In my master’s project I investigated an interdisciplinary musical practice based on my artistic and educational background in art, music and philosophy. I chose one concept per discipline: non-idiomatic improvisation from the field of music, the non-productive attitude from art, and pluralist aesthetics from philosophy. I used the three concepts to find materials for my project: both musical materials, for example live improvisation and recordings, and non-musical materials, for example photographs and texts. The materials I found made up the components of a performative piece of music and became musical through contextualisation and metaphor. The photographs, recordings and texts were collected from different periods in my life and represented my interests, relations and values during my different educations. The ensemble that I assembled to perform the music consisted of people that were close to me on both a personal and professional level to emphasise that the music was based on my educational background and personal narrative. Initially I was less interested in the sonorous outcome of my project and I would have accepted it based solely on its interdisciplinary motivations. During my studies I realised that involving musical parameters to a greater extent enhanced the interdisciplinary and non-musical aspects of my project. An important learning outcome of my project was that focusing on the musical particularities of my artistic practice strengthened its interdisciplinary character. This is something that I wish to investigate further as a continuation of this project. / <p>Seduced by (a) last year (Larsson 2020) </p><p>Andreas Hiroui Larsson: composition, cymbals, drums, text, and voice</p><p>Johan Jutterström: saxophone, speaker, USB, and voice</p><p>Johanna Arve: beamer, speaker, USB, and voice</p>

The Rococo period in the arts, flourishing mainly from about 1710 to about 1750, was stylistically unified, but nevertheless its tremendous productivity and appeal throughout Occidental culture has proven difficult to explain. Having no contemporary theoretical literature, the Rococo is commonly taken to have been a final and degenerate form of the Baroque era or an extravagance arising from the supposed careless frivolity of the elites, including the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Neither approach adequately accounts for Rococo style. Naming the Rococo raises profound issues for understanding the relations between conception and production in historical terms. Against the many difficulties that the term has involved in accounting for an immense but elusive cultural movement, this thesis argues that some of the chief philosophical conceptions of the period clarify the particular character and significance of Rococo production. Rococo production is here studied chiefly in decor, architecture, and the plastic arts. This thesis also makes an extended general argument for the value of intellectual history. Rococo style is a group of visual effects of which the central character is atectonicity. This is established by a synthesizing overview of Rococo ornamental motifs. Principal theorists of post-Cartesian thought have failed to see how these distinguish Rococo style from both Baroque and Enlightenment culture. The analysis addresses the historical narratives of Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault, Deleuze, and others about Baroque and Enlightenment culture. The core historical claim of this thesis is that Rococo atectonic effects are visual forms of the anti-materialist, idealist ontology of George Berkeley and of the metaphysics and ontology in the early work of Giambattista Vico. Close readings of important passages from works of both philosophers published in 1710 develop the relationship between atectonics and idealist ontology. Both men rejected the Baroque hierarchical cosmology in favor of finitude as the key to human understanding. The readings center on the issue of causality, including Berkeley's views of the perfect contingency of the world and on Vico's theories of truth and ingenium. A reading of Diderot's critique of the Rococo, which led the reaction to it, shows that he recognized the power of idealist ontology in the Rococo cultural production. The larger force in the rejection of Rococo is the emergence of the sublime as a morally fearful feature of physical nature. Montesquieu's aesthetic work also shows the transition to a more rigidly determined view of existence, which was expressed but constrained in the little-recognized lattice motif in Rococo arts. The result of these readings is the influence during and after the Rococo period of the concept of continuous creation, in which the memory and imagination of the human subject relays God-given powers of creation into the production of culture. Continuous creation also suggested a human capability to animate material nature. Rococo style displays this as a pre-cinematic effects that represent the non-material, non-causal deep structure of reality.

Augusto Boal developed Theatre of the Oppressed as a way of using the symbolic language of the dramatic arts in the examination of power relations in both the personal and social contexts. Boal understood that symbolic realities directly influence empirical reality and that drama, as an art form that employs the narrative and the event, serves as a powerful interface between symbols and actuality. In the dramatic process, the creation and the environment from which it emerges are inevitably transformed in the process of enactment. These transformations manifest in the context of power relations - in the context of the receptors ability to make decisions and to engage in actions, and the communicators ability to influence the receptors opinions and behaviour. This thesis will examine two different practices in which symbolic realities have been utilised in the context of human relations of power. Primarily, this thesis examines the theory and practice of Theatre of the Oppressed as it has developed.