathing beyond Embodiment: Exploring Emergence, Grieving and Song in Laboratory Theatre'
Body & Society (26) 2
2020
URL
Caroline Gatt, Tim Ingold
'From description to correspondence: Anthropology in real time'
Design Anthropology: Juxtaposing theory and practice, ed. Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, Rachel Smith
Berg Publishers
2013
Caroline Gatt
'Enlivening the Supra-personal Actor: Vectors at Work in a Transnational Environmentalist Federation'
Anthropology in Action (20) 2
2013
URL
Caroline Gatt, Diego Galafassi, Gey Pin Ang
'From an Ethics of Estrangement to an Anthropology in Life'
Journal of Embodied Research (4) 2
2021
URL
Caroline Gatt
'Gender, the Environment, and Ecofeminism'
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed.
2021
URL
Caroline Gatt
'Introduction to the Special Issue'
Collaborative Anthropologies (10) 1
2017
URL
Caroline Gatt
'Living Atmospheres: Breath and Permeation through Song-action in Experimental Theatre'
Exploring Atmospheres Ethnographically, ed. S Schmitt, S Schroer
Ashgate
2017
Caroline Gatt
'Performance'
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed.
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
2019
URL
'Sketches for Regenerative Scholarship'
Caroline Gatt, Joss Allen
URL
Caroline Gatt
'Teaching and Learning Anthropology Otherwise: Lessons from a Collaboration between Laboratory Theatre and Anthropology'
Knowing from the Inside: Design for a Curriculum, ed. Tim Ingold
Bloomsbury
2022
Caroline Gatt
'Vectors, direction of attention and unprotected backs: Re-specifying relations in anthropology'
Anthropological Theory (13) 4
2013
Caroline Gatt (ed.)
The Voices of the Pages
University of Aberdeen Press
2017
URL
B Spatz, N. E. Erçin, C. Gatt, A Mendel
'He Almost Forgets That There is a Maker of the World'
Journal of Embodied Research (4) 2
2021
URL
Ben Spatz, N. Eda Erçin, Caroline Gatt, Agnieszka Mendel
'Triptych: Genesis, Kavana, Sabbath'
PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research (2) 2
2019
URL
Christopher A. Williams
Coordinator, Co-PI
Composer/contrabassist, artistic researcher
University of Music and Performing Arts Graz

Christopher A. Williams (1981, San Diego) makes and researches (mostly) experimental music. From 2021-2025 he will lead the research project ‘(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics’ (Austrian Science Fund ZK 93) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.

As a composer and contrabassist, his work runs the gamut from chamber music, improvisation, and radio art to collaborations with dancers, sound artists, and visual artists. Performances and collaborations with Derek Bailey, Compagnie Ouie/Dire, Charles Curtis, LaMonte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, Ferran Fages, Robin Hayward (as Reidemeister Move), Barbara Held, Christian Kesten, Christina Kubisch, Liminar, Maulwerker, Charlie Morrow, David Moss, Andrea Neumann, Mary Oliver and Rozemarie Heggen, Ben Patterson, Robyn Schulkowsky, Ensemble SuperMusique, Vocal Constructivists, dancers Jadi Carboni and Martin Sonderkamp, filmmaker Zachary Kerschberg, and painters Sebastian Dacey and Tanja Smit. This work has appeared in various North American and European experimental music circuits, as well as on VPRO Radio 6 (Holland), Deutschlandfunk Kultur, the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, Volksbühne Berlin, and the American Documentary Film Festival.

Williams’ artistic research takes the form of both conventional academic publications and practice-based multimedia projects. His writings appear in journals such as the Journal for Artistic Research, Critical Studies in Improvisation, TEMPO, Contemporary Music Review, Journal of Sonic Studies, Open Space Magazine, and diverse anthologies.

He co-curates the Berlin concert series KONTRAKLANG. From 2009-2015 he co-curated the salon series Certain Sundays.

Williams holds a B.A. from the University of California San Diego (Charles Curtis, Chaya Czernowin, and Bertram Turetzky); and a Ph.D. from the University of Leiden (Marcel Cobussen and Richard Barrett). His native digital dissertation is Tactile Paths: on and through Notation for Improvisers.

Selected publications
Mathias Maschat, Christopher Williams
'Three Performances: A Virtual (Musical) Improvisation'
Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance, ed. Matthew Reason, Anja Mølle Lindelof
Routledge
2016
Christopher Williams
'Anarchiving (in) Ben Patterson's Variations for Double-Bass'
Journal for Artistic Research (16)
2018
Christopher Williams, Chris Heenan
'Certain Sundays: Altmodische Gastfreundschaft, neumodische Überblendung der Kunstschärfe und soziale Erfahrung'
positionen (112)
2017
Christopher A. Williams
'Mapping Participation: Lawrence Halprin's RSVP Cycles Meets Richard Barrett's fOKT'
Contemporary Music Review
2021
Christopher Williams
'Say No Score: A Lexical Improvisation after Bob Ostertag'
Tempo (72) 283
2018
Christopher Williams
'Treatise, comment et pourquoi : Un court exposé empirique'
PaaLabRes
2017
URL
Christopher Williams, Martin Sonderkamp
'Where You End and I Begin: Cognition and continuity in experimental music and dance'
Critical Studies in Improvisation | Études Critiques en Improvisation (8) 2
2012
URL
Deniz Peters
Collaborating researcher, Advisory Board member
Artistic researcher, interdisciplinary musicologist
University of Music and Performing Arts Graz

Deniz Peters (Dr.phil, MA) is Professor for Artistic Research in Music and Head of the Doctoral School for Artistic Research at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, and the current President of the international Society for Artistic Research SAR. His artistic research on interpersonal empathy combines phenomenological, conceptual, and interaction analyses with an experimental piano practice, improvising with musicians and dancers Simon Rose, Stevie Wishart, Ellen Waterman, Christopher Williams, Bennett Hogg, Stefan Östersjö, Magdalena Chowaniec, Alexander Deutinger, and many others. He is also re-thinking musical expression in a philosophical-analytical research project; a third area of activity is directed towards a fuller understanding of the methods, documentation, typology and epistemology of artistic research through music. Further, he is actively involved in research modules and advisory boards within the (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics FWF-Zukunftskolleg, and The Epistemic Power of Music FWF-Project. Peters has appeared as keynote speaker, speaker, performer, and panel discussant at numerous conferences in musicology, philosophy, and artistic research in Europe, Australia, and the USA. Publications include a collected edition Bodily Expression in Electronic Music (Routledge); articles in Performance Research, Contemporary Music Review and Empirical Musicology Review; chapters in collections with Lexington, Springer, Leuven UP, Rowman & Littlefield,and Oxford UP; and a CD of findings (Leo Records).

Ensembles

Splitter Orchester
Berlin

Splitter Orchester, founded in 2010, brings together 21 of Berlin’s most cutting-edge composer-performer-improvisers to question the musical establishment. Their sound blends a broad array of extended techniques on traditional, electronic, and self-built instruments, focusing on sonic materiality and space. The methods of the orchestra reflect the members’ inclusive but critical approach toward the many facets of composition and improvisation.

Splitter Orchester has collaborated with composers Mathias Spahlinger, Øyvind Torvund, George Lewis, Alwynne Pritchard, Jean-Luc Guionnet, and Mazen Kerbaj. International concert appearances include MaerzMusik, the International Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt, the CRAK festival in Paris, Borealis, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the météo Festival, and their own biennial Splitter festival in Berlin.

Splitter consists of:

Burkhard Beins - Percussion
Anthea Caddy - Cello
Roy Carroll - Electronics
Anat Cohavi - Clarinet
Axel Dörner - Trumpet
Sabine Ercklentz - Trumpet, Electronics
Kai Fagaschinski - Clarinet
Emilio Gordoa - Vibraphone
Robin Hayward - Tuba
Steve Heather - Percussion
Chris Heenan - Contrabass Clarinet
Mike Majkowski - Double Bass
Magda Mayas - Clavinet
Matthias Müller - Trombone
Andrea Neumann - Inside Piano
Andrea Parkins - Accordion, Objects, Laptop
Simon J. Phillips - Piano
Michael Thieke - Clarinet
Sabine Vogel - Flutes
Biliana Voutchkova - Violin
Marta Zapparoli - Electronics, Tapes

Trondheim Jazz Orchestra
Trondheim

Trondheim Jazz Orchestra is one of the most important and creative jazz ensembles in Norway. Since it was established in 2000, the orchestra has had a great number of exciting projects with Norwegian and international jazz profiles such as Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Joshua Redman, Erlend Skomsvoll, Eirik Hegdal, Sofia Jernberg, Maria Kannegaard, Kim Myhr, Jenny Hval, Stian Westerhus, Ståle Storløkken, Kristoffer Lo, and Marius Neset.

The orchestra belongs to the Mid-Norway Centre of Jazz which initiates and organises new projects. The orchestra is operated as a musicians’ pool, so that the orchestra changes as to instrumentation and size from project to project. This gives room for great width in their repertory. The musicians that have been involved in the orchestra are amongst Norway’s most famous jazz profiles.

The (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics constellation includes:

Eira Bjørnstad Foss - violin
Klaus Ellerhusen Holm - clarinet, alto saxophone
Amalie Dahl - alto saxophone
Jenny Frøysa - baritone saxophone
Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø - trombone and electronics
Joakim Rainer Petersen - piano and electronics
Bjørn Marius Hegge - bass
Amund Storløkken Aase - vibraphone
Kyrre Laastad - drums, percussion

Trondheim Jazz Orchestra is supported by: Norwegian Art Council, Trondheim City and County of Sør Trøndelag.

the klingt collective
Vienna

the klingt collective is a new group drawn from the Vienna-based experimental music community anchored in the internet platform klingt.org. The ten members are active in various international and local music scenes spanning improvised music, sound art, pop music, free jazz, noise, contemporary music, and theater and film music. Most have played together in smaller collaborative constellations, including groups and projects such as Radian, TWIXT, Gustav & Band, Low Frequency Orchestra, Sonic Luz, Gésir, and The Vegetable Orchestra.

The lineup includes:

Martin Brandlmayr - drums
Angélica Castelló - electronics
dieb13 - turntables
Klaus Filip - ppooll
Susanna Gartmayer - bass clarinet
Noid Haberl - cello
Billy Roisz - electronics & bass
Martin Siewert - guitars & electronics
Oliver Stotz - guitars & electronics

Documentation team

Thomas Martius
Videographer
Berlin

Thomas Martius first graduated with a degree in Business Administration before turning to Applied Theatre Studies at the University of Giessen. Since his graduation (1994) he has worked as a freelance artist, producing more than one hundred original performances, theater projects, and videos.

His multimedial work is location- and situation-specific. He describes his larger scale projects as editorial fictions, such as Pottingers Haus. The most recent performances (The Lost Father, Luke und Alina und alle 21 Jahre) took place in a movie theater (Babylon) in Berlin. Live material and pre-produced material intermingle on all levels of his cinematic theater: in music and sound design, acting, amusement and story telling. More recently, he has also worked on films, radio plays and on OPPEAR (Opera Performing Art), his minimal adaption of opera.

As a video-artist he has filmed opera singers for the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. As an actor he’s appeared in various contexts. His practical video class has been on the curriculum of the Theater Studies Institute at the Freie Universität, Berlin, ongoing since 1996. He has been artistic collaborator for the International Research Center’s program, Interweaving Performance Cultures. He taught at the Art Academy of Tallinn, at the graphic design department at Lette-Verein-Berlin, and at other institutions. He was guest artist at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center in New York, Fellow at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France, and artist-in-residence at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice in 2011 and 2020. For the video documentation of ‘(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics’ he is excited to team up with Christopher Hewitt, the most experienced documentarist of performance he knows.

When not travelling Martius resides with his partner and their child in Berlin.

Christopher Hewitt
Videographer
Berlin

Christopher Hewitt has been involved in the areas of performance art and interdisciplinary art for the past 30 years, working as a curator, teacher, facilitator and very occasionally as a performance artist himself. After nearly 10 years of being based in London, which included working as the Director of Live Art at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, he went on to set up the Crossing Borders performance art degree programme at the Turku Academy of Art in Finland. For several years he worked as the producer for the seminal Norwegian performance theatre group Baktruppen and was editor and publisher of the video compilation publication ‘liveartwork DVD’. He is based in Berlin where he works primarily as a video documenter of performance work.

Roy Carroll
Sound
Berlin

Roy Carroll is an Irish musician and composer, based in Berlin. He works primarily with electroacoustic media such as transducers, synthesis, feedback, audio recordings, amplification, software, and auditory and psychoacoustic phenomena to create multi-layered forms that continually renegotiate the transformation of electrical audio signals into disturbed air. Roy is one half of The Instrument with choreographer Maya M Carroll, with whom he has created over 30 works for the stage. He has toured / presented work throughout Europe, and in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, USA, Russia, and New Zealand.

Roy is also active as an audio engineer, specialising in FOH, recording and mixing experimental and new / contemporary music. The greater part of his work is with the fertile Berlin scene. He holds an M-Phil in Music and Media Technologies from Trinity College Dublin, for which he specialised in electroacoustic composition, under the supervision of Donnacha Dennehy. Clients include: Achim Kaufmann / Michael Moore, Anthony Pateras, David Sylvian, Kevin Volans, Peter Brötzman / Keiji Haino, Peter Evans, Maulwerker, Meg Stuart / Damaged Goods, Polwechsel, Splitter Orchester, Thomas Lehn / Marcus Schmickler, Tyshawn Sorey, A L’arme festival, Berlin Jazz Festival, Biegungen im Ausland, Concepts of Doing festival, DARA Strings Festival, Designing Voices, Flux festival, März Musik, Musica Sanae, Time Krystal, Ultraschall

Organisational team

Benedikt Alphart
Student assistant
University of Music and peforming Arts Graz

Benedikt Alphart is a composer and computer musician. Since 2018 he has been studying at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz with Richard Dünser and Gerhard Eckel. His artistic practice is closely linked with a fascination for sound recording. Going beyond his passion for field recording, this has led him to work in music recording, location sound, film productions and as a performer of live-electronic music.

Benedikt joined the ‘(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics’ team in 2021 as a student assistant to help facilitate the technical side of their research. He is simultaneously working at the Doctoral School for Artistic Research, where he takes care of audiovisual (post-)production.

Advisory Board

Tim Ingold
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, ↗ Website
Angelika Krebs
Professor of Philosophy, University of Basel, ↗ Website
George E. Lewis
Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, Columbia University, ↗ Website
Erin Manning
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Relational Art, Concordia University, ↗ Website
Anand Pandian
Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, ↗ Website
Deniz Peters
University Professor of Artistic Research, University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, ↗ Website
John Sutton
Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, ↗ Website
Michael Wheeler
Professor of Philosophy, University of Stirling, ↗ Website


