Alessandro Cazzato

The study of bowed string instruments, despite their cultural significance, often remains confined to traditional disciplinary boundaries. ‘EC ⎻ Ex Chordis’ Journal addresses this limitation by creating an interdisciplinary platform that connects performance, education, and artistic research. Its purpose is to develop a holistic understanding of bowed string instruments by integrating diverse methodologies and fostering dialogue across fields.

The EC Journal’s main goal include bridging musical practice, pedagogical traditions, and scholarly research, thereby expanding the field of bowed string instrument studies. Key research questions include: How can interdisciplinary approaches deepen the understanding of bowed string instruments? How can a dedicated platform connect the practical, educational, and academic dimensions of bowed string instruments?
‘Ex Chordis’ operates on the hypothesis that a Diamond Open Access format can encourage innovative research and amplify appreciation for bowed string instruments within musical and cultural discourses. Using a descriptive methodology, the Journal analyzes its aims, editorial policies, and Open Access model, which features a double-blind peer-review process. Its target audience includes researchers, educators, and performers from various disciplines interested in bowed string instruments.

Aligned with international Open Science policies, including the Messina and Berlin Declarations and the principles of League of European Research Universities (LERU), ‘Ex Chordis’ promotes the widest possible dissemination of research. It seeks to challenge conventional analytical frameworks by uncovering connections between historical development, contemporary relevance, performance practices, and cultural narratives.

‘Ex Chordis’ aspires to be a key resource for the interdisciplinary study of bowed string instruments, fostering innovative research and providing new insights into their role in musical and artistic contexts, while ensuring broad international accessibility.

Christine Reeh-Peters

The ongoing digitization of all areas of everyday life and its visual storage in data clouds has become one of the symptoms of the post-human age since the coronavirus pandemic. In this context, the neologism ‘pandemic image’ refers to a concept that I am exploring as an artistic consequence linked to a shift in collective consciousness: humans no longer stand at the centre of their environment but are intertwined with their non-human cohabitants. Furthermore, the Earth is threatening to become uninhabitable. This awareness arose in parallel with a human-made shift of physical life into the digital realm – the contemporary phenomenon of human self-digitization. ‘Being in film’ is the current techno-ontological state of the human species, a digital being-in-the-world created by simple image communication software on our everyday digital devices. It means a new holographic or even spectral way of life in which human avatars merge with machine-generated AI images.

By giving examples from my own artistic research practice enquiring into this new type of digital audiovisuality and introducing what I call the ‘machinic spectre of film’, the idea of a possible spectral ethics of film is proposed.

Chiara Percivati, Valerio Lorenzoni, Davide Paolillo, Toon Chaerle, Jouke Verlinden

The Future Shock Orchestra is an interdisciplinary laboratory exploring digital lutherie and instrument augmentation, jointly developed by the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp and the University of Antwerp’s Design Faculty. Originating in 2023, the project explores how the study and practice of digital musical instruments (DMIs) can be integrated into the traditional conservatoire context, while also encouraging design students to expand their notion of value beyond functionality and economics toward creativity, ultra-personalization, and digital augmentation.

Over three years, the lab has united students from both institutions in intensive collaborative modules. Working in small interdisciplinary teams, participants design and build new digital instruments using sensors, microcontrollers, actuators, CAD, 3D printing, and sound synthesis tools. Each prototype undergoes iterative testing and culminates in collective performances, with twelve instruments documented to date.

The laboratory introduces students to the creative and technical ecosystem of DMIs, equipping them with new skills while—more importantly—fostering a context where artistic and technical creativity can converge and mutually enrich one another.

Nayoung Jung, Edwin van der Heide, Fons Verbeek

Cranking has been used to generate power or as a controller for a game device, but its usage to control light has not been actively implemented. To discover its potential for interaction design, this study explored cranking both as a direct form of control and as an input of an interactive dialogue between the light and us.

Through iterative prototyping (research-through-design), we explored various setups — Arduino combined with discrete and continuous sensors mounted to either a crank handle or a grinding wheel. By mapping cranking direction and speed to light parameters such as brightness, colour, and movement, the study examined how physical input influences system response and user experience. The designs were critically evaluated across five aspects: controllability, repeatability, understandability, intuitiveness, and engagement.

Findings highlight how physical characteristics like inertia influence control and immersion. The small crank allowed precise directional input but limited speed control due to low inertia, while the grinding wheel’s momentum supported sustained speed input, enriching interaction. When wheel speed triggered autonomous light movement, a two-way feedback loop emerged, fostering embodied negotiation between user and system.

More-Than-Switch demonstrates cranking’s potential beyond mechanical input, emphasising tactile engagement and embodied feedback to promote richer, more participatory human-technology interactions.

This study is my graduation thesis for MSc Media Technology at Leiden University in 2025. It was supervised by Edwin van der Heide (e.f.van.der.heide@liacs.leidenuniv.nl) and Dr. Fons Verbeek (f.j.verbeek@liacs.leidenuniv.nl)

Camilla Scholz

Bias in technology is rooted deeper than subjective data. Many sources of bias can be found in the history and creation of technology, embedded in the code itself. The culture surrounding Computer Science has historically strengthened discriminatory values, being mostly male-driven and inaccessible. At the same time, through its now ubiquitous and mathematical nature, we tend to extend mathematical rationality to algorithms, equating data directly with information and ignoring what is lost and added in translation.

This artistic research challenges the seeming objectivity of code by examining the culture and values surrounding source code. By translating goals and actions into source code, meaning is added depending on the context, making it inherently subjective. The context surrounding programming languages decides what is programmable, how, and who is allowed or able to use them.

This interplay between culture and code is explored through a new esoteric programming language, feel.exe. In feel.exe, you code visuals by writing about your feelings, creating a tension between intention and interpretation as it questions what the main medium for expression is. Harnessing the subjectivity of emotions, it acts as an artistic intervention that highlights the personal nature of code, imagining a new coding practice.

Michaela Mikulková

The study examines the evolving nature of artistic practice in the context of generative artificial intelligence (AI), analysing how its integration into visual art challenges established notions of authorship and creative agency. As AI tools become increasingly embedded in artistic workflows, the boundaries between human and machine-generated creation are growing more complex and fluid.

The research investigates the motivations driving contemporary artists and professionals to engage with generative AI and how such engagement redefines the artist’s role. It differentiates between AI-generated, AI-assisted, and AI-augmented works, emphasizing human intention as a fundamental criterion for recognising artistic authorship.

Employing a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews with experts working with generative AI tools, the study addresses three central questions: What motivates artists to integrate AI into their creative practice? How should curatorial practices adapt? And who is acknowledged as the author of artworks created with AI?

Findings reveal a spectrum of motivations and highlight the importance of human agency, transparency, and critical reflection. The concept of a “post-authorship paradigm” emerges, positioning cultural resonance above origin and framing AI as an active cultural agent in contemporary creativity.

Vicky Panossian, Salma Yassine

This research raises the question of access to memories of landscapes of war zones using AI to revisit the viewers’ destructed hometowns. It is based on a larger PhD project with 16 interviews conducted by Vicky, which follows the question of the social role of material culture of war and conflict zones for Arabic-speaking migrants in the UK.

Together with Salma, this presentation is based on a co-designed theoretical framework that brings in Salma’s research on queer time and space. This project focuses on distorted memories from war zones, where the linearity of memory is hindered by trauma. This poster illustrates our work in understanding how photogrammetry, predominantly through applications such as Google Maps, is used to access otherwise inaccessible war zones for immigrants from those regions.

The poster follows the role of agency in the (de)construction of spatial nostalgia that is fundamentally based on access. It raises the question of alternative mapping through AI versus that of (inherited) memories of landscapes. The presentation concludes by highlighting whether there is an emancipatory means of access that can be practiced through structures of documentation.

Gàbor Egri, Endre Papp

In a time when cultural institutions face both technological transformation and growing sustainability imperatives, understanding how these forces intersect is more urgent than ever. Our research, conducted by ReStageGroup, presents the first large-scale study in Hungary mapping how performing arts institutions perceive and respond to sustainability challenges—not only as environmental concerns, but as structural, economic, social, and cultural shifts.

We surveyed over 160 theatres, orchestras, dance companies, and cultural centres across Hungary to understand how sustainability is integrated into institutional strategies, creative practices, and public communication. While nearly 85% of respondents consider sustainability important, implementation remains fragmented. Financial constraints, lack of internal expertise, and systemic barriers hinder institutions from translating intention into action.

Crucially, the research reveals that sustainability in the performing arts cannot be addressed in isolation from broader shifts in governance, funding models, and societal expectations—many of which are accelerated by technological convergence. Despite operating within a resource-scarce and structurally rigid environment, many institutions express openness to innovation and collaboration, highlighting an emerging readiness for transformation. This transformation, however, requires not only internal change but also external frameworks that connect cultural and technological development.

Our findings contribute to the REACT conference’s mission by revealing how sustainability functions as both a cultural and technological challenge. They underscore the need for interdisciplinary strategies—where culttech, policy innovation, and knowledge-sharing mechanisms can support cultural actors navigating this shift.

While our data is rooted in Hungary, the underlying patterns—between values and action, capacity and constraint—resonate across contexts where culture is undervalued in innovation ecosystems. By mapping current practices and barriers, we aim to inform a new generation of sustainable, digitally aware cultural policies and institutional models. We invite dialogue with researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of sustainability, cultural governance, and technological transformation. Based on the findings of this online research, a further qualitative survey is planned in autumn 2025 to explore the most relevant issues in greater depth.

Dario Savino Doronzo

This contribution examines La Notte della Taranta as a case study of how large-scale cultural events can activate territorial regeneration, strengthen local identity, and promote sustainable tourism. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective that combines cultural studies, cultural economics, and spatial analysis, the research traces the evolution of the festival from a grassroots initiative to an internationally recognized cultural brand.

The study is based on a mixed-methods approach, including the analysis of tourism flows, interviews with local stakeholders, and ethnographic observation of event organization practices. Findings reveal that La Notte della Taranta functions as a catalyst for both symbolic and economic value creation, repositioning the Salento region as a cultural destination and contributing to the off-season diversification of the tourism economy. Special attention is paid to the festival’s digital outreach strategies, which enhance audience engagement and increase the visibility of intangible heritage, as well as to its integration of environmental and social sustainability practices.

The presentation also explores how this model might be transferred to other Mediterranean and European territories seeking innovative and inclusive development trajectories. This case offers a lens through which to understand cultural events not only as moments of celebration, but as strategic infrastructures for territorial transformation, social resilience, and cultural–technological experimentation.

Valentýna Landa Filípková

This research project explores how early interdisciplinary collaboration in higher education can help students develop a common language across design, science, and engineering — and asks what practical frameworks can support this process.

The project seeks to create an enjoyable and inspiring experience that motivates university students to collaborate across disciplines and explore environmentally responsible material design as a shared process connecting creative, scientific, and technical thinking.

Responding to the lack of intensive interdisciplinary practice and environmentally focused design education — not only at Czech universities but more broadly — the project develops and tests a universal workshop model designed to stimulate local dialogue, bridge gaps between disciplines, and help students experience collaboration directly, creating a safe, structured, and enjoyable setting to connect creative, scientific, and technical thinking.

Amanda Nelms

This poster explores third-year Honors students’ inquiry and application of Career Readiness and GenAI to implement solutions to challenges faced by non-profits in the community. University students are encountering the phenomenon of preparing for careers that have yet to be invented. While employers are eager to hire candidates who demonstrate Career Readiness competencies, a heightened focus on creativity and the ethical use of GenAI is necessary to compete in the workplace.

This poster will explore the intersection of creative inquiry frameworks, Guildford’s (1967) AUT and Osborn and Parnes (1953) CPS process, without the use of technology and again after exploring the ethical uses of GenAI in creative thinking. Students’ approaches to utilize creative thinking strategies to work towards a project identified by non-profit leaders in the community, while utilizing tech tools as a resource, will be explored.

Implications for course amendments and university-wide implementation of GenAI as a tool to increase creativity and Career Readiness to prepare graduates for the evolving culture-tech landscapes will be discussed. This poster invites dialogue on preparing graduates for emerging culture-tech landscapes through ethical, interdisciplinary innovation.

Emily Genatowski

As embodied artificial intelligence transitions from industrial labs into domestic environments, its presence extends far beyond tool-like utility to shape emotional, cognitive, and cultural experiences. This project investigates a year-long cohabitation with Tova, a humanoid AI companion, through the lens of cognitive psychology, affect theory, and critical ethnography. Centered on the research question, How does prolonged domestic interaction with an embodied AI influence attention, emotion, interpersonal boundary formation, and self-perception? this study leverages autoethnographic diaries, observational protocols, and semi-structured interviews to document human responses over time.

Methodology: A qualitative design supplemented by participant journaling, emotion-rating scales, and interpersonal boundary mapping. Real-time observations focused on routine disruption, anthropomorphic projection, and shifts in mood regulation.

Key Findings: Participants (myself and my community) reported a slight emergent sense of companionship alongside heightened self-awareness under perceived surveillance. Emotional regulation patterns shifted. Responses to Tova’s presence triggered both comfort and discomfort. Routines were reorganized around Tova’s movement and interaction cycles. Spatial perception changed: shared space was psychologically partitioned into zones of human autonomy versus AI presence. Many attributed personality and agency to Tova, creating hybrid relational modes: part-valued social other, part-programmed machine.

Wyatt Jones, Stiles Logan

The development of widely accessible generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT has drastically shifted the culture of higher education. Professors and students can now synthesize information from across the internet in seconds, which has given rise to new methods of learning, teaching, and cheating. How universities choose to manage this development will significantly impact the quality and equity of instruction and learning available therein. Research and discussion around the topic of generative AI are now necessary and important for the future of education, as well as the workforce.

This poster’s research centers around the question: How do professors and students feel about the use of generative AI in educational environments, specifically in the university setting? Professors and students in the highly AI-impacted fields of Mathematics, Data Science, and Computer Science were anonymously surveyed to determine their understanding of generative AI’s capabilities, AI’s importance to their current and future careers, and AI’s value in education.

The findings showed that students and professors both recognized technological limitations to generative AI, as well as its importance to their careers. Surprisingly, students had a more negative perception of AI’s application to education, while professors viewed its introduction to education positively.

Jez Coram

This poster details educational strategies for teaching storytelling through post-digital and polycrisis cultures. The conceptualisation of post-digital and polycrisis are used as 21st-century provocations to expand the teaching of storytelling practices beyond more traditional forms of digital storytelling. How do we tell stories through interconnected crises and pervasive technological cultures? Here, pedagogical strategies that are rooted in digital technological exploration of narrative are developed into transdisciplinary creative critical praxis for aesthetic, political, technological, and sociotechnological critique.

The poster is based on my research and scholarship as co-lead of the Polycrisis Research Network at the University of Leeds, UK, my practice-centred inquiry into radical essaying in art and media, and my teaching of the module Digital Storytelling at undergraduate level in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. The poster outlines critical reflection on my teaching strategy and proposes a move from privileging pedagogy to a heutagogical approach that offers individual learning pathways, based on rhizomatic learning and the principles of heutagogical theory. These pathways offer students a hypernegotiation of storytelling praxis in the teaching space, simulating a hypernegotiation of storytelling in a polymediated world.

Carolin Vedder

The study examines the evolving nature of artistic practice in the context of generative artificial intelligence (AI), analysing how its integration into visual art challenges established notions of authorship and creative agency. As AI tools become increasingly embedded in artistic workflows, the boundaries between human and machine-generated creation are growing more complex and fluid.

The research investigates the motivations driving contemporary artists and professionals to engage with generative AI and how such engagement redefines the artist’s role. It differentiates between AI-generated, AI-assisted, and AI-augmented works, emphasizing human intention as a fundamental criterion for recognising artistic authorship.

Employing a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews with experts working with generative AI tools, the study addresses three central questions: What motivates artists to integrate AI into their creative practice? How should curatorial practices adapt? And who is acknowledged as the author of artworks created with AI?

Findings reveal a spectrum of motivations and highlight the importance of human agency, transparency, and critical reflection. The concept of a “post-authorship paradigm” emerges, positioning cultural resonance above origin and framing AI as an active cultural agent in contemporary creativity.

Cyran Aouameur, Javier Nistal

Recent advances in widely accessible generative AI for music have largely focused on producing complete compositions at the push of a button. While these systems demonstrate significant technical progress, they often sideline a musician’s expertise and creative agency, favoring instantaneous results geared toward non-expert users. This raises a key question: how can generative AI be designed to support, rather than replace, established music-making practices?

Our model, Diff-A-Riff, approaches this question by prioritizing compatibility with musicians’ established workflows. Built on a diffusion-based architecture, Diff-A-Riff generates motifs and stylistic variations in response to user-provided input such as melodies, chord progressions, or rhythmic fragments. Instead of dictating outcomes, it offers raw material that can be shaped, remixed, and integrated seamlessly into digital audio workstations. The design of the model creates new ways of controlling the generation of musical content via a context-and-target pair, and its core concept—adaptability—allows musicians to remain at the creative center of the process.

We also outline potential applications of Diff-A-Riff across different creative contexts. In production, it could serve as a sketching tool to break creative blocks by suggesting new variations, and in improvisation, it could act as a responsive co-performer in real time. These envisioned scenarios highlight the model’s central aim: to act as a collaborator and catalyst for exploration, rather than an autonomous creator.

By situating generative AI inside established workflows, Diff-A-Riff contributes to broader discussions at REACT about the role of technology in reshaping artistic practice. It highlights how cultural values—such as respect for human agency, iterative experimentation, and collaborative authorship—can actively inform the design of new creative technologies, offering a model for more inclusive and artist-centered AI systems.

Mārtiņš Priedītis

This research presents a novel methodology for AI-driven generative data sculpture as an innovative tool for interpreting and actualizing cultural heritage. The approach — machine hermeneutics as artistic practice — integrates semiotic analysis, emotion mapping, and mid-air haptic feedback to translate large-scale archival data into multisensory, emotionally resonant experiences. Drawing on over 260,000 digitized photographs from Latvian national collections, the project transforms mediated collective memory into a living, interactive sculpture where audiences can both see and feel historical emotions through haptic–visual mapping.

Developed through a mixed-method framework combining adaptive grounded theory, case study analysis, and machine hermeneutics, the system employs AI models (FER, YOLO, BERT) in Google Colab and real-time visualization via TouchDesigner and SonicSurface.

The work addresses major ethical challenges such as digital colonialism, decontextualization, and tactile amnesia, while aligning with UNESCO’s AI and digital heritage ethics. Recognized with cum laude honors at RISEBA University (2025), this research establishes a foundation for further doctoral studies and international collaborations. Beyond its academic value, it demonstrates strong commercial potential for museums, archives, and cultural heritage institutions, as well as large-scale public installations, architectural media art, and NFT-based digital heritage projects.

