International artists and academics join Catalyst MA students to explore artistic research at the 2025 MA Symposium

Artistic research is a powerful tool. It gives form to questions we can’t answer with data alone. It maps emotion, memory and culture in ways that traditional research cannot. At Catalyst – Institute for Creative Arts and Technology, it is the beating heart of our Master of Arts programmes in music and film.

Our annual Postgraduate (MA) Symposium is the culmination of this work — a public platform where Catalyst students and invited practitioners explore creative research across performance, sound, image, movement and theory. This year’s theme, Multipli-Cities, asked how place, identity and artistic practice intertwine across disciplines and borders.

Below are just a few glimpses into the work presented.

A platform for artistic research in action

Unlike traditional exhibitions or end-of-year shows, Catalyst's MA Symposium is a live research environment. It’s a space for sharing work-in-progress, testing ideas, and exploring new forms of knowledge production through performance, sound, film and installation.

At Catalyst, artistic research is central to our pedagogy. Our MA students are not only honing their creative craft, they are investigating complex questions through hands-on inquiry — from diasporic identity and decolonial practice to AI-human co-creation and participatory sound design.

The MA Symposium is where all this comes together — where personal, political and poetic work meets public dialogue.

A global network of artistic thinkers

Participants in the 2025 MA Symposium included emerging and established voices from Catalyst - Institute for Creative Arts & Technology and:

• Goldsmiths, University of London
• Aalto University
• University of the Arts London (UAL)
• University of the Basque Country
• UdK Berlin
• Gothenburg University
• Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF
• Newcastle University
• Manchester School of Art

Sonic geographies & embodied archives

How can we understand a city through sound? What does memory feel like in the body? These artists and researchers explored place and identity through sonic, poetic and performative methods — using listening, journaling, theory and storytelling to investigate how we experience and reconstruct space.

• Sounding the Moment – Claire Dickson (Catalyst, MA Creative Production: Music) - A hybrid performance-lecture and vocal diary exploring embodied journaling, daily sound practice and relational composition over 200 days.
• Sonic Sanctuaries – Martin Heslop (PhD in Creative Writing and Music, Newcastle University)- A spoken presentation drawing from walking, listening and writing workshops with newly arrived sanctuary-seekers in Newcastle, UK.
• The House of Asterion – Oguz Baran (Scientific Artistic Research, Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF) - An affective cartography of memory and space, weaving essay film, poetics and myth into a layered spatial narrative of personal and cultural memory.
• Expanding Artistic Practice in Filmmaking – Shoshana Simons & Kaixiang Zhang (Catalyst, MA Creative Production: Film & Music) - A collaborative, cross-disciplinary presentation reflecting on hybrid methodologies in experimental film, incorporating ambient music and ancestral research.
• Sonic Maze – Fede Ciotti (MA Computational Arts, Goldsmiths University of London) - An exploration of mark-making as performance, using Max/MSP and sensor-based interaction to translate drawing gestures into a live sonic experience.
• Relativity – Morgan Hickinbotham (Catalyst, MA Creative Production: Music) - A performance using field recordings from Icelandic glaciers to explore time scales of climate change and the shifting sonic landscape of our environment.

Film as collective reflection

These works use filmmaking as a research methodology, where narrative, collaboration, and experimental form converge to explore identity, memory, trauma and collective experience.

• Looking For The Self – Marta Tiana (Catalyst, MA Creative Production: Film) - A poetic docfilm exploring identity and perception through non-linear storytelling and immersive sound design.
• Esther, Rivke, Chayale – Shoshana Simons (Catalyst, MA Creative Production: Film) - A meditation on intergenerational Jewish identity, told through archival footage, poetic monologue and original music.
• LOVE – Paula Okuneva (Catalyst, MA Creative Production: Film) - A short personal reflection on the role of urban space in personal transformation, framed by themes of vulnerability, honesty and self-discovery.
• Beyond the Output – Chen Wang (PhD in Music, University of the Arts London) - A sonic collaboration between human voice and AI, exploring generative systems, authorship and the dynamics of creative feedback loops.
• Pay & Erase – Thais Mancini, Paula Okuneva, Shoshana Simons, Lia Lyutakova (Catalyst, MA Creative Production: Film) - A speculative satire examining how technology might erase historical crimes — and what we lose when we delete memory.
• Points of View – Benjamin Green (PhD by Practice, Manchester School of Art) - A collaborative documentary with secondary school students in the UK, reflecting on place, coming-of-age and poetic authorship through radical pedagogy.
• Echoes – Elisa Pereira Martins & Lara Khattar (Catalyst, MA Creative Production: Music & Film) - An experimental nonfiction film using archival audio and fictional visuals to explore war trauma, memory and sonic affect.