Selected Team publications

Joshua A. Bergamin
'An Excess of Meaning: Conceptual Over-Interpretation in Confabulation and Schizophrenia'
Topoi (39) 1
2020
URL
Joshua A. Bergamin
'Being-in-the-flow: expert coping as beyond both thought and automaticity'
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (16) 3
2017
URL
Joshua A. Bergamin
'To Know and To Be: Second-Person Knowledge and the Intersubjective Self, A Reply to Talbot.'
Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (6) 10
2017
Joshua A. Bergamin
'Bridging the Abyss: Re-interpreting Heidegger’s animals as a basis for inter-species understanding.'
The Human-Animal Boundary, ed. Nandita Batra, Mario Wenning
Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield
2019
Joshua A. Bergamin
'An Excess of Meaning: Interpretation and the Cut-Up'
Beatdom (21)
2021
Joshua A. Bergamin
'Kurt Cobain: Martyr of Authenticity'
Overland
2021
Gey Pin Ang, Caroline Gatt
'Collaboration and Emergence: The Paradox of Presence and Surrender'
Collaborative Anthropologies (10) 1
2017
URL
Gey Pin Ang, Caroline Gatt
'Crafting Anthropology Otherwise: Alterity and Performance'
Who are 'We'? Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology, ed. L Chua, N Mathur
Berghahn Books
2018
Caroline Gatt
'The Anthropologist as Member of the Ensemble: Anthropological Experiments with Theatre Makers'
Theatre as change: The Transformative Potential of Performance, ed. Alex Flynn, Jonas Tinius
Palgrave
2015
Caroline Gatt
'Breathing beyond Embodiment: Exploring Emergence, Grieving and Song in Laboratory Theatre'
Body & Society (26) 2
2020
URL
Caroline Gatt, Tim Ingold
'From description to correspondence: Anthropology in real time'
Design Anthropology: Juxtaposing theory and practice, ed. Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, Rachel Smith
Berg Publishers
2013
Caroline Gatt
'Enlivening the Supra-personal Actor: Vectors at Work in a Transnational Environmentalist Federation'
Anthropology in Action (20) 2
2013
URL
Caroline Gatt, Diego Galafassi, Gey Pin Ang
'From an Ethics of Estrangement to an Anthropology in Life'
Journal of Embodied Research (4) 2
2021
URL
Caroline Gatt
'Gender, the Environment, and Ecofeminism'
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed.
2021
URL
Caroline Gatt
'Introduction to the Special Issue'
Collaborative Anthropologies (10) 1
2017
URL
Caroline Gatt
'Living Atmospheres: Breath and Permeation through Song-action in Experimental Theatre'
Exploring Atmospheres Ethnographically, ed. S Schmitt, S Schroer
Ashgate
2017
Caroline Gatt
'Performance'
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed.
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
2019
URL
'Sketches for Regenerative Scholarship'
Caroline Gatt, Joss Allen
URL
Caroline Gatt
'Teaching and Learning Anthropology Otherwise: Lessons from a Collaboration between Laboratory Theatre and Anthropology'
Knowing from the Inside: Design for a Curriculum, ed. Tim Ingold
Bloomsbury
2022
Caroline Gatt
'Vectors, direction of attention and unprotected backs: Re-specifying relations in anthropology'
Anthropological Theory (13) 4
2013
Caroline Gatt (ed.)
The Voices of the Pages
University of Aberdeen Press
2017
URL
B Spatz, N. E. Erçin, C. Gatt, A Mendel
'He Almost Forgets That There is a Maker of the World'
Journal of Embodied Research (4) 2
2021
URL
Ben Spatz, N. Eda Erçin, Caroline Gatt, Agnieszka Mendel
'Triptych: Genesis, Kavana, Sabbath'
PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research (2) 2
2019
URL
Mathias Maschat, Christopher Williams
'Three Performances: A Virtual (Musical) Improvisation'
Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance, ed. Matthew Reason, Anja Mølle Lindelof
Routledge
2016
Christopher Williams
'Anarchiving (in) Ben Patterson's Variations for Double-Bass'
Journal for Artistic Research (16)
2018
Christopher Williams, Chris Heenan
'Certain Sundays: Altmodische Gastfreundschaft, neumodische Überblendung der Kunstschärfe und soziale Erfahrung'
positionen (112)
2017
Christopher A. Williams
'Mapping Participation: Lawrence Halprin's RSVP Cycles Meets Richard Barrett's fOKT'
Contemporary Music Review
2021
Christopher Williams
'Say No Score: A Lexical Improvisation after Bob Ostertag'
Tempo (72) 283
2018
Christopher Williams
'Treatise, comment et pourquoi : Un court exposé empirique'
PaaLabRes
2017
URL
Christopher Williams, Martin Sonderkamp
'Where You End and I Begin: Cognition and continuity in experimental music and dance'
Critical Studies in Improvisation | Études Critiques en Improvisation (8) 2
2012
URL

Improvisation and ethics are everywhere. We improvise in so many practices – from cooking to sports to migration policy – that it often goes unnoticed. The same is true of ethics; as self-interpreting animals, we disclose ethical values in practices as diverse as democracy, empirical science, and punk rock. But the role of improvisation within ethical processes (e.g., value-formation and habituation) is often overlooked. Instead, people commonly assume that they consciously and rationally adhere to ethical norms as more-or-less fixed rules. This project aims to develop an alternative understanding of ethical processes by engaging with a practice in which improvisational qualities of ethics are unmistakable: experimental improvised music.

(Musical)
Improvisation
and Ethics
Event / encounter
04. October 2024
21:00

Lab 7: Splitter Orchester and Trondheim Jazz Orchestra at musikprotokoll

The grand finale of our seven (Musical) Ethics Labs will take place in Graz at the musikprotokoll festival, ORF’s main yearly contemporary music event.

Berlin’s Splitter Orchester and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra will meet a second time, developing questions from Lab 6 and offering pieces in a variety of smaller instrumentations.

In contrast to previous Labs, music and discourse will be intertwined in the same event. Audience members will have the opportunity to participate in an app-based experiment co-designed with musicologist Andreas Pirchner around the topic of “endings”. An “activated intermission” will offer chances for conversation with the project researchers and other audience members.

For those unable to join in person, we look forward to sharing documentation in an ORF “Zeit-Ton” radio broadcast on 11 February 2025. A video essay with footage from the event will come later next year.

Event Documentation / talk
26. June 2024–26. March 2024
16:30

Gatt and Winkler-Reid convening major conference and key note

Caroline Gatt, together with Sarah Winkler-Reid, is on the scientific committee for the Royal Anthropological Institute’s biennial major conference on “Anthropology and Education”. As part of this work Gatt and Winkler-Reid are convenining one of the conference’s Keynotes, called “From Education to Anthropology and Back Again”. The key note will consist in a roundtable discussion between Gatt (University of Graz), Winkler-Reid (Newcastle University) and Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen), Elsayed Elsehamy Abdelhamid (The University of Manchester), Soumhya Venkatesan (University of Manchester), Simone Dennis (The University of Adelaide), Mariya Ivancheva (University of Strathclyde), Cris Shore (Goldsmiths) and Andrew Dawson (University of Melbourne)

Event Documentation / workshop
25. June 2024–25. June 2024
10:30

Ethical, responsive, pluriversal anthropological education: Workshop

As part of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s major conference on education, Caroline Gatt is convening a workshop together with Idjahure Kadiwel (Universidade de São Paulo), Francy Baniwa (Universidade Federal Rio de Janeiro), Ty Tengan (University of Hawaii at Mānoa), Zoy Anastassakis (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) and Mr Luiz Fontes (Brazil).

The workshop offers concrete examples of pedagogies for pluriversal anthropologies. Participants will engage with three ways of teaching anthropology: Two developed by Indigenous anthropologists to appropriately share their respective knowledges; one offering a transnational improvisational pedagogy.

If you’re in London in June do come along!

News
26. March 2024

Doctoral workshop on performance and collaborative methods in Catania

On the 8th of April, Caroline Gatt will be giving a workshop on research design and methods for working collaboratively with performers and by means of performance.

Following the workshop, on the 9th April, Gatt will be giving a public talk about her book “An Ethnography of Global Environmentalism: Becoming Friends of the Earth”, which focuses on the ethical-self formation of environmentalists.

Thanks to the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Catania for the invitation.

News
26. March 2024

Gatt awarded FWF funding for new book

Caroline Gatt would like to thank the FWF for awarding €13.000 to make her new book, co-edited with Jan Peter Laurens Loovers, open access.

The book entitle “Beyond Perception: Correspondences with the work of Tim Ingold”, is a collection of 23 chapters and essays that showcase the way a range of scholars have engaged with Ingold’s opus.

More than twenty years have passed since Tim Ingold published his ground-breaking The Perception of the Environment (TPE) in 2000. As set out in TPE and subsequent publications, Ingold proposed an understanding of the world that placed sentient, remembering and imagining organisms, or inhabitants, some of them human, at the heart of an extensive field of socio-ecological relations, with broad-ranging analyses of how this shift affected our understanding of personhood, knowledge and skills. TPE, and Ingold’s subsequent books, have become key works for a variety of disciplines ranging from anthropology, archaeology, and human geography to art, architecture, design and studies of material and visual culture.

The main aim of this book is to bring together works that advance a paradigm change occurring in various academic disciplines from ‘fixist’ to ‘emergence’ onto/epistemologies. In the introduction to the volume, Gatt and Loovers argue that Ingold’s work has been key in this current broad shift. Ingold’s work over the past 20 plus years has enabled the development of a new approach; a ‘relational’ anthropology. This is the first book to synthesize scholarship drawing on Ingold’s work and demonstrating the relevance of relational anthropology to broader political and ethical matters.

