Short Abstract

Modulation Matrix invites you to co-create new rhythms of art, science, and community. Through playful orchesis and collective patching, participants turn modular synthesis into a living choreography—recalibrating power, relation, and future possibility.

Description

Let’s admit it: most academic conferences promise intellectual stimulation, but too often yield recaps of the all too familiar—rhetorical feedback loops dressed in shiny theoretical garb. For those who yearn for something more liberating, the Modulation Matrix offers a tonic: part experimental installation, part collective performance, part cheeky philosophical gambit. With choreographies in a synthetic surrounding that fuse poetry, music and dance to create new understandings, it celebrates traditional social gatherings like the Ceilidh or the Ancient Greek form of Orchēsis through virtual-analog synthesizers. In embodied engagements in dance, play and poetry, participants immerse themselves in their own rhythms and modulations through techno-material media, marrying libido and logos in a communal convivium.

Here, modulation is no mere instrument or metaphor machine, but a tangible apparatus affording affects, inspired by the seductive tangles of modular synthesis to experience jouissance. We are inviting attendees to patch, re-route, and experiment—not just with sound but with relation, thought and social possibility. The piece expands the logic of the synthetic thing called ‘modulation matrix’ to a human ‘thing’, which literally brings together. In doing so, we intend to make the choreography of current power relations, algorithmic feedback systems, and animate desire palpable, transforming often-invisible structures into opportunities for playful recalibration.

Participants become active performers engaging in attunement, experiencing relational sensitivity, and adaptive co-creation through joyful play. The work illuminates how rules and authority quietly direct collectivities, yet through intra-active intervention, it encourages moments of creative re-routing and imaginative future-making.

Here, the inclusive choreography of the Ceilidh becomes the living architecture for collective Orchēsis. Participants move, listen, reroute, and form new connections—an epistemic symphony in perpetual motion. Ultimately, Modulation Matrix is more than a conference diversion; it unfolds in presence to generate a happening of “more-than-now”, to embody worlds that could be otherwise.