Experimental sense-making, musicking and no control: Performing black box music instruments
Organised Sound June 11, 2026 Thomas Grill, Arthur Flexer, Angélica Castelló et al.
In musical improvisation with custom-built, unfamiliar 'black box' instruments, performers and audiences face ambiguous agency, where the instruments function alternately as extensions of the body and as quasi-autonomous others. Players shift from reactive analysis to proactive improvisation, and the unpredictability destabilises traditional control, revealing improvisation as collective, participatory sense-making. The project shows how complexity and unpredictability foreground questions of agency, sense-making, and aesthetic experience, highlighting the emergent, co-creative agency of both humans and technological instruments.