Event Documentation / encounter
22. March 2024–23. March 2024
20:30

Lab 6: Splitter Orchester and Trondheim Jazz Orchestra at MaerzMusik

(Musical) Ethics Lab 6 with the Splitter Orchester and Trondheim Jazz Orchestra — together at last — will take place in Berlin as part of a wonderful program at this year’s MaerzMusik Festival.

The event will involve a concert at 20:30 on Friday 22 March in the Akademie der Künste, to be followed by a post-concert chat with members of the ensembles and research team.

Then, on Saturday 23 March, there will be a public symposium from 16:00-17:30 in the Library of the Berliner Festspiele, on the theme “Improvisation as Praxis: Music as a form-of-life”, featuring musicologist Nanette Nielsen, cognitive scientist John Sutton, and philosopher Michael Wheeler in discussion with Josh and Christopher from the research team.

Hope to see you there…

News
14. March 2024

New Article in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

Bergamin’s forthcoming article on the phenomenology of improvisation is now online in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. In the article, he draws on interviews with free improvisors to explore how they navigate the material, cultural, and musical structures that both enable and constrain improvised choices. He concludes that their refined creativity requires an ethical awareness akin to what Aristotle called phronēsis, or practical wisdom.

News
11. January 2024

New Volume on Gadamer and Music

A new chapter by Bergamin is out now online in this rich new volume Gadamer, Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics, edited by philosopher and guitarist Sam McAuliffe (hard copy forthcoming from Springer). Featuring contributions from philosophers and musicologists, the book offers diverse applications of Gadamer’s hermeneutic thought to how we make sense of our lives through music.

A pre-print of Bergamin’s chapter is available here, but we highly recommend checking out the entire volume (and ordering a copy for your nearest library).

News
02. January 2024

New chapter in Routledge Companion to the Anthropology of Performance

A new chapter by Caroline Gatt is now published in the Routledge Handbook to the Anthropology of Performance, a new major reference work. The book is edited by anthropologists Lauren Miller and David Syring.

In addition to the chapter, Gatt has also contributed an entry in the Appendix which offers tools, exercises, and activities designed by contributors as useful suggestions to readers, both within and beyond academic contexts, to take the insights of performance anthropology into their work.

A pre-print of Gatt’s chapter is available below, but the entire volume will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners concered with performance and ethical ways of conducting investigative projects.

Writing in progress
05. December 2023

Bergamin: "The Participant Belongs to the Play" (pre-print)

Event Documentation / encounter
19. November 2023–27. November 2023
00:00

Lab 5: Splitter Orchester

The Splitter Orchester meets the (M)IE team again in Berlin, this time for a “private” Lab with no pre-planned public events. Stay tuned for possible spontaneous showings at our workspace at studioboerne45.

News
17. November 2023

New article in Frontiers in Sociology

Caroline Gatt’s article “Decolonizing scholarship? Plural onto/epistemologies and the right to science” is now published in open access in the journal “Frontiers in Sociology”. Gatt’s article outlines the way that the institution of the university continues to perpetuate epistemic colonialism. The article goes on to suggests ways in which the academy needs to be refounded in order for scholarship to become ethical.

Event Documentation / encounter
07. October 2023–08. October 2023
14:00

Lab 4: Trondheim Jazz Orchestra at Fri Resonans

Bergamin and Williams return to Trondheim on 1 October for (Musical) Ethics Lab 4, a second encounter with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra. Two public events are on offer, both presented by the Fri Resonans Festival.

On Sat. 7 October from 14:00-15:15 a “research concert” will be hosted by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s music department, moderated by Prof. Michael Francis Duch. The MIE team will discuss the Lab and its methods with guest academics from NTNU and musicians from TJO. TJO will whet our appetites for the next day’s concert with a couple short musical interludes.

The main concert event takes place on Sun. 8 October at 20:00, featuring a program developed collectively over the course of the previous week in the Lab. Work will build in part on experiments from Lab 1 in June 2023; for a taste of that, check out the two trailers made by our video collaborator Thomas Martius:

Event Documentation / talk
15. June 2023–15. June 2023
17:00

Gatt featuring on the Royal Anthropological Institute 'Reviewer meets reviewed' event

Reviewer meets Reviewed

  • A SEMINAR SERIES OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE -

An Ethnography of Global Environmentalism:
Becoming Friends of the Earth

The Royal Anthropological Institute is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between author Dr Caroline Gatt (University of Graz) and reviewer Professor Stewart Barr (University of Exeter).

Based on nine years of research, this is the first book to offer an in-depth ethnographic study of a transnational environmentalist federation and of activists themselves. The book presents an account of the daily life and the ethical strivings of environmental activist members of Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), exploring how a transnational federation is constituted and maintained, and how different people strive to work together in their hope of contributing to the creation of “a better future for the globe.” In the context of FoEI, a great diversity of environmentalisms from around the world are negotiated, discussed and evolve in relation to the experiences of the different cultures, ecosystems and human situations that the activists bring with them to the federation. Key to the global scope of this project is the analysis of FoEI experiments in models for intercultural and inclusive decision-making. The provisional results of FoEI’s ongoing experiments in this area offer a glimpse of how different notions of the environment, and being an environmentalist, can come to work together without subsuming alterity.

The book is published by Routledge. More info here:
https://www.routledge.com/An-Ethnography-of-Global-Environmentalism-Becoming-Friends-of-the-Earth/Gatt/p/book/9780367594206?utm_source=cjaffiliates&utm_medium=affiliates&utm_campaign=nmpi&utm_term=generic&utm_content=generic&gclsrc=aw.ds&cjevent=16dc48307d3211ed809879eb0a18ba74

Event Documentation / talk
08. June 2023–09. June 2023
00:00

The Habits of Freedom : Bergamin at Padova 'Interlacing Concepts and Practices' Conference

The Habits of Freedom: Improvisation, Rationality, and the Paradox of Spontaneity

The practice of musical improvisation – of spontaneous co-creation in a unique situation – offers a rich and colourful example of the questions at the heart of the McDowell-Drefyus debate (Dreyfus 2005, 2007, 2013; McDowell 2007, 2013). The debate itself centres on the phenomenological contrast between reflective or deliberative thought, and reflexive or habitual skilled practice. At issue is the role that concepts play in these (apparently) contrasting modes of cognition, and particularly their employment (or otherwise) during the ‘flow’ of skilled practice.

In improvisation, we find a (seemingly) paradoxical situation where deeply-practiced habits are employed spontaneously toward an open-ended goal, in acts of sense-making that involve a constant negotiation between players, materials, and their wider social context. While many practicing improvisors insist that one should not ‘think’ (deliberatively) about one’s actions, there remains nevertheless a strong normative conception of what sounds or musical phrases ‘make sense’ in any given context. Which is to say – with Dreyfus – that there is no explicit reasoning going on in the act of improvised creation, yet nevertheless – with McDowell – that there are always reasons for why certain musical decisions ‘make sense’ and others do not.

In this paper, I discuss the moment of practical decision-making in improvisation, in the context of an ongoing phenomenological study that I am currently undertaking in collaboration with practicing improvising ensembles. I explore the way that habits both enable and constrain musicians’ creative decisions, and how their spontaneous (and apparently non-conceptual) musical actions are grounded in a ‘vocabulary’ that develops over time via a social practice of collective sense-making.

By pushing deeper into the frequently-reported analogy of improvisation with a ‘conversation,’ I argue that our fluent use of language is likewise a practical skill that blurs the distinction between ‘conceptual’ thought and ‘non-conceptual’ praxis. I expand on this by taking up Charles Taylor’s suggestion that skilled human action is not simply non-conceptual, but rather post-conceptual – that the process of habituation attunes us to directly experience concepts in a reflexive, perceptual way.

I conclude with some ethical considerations about what these normative and habitual constraints mean for human freedom – most importantly, what being constituted by language and cultural norms implies about the limits of our individuality, and whether and how aesthetic practices (like improvised art) can make these norms and limits more visible.

Event Documentation / talk
01. June 2023–01. June 2023
11:00

"Human and non-human agency in sound and music" Bernd Brabec at the (M)IE Seminar Series

This iteration of the (M)IE Seminar Series will come to a close with a very exciting talk by Bern Brabec (Universität Innsbruck).

The seminar will be held at the Forum Stadtpark, Graz (with coffee and brötchen) and online.

Title:
HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN AGENCY IN SOUND AND MUSIC

Abstract:
Music was brought to humans by gods, ritual chants were received from animal spirits, or voices of the deceased are channeled through the voice of a gifted singer. Artificial intelligence is at the point of composing or even performing (at least, producing) music in formats that sound – for some genres – perfectly similar to humanly composed pieces.
Musings about non-human agency in music are probably as old as human discourse on music. Pondering the possibility of non-human music (made by birds, or by algorithms) is however tied to the question how ‘music’ is defined in human terms. In this talk I will present some examples of sonic creations by computers, animals, plants, outer space bodies, and spirits or gods in order to discuss whether music is something essentially human or not. Maybe, obtaining different perspectives on the phenomena yields different, even contradictory results.

https://unimeet.uni-graz.at/b/car-jks-uxl-sqf
Event Documentation / talk
23. May 2023–28. May 2023
00:00

Free (?) Agency : Bergamin at the 'Science of Consciousness' Conference

Free (?) Agency : Towards a Phenomenology of Musical Improvisation

Musical improvisors have a long history of exploring conscious states. From pre-modern ritual performance, to Indian classical music, to the Grateful Dead, musical improvisors across time and cultures have developed sounds and techniques to alter both their own consciousness and that of their audiences, in ways that are imbued with meaning.

While such creative exploration is rarely considered ‘research’ in a scientific sense, recent empirical work (Dolan et al 2018) has approached the topic, positing an ‘improvising mindset’ that parallels ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi 2009) and ‘primary’ (Carhart-Harris et al 2014) states of consciousness. Notably – and intriguingly – elements of this state appear to be shared between improvising performers and their engaged audiences.

Musical improvisation therefore offers a rich and accessible case study into different aspects of consciousness, attention, and awareness, and an opportunity to explore how such aspects arise and interact as players navigate a complex sensory and social environment. The spontaneous, reflex-like creative decisions of the improvisor raise important questions about the interplay of habits, choice, and discursive thought, while offering rich, immersive examples of joint-attention and participatory sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo 2007; Schiavo & De Jaegher 2017).

Yet while such phenomena have been fruitfully studied from third-person (psychological, neuroscientific, musicological) perspectives, less attention has been paid to a central element of the practice: the experience of the improvisor herself. In this paper, therefore, I develop a phenomenology of musical improvisation based on ongoing fieldwork, involving in-depth interviews, observation, and participation with professional improvisors through a series of artist-led ‘musical labs.’ These ongoing interdisciplinary workshops have been co-designed to collaboratively explore and bring out the habits and musical/social phenomena at the heart of improvisation.

Bringing fieldwork results into dialogue with classical phenomenologists (Heidegger 1927; Merleau-Ponty 1945) and their more contemporary followers (Gallagher & Zahavi 2008; Sutton et al 2011; Høffding 2018), I describe and examine key phenomenological structures, centred around – but challenging – the oft-observed dichotomy between ‘reflexive’ action and ‘reflective’ discursive or deliberative thought (Dreyfus 2005). I argue that elements of these cognitive modes co-occur during improvising states, resulting in what I call ‘split-attention’ between different intentional objects and modes of awareness. Such split-attention appears closely related to the frequently-reported phenomenon of ‘watching oneself’ perform during flow-states.

The interaction of co-existing modes of consciousness raises important questions for concepts of habit, choice, freedom and agency, encapsulated in the (seemingly-)paradoxical notion that spontaneous, freely improvised actions need a lot practice to be enacted well. I unpack this through a phenomenological analysis of how decisions are made in moments of improvisation, giving particular emphasis to the role of external affordances – instruments, spaces, relationships, and above all, the music itself – that constrain but thereby enable particular choices to ‘make sense.’

I suggest that musical improvisation offers an encapsulated example of phenomena that occur throughout our broader human lives, and modes of consciousness and attention that challenge traditional conceptions of agency. I therefore conclude with questions for consciousness researchers, and suggestions for future empirical work.

Event Documentation
11. May 2023–11. May 2023
11:00

Tim Ingold at the (M)IE Seminar Series

We are thrilled that Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen) will be coming to Graz to give the next talk in the (M)IE seminar series.

The seminar will be held at the Forum Stadtpark, Graz (with coffee and brötchen) and online.

Title:
HOW THE WORLD MAKES ITSELF HEARD

Abstract:
Does a falling tree make a sound if no-one is around to hear? It depends on what you mean by sound. If it is a physical impulse, transmitted through the aerial medium, then ‘yes’; if it is something we register in our minds, then ‘no’. But must we choose between these alternatives? In this talk, I ask you to picture yourself walking in the forest, during a storm. The sounds of trees falling, wind gusting and thunder rumbling are not objects of perception but rather the reverberations of a consciousness that has opened to the sky, to merge with the cosmos. In this sense, sounds are neither mental nor physical but atmospheric. This leads us to think differently about ears, not as anatomical organs primed to respond to acoustic signals, but as the attentiveness of a body placed on aural alert. This aural attention, this hearing, gives voice to the tree, the wind and the thunder. Hearing, thus, doesn’t provide a portal for the human mind to take possession of a world. Rather, it is in taking possession of its human inhabitants that the world makes itself heard. Is this also what happens in music-making?

Chair: Joshua Bergamin (Universität Wien)

Watch the seminar
Event Documentation
20. April 2023–20. April 2023
14:00

Anatomy of a (Musical) Ethics Lab at SAR 2023

Christopher Williams will be presenting the methods and approaches of the (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics project at this year’s Society for Artistic Research conference, Trondheim 19 - 21 April.

By happy coincidence Christopher will be presenting the (M)IE team’s ‘Anatomy of a (Musical) Ethics Lab’ at Dokkhuset, which was also where the project’s first lab was held with Trondheim Jazz Orchestra in June 2022.

Event Documentation
30. March 2023–30. March 2023
11:00

Ben Spatz at the (M)IE Seminar Series

The second talk in the (M)IE Seminar Series will be given by Ben Spatz, who will be discussing crucial questions in relation to ethics, politics and artistic research.

This seminar will be held online only. Please scan the QR or follow the link below to participate.

Title:

WHITE ETHICS: RACE, METHODS AND ARTISTIC RESEARCH

Abstract:

This seminar will consider how the project of artistic research could be reframed by a decolonial understanding of history and the present.
A methodology of productive deflation will be used to exam- ine the structural, institutional, and atmospheric whiteness of european artistic research, simultaneously rejecting its implicit claims to universality and reactivating its potential politics as a mode of critical whiteness practice.
We will ask:
• What happens when racialization and coloniality are taken as fundamental aspects of the given conditions or experi- mental apparatus that underpins artistic research?
• What happens when we assume not only that our identities are constructed by our practical techniques (as social the- ory and performance studies have long argued), but also that our epistemic techniques arise out of our embodied and emplaced identities?
• How can the naming of whiteness — as in critical black studies, critical indigenous studies, and critical whiteness studies — help us to link the dynamic introspective and micropolitical ethics of artistic research with broader social and political movements?
The seminar will be organized around material from Spatz’s artistic research and from their forthcoming monograph Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research (Northwestern University Press).

urbanresearchtheater.com

Event Documentation / talk
21. March 2023–23. March 2023
00:00

Ethical striving with other-than-humans

Caroline Gatt will be presenting a talk at the Finnish Anthropological Society Conference 2023 in March. The panel, convened by Anna Krzywoszynska, University of Oulu, and Agnese Bankovska, University of Helsinki, is called “Making ‘Good’ Relations in more-than-human worlds”.

Gatt’s paper is entitle “Ethical striving with other-than-humans in two multicultural examples” and the abstract is below:

From dominant western perspectives, debates around ethics are conducted along anthropocentric modalities of relationship: only persons with the capacity for self-awareness, autonomy and rational judgment are considered able to engage in ethical behaviour. Even though there are increasing instances of legal processes attempting to expand definitions of personhood to non-humans, these retain an anthropocentric understanding of personhood, as Elizabeth Oriel shows. In animal rights movements and animal studies, it is human behaviour towards animals that is discussed in terms of ethics. And despite attempts of Object Oriented Ontology and New Materialism to decenter anthropocentrism, a central critique of these approaches is that intimate relations between humans and other-than-humans become even more unlikely.

In this paper I present two examples from multicultural contexts in which the humans involved are open to different subjectivities and knowingly engage together in forms of ethical striving; human and non-humans enter into relation for ‘doing good’. The first example comes from my doctoral research with Friends of the Earth (FoE) activists and the second is from my current research with improvising musicians. Both examples are characterized by a striving to relate with non-humans. In these examples the different subjectivities that emerge are not known in advance. What the efforts of both activists and musicians show are different strategies for how ‘good’ relations beyond anthropocentric positions are sought. I ethnographically explore how the humans involved, both individually and collectively, perceive and evaluate this ethical striving. I also suggest how we might describe more-than-human collective ethical striving in such contexts.

Event Documentation
09. March 2023–09. March 2023
11:00

Bergamin, Gatt and Williams give the first talk of the (M)IE Seminar Series

For the first talk in the (M)IE Seminar Series, Joshua Bergamin, Caroline Gatt and Christopher Williams will be presenting their methods, approaches and reflections on the first year of the (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics project.

The seminar will be held at the Forum Stadtpark, Graz (with coffee and brötchen) and online.

Title:
ANATOMY OF A (MUSICAL) ETHICS LAB

Abstract:
In this seminar we ask: In interdisciplinary projects that integrate artistic research, how do teams
• calibrate zoomed in (e.g. ‚practitioner‘) and zoomed out (e.g. ‚audience‘) perspectives?
• balance the generative and comparative aspects of practice-informed research over time?
• negotiate formats and priorities in individual and group outputs?
We - as an artistic researcher in music, an anthropologist, and a phenomenologist – address these questions and unpack the methods of ‚(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics‘, a four-year interdisciplinary project funded by the Austrian Science Fund.
The aim of the project is to investigate the improvisatory foundations of ethical behaviour and processes across a range of human activity. A series of seven ‚(Musical) Ethics Labs‘ with live experimental improvising music ensembles offers case studies for examining and experimenting with key ethical phenomena such as listening, habituation, and value-formation.
The goals of our artistic-scholarly assemblage are to bring to the fore the ethical phenomena of interest for the ben- efit of the musical process itself and for collective reflec- tion. This reflection informs the design of subsequent labs and will cumulatively ground a generalisable conceptual framework for understanding the ethical significance of improvisation beyond music and art.

Watch the seminar
Event Documentation
09. March 2023–09. March 2023
09:00

(M)IE Seminar Series

The (M)IE seminar series will explore issues related to ethics, improvisation, music, and research methods.

Seminars will be held both at the Forum Stadtpark, Graz (with coffee and brötchen) and online. The link to participate is posted below.

We invite you to join in the discussions and debates!

Each talk will be recorded and made available online.
It is funded by the University of Graz Postdoctoral office, the FWF and the Forum Stadtpark.

https://unimeet.uni-graz.at/b/car-jks-uxl-sqf
Follow the link or scan the code to join the seminars online

https://unimeet.uni-graz.at/b/car-jks-uxl-sqf

Event Documentation / talk
28. January 2023–29. January 2023
10:00

Anatomy of a (Musical) Ethics Lab

We will present an in-depth report on our methods and discoveries in the first three Labs of 2022 at exploratorium Berlin’s yearly ‘Symposium / Open Space’, this year focusing on improvisation and ethics.

The schedule will be improvised on the spot!

Event Documentation
27. January 2023
23:05

ORF Zeit-Ton broadcast

A broadcast around Lab 3, featuring music from concerts with the klingt collective at Wien Modern in November 2022, and interviews (auf Deutsch) with Christopher A. Williams and musician Angelica Castelló.

Event Documentation / performance
27. January 2023–29. January 2023
20:00

Satellite Lab 1

A condensed version of our Lab opened exploratorium Berlin’s 2023 Symposium on the theme of ‘Improvisation und Ethik’, followed by conversation with participants and the audience (auf Deutsch).

Musicians:
Christopher A. Williams (US/AT): concept, direction, double bass
Carl Ludwig Hübsch (DE): tuba
Christoph Irmer (DE): violin
Nina Polaschegg (AT): double bass
Wolfgang Schliemann (DE): percussion
Sabine Vogel (DE): flute
Moderation: Mathias Maschat

Event Documentation / talk
25. January 2023
20:00

Get Your Groove Gone: Social connectedness and shared attention in ametric musical improvisation

Bergamin and Williams present a talk about (non-)groove in their experience at Lab 2 with the Splitter Orchester at the Groove Workshop 2023. Abstract below:

It is well-established that rhythm generates embodied senses of belonging in musical and non-musical contexts (Born 2011, Mater. Cult.; Gatt 2018, Routledge; Iyer 2018, OUP; Hamilton 2019, Midwest Stud. Philos.). Recent studies on entrainment (Cross 2009, Empir. Musicol. Rev.; Clayton 2012, Mus. Sc.), in musical performance particularly, support the view that rhythm forms a powerful medium of social connection. Rhythm also offers examples of ‘participatory sense making’ (Schiavo and De Jaegher 2021, Routledge) where – as an emergent phenomenon that recursively structures and influences performers’ decisions – it contributes to collective performance while retaining a sense of autonomy beyond the actions of any individual producers. These phenomena converge in the culturally-specific yet widely recognizable virtue of groove (Keil and Feld 2005, Fenestra; Doffman 2009, Open Uni.).

However, in experimental improvised music, where performative social connection is not only highly valued but often topicalised, groove is often optional, and is at times even actively circumvented. The practices of experimental musicians therefore raise questions about the specific function of groove in relation to other intersubjective musical structures, and the varieties of musicians’ experiences of music as an autonomous object.

In this paper, we discuss these questions via a case study of a large contemporary improvising ensemble. Drawing on in-depth interviews and musical analysis of live performances, we explore what constrains and structures musical choices in the absence of groove. We contrast the practice of ‘deep listening’ against the ‘flow’ of groove-based improvisation, and suggest that the bandwidth of individual choice is perhaps wider in experimental music. Nevertheless, other emergent rhythms and structures do arise spontaneously in ways that aren’t attributable to any one performer, and help reframe how we might understand the intersubjectivity and joint attention of musical performance.

We close by examining the correlation of these emergent structures with reported feelings of connection and togetherness, and discuss the implications for our understanding of autonomy, choice, and personhood during acts of musical co-creation.

News
13. December 2022

'Knowing by Singing' in American Anthropologist

The special section called ‘Knowing by Singing’ has just been published in the December issue of the American Anthropologist was edited by Dr Caroline Gatt, who recently joined the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, and her co-editor Valeria Lembo. The special Section includes an introduction by Gatt and Lembo, three articles by Carola Lorea, Stephanie Aubinet and Kelly Fagan Robinson, and commentaries by Fiona Magowan and Tim Ingold.
 
The special section also features the translation in British Sign Language of the article ‘Knowing by DEAF Listening: Epistemologies and ontologies revealed in song-singing’ written by anthropologist Kelly Fagan Robinson and translated by Helen Foulkes, a deaf BSL translator. 
 
This is the first time an article in BSL is published on American Anthropologist. The translation of the abstract was funded by the American Anthropologist and the Leverhulme Trust funded the article’s main translation.
 
You can access the BSL video translation and more info about the piece here: 
https://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/news/cambridge-researcher-involved-british-sign-language-translation-first-anthropological-journal

Event Documentation / encounter
21. November 2022–22. November 2022
19:30

Lab 3: the klingt collective at Wien Modern

The venerable Wien Modern festival hosts Encounter 3, our final event of 2022, with the Vienna-based klingt collective at Odeon theatre.

Monday’s performance will begin at 19:30 and be followed by a Q&A with musicians and researchers.

Tuesday’s event will commence with a roundtable discussion at 18:00, followed by the concert at 19:30. Our roundtable guests include philosopher Michael Wheeler, artistic researcher Deniz Peters, and members of the klingt collective.

