Decentralised Creativity and Agential Systems in music

Topic

Artificial intelligence (AI), with its learning algorithms operating at scale, can mimic human creative agency, and blockchain technologies, through smart contracts, can augment works of art with more or less autonomous behaviours that correspond to the agency of human participants in socio-economic interactions. While such developments can destabilise traditional notions of ownership, provenance, and agency in musical practices, they can also empower artists. Those working creatively with sound and music are today increasingly becoming system-builders and curators of musical ecosystems, turning their focus from the creation of singular, standalone musical works (in any traditional sense of the term) to the design of systems capable of generating artworks. This suggests an evolving role of music-producing systems today: from fixed intellectual constructs and creative expressions to dynamic, more-than-human technological networks that not only actively participate in the production of artworks with increasing levels of agency, but which can themselves be considered as artworks that constitute generative, expressive assemblages. This shift is further emphasised in distributed contexts, where varying levels of automation blur the boundaries between human and non-human contributions, creating environments where agency is negotiated and shared across diverse actants.

Themes

We invite contributors to join us in exploring continuities, differences, and new challenges and opportunities arising in this context. Submissions to the conference should examine the intersections of music and sound art, technology, creativity, and philosophy, and focus on how the shifts outlined above redefine the roles of artists and the nature of musical practices. By exploring the implications of AI and/or blockchain technologies as agential systems, we aim to engage with emerging frameworks that rethink, challenge, or advance traditional perspectives on authorship, creativity, and collaboration.

We welcome proposals addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

1. Generative and Collaborative Systems: How learning algorithms and distributed networks enable new forms of generative music and sound-based art. Case studies of collaborations between human and non-human agents in artistic creation.
2. Decentralized Networks and Autonomous Works: The role of blockchain in supporting decentralized creative practices and enabling autonomous artworks. Explorations of smart contracts as a medium for embedding agency into artistic systems.
3. Agency and Aesthetics in Posthuman Creativity: How agency is redefined when systems actively participate in the creative process. Aesthetic implications of emergent and distributed systems in music and sound art.
4. From Frameworks to Agential Technologies: Historical precedents in systematic composition and their evolution into contemporary technological practices. How technological systems extend the boundaries of human creativity by operationalizing intellectual constructs.
5. Ethical and Philosophical Reflections: The ethical considerations of embedding agency into systems and artworks. Philosophical perspectives on ownership, provenance, and the decentering of human-centric creativity.

Submission guidelines

We encourage submissions from researchers, artists, and practitioners working across disciplines, including music, sound art, digital art, philosophy, media studies, and computer science.

• Academic/critical presentations (20-minutes) followed by panel discussions.
• Submission for exhibition (digital, web-based, screen-based, installation-based, etc.) and/or performance/concert setting. (Contributors to exhibition and performance events will also give a critical presentation about the artwork.)

Title + Abstract (300 words) detailing the relevance to the conference themes. A short biography (150 words max). Technical or spatial requirements, if applicable.Proposal submission deadline: June 15, 2025 Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2025