GAPPP: Gamified Audiovisual Performance
and Performance Practice

Marko Ciciliani – Head of project

Head of Project and principal investigator Prof. Dr. Marko Ciciliani (CRO/DE) is a composer, performer, researcher and audiovisual artist based in Austria. The focus of Ciciliani’s work lies in the composition of performative electronic music, often in audiovisual contexts. Light- or laserdesigns are often integral parts of his compositions. More recently he has also included live-video in his compositions, by making the manipulation of images part of an extended instrumental design. The artistic combination of sound and light was also the topic of his PhD research that he completed at Brunel University London in 2010.
It is characteristic of Ciciliani’s compositions that sound is not only understood as abstract material but as a culturally shaped idiom. The exploration of a sound’s communicative potential is as much in the foreground of his work as its objective sonic quality. Ciciliani’s work is characterized by a conceptual approach in which aspects of classical composition, sound and media-studies play tightly together.
The different “genres” in which Ciciliani’s music can be found are reflecting his manifold artistic activities. His music has been performed in more than 35 countries across Europe, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.

It has been programmed by festivals and concert series of electronic experimental music like Experimental Intermedia/NYC, Club Transmediale/Berlin, SuperDeluxe/Tokyo, NowNow Series/Sydney, Ibrasotope/São Paolo or Findars/Kuala Lumpur; just as much as by festivals for post-avantgarde music as Wien Modern, Ultraschall Berlin, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Maerzmusik, ISCM World Music Days and many more.
In 2009 Marko Ciciliani was recipient of the prestigious Villa Aurora Stipend, a three-month artists residency in Los Angeles. He received numerous project-residencies at STEIM/Amsterdam, ESS/Chicago, ICST/Zürich, Mittersill/Austria and ZKM/Karlsruhe. In 2015 Ciciliani has been granted funding for a 3 year artistic research project titled “GAPPP – Gamified Audiovisual Performance and Performance Practice”. It is funded as part of the PEEK program of the Austrian Science Fund and will run from 2016-19.
Ciciliani is full Professor for Computer-Music Composition and Sound Design at the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) of the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. His primary fields of research are audiovisuality and performance practice of electronic music.
Ciciliani has been invited as coach to the multidisciplinary course LabO in Antwerp in 2013 and 2015 and was its artistic director from 2020-2021. In 2014, he taught at the “Summer Courses for Contemporary Music Darmstadt” as part of the IEM's studio residency. In 2016 and 2018 he was re-invited to teach as official tutor and artistic researcher.
www.ciciliani.com

Barbara Lüneburg – Key researcher and performer

Key researcher and violinist Prof. Dr. Barbara Lüneburg (DE/AT) is a performing artist of international reputation in the fields of contemporary music, violin, viola, electric violin and multimedia. Her arts based research focuses on the creative potential of performance practice in new music with an emphasis on collaboration, creativity, relation performer-audience and charisma (trait approach, as a social process, dramaturgical approach and theatrical perspective). For her doctoral studies at Brunel University London, she explored theories from media sciences and music sociology as well as psychology and creativity research for their uses in arts practice. She built theoretical concepts usable in performance and art (coding), applied the process of theoretical sampling and drew comparisons between performance situations in different countries, continents and socio-cultural contexts applying the steps of Grounded Theory.

In GAPPP, she continued her research on collaboration and performer-audience relation. In Barbara Lüneburg’s function as artistic director and manager of ensemble Intégrales (from 1997-2012), an internationally performing chamber music group for contemporary music, she has gained invaluable experience in management, acquisition of funding, PR and leadership, which will come to the benefit of this project. Lüneburg is Professor for Artistic Research at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz/Austria.
www.barbara-lueneburg.com

Andreas Pirchner – Key researcher, musicologist

Researcher Andreas Pichner (AT) is a musicologist and visual designer with a research focus on audio-visual dependencies and the aesthetics of algorithmic and generative art and music. He received a diploma in media design from Hochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd and concluded his musicological studies with Richard Parncutt, Werner Jauk and Elena Ungeheuer with a masters thesis on Iannis Xenakis. He is currently following a PhD programme at Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg with Elena Ungeheuer.

Pirchner works as a lecturer for creative programming at the Kunstuni Linz, and teaches media technology and applied informatics at Ortweinschule Graz. He is a founding member of the study group “music | media | publishing”. In GAPPP he works in the role of a systematic musicologist with a focus on sociology and music psychology and is apart from general theoretical and methodical reflections mainly responsible for preparing, conducting and analysing the interviews with composers, and audiences of GAPPP. In addition to his academic activities he pursues his creative practice in the arts and design.
andreaspirchner.com

Susanne Sackl-Sharif – Key researcher, musicologist
(until August 2017)

Researcher Dr. Susanne Sackl-Sharif (AT) is a musicologist and sociologist with research focuses on audiovisual media, gender studies, popular culture, qualitative research methods, and political participation. She completed her PhD in systematic musicology and cultural sociology with distinction at the University of Graz in 2014 and won the “Gabriele Possanner Award 2015” as well as the “Josef Krainer Award 2015” for her Phd thesis “Gender – Metal – Video Clips”. 

