The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) has approved two “PEEK projects” associated with the mdw, after last having done so back in 2010. The acronym “PEEK” denotes a category of project that aims to further the development and appreciation of the arts—with a central priority being art-based research and enhancing the role it plays within the research field at large. The two mdw-associated projects just approved will be financed by the FWF to the tune of nearly € 400,000 each.
Kreative (Miss)Verständnisse – Methodologien der Inspiration (Creative (Mis)Understandings – Methodologies of Inspiration), led by Johannes Kretz, head of the mdw’s Department of Composition, Electroacoustics, and Tonmeister Education, is devoted to developing new ways of dealing with inspiration. “We seek to encourage the creative (mis)understandings that arise from the interaction between research and artistic practice and between European folk music and art music as well as non-Western styles, in particular those of indigenous minorities in Taiwan,” says the project head. An interdisciplinary and transcultural methodology of music creation is to be developed, thus fuelling dialogue-based, decentralised knowledge production in the context of artistic interaction.
Verrottende Klänge – über den zeitlichen Verfall von digitalem Audio: sich dem Verderben hingeben (Rotting Sounds – On the Degradation of Digital Audio Over Time: Giving In to Decay), led by Thomas Grill, aims to study aspects of digital data’s deterioration and the causes, mechanisms, and effects of degradation-related phenomena in the context of digital sound. One aim here is to raise awareness of the materiality, fragility, and socio-economic contextuality of digital data while dispelling the myth of digital audio and video data’s losslessness. Furthermore, a central concern in dealing with “the omnipresence of decay” is to “unearth latent degrees of freedom pertaining to artistic practice”.
