ARTISTIC RESEARCH AND THE DOCUMENTATION OF SOCIAL CRISES: POSTHUMANIST APPROACHES TO COLLECTIVE AFFECTIVE STATES IN WARTIME MUSIC

Traditional research methods often struggle to capture embodied, affective, and relational layers of experience emerging during crises such as war. Arts-based research and artistic research offer practice-led epistemologies aligned with posthumanist praxis. This article examines how artistic research can document and transform collective affective states in crisis, using the author’s composition Wartime Reflections II. Resonances as a case study. A practice-led inquiry integrates the score, composer’s notes, and documentary elements (voice messages, textual fragments). The analysis employs “musical lenses” (form, rhythm, dynamics, timbre, polyphony/harmony) and draws on theories of collective affect (Durkheim), anticipatory grief (Rando), resilience (Masten, Ungar), learned helplessness (Seligman), despair (Freud, Kierkegaard), communitas (Turner), and moral elevation (Haidt). The resulting five-part model—Premonition, Resilience, Exhaustion, Despair, Uplift—shows how music functions not only as representation but as method for structuring and sharing crisis experience.