As with all encounters, the concerts may vary radically, so attendance on both nights is strongly recommended!

https://vimeo.com/805579102/043ca683ad

Event Documentation / talk
02. November 2022
13:30

Introduction to (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics

Christopher A. Williams presents an introduction to the project to students at the Hochschule Osnabrück, Institut für Musik. Abstract below:

What do music and ethics have to do with each other? How does the phenomenon of improvisation tie them together? What can we learn about human life by studying experimental music? These are some of the many questions I, anthropologist Caroline Gatt, and philosopher Joshua Bergamin are currently thinking about in the context of a four-year interdisciplinary project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF, grant number ZK93) called “(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics” https://improv-ethics.net/. In this presentation, I will share some of our assumptions about this broad topic, outline our methods, and offer documentation from our first three (Musical) Ethics Labs with large improvising ensembles, which form the heart of the (creative) research.

Writing in progress
25. October 2022

Composing with (Improvising) People: A Paramanifesto

News
25. October 2022

Video: Lab 2 Roundtable, Berlin

We are pleased to share documentation of the round table held before the second concert that rounded off the (Musical) Ethics Lab 2. The speakers were Splitter musicians Steve Heather, Magda Mayas and Sabine Vogel, theatre and performance scholar Irene Lehmann, anthropologist Jonas Tinius, and (M)IE team Caroline Gatt, Joshua Bergamin and Christopher Williams. Akademie der Künst, Berlin 27 August 2022.

News
21. October 2022

Video: Lab 1 Roundtable, Trondheim

We are pleased to share documentation of the round table held before the second concert that rounded off the (Musical) Ethics Lab 1. The speakers were saxophonist Amalie Dahl, trombonist Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø from the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, philosopher and jazz expert Mattias Solli (NTNU), and (M)IE team Caroline Gatt, Joshua Bergamin and Christopher Williams. Dokkhuset, Trondheim, Norway 25 June 2022

News
19. October 2022

Video: Trailers of Lab 1 with Trondheim Jazz Orchestra

The first (M)IE Lab ran from the 16th to the 26th June 2022 with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra. We are thrilled to share with you trailers and photos from the concerts and roundtable.

Photos by Thomas Martius, filming by Christopher Hewitt and Thomas Martius, trailer editing by Thomas Martius.

Event Documentation / talk
07. October 2022–07. October 2022
14:30

Whoidentity Panel, musikprotokoll @ ARTikulationen

Gatt was invited to speak on the ‘whoidentity’ panel, which is a collaboration between ORF musikprotokoll and ARTikulationen. Other panellists are double bass player John Eckhardt, composer and sound artist Miya Masaoka, and composer and artistic researcher Pia Palme. Hanns Holger Rutz, co-organiser of ARTikulationen, moderated the panel.

The panel explored questions of the self and other in artistic collaborations.

How is identity defined and questioned in collaborative artistic and artistic research contexts? Between composers and performers, between performers or improvisers in an ensemble, and between artists in transdisciplinary work, creative proximities, distances and frictions arise out of underlying social identities. In this panel, musicians, artistic researchers, and scholars discuss creative conflicts in artistic work and research with a particular focus on collaboration, and how (and whose) identities might be questioned, changed, abandoned, or found in engaging with others.

ARTikulationen interweaves in-depth artistic research presentations, a festival character (intermezzi-performances), and a mini-symposium – this year on matters of intersubjectivity in artistic research. It is directed by Deniz Peters, co-directed and produced by Hanns Holger Rutz, and organised by the Doctoral School for Artistic Research (KWDS).

Photos by John Eckhardt

Event Documentation
17. September 2022–18. September 2022
10:00

Anthropology as life practice, Gatt at Interface Commission Workshop

Anthropologist Caroline Gatt has been invited as a keynote to present at the Interface workshop to share her experience of developing engaged approaches, including performative anthropological methods of scholarship. Interface is the Engaged Anthropology Commission of the Swiss Anthropological Association. Description below:

Over the last 4 decades ample arguments have been made in anthropology and beyond not only for the discipline to be more engaged in broader social matters, but also that any apparent disengagement is merely the product of discourse or ideology. Any knowledge is situated and always already embedded in a person’s experience and values (Haraway), even though the basis for much academic work is what Savranski has called ‘an ethics of estrangement’. The struggle between what are effectively two distinguishable epistemologies can be seen in the ongoing division in anthropology between ‘fieldwork’ and the complex of other aspects of academic anthropological work (including reading\writing, publishing\sharing one’s research, teaching, administrative work etc…). Sanjek refers to the latter as anthropology’s ‘career complex’. While epistemology, and more recently even ontology, are now routinely examined as part of fieldwork, the same cannot be said for the rest of this career complex. This leads to an epistemological split: In fieldwork anthropologists explicitly join in with the life and happenings all around them as the basis for learning and knowing; in ‘university work’ that ethics of estrangement, underpinned in anthropology by logocentrism, remains the dominant way of knowing.
There are at least two reasons why this split needs revision. First, logocentrism is an ideology of language tied to a hierachization of ways of knowing that privileges Western academic epistemologies. As part of imperial projects across the world it has been called upon to justify the subjugation of all sorts of knowledge, from Indigenous and Black ways of knowing, to female, Queer and even practical (as opposed to intellectual) ones. Therefore, if anthropologists want to work towards decolonizing their discipline they will need to revise the onto\epistemologies at work in their daily practices. Enabling different ways of knowing to inform not only the concepts anthropologists develop but also the way the discipline is practiced promises both a wealth of new insight but also a radical revision of the politics of knowledge the discipline is embedded in.
Second, while description and critique are essential ingredients in an engaged anthropology, to make these the aim is somewhat contradictory. What many studies show, consider studies with hunters and with performers, is that the epistemology at work in anthropological fieldwork is prospective and speculative, rather than retrospective. Reflection and critique are not separate aspects of a person’s ongoing responsiveness to their experiences. Although it is impossible to control how anthropological work is received by multiple and varied audiences, it is possible to embrace the speculative potential of anthropological work. Therefore, an alternative aim for anthropological work, one which does not split off the way of knowing of fieldwork from everything else, is to make proposals for life that learn from and draw on the myriad, grounded and rich experiences that are the bread and butter of anthropological research.
In this workshop\session I make the above arguments by tracing the relationship between a skilled practice and different ways of knowing by inviting you to try a couple of tasks to think through. I draw on my collaborative work with environmental activists, laboratory theatre practitioners and regenerative farmers\artists that have led me to working towards setting up a college of ‘regenerative scholarship’. The college is a dream which is a long way off, in large part because of challenges from within academia. As well as outlining the principles for this college, I describe some of these challenges, which are an illustration of the politics of knowledge I described above.

Event Documentation / talk
31. August 2022
16:00

When is 'my truth' true? Bergamin at the BSP

Philosopher Josh Bergamin will be presenting a paper at this year’s annual conference for the British Society for Phenomenology, which is being held in hybrid-format in Exeter and online. Abstract below:

When is ‘my truth’ true? Interpreting lived experience in phenomenological interviews

Many topics and methodologies for investigating subjectivity that have become widespread in the social sciences – for example, an emphasis on ‘lived experience’ – have been significantly developed by applied phenomenologists. Yet phenomenology’s own commitments often bring it into tension with giving full voice to its subjects.

For example, the ‘bracketing’ of prejudices may not take into account how those prejudices are constitutive of the subject herself. Furthermore, researchers are rarely trained to self-reflect on how their own history – cultural, sexual, professional – might colour their interpretation of a subject’s ‘bracketed’ responses.

A risk therefore is that a subject’s experience be distorted by the researcher’s own interests. But at the same time, the latter’s immersion in a broader investigative discourse offers insights to which their subject may have little access.

My paper examines this tension as it manifests in an ongoing interdisciplinary research project, working with improvising musical ensembles. Centred on the co-creation of a ‘hermeneutic circle’ between artwork, artist, and analysts, the project aims not only to render the research process itself transparent, but to consciously blur the distinction between researchers and research subjects, treating subjects as partners in a creative process in which all participants have a voice and an opportunity to learn/grow.

After briefly outlining our methodologies, I dig deeper into the problems of truth and interpretation that this process exposes, namely:

– At what points do ‘lived experience’ accounts reach limits that might be better informed by critical distance or historical consciousness?

– Is it essential to reconcile contradictions between levels of analysis? If so, how do we give weight to values like truth while doing justice to different lived realities? If not, can we avoid reperpetuating power imbalances between researcher and subject?

