Symposium Session 1

Abstracts

Erin Demastes – Found Objects, Play, & Creativity

To play is to work within the boundaries of a given idea, object, material, or technology and to explore both its potential for growth and development and its limitations. A key similarity between play and improvisation is the need for a framework, concept, boundary, or context that the artist or researcher can work within or against. Play and improvisation allow for a multiplicity of ideas to arise from a source and can foster a deeper understanding of the medium being explored.

One of the main differences between using found objects and musical instruments in a composition is that found objects have uses and cultural associations from outside of the musical setting they are placed in. By playing with the boundaries set for these objects by their designed uses, affordances, and their cultural associations, new methods and considerations for composing and performing arise. Many composers of found object experimental music play with audience expectations either with the design of the object or with its cultural associations, and this can create new ways of structuring the tension and resolution that time-based art relies on.

Gerard Ryan – Improvising Without Outcome: Listening to the Infrastructure of Consumption

What does it mean to improvise with systems that do not listen back?

This talk explores a sound-based research practice that listens to the hidden signals of consumer infrastructure—contactless payment terminals, barcode scanners, automatic doors, surveillance gates, and wireless networks. These systems produce emissions not intended for human ears, yet they govern the texture and timing of everyday consumption. Using wide-band electromagnetic receivers, I conduct site-specific soundwalks that capture these emissions and render them audible. The work does not seek to interpret or explain what is heard. Instead, it stays with the signal—registering the presence of operational systems through sonic contact.

Framed as an “anti-method,” this approach treats listening not as a path to insight, but as a form of proximity to systems we usually ignore. It improvises a method in which uncertainty, friction, and non-response are not problems to be solved, but conditions to be inhabited.

In this presentation, I will reflect on how this work connects with critical improvisation studies—particularly its interest in acting without guarantees, thinking beyond control, and dwelling within systems that offer no easy response.

Cameron Clarke – Lead by Landscape

This talk looks at how a series of site specific performances and installations  developed through ceding artistic control to outside factors such as audience,  location, ambience and interruption. Through taking the compositional process outside of the sheltered confines  of the studio incidental factors that arise from developing work in public space go on to play a key role in the process and outcome of the work created.

Delivered in collaboration with IF 2026, with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada