Bodies as Transducers

Location: Orpheus Instituut, Korte Meer 12, 9000 Ghent

Date: 5-6 November 2026

Registration deadline: 20 October 2026

Artistic research operates at the intersection of bodies, materials, and concepts. From this perspective, musical performance appears as an intense transductive process through which energy, information, and materialities undergo continuous transformation. Musical objects emerge not so much as reproduction of fixed works, but as dynamic concatenations of infinite "musical particles"—micro-events of ongoing individuation where affective, material, and conceptual forces momentarily converge, only to dissolve and reconfigure elsewhere. For performers, each particle marks a threshold where muscular, sensory, and imaginative energies convert into sonic form; for composers, these particles constitute generative diagrams that invite further differentiation.

Drawing on Simondon's concept of transduction, Deleuze and Guattari's multiplicities, and Paulo de Assis's differential ontology of music and the notion of performative transductions, this conference examines how performance functions as a field of energetic reconfiguration where the body acts as the central transductive force and bodies, instruments, notations, and concepts mutually transform one another. We ask:

• How does the performing body, entangled with instruments, materials, notations, and concepts, generate transductive events? 
• What forms of knowledge and creative potential emerge when sound becomes an effect of mutual transformation among human and nonhuman agents?
• How might compositional practices—whether notated, improvised, or technologically mediated—harness or respond to such transductive dynamics?

We invite contributions that explore these questions through contemporary musical practices, examining how transductive encounters between bodies, materials, and ideas might reshape our understanding of creativity, collaboration, and music-making today.