Research

Eda Er's research sits at the intersection of artistic practice and critical inquiry, working across composition, performance, feminist theory, and new media technology. Her central questions concern how embodied knowledge — the knowledge held in gesture, breath, material, and cultural memory — can be translated into and through technological systems without being flattened or neutralized by them. Grief, diaspora, and generational silence shape the forms this work takes; new media technologies, in her practice, serve as instruments of reclamation rather than erasure.

Her work draws on feminist new media studies, postcolonial theory, and the philosophy of technology to interrogate what it means to compose with systems that remember, listen, and respond. She is particularly interested in the design of augmented instruments as sites of feminist practice — tools that do not simply amplify but that reconfigure the relationship between performer, material, and audience. Central to this is a concern with who has historically been permitted to compose, to notate, and to be heard, and what new forms of authorship become possible when the instrument itself is built from suppressed traditions.

Methodologically, she develops compositional systems grounded in material process — water, pigment, breath, surface — and translates these into notational frameworks, live electronics, and spatial audio structures. Extended vocal techniques, multichannel diffusion, and real-time computer vision form the technical substrate of her practice, always in service of a deeper inquiry into embodiment, rupture, and cultural transmission.

Fluid Narratives is Eda Er's doctoral artistic research project, transforming the traditional Turkish art of Ebru — Ottoman water marbling, historically practiced by women — into an augmented instrument for live composition and feminist storytelling. The project develops a custom performance system integrating contact microphones, computer vision, transducers, and multichannel diffusion, in which the physical act of marbling becomes a real-time compositional gesture: pigment dropped into water, combed into form, translated into sound and image simultaneously.

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Fluid Narratives — teaser (3 min)

The primary finished work under this research is Instructions for Not Disappearing — a piece for solo soprano, Ebru instrument, live electronics, live video, and movement. The work is structured around a five-section alchemical arc moving from Prima Materia to Gold, using the transformative logic of alchemy as a metaphor for the processes of grief, reclamation, and survival that animate the project's feminist and postcolonial concerns.

Central to the research is the development of an Ebru Notation System — a gestural score language that maps the physical vocabulary of marbling (drop, comb, pull, swirl, veil) onto musical parameters, enabling Ebru to function not only as visual art but as a compositional tool with its own internal grammar. This system bridges the intuitive, improvisatory quality of traditional Ebru with the structural demands of contemporary composition and live performance.

To perform is to transmute. To compose is to reclaim. To create is to survive.

Dick Higgins introduced the term intermedia in 1966 for work that falls between established media rather than combining them — as distinct from mixed media, where the elements remain separable and each could stand on its own. Fluid Narratives meets that condition literally. A single gesture across the water produces sound and image at the same instant: the comb drawn through pigment is the sonic event and the visual event, not one accompanied by the other. There is no audio that could be released without the image, and no image that illustrates an already finished score.

The material sets the grammar. Surface tension, pigment density, and the rate at which a pattern collapses determine what can happen next, so the physical behaviour of the medium and the musical form are not separable decisions. This is also why the project is not documentation of a craft: Ebru is not filmed and set to music, it is played. Instrument, score, and image are one object — which is what makes the work intermedia rather than multimedia.