Art and Creativity

I have used “barefoot shoes” for more than a decade. Only occasionally, I wear something else. It started with a pair of Vibram five fingers, but after family complaints about the weird-looking toes, I moved on to various types of “normal” minimalistic shoes, such as the ones from Vivo Barefoot. Yesterday, I wore a pair of Birkenstock sandals and immediately noticed how strange it felt when I started my daily standstill session. I felt it impacted my stance; I swayed more and felt less grounded. By coincidence, I was interrupted halfway through the session and decided to stop my standstill and start over again. Then I took the opportunity to switch to a pair of barefoot shoes for the new session. I immediately noticed how different it felt to stand still with a thin versus thick sole. This relates to why I wear barefoot shoes in the first place. ...

Today, I am starting up my new research project AMBIENT: Bodily Entrainment to Audiovisual Rhythms. I have recruited a great team and today we will have our first meeting to discuss how to work together in the coming years. I will surely write much about this project on the blog. For now, here is a quick teaser to explain what it is all about:

I have just been involved in a new committee that will advise on national research infrastructure in Norway. I guess my appointment to this committee is partly based on my experience with building up a medium-sized infrastructure on my own, the fourMs Lab. In addition, I lead the infrastructure board of the Department of Musicology and am a member of the e-infrastructure committee of the University of Oslo. The following text is based on some thoughts on infrastructure needs from a humanities perspective that I presented in a meeting. ...

We presented the installation Strings On-Line at NIME 2020. It was supposed to be a physical installation at the conference to be held in Birmingham, UK. Due to the corona crisis, the conference went online, and we decided to redesign the proposed physical installation into an online installation instead. The installation ran continuously from 21-25 July last year, and hundreds of people “came by” to interact with it. I finally got around to edit a short (1-minute) video promo of the installation: ...

Life is always full of challenges, but those challenges are also what drives personal development. I am constantly reminded about that when I see this picture, which was made by my mother Grete Refsum when I started in school. I think the symbolism in the image is great. The eager child is waiting with open arms for an enormous ball. Even though I am much older now, I think the feeling of starting on something new is always the same. Starting school, starting university, starting a new job, starting a new project. It is always a feeling of something large and unknown that is approaching. ...

Open Science is on everyone’s lips these days. But why don’t we use the term Open Research more? This is a question I have been asking regularly after I was named Norwegian representative in EUA’s Expert Group on Science 2.0 / Open Sciencecommittee earlier this year. For those who don’t know, the European University Association (EUA) represents more than 800 universities and national rectors’ conferences in 48 European countries. It is thus a very interesting organization when it comes to influencing the European higher education and research environment. ...

As Head of the Department of Musicology for the last four years, I have been acquainted with the inner workings of the University of Oslo (UiO). Before, I mainly looked at the university from the perspective of a researcher and educator. Now I have been involved in issues at all three “levels”: department, faculty, and central. I have also collaborated a lot more with all parts of the administration: studies, research, IT, economy, communication, archive, and HR. In general, I am impressed by what is going on “behind the scenes”. But there are also some challenges with the way things are currently organized, which I believe hinders progress. In this blog post, I will elaborate on some of these topics. ...

The year started off with my second daughter being born on 23 January. She is a lovely little person, but I have come to realise that the saying “one is like none, two is like ten” is not so far from the truth… Adding to the picture, I started as Head of Department of Musicology in February. This has been both extremely interesting but also very challenging. Even though I have been leading various organisations and groups in the past, this is my first official leader job, and the learning curve has been rapid: getting into budgeting, human resource management, strategic planning, etc., and having my calendar focused around weekly leader group meetings at the Faculty of Humanities, and the monthly board meetings. ...

From 2007 to 2011 I had a part-time research position at the Norwegian Academy of Music in a project called New Instruments for Musical Exploration, and with the acronym NIME. This project was also the reason why I ended up organising the NIME conference in Oslo in 2011. The NIME project focused on creating an environment for musical innovation at the Norwegian Academy of Music, through exploring the design of new physical and electronic instruments. We were three people involved in the project, percussionist/electro-improviser Kjell Tore Innervik, composer Ivar Frounberg, and myself, and we had a great time together in creating and performing with a number of different new instruments. ...

Yesterday, I posted a blog entry on my TimeLapser application, and how it was used to document the working process of the making of the sculpture Hommage til kaffeselskapene by my mother. The final timelapse video looks like this: Now I have run this timelapse video through my VideoAnalysis application, to see what types of analysis material can come out of such a video. The average image displays a “summary” of the entire video recording, somehow similar to an “open shutter” in traditional photography. This image allows for seeing what has been moving and what has not been moving throughout the entire sequence. ...