Orpheus Instituut announces Keynote Speakers for Bodies as Transducers
News March 12, 2026Conference taking place in November 2026 in Ghent
Organised by Diego Castro-Magas, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Orpheus Instituut, this conference explores how bodies, materials, and ideas interact in contemporary music-making. We are pleased to announce four keynote speakers.
This conference examines performance as a field of energetic reconfiguration in which the body functions as a central transductive force. It addresses a range of concerns, including radical embodiment, notation and materiality, diagrammatic thinking, artistic epistemology, differential ontology, and collaborative ecologies, while also drawing on Eugenie Brinkema’s radical formalism as a reorientation of affect theory towards form, structure, and relation. In this light, bodies, instruments, technologies, notations, and concepts are understood not as separate domains, but as forces that mutually transform one another in contemporary music-making.
Eugenie Brinkema
Eugenie Brinkema is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, status-only Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, and affiliated faculty at the University of Amsterdam. Her research in film and media studies focuses on violence, affect, sexuality, aesthetics, and ethics. In dialogue with critical theory and continental philosophy, she argues for the speculative value of formalist readings in texts ranging from horror films to works of the new European extremism, from gonzo pornography to contemporary photography. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Angelaki, Camera Obscura, Criticism, differences, Discourse, film-philosophy, Genre, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, LIT, New Literary History, qui parle, and World Picture. Her books include The Forms of the Affects (2014) and Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022), both published with Duke University Press. She is currently working on a book about color.
Clara Maïda
Clara Maïda is a composer who develops an interdisciplinary research and artistic creation at the intersection of music composition, psychoanalysis, Deleuze/Guattari's philosophy, and nanosciences. She investigates the relations between sonic structures and unconscious psychic processes, a ramified and kinetic musical writing and neuronal networks, sound rhizomes, elastic and metamorphic conceptions of space–time. She also explores in her writing and through electronics the hybridisation sound/noise, instrumental/urban machinic sounds. Guest Composer of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the DAAD in 2007, she has received international awards and grants, with works commissioned, premiered, and broadcast worldwide. Her practice extends across instrumental and electroacoustic composition, multimedia installations, transdisciplinary publications, and invited lectures internationally.
Scott McLaughlin
Scott McLaughlin is an Irish composer and free-improviser (cello and live electronics), and Associate Professor in Composition and Music Technology at the University of Leeds. His work explores the physical materiality of sound, contingency, and indeterminacy in performance, often drawing on experimental and spectral approaches alongside dynamical systems theory and philosophy. Through practice-led research, he investigates resonance, perceptual ambiguity, and recursive feedback processes in constraint-based open-form composition. McLaughlin’s music has been widely performed internationally, and he was awarded an AHRC Leadership Fellowship (2019–21) for The Garden of Forking Paths, a project on composing with the indeterminacies of the clarinet.
Aaron Cassidy
Aaron Cassidy is a composer and conductor best known for his influential work with multicolored, graphical, tablature notations that prioritize the physical, bodily, and mechanical aspects of sound-production in music, alongside his more recent work exploring the notation of ‘non-geometrical’ rhythm, which untethers speed, duration, and meter from traditional concepts of pulse. His compositions have been presented in hundreds of performances across 29 countries and can be heard on 12 commercial CD releases. He is Professor of Composition at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover, where he also serves as Director of Incontri – Institut für neue Musik.
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Our open call closes on April 27, 2026.
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