[codex] I. 

 

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PROGRAM STRUCTURE

 

The residency unfolds through three consecutive stages. Each has a distinct function within the overall inquiry, moving from the articulation and genealogical mapping of participants’ practices toward critical analysis, practice-led experimentation, collaborative development, and public presentation.

 

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Stage I. | October 2026
2 online seminars

 

The first stage establishes the residency’s shared artistic, genealogical, and discursive foundations.

 

Participants introduce their practices, training, materials, prototypes, and central questions. These presentations establish a shared context for understanding the craft, design, acoustic, electronic, computational, performative, scholarly, and cultural positions represented across the cohort.

 

Participants identify the concepts, models, materials, tools, technologies, teachers, workshops, institutions, platforms, communities, and experiences shaping their work. They also articulate how they learned to recognize originality, authenticity, excellence, usability, expressivity, reliability, relevance, and success.

 

The seminars initiate an exchange of perspectives and help participants define their guiding questions. Attention may focus on relationships between inherited models and individual invention, the embodied and material operation of paradigms, the historical construction of criteria, and the edition’s conceptual framework.

 

Stage I includes:

– 2 online seminars
– Presentation of participants’ instrument-making and development practices
– Introduction of formative paradigms, sources, lineages, technologies, and contexts
– Presentation of prototypes, instruments, design questions, or initial research proposals
– Exchange among inventors, designers, makers, developers, performers, and mentors
– Discussion of originality, authenticity, excellence, instrumentality, and knowledge
– Identification of historical, material, technical, conceptual, and institutional questions
– Initial mapping of individual and collective residency inquiries
– Introduction to source, substance, and structure
– Q&A

 

The purpose of this stage is not to finalize projects, but to establish a precise basis for their development. Participants begin to articulate which paradigms their instruments inherit, reproduce, contest, or combine, and how shared inquiry might transform their methods, designs, and understanding.

 

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Stage II. | December 2026
2 online seminars

 

The second stage moves participants from genealogical mapping toward sustained critical analysis, iterative prototyping, practice-led experimentation, and comparative evaluation.

 

Participants present prototypes, instruments, drawings, models, schematics, circuit diagrams, code, recordings, performance tests, material studies, research propositions, or other documentation. The group engages these materials through listening, demonstration, discussion, comparison, testing, diagnosis, and reflection.

 

This stage examines instrumental paradigms before the on-site residency. Depending on each project, discussion may address materials, fabrication, acoustics, mechanics, electronics, software, sensing, mapping, ergonomics, notation, embodiment, playability, timbre, latency, durability, repair, sustainability, accessibility, ownership, or relationships between design intentions and musical outcomes.

 

Prototype–practice analysis is approached not as verification of finished objects, but as an encounter among historical frameworks, material behavior, embodied interaction, technical decisions, and criteria. Participants examine how instruments make assumptions tangible, which genealogies and exclusions they carry, and where resistance, failure, ambiguity, or unforeseen behavior may become artistically productive.

 

Stage II includes:

– 2 online seminars
– Presentation of developed instruments, prototypes, research materials, and documentation
– Collective listening, demonstration, testing, diagnosis, and analysis
– Discussion of instrumental paradigms, sources, materials, systems, techniques, and criteria
– Examination of design decisions and their artistic, social, or institutional implications
– Practical and critical feedback from participants and mentors
– Reflection on each inquiry’s conceptual, material, and methodological premises
– Identification of questions requiring further prototyping, testing, or study
– Consideration of practical, technical, ethical, safety, and access requirements
– Development of initial fabrication, performance, and presentation strategies
– Preparation for the on-site residency and festival presentations
– Continued engagement with source, substance, and structure
– Q&A

 

By the conclusion of Stage II, participants should understand the historical, artistic, material, technical, and logistical conditions required on site. Projects need not be complete; they should be sufficiently articulated to enter intensive fabrication, testing, performance, comparison, revision, refinement, and public presentation.

 

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Stage III. | June 2027
On-site residency at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week

 

The final stage takes place in Bled, Slovenia, as part of the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week.

 

During the on-site residency, participants work in an intensive environment for instrument development, artistic research, experimentation, testing, performance, and public presentation. Materials developed online enter shared practice, where prototypes are examined under concrete acoustic, spatial, technical, embodied, performative, institutional, and interpersonal conditions.

 

The on-site phase is not merely the delivery of completed objects. Making, testing, discussion, experimentation, and performance remain forms of inquiry. Participants may discover that assumptions require clarification, redesign, repair, revision, or abandonment. Encounters among materials, mechanisms, code, bodies, sounds, spaces, and audiences may reveal historical, formal, technical, ethical, or conceptual possibilities.

 

Participants develop projects through repeated building, adjustment, calibration, listening, demonstration, performance, discussion, and collective decision-making. Individual instruments retain distinct identities while contributing to shared laboratories, comparative tests, collaborative experiments, and public conversations.

 

Stage III includes:

– On-site residency at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week
– Direct exchange among inventors, designers, makers, developers, performers, and mentors
– Artistic research and practical development of instruments and systems
– Genealogical analysis, listening, demonstration, and practice-led testing
– Individual and collaborative workshops, laboratories, and rehearsals
– Material, technical, and musical experimentation and refinement
– Revision, recalibration, repair, or redesign where required
– Exploration of acoustic, spatial, technical, embodied, safety, and institutional conditions
– Preparation for public presentation
– Performances, demonstrations, instrument-development laboratories, and research presentations

 

The public presentations culminate the residency while remaining connected to the processes through which each project developed. They present invention, making, testing, performance, research, reflection, and exchange as interdependent dimensions of musical knowledge.

 

Depending on the project, festival presentations may include performances, demonstrations, lecture-performances, instrument-development laboratories, research presentations, installations, listening formats, or first realizations developed during the residency.