Giulia Guarnaccia

This research explores how contemporary art can destabilize technopower by producing counter-narratives at the intersection of digital systems and material realities. It begins with urgent questions: Can technologies be reappropriated as counter-tools? Can art still fracture dominant narratives and disrupt the present? In an age marked by overconsumption and extractivism, what creative strategies and practices can be developed?

The investigation unfolds along two main trajectories—understood not as binary paths but as rhizomatic constellations that interweave and overlap. The first concerns algorithmic resistance, where artists critically engage with infrastructures such as facial recognition systems and generative AI datasets through disobedient and subversive practices. These works expose the structural reproduction of power within computational systems while deforming their aesthetics.

The second trajectory focuses on material reuse, foregrounding the ecological and geopolitical implications of digital capitalism and colonialism. Here, artistic practices address extractivism as a colonial legacy, re-engaging with land, matter, and memory to propose alternative relations with the environment.

Grounded in decolonial AI, media studies, and radical ecology, the research argues that the problem lies not in “technology” itself, but in the hegemonic structures that govern it. Art, therefore, must resist market-driven aesthetics and articulate speculative, embodied alternatives.

Alexander Grasser-Parger

This research examines the impact of openness, real-time collaboration, and social communication on collective creativity and decentralized teamwork in virtual design environments. Through academic workshops and public Web3/blockchain projects, distributed teams engaged in collaborative design using networked digital tools and participatory platforms, embracing CultureTech as a design medium. Academic settings fostered remote team formation and collaborative competence, while public case studies demonstrated broad community involvement via blockchain applications and NFT-minted environments. Over 200 participants contributed to real-time block-building, and community co-design efforts led to full-scale exhibition works. Easy-to-use decentralized software enabled inclusive participation, transforming anonymous contributions into sustained communities through active social media engagement. The findings reveal that decentralized, community-driven design processes expand authorship, nurture collaboration, and embed cultural value in co-produced artifacts. This convergence of design theory, educational practice, and CultureTech advances understanding of how virtual spaces and blockchain infrastructures support novel, participatory creative production.

Tilman Aumüller Cristopher Krause

Analogue role-playing games were, at a certain historical moment, the dreamscapes and testing grounds for today’s computer games—spaces where the logics of simulation and interactivity were explored before computers could perform them. This presentation draws on a four-year artistic research project on contemporary experimental role-playing games and asks: as computer games increasingly imitate human communication, could analogue RPGs once again serve as testing grounds for a future computer culture?
Experimental analogue role-playing games are not only based on prompts, like large language models, but also generate meaning through collective processes that remain connected to an unformed radical imagination. Could this experience help us redefine our relationship with technology amid ecological and social crises?

This presentation offers insight into an underexplored form of digital culture—one that challenges the prevailing focus on technology itself and reminds us that cultural transformation is driven not only by technical innovation, but also by dreams and collective desires.

Stefanie Alice Hofer, Katharina Roetzer

The ubiquitous integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday life profoundly shapes children’s understanding of technology, culture, and social norms. However, existing AI curricula in early childhood education (ECE) are limited and often overlook these socio-technological implications, focusing primarily on technical understanding.

We are developing CAiT (Cultivating AI-literacy with Tangibles) for children aged 4–8 — a period vital for acquiring social and cultural schemas. CAiT is a pedagogical model delivered via a tangible Augmented Reality (AR) application that combines digital and physical objects to facilitate playful, experiential learning grounded in a relational, embodied, and culturally responsive framework. It integrates principles from 4EA cognition, explainable AI (xAI), and human-computer interaction (HCI) to foster AI competencies through language use, embodied experience, and the enhancement of cognitive and social skills, with a core emphasis on inclusivity.

Employing a participatory design methodology, we co-develop the application with children, parents, and caregivers from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds. Empirical data is gathered through co-design workshops using qualitative methods such as ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews, and artifact analysis. This iterative process investigates how globally diverse narratives and cultural tools can effectively teach foundational AI principles in ECE. The outcomes aim to contribute to a structured, empirically grounded framework for AI literacy in early education.