Drawing on Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead, this chapter rethinks creativity through improvisation, musical performance, and calligraphy, proposing imagination not as innovation or design but as participation in an unfolding and continually self-transforming world.
Through speculative Irish avant-garde archives, neural-network improvisation, and machine-generated musical histories, this chapter explores how artistic practice can interrogate surveillance capitalism, personalised media environments, and the unstable structures of feeling through which contemporary life is increasingly mediated.
Exploring history, Romanticism, and political thought, this chapter rethinks historically informed performance and contemporary composition as convergent imaginative practices through which music mediates selfhood, temporality, collective experience, and possibilities for social transformation.
Medieval music manuscripts, GAN machine learning, and artistic research converge in an exploration of parafictional histories, historical plausibility, and the shifting boundaries between archival reconstruction, speculation, and musical meaning.
How repetition alters musical perception is central to this exploration of digital looping, suspended temporality, and the shifting relationship between live performance, recorded sound, and experiences of duration, memory, and becoming.
From Beethoven motifs to contemporary compositional practice, musical objects are reimagined as unstable and allographic entities whose meanings emerge through framing, perception, cognition, and the shifting relationships between notation, sound, gesture, and interpretation.
Case studies of the Stegreif Orchestra and in audible: The Baroque Cello Project examine how musical performance can explore improvisation, choreography, historical practice, and sonic experimentation through fluid relationships between bodies, technologies, listening, and imagination.
What if musical time is neither linear nor quantised? Drawing on hardcore music, Ligeti, Mingus, and rhythm theory, this chapter proposes “plastic time” as a non-Euclidean and anti-foundational approach to musical temporality.
The closing forum brings together perspectives from archaeology, historiography, and artistic research to discuss temporality, rhetoric, embodiment, heritage, phenomenology, and the imaginative reconstruction of pasts, presents, and possible futures.
Cite as
Diaz, Carlo, ed. Imagining the Non-Present: Thought Experiments on Rich Temporality in Sound. SONUS Series. Ghent: Orpheus Instituut, 2026. https://doi.org/10.47041/SONUS.2026.2.
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