Ivar Roban Križić – Performing Reflection: Improvisation in Word, Thought and Action
Free improvisation in music offers a unique field for exploring how artistic practices develop through embodied engagement, critical reflection, and collaborative experimentation. This research focuses particularly on the process of practicing within this context, tracing the evolution of specific exercises and preparatory methods. These were initially tested in collaborative projects with other musicians and later refined through a series of workshops. A central theme that emerged throughout this process is the role of reflection—both musical and verbal—as a vital component of artistic development. This realization culminated in the project Performing Reflection, which established a dialogical relationship between musical improvisation and reflective discourse. The work contributes to a deeper understanding of how structured exercises and reflective practices can support and expand the art of free improvisation, offering new perspectives on its preparation, pedagogy, and performance.
Ivar Roban Križić is a double bassist, improviser, composer-performer, artistic researcher, curator, and educator based in Vienna. His work spans contemporary jazz, experimental music, free improvisation, and interdisciplinary performance. He combines embodied improvisation with philosophical inquiry and technological experimentation, developing performance setups involving feedback systems, custom electronics, and various extensions of the double bass.
He completed a Doctorate in Artistic Research at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, focusing on the epistemology of free improvisation, tacit knowledge, and critical reflection in performance. He previously studied jazz double bass at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, as well as German Studies and Philosophy at the University of Zagreb.
His recent and ongoing artistic research concentrates on the relations between improvisation, difficulty, embodiment, self-sabotage, cognition, and interactive technologies. This includes collaborative work in ensemble-based composition, AI-mediated improvisation, and long-term explorations of performer interaction. His theoretical background draws on phenomenology, cognitive science, critical improvisation studies, and distributed or relational models of creativity.
As a curator, he runs the symposium series Perspectives on Improvisation, which connects approaches from dance, electro-acoustic music, pedagogy, instrument building, and critical theory. He teaches courses on improvisation, artistic research, and reading at both the mdw and the MUK, and has given workshops and lectures at institutions in Vienna, Graz, Linz, Oslo, and elsewhere in Europe. His pedagogical work emphasises reflective practice, heterarchical learning, and his constants/variables model for improvisation.
His artistic output includes solo and ensemble performances, lecture-performances, research-creation formats, and technologically augmented works that combine musical performance with theoretical reflection and documentation.
Supervisors: Tasos Zembylas, Thomas Grill, Peter Herbert, Burkhard Stangl
Karl Salzmann – To Start from Scratch
In the project To Start from Scratch the record player is used as an apparatus and a starting point for further investigations. To Start from Scratch is therefore both a title and a method.
The project is currently divided into three sub-areas: while at the beginning of the project the focus was on researching and re-evaluating historical facts about modifications and performance practices with the gramophone (including Hindemith, Toch, Moholy-Nagy), over time the focus shifted to observing contemporary artistic practice with the medium of the record player. Through a variety of experimental settings, both installative and performative in nature, I have been able to carry out autoethnographic research as well as phenomenological investigations into the practice of other artists working with the turntable. Another area of the research, which is also an essential component of all the previous sub-areas, is the materiality of sound. Here, the materials of the recording media (including PVC and shellac) are at the focus of a critical examination of their economic and ecological aspects.
The materiality as well as the apparatus and the artistic practices are always considered and examined as relational in the project. I use strategies such as participant observation, autobiographical narration and dense description. In order to convey the content – especially that of materiality in the sense of auditory information, the reflection and documentation of the project is conceived in the form of audio-papers, sculptural and audio-visual objects, among other things.
Supervisors: Hans Schabus, Thomas Grill, Annegret Huber, Alexander Damianisch