Dirty Spaces

‘Dirty Spaces’ is a series of performance experiments developed within the research project ‘Spirits in Complexity – Making kin with Experimental Music Systems’. The work investigates feedback-based performance setups as complex systems in which human, technological, and environmental actors interact on comparable levels. Instead of treating noise, instability, or interference as disturbances, the series explores them as constitutive elements of musical creation.Methodologically, ‘Dirty Spaces’ employs recurrent amplification, contact microphones, and parametric filtering to create fragile conditions in which even minimal gestures or environmental perturbations produce amplified sonic events. Variations of the series have incorporated additional components, such as live sampling or generative AI, as well as collaborative constellations with other musicians, thereby expanding the feedback ecology into more complex, entangled networks.Findings from these performances indicate that such setups expose emergent behaviors otherwise inaccessible through conventional instrument–performer relationships. The notion of ‘dirt’ is central: audience presence, spatial conditions, electrical instabilities and algorithmic contributions all modulate the sonic field, shifting performance from control toward negotiation. These dynamics resonate with concepts such as Di Scipio’s structural coupling and Latour’s actor–network theory, situating performance within an ecology of distributed agency.In conclusion, ‘Dirty Spaces’ demonstrates how feedback systems can serve as laboratories for investigating resonance, contingency, and kