Watch the recording of the seminar here:

Title: Abstracting Instruments as Structures and Trajectories (Oliver Bown) and Creating Communal, Collaborative DMIs with Repurposed Objects (Anthony Marasco)
Time: 3pm UK time, 3rd August 2026
URL: YouTube Livestream

OPEN SEMINAR #013 (from 15:00 UK time)

Title: Abstracting Instruments as Structures and Trajectories

Presenter: Oliver Bown

Abstract: Historically, instruments can be considered configurations of the physical universe (structures), that are then interacted with to make music (trajectories). Computing technologies, and more generally machine technologies, enable systems that creates their own trajectories, and that can have their structures reconfigured in live performance. AI systems further this machine dynamism. This playful talk explores how we can conceptualise musical objects in terms of the dynamic interplay between structures and trajectories.Presenter

Biography: Oliver (Ollie) Bown is a British researcher and musician based in Australia, where he is professor at the School of Art & Design at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, He is co-director of UNSW’s Creative Technologies Research Lab (CTRL), an interdisciplinary academic group comprising creative artists and musicians, designers, media theorists and cultural studies researchers who together research technology in its relation to creative work. Ollie’s research explores the nature of creativity in the arts, how technology is a site of artistic creative exploration, and how AI technologies are transforming creative fields in their ability to automate aspects of the creative process.

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OPEN SEMINAR #014 (from approx. 15:30 UK time)

Title: Creating Communal, Collaborative DMIs with Repurposed Objects

Presenter: Anthony Marasco

Abstract: The past decade has seen an expansion of NIME research centering on repurposing and recontextualizing preexisting hardware as a tenet of the digital musical instrument (DMI) design process. Projects and studies on the environmental and artistic benefits of circuit-bending and recycling hardware put a spotlight on what Masu et al. define as “the O (for 'Old') in NIME”: a push against the inherent drive to produce DMIs that feature new, cutting-edge technologies in favor of resurrecting older systems and components. As an artist and instrument designer, my work explores what we gain by building new interfaces for shared, collaborative music making out of familiar items while still embracing contemporary tools for computer-aided composition and networked music performance. In this talk, I'll discuss two projects of mine that ask audiences and performers to confront and investigate how their relationships with nostalgic objects color how they experience artworks that mix entertainment with media archeology.

Presenter Biography: Anthony T. Marasco is a composer, sound artist, and instrument designer who takes influence from the aesthetics of today's Digimodernist culture. His music and installations showcase both emerging technologies and recontextualized everyday items to highlight their creative flexibility, combining interactive sensor systems and cyber-hacked circuit-bent hardware with modular synthesizers and tabletop sound computers. An internationally recognized artist, Marasco’s works and research have been featured at NIME, SEAMUS, ISCM’s World New Music Days, the Networked Music Festival, MoxSonic, ICMC, the Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium, the Electroacoustic Barn Dance, Mise-En Festival, and more. Marasco was the grand-prize winner of the 2013 UnCaged Toy Piano Festival's Call for Scores, a resident artist at Signal Culture Experimental Media Labs, and a winner of the American Composers Forum Philadelphia’s “If You Could Hear These Walls” project. He’s received commissions from andPlay, WIRED Magazine, the Elm Trio, smol ensemble, Phyllis Chen, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, Toy Piano Composers, and Maureen Batt. Dr. Marasco is an Assistant Professor of Music Composition and Technology and the Director of the Electronic Music Studios and the MSU Future Instruments Lab at Michigan State University.