Since 2009, she works as a lecturer for empirical methods, gender studies, popular culture, and sociology at the University of Graz, the University of Salzburg, the University of Klagenfurt, and the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. She is a founding member of the study group “music | media | publishing” and since 2014 a board member of the “Österreichische Gesellschaft für Geschlechterforschung”.

From 2012 to 2014 she worked as a research assistant in the joint FWF-DFG project “After Bologna: Gender Studies in Entrepreneurial Universities“ in Graz and Berlin; from 2014 to 2015 she explored political participation processes for the research institute “Spectro” (Vienna). She was a team member of GAPPP until August 2017 and mainly worked as a music sociologist conducting and evaluating interviews with composers and audiences.
www.sackl-sharif.net

Simon Katan – Digital art

Visiting Artist Simon Katan (UK) is a digital artist with a background in music and a strong preoccupation with games and play. His work incorporates hidden mechanisms, emergent behaviour, paradox, self-reference, inconsistency, abstract humour, absurdity and wonder. He makes software which creates musical odysseys through exploring animated worlds and design games in which the players unwittingly become performers of bizarre and occasionally daft rites. 

He completed his PhD in audio-visual co-dependency in music at Brunel University in 2012 and won a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention for his work 'Cube with Magic Ribbons. He has exhibited and performed in the UK and Europe at festivals and conferences including Imatronic (Germany), Beam Festival (UK), Sonica (Slovenia), ICMC (Slovenia), Spitalfields Festival (UK), Sonorities (Nthn Ireland, and Borealis Festival (Norway). Simon has recently undertaken residencies at and collaborated with organisations including the Royal Opera House, Camden Roundhouse, Tyneside Cinema, and ZKM Karlsruhe. As well as lecturing at Goldsmiths University Simon carries out research into embodied audio visual interactions to improve performing arts accessibility for disabled practitioners.
www.info.simonkatan.co.uk

Kosmas Giannoutakis – Composer

Visiting Artist Kosmas Giannoutakis (GR) is a composer who creates game pieces, pure acoustic or with the integration of digital media.
He explores the fundamental nature of music making, which is related to the act of playing and gaming. He is interested in bringing in focus the interactive relationships of the performers, by not intending a static, preconceived sounding result of a fixed performance but a dynamic transformation of the performance itself which leads to multiple performative outputs. His pieces exhibit indeterministic behavior, since the performers interact following game rules, evaluate aurally the game results and change their performance status, enhancing the Liveness factor of the performance since decisions are made here and now. www.kosmasgiannoutakis.eu

Christof Ressi – Composer

Visiting Artist Christof Ressi (AT) is a composer and studied instrumental compostion, jazz, and electronic music.
Christof Ressi was born in 1989 in Villach (Austria). After studying cello as a child, he picked up the piano and electric guitar and developed an early interest in Classical, Jazz and Rock music. He did his Bachelor's and Master's degree in classical composition with Gerd Kühr and a Master's degree of jazz composition and arranging with Ed Partyka at the University of Arts in Graz. He currently studies computer music with Marko Ciciliani at the IEM in Graz.

Ressi's artistic work comprises various different styles and fields of music, such as New Music, Jazz or experimental electronic and audio-visual music. He regularly composes music and designing live-electronic setups for theater and dance productions. Additionally he works as an arranger in various musical idioms, like Pop, Jazz and music for TV and cinema. His special interest lies in multimedia art and computer programming. His music has been performed in Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Mexico, Japan, China, UK, USA and South-Africa. Ressi has won two Downbeat Student Music Awards for his Jazz arrangements and compositions.

Martina Menegon – multimedia artist

Martina Menegon (Italy, 1988) is a multimedia artist and lecturer of Virtual Reality and Interactive Arts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and at the Art University in Linz. She also regularly collaborates with Klaus Obermaier and Stefano D’Alessio, teaching multimedia tools for interactive arts and creating interactive performances and installations. Through multimedia installations that spawn between interactive, virtual and mixed reality art, Martina Menegon uses digital media to re-materialise the body after it has been transferred into a virtual state, creating an intimate and complex assemblage of physical and virtual elements that explore the contemporary self and its synthetic corporeality.
martinamenegon.com

Stefano D'Alessio – new media artist and composer

New Media artist, composer and educator Stefano D’Alessio (Italy) focuses on interactive performances and installations merging different media through technology and paying special attention to time-based composition. His research addresses the digitisation of the human in new technologies and the virtual representations of the “real”, his work involves the human body as a subject for analysing coding and decoding processes of the real/physical, in to digital/abstract, questioning the ephemeral limits between machine and body, artificial intelligence and consciousness. Stefano composes electronic and electro-acoustic music often collaborating with dance and theatre directors. Stefano D’Alessio has been regularly teaching new media for interactive arts assisting Klaus Obermaier at bachelor, master, and post graduate master courses at the IUAV University and lecturing at the Linz University of Arts and at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. Since 2010 he has been collaborating with Martina Menegon and Klaus Obermaier on multiple art projects.
cargocollective.com/stefanodalessio