The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Technology [research group]
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PROGRAMME FORMAT
Stage I | Articulation and Presentation | October 28, 29 2026
Stage I consists of two online seminars devoted to the presentation and critical articulation of participants’ practices, current projects, technological environments, and principal research questions. Each participant or group introduces work in a form appropriate to the project: compositions, performances, instruments, interfaces, software, code, recordings, installations, diagrams, prototypes, texts, datasets, documentation, or other relevant materials.
The aim is to make each practice’s operative conditions fully visible. Participants will be invited to identify the technologies on which their work depends, the concepts and models those technologies embody, the problems the project seeks to address, and the artistic, social, or intellectual stakes it claims. Discussion will attend to the relation between stated intentions and technical procedures, between interface design and user agency, between system behaviour and aesthetic outcome, and between a project’s internal logic and the infrastructures through which it becomes possible.
Moderated peer response will help participants distinguish productive questions from premature conclusions, clarify terms that remain unstable or ambiguous, and identify technological assumptions that might otherwise pass unnoticed. By the end of Stage I, each participant will have established a provisional account of the philosophical grounds of their practice and a focused set of questions for further artistic, conceptual, and technical development.
Stage II | Critical Inquiry and Development | January 13, 14, 2026
Stage II consists of two online seminars devoted to collective inquiry into the grounds, methods, scope, and possible functions of philosophy of music technology. Rather than treating music technology as a neutral domain of innovation, the group will examine how technologies frame musical thought, distribute capacities, establish norms, and shape what can be produced, perceived, remembered, and valued.
Inquiry may encompass ontological questions concerning the identity of instruments, works, files, systems, and events; epistemological questions concerning what technological practice knows and how such knowledge is produced; aesthetic questions concerning mediation, form, experience, and judgment; ethical questions concerning responsibility, consent, extraction, and consequence; political questions concerning ownership, access, standardization, surveillance, and control; ecological questions concerning materials, energy, maintenance, and waste; and institutional questions concerning which technologies become legitimate, available, or invisible.
Participants will develop compositions, performances, devices, software, writing, and artistic-research projects through sustained discussion and critical reflection. This stage strengthens the project’s conceptual precision, methodological coherence, practical awareness, and public communicability. Each participant will formulate provisional trajectories for further development, including assumptions to be tested, concepts to be refined, systems to be revised, dependencies to be examined, and forms of presentation to be prepared before the public residency.
Stage III | Public Presentation and Exchange | June 14-25, 2027
The programme culminates in research presentations, lectures, demonstrations, performances, and public discussions at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia.
Participants will present the questions, methods, technologies, propositions, and outcomes of their research in forms suited to their practices. Public presentation is understood as a further stage of inquiry: an opportunity to test arguments, demonstrate systems, expose technological choices to scrutiny, encounter new responses, refine language, and consider how artistic research changes when it enters a shared discursive and performative space.
The residency enables participants to situate their projects in relation to debates, develop new intellectual and professional connections, and contribute to the formation of an international discourse on the conditions and possibilities of music technology today.
DATES
MENTORS
PROGRAMME FORMAT
RESEARCH PREMISE
WHY THE NEW LEXICON?
CENTRAL QUESTIONS
WORKING METHOD
PARTICIPANT VALUE
WHO THE PROGRAMME ADDRESSES
TOWARDS MULTIPLE PHILOSOPHIES OF MUSIC TECHNOLOGY
APPLICATION
APPLICATION FORM AND
PARTICIPATION FEES
The New Lexicon program is produced by .abeceda Institute
.abeceda [Institute for Research in Art, Critical Thought and Philosophy], a public-benefit NGO and non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing contemporary artistic practices and critical inquiry. Through its innovative programmes, .abeceda has gained international recognition as one of the leading platforms for contemporary music and artistic research in the Adriatic region and across Europe: www.abeceda.io