Timbral Frame : Expanding artistic identity through the process of creating an installation-performance

Abstract

This thesis investigates how reinforcing individuals' most meaningful ways of practice, and collaborative creativity, can affect the artistic outcome of a project and the formation of an artistic identity. It demonstrates how my personal artistic practice as a woodwind player, composer, and improviser is strengthened by traditional handcrafts, sound-oriented multidisciplinary practices, and interdisciplinary collaboration. The main body of the text is centered around the process of creating an installation-performance timbral frame in collaboration with three other multidisciplinary artists. The text reflects, articulates, contextualizes, and justifies the methods that I have used artistically in my personal work, and as a facilitator of an interdisciplinary collaboration.

Throughout the study I have referred back to my personal work with the modified instrument, as it offers tangible results to the research question investigating the influences on personal artistic identity. During the process of this study, the role of interdisciplinary collaboration reinforcing human connection grew bigger, becoming an integral part of the research.

Findings of this study shows how artistic identity and artistic practice exists in a reciprocal and mutually influential iterative cycle, and how collaboration taking a starting point from implementing meaningful forms of expression, and connectivity, can result in artistic outcomes that trace shared ownership between the creators. Further outcomes of this research include installation-performance, compositions, improvisations, collaborations, instrument modifications, techniques, multichannel loudspeaker system, sculpture, and a documentation of this process.