I examine these questions with reference to particular case studies, while suggesting potential generalisable conclusions.

Event Documentation / encounter
26. August 2022–27. August 2022
18:00

Lab 2: Splitter Orchester at Akademie der Künste, Berlin

Encounter 2, with Berlin’s Splitter Orchester, takes place at the Academy of the Arts Berlin, one of Europe’s oldest cultural institutions.

Friday’s performance will begin at 20:00 and be followed by a Q&A with musicians and researchers.

Saturday’s event will commence with a roundtable discussion at 18:30, followed by the concert at 20:00. Our roundtable guests include anthropologist Jonas Tinius, theatre and performance scholar Irene Lehmann, and Splitter musicians Steve Heather, Sabine Vogel, and Magda Mayas.

As with all encounters, the concerts may vary radically, so attendance on both nights is strongly recommended!

Event Documentation / talk
12. August 2022
14:40

The Participant Belongs to the Play, Bergamin at Southern Denmark University

On Friday 12th August, our philosopher Josh Bergamin will be presenting a paper to the Conference on the Present and Future of Hermeneutics and Phenomenology at Southern Denmark University in Odense. Abstract below:

The Participant is the Play: Ethical applications of a phenomenological case study in musical co-creation

Phenomenology and hermeneutics’ most influential shared legacy is undoubtedly their challenge to the Modernist conception of the human being. In particular, they have worked – via individual and social levels of analysis – to deconstruct the dominating picture of the human as a ‘rational individual ego’ in favour of a broader understanding of ourselves as embodied, historically-situated, socio-cultural beings.

At the same time, these complementary disciplines have given us the tools and frameworks to understand how our particular self-understandings have developed over time, offering a method to understanding our subjectivity on its own terms, yet without sacrificing scientific rigour.

A growing engagement with phenomenological and hermeneutic discourses – not only within the humanities, but increasingly in dialogue with ‘harder’ sciences of the mind and brain – therefore offers an opportunity to develop and apply their methodologies across disciplines and to particular problems that have not traditionally been seen within their remit.

In this paper, I discuss these themes in the context of an ongoing interdisciplinary research project into the ethical aspects of improvised music. Using Gadamer’s discussion of art as a jumping-off point, I argue that the relevance of his insights extends beyond aesthetics, and offers a richer way of conceptualising embodied practical consciousness, especially the collective forms that emerge during acts of dialogue and co-creation.

Specifically, I apply Gadamer’s discussion of rhythm to interpreting a series of phenomenological interviews with an ensemble of professional improvising musicians, aimed towards understanding the forms of attention and mindedness that guide their playing. Viewed through a hermeneutic framework, I suggest that their collective performance can be understood not simply as a collaboration of individuals, but as a living event which both shapes and is shaped by the human and non-human participants in the work.

Such a conclusion has important ethical implications, as it brings into question the limits of individuality, freedom and autonomy in collaborative settings. This, in turn, suggests a practical methodology for exploring ontological questions about intersubjectivity and mindedness. I therefore close by considering the implications of this case study for the role that applied phenomenology can make to the ethical and political debates that arise from ongoing questioning of our concept of the human.

Event Documentation / workshop
03. July 2022
10:00

Prelude to a Method

In this practical workshop at the Society for Artistic Research 2022 Conference at the Bauhaus University Weimar, we invited participants from any field to experience interventions currently being developed for use with musical ensembles.

Participants worked with us through a collage of performative exercises and simple scores inspired by artists and scholars such as Augusto Boal, Lawrence and Anna Halprin, Ben Spatz, and Pauline Oliveros. These are meant to bring specific ethical issues to the surface through practice. We then looked back over the performance work and discussed how it responds to questions such as:

  • (How) do interventions that increase the visibility of practical ethics affect participants’ aesthetic values, and vice versa?

  • (How) is the experience of being a self amongst others altered in the act of collaborative improvisation?

  • What aspects of listening – to both the human and other-than-human – in improvisational practice are conducive to (individual and collective) ethical goals?

The workshop was a useful way both to show our work process as well as learn from participants from different fields, as we weave together our working-processes-in-progress into a method that can be applied beyond music.

Event Documentation / encounter
24. June 2022–25. June 2022
19:00

Lab 1: Trondheim Jazz Orchestra at Dokkhuset

Encounter 1 kicked off in June, with TJO in their HQ on the harbor in Trondheim.

Friday’s performance consisted of two sets, exploring the band’s relation to the audience, the space, and each other, and was followed by a lively Q&A session with the public.

Saturday’s concert presented a very different work, and followed a roundtable discussion where our researchers discussed the project themes with TJO saxophonist Amalie Dahl, trombonist Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø, and local philosopher and jazz expert Mattias Solli from the NTNU.

Photos by Thomas Martius

Event Documentation
19. March 2022–20. March 2022
18:00

Williams invokes Ben Patterson at MaerzMusik

Christopher A. Williams plays Ben Patterson’s Fluxus classic Variations for Double-Bass on 19 March, followed by a talk on 20 March entitled ‘What’s Left of the Blurring of Music and Life? Some Pattersonian Speculations’, at a special program around Patterson organized by the MaerzMusik festival and SAVVY Contemporary gallery.

Talk abstract

Ben Patterson’s early work, as exemplified by his legendary 1961 piece Variations for Double-Bass, both embodies and challenges the notion of ‘lifelike art’ theorized by Happening inventor Allan Kaprow. Although the legacy of that notion has had a rough time recently, Patterson’s work remains fresh. Through my performative experience with Variations, I will explore why that is so, and argue that an understanding of the blurring of life and art — updated with Patterson’s help — might be more relevant to current problems in contemporary music than is obvious.

Click for more information on Variations

Event Documentation
14. March 2022–11. April 2022
19:00

Anthropology as Education

Caroline Gatt and Tim Ingold are convening the first studio of this year’s conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists. The Studio, called ‘Anthropology as Education’ runs from March 14th until 11th April and will explore what an understanding of Anthropology as an educational process might imply for both anthropology and education.

Education is literally a way of leading out into the world, where we are exposed to beings and ways of life different from those to which we are accustomed. If we take education in this sense, then Anthropology is educational through-and-through. But it is a sense that challenges the orthodox idea of education as the intergenerational transmission of authorised knowledge. Philosophers of education, from John Dewey a century ago to Gert Biesta today, have struggled to articulate a vision of education that would escape the stultification of the transmission model. A critical anthropology needs to catch up with this literature.

The introduction to this first studio is on March 14th 19:00 - 21:00 GMT and the closing session is on April 11th 08:00 - 09:00 GMT. In between the introduction and closing sessions participants can join in online talks, workshops, demonstrations, discussions, while also contributing to growing texts by commenting on the conference platform.

This year’s ASA conference is experimenting with an entirely novel format. Following an introduction, the conference will comprise five consecutive studios, each extending over a month, with opportunities for ongoing conversation on the virtual conference platform. Our intention is not so much to provide a forum for the presentation of finished work as to open up a space for conversation, with a view to advancing the topic under discussion. By the conclusion of the conference, then, we expect to be in a very different place from where we began. This, in turn, will be reflected in the eventual conference volume, which we conceive less as a collection of papers than as a multi-stranded compilation of voices and perspectives.

Deadlines for proposals

Studio number:
1: Friday 4th March
2: Friday March 18th
3: Friday April 15th
4: Friday August 19th
5: Friday September 16th

Writing in progress
24. February 2022

Drifting Lexicon

Responsibility for the content:

Dr. Christopher A. Williams
Senior Scientist
Künstlerisch-Wissenschaftliche Doktoratsschule
Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz
Maiffredygasse 12b/II
8010 Graz
Austria
christopher.williams@kug.ac.at
+43 316 389 4048

Responsibility for links:

Responsibility for the content of external links (to web pages of third parties) lies solely with the operators of the linked pages. No violations were evident to us at the time of linking. Should any legal infringement become known to us, we will remove the respective link immediately.

Data privacy:

This website links to a separate newsletter signup form operated by the third-party service TinyLetter. Only data that you explicitly provide when subscribing, i.e. your e-mail address, is stored for the period of your subscription, in order to be able to deliver the electronic newsletter. You may, at any time, unsubscribe by clicking the appropriate link provided in TinyLetter’s signup confirmation email.