Keynotes
Mind Improvisation IV
Hyojee Kang is a pianist, performer, and interdisciplinary researcher whose work explores the intersection of embodied performance, improvisation, and philosophical inquiry. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Music and the Department of Biomedical Convergence at Korea National University of Transportation.
Her artistic practice integrates piano performance with performative research, critically engaging with technology while resisting its dominance over artistic meaning. Kang leads international collaborations across art and science, received the ArtsIT 2025 Best Paper Award, and has published as first author in PLOS ONE. She regularly presents and performs internationally as a keynote speaker, researcher, and featured artist.
Her work consistently questions the cultural impulse to legitimize art through technology, positioning improvisation and embodied performance as critical modes of knowledge production.
Drawing from her interdisciplinary practice as a pianist, improviser, and researcher in brain imaging and multimodal interaction, Hyojee Kang investigates how contemporary art can operate as a site of philosophical and epistemic experimentation. Her work challenges the assumption that technological sophistication or scientific measurement inherently produces meaning, instead positioning uncertainty, non-fixity, and imperceptible dimensions as essential conditions of artistic thought.
Kang’s research spans embodied performance, neural and physiological data, and improvisation-based systems, including peer-reviewed studies on prefrontal cortex activity during piano performance and motif improvisation, as well as applied research on multimodal, game-based music interventions for emotional regulation. Across these domains, she consistently resists the reduction of artistic experience to data visualization or neuroscientific validation.
Rather than subordinating art to scientific authority, Kang openly rejects models of art–technology convergence that rely on validation, optimization, or explanatory transparency. She argues that philosophical inquiry must precede—and continually destabilize—any technological act within artistic practice. In her keynote for ArtsIT2026, performance is framed as embodied research and improvisation as a mode of world-making, where human cognition, bodily processes, and computational systems co-become without hierarchical control.
By foregrounding instability, failure, and emergence, Kang proposes alternative models for art–technology convergence that privilege somatic experience, speculative thought, and critical reflection over instrumental efficiency. Her keynote invites ArtsIT audiences to reconsider how art, science, and technology might meet not through explanation or optimization, but through shared risk, indeterminacy, and the production of new realities.
Abstract
Mind Improvisation IV is an improvised performance situated within a continuously evolving system of sound, visual processes, biodata, and embodied action. Emerging from an interactive art project initiated in 2022 under the title Mind Improvisation, the work operates through a Möbius-like configuration in which relations are perpetually generated, folded, and dissolved. Rather than relying on fixed structures or stable perceptual models, the performance explores dimensions that exceed human sensible capacity through a non-fixed continuum of imagination and experience.
Improvisation is treated not as expressive freedom, but as an ontological condition of becoming—a condition that exposes both performer and system to failure, interruption, and loss of control. Each action opens a multiplicity of possible continuations that cannot be hierarchized or resolved.
The performance—integrating piano, visual art, and bodily movement—is approached not as a stable set of instruments, but as a site of exposure. Sound, gesture, image, and responsive systems participate in a shared, indeterminate process of world-making that neither the performer nor the technology can fully command.
Bodily and mental signals—such as neural activity or physiological rhythms—are not mobilized to explain or visualize the performer’s inner state. Nor are computational processes deployed to secure transparency or control. Instead, these elements may appear, withdraw, distort, contradict the sounding reality, or overwhelm it entirely. Folded into the performative continuum as agents of deformation, biodata actively interfere with sound, image, and gesture, resisting coherence and clarity.
Within this framework, technology does not function as an instrument subordinated to artistic intention, nor does science operate as an epistemic authority. The work deliberately courts malfunction, opacity, and excess, rejecting the demand to legitimize artistic experience through scientific validation or technological optimization.
Philosophically, Mind Improvisation IV aligns with a conception of reality as non-fixed, deterritorialized, and continuously generated. Rather than representing a pre-existing world, the performance participates in its ongoing production. Sound, image, body, and system co-compose a temporary plane of experience—an event that exists only in its emergence, irreducible to documentation, repetition, or closure.
Pablo Garcia
Professor, Department of Contemporary Practices
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
NeoLucida
Pablo Garcia is a Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where his research-based creative practice explores and reframes historical artistic processes for a 21st-century audience. His work examines the intersection of forgotten analog methods and cutting-edge digital technologies, paying homage to centuries of human-machine collaboration in art and design. Through a multidisciplinary approach, he investigates art-and-technology relationships across site-specific installations, machine-assisted drawings, kinetic sculptures, optical illusions, speculative architectures, and original scholarship.
Since 2013, he has commercially produced the NeoLucida, a modern reinterpretation of the camera lucida. Initially designed as a media-archaeological research project, the device is now in the collections of international institutions such as the American Philosophical Society, the Yale Center for British Art, the Science Museum (London), the Polytechnic Museum (Moscow), and the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire (Geneva).
Prof. Garcia has twice been named a Fulbright Scholar, and his extensive research on 600 years of drawing machines, documented at DrawingMachines.org, is supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Garcia holds degrees in architecture from Cornell University and Princeton University.