Public practice, ritual and resistance

Through installation, participation and embodied process, these artists investigate the politics of space, belonging and performative resistance — transforming rituals, landscapes and social behaviours into creative research.

• Cairene Car-Culture – Abla Abdelnaby (Master in Media Design, The German University in Cairo) - A sonic ethnography of Cairo’s traffic and automobility, investigating how urban structures reflect and shape social behaviours and soundscapes.
• Fence Choreographies – Anita Araujo & @de_colonialanguage (University of the Basque Country / Gothenburg University) - A collaborative project exploring how fences frame public-private relations and everyday movement through site-specific choreographies and public letters.
• Ritual as Multi-Dimensional Architecture – Kaixiang Zhang (Catalyst, MA Creative Production: Music) - A participatory music performance using ritual as a spatial framework for holding presence, form and collective improvisation.
• Reasons to Scream! – Juli Saragosa (Catalyst, Film Production Programme Certificate Lead) - A queer-feminist “audio-film” created by a collective of superhero*ines addressing gendered violence and power structures in the film industry.
• Dream Forum – Dárida Rodrigues (PhD in Performing Arts and Moving Image, University of Lisbon) - A participatory installation and dream lab that invites visitors into collective imagination and urban reflection using rest, ritual and storytelling.
• An Improviser's Guide to Film Music – Kostis Fanaras (Catalyst, MA Creative Production: Music) - A hybrid presentation linking open-form scores and improvisational film composition, rooted in jazz, photoplay and experimental sound.
• Transit Cadence – Federico Torres & Alp Seyrekbasan (New Media Design MA, University of Europe for Applied Sciences) - A performance reimagining the rhythm of urban life through audiovisual abstraction, language and speculative sound systems.
• Epistemic Empowerment through Participatory Music-Making – Ivan Chaparro (PhD in Music, UdK Berlin) - A decolonial approach to collaborative music-making with newly arrived migrant youth in Germany, exploring sound as a tool of agency and inclusion.
• Smoking Mirror: Aethereal Resonances – Juan Duarte (PhD in Arts and Design, Aalto University) - An immersive performance-lecture using weather data, obsidian mirrors and mythology to reawaken ecological listening and ancestral technologies.
• void•form – Zaak Kerstetter (Catalyst, MA Creative Production: Music) - A live generative performance system blending algorithmic sound, human touch and unpredictability — exploring presence, risk and sonic expression.

On multiplicity and artistic research

The Catalyst Symposium features contributions from internationally recognised artists whose practices reflect the depth and relevance of artistic research today.

Ariel William Orah — a Berlin-based Indonesian artist, community catalyst and co-founder of the Sōydivision collective — presents a keynote exploring transdisciplinary approaches to memory, identity and resistance within diasporic contexts. His work merges sound, performance and socially engaged practice to investigate how place is shaped by trauma, ritual and collective storytelling.

James Perley — an American composer, technologist and interactive media artist — joins Orah and others for the closing panel Multipli-cities in Artistic Research Practice. Together, they reflect on how artists navigate multiplicity through hybrid methodologies, collaboration and contextual awareness.

Their contributions frame the Symposium’s core question: how can artistic research serve as a tool for engaging with complex cultural, social and political realities?

Discover Catalyst's approach to artistic research

At Catalyst, artistic research is more than a teaching method — it’s a driver of cultural inquiry and transformation. As contemporary artists face global challenges such as displacement, identity, digital innovation and climate disruption, practice-based research becomes a powerful way to investigate, reflect and respond.

Through our Master of Arts in Creative Production (Music) and Master of Arts in Creative Production (Film), students develop the critical and creative tools to turn bold ideas into meaningful, socially engaged work. Whether working in sound, image, performance or installation, artistic research bridges theory and practice, connecting creativity with real-world impact.

The work doesn’t end with the MA Symposium. It’s part of a larger, ongoing ecosystem of learning through doing — supported by Catalyst’s Dolby Atmos Studio, in-house cinema, ensemble rooms, and 29 custom-built music production studios.

Explore how our MA programmes empower artists to investigate, collaborate and lead:

MA in Creative Production (Music)
MA in Creative Production (Film)