Auto-Destructive Composition: Erasure and Remains in Transient Posthuman Musics (researcher: Eveline Vervliet)
This research project investigates auto-destructive composition as an artistic and epistemological practice. “Auto-destructive composition” is a term coined within this research to describe musical compositions in which processes of destruction, such as erasure and degradation, are embedded within the work itself, causing the composition to break down through its own performance. The “auto” in auto-destruction indicates that these destructive processes are internal to the composition, rather than imposed by an external agent. Auto-destructive compositions are inherently transient, challenging dominant ontologies of musical compositions as fixed and repeatable. To the best of my knowledge, this specific compositional framework does not yet exist, and the project takes responsibility for its development.
Results
The artistic results of this project will be situated between concert music, installations, and software. They will be made public through concerts and exhibitions. Intermediate results will be presented at artistic research forums and relevant international conferences.
Already throughout the research trajectory, a body of slowly growing online documentation will
become accessible. On this online platform, documentation is not preserved statically but allowed to change and evolve. The goal is to keep this archive alive also after the doctoral studies.
At the end of the project, the fully-grown documentation of the artistic body behind the project will
be complemented with a dissertation relating the artistic output to the reflective, conceptual and historical frameworks. In between, side essays or parts of the final text will be presented as academic papers, artist talks and contributions to artistic research journals, both nationally and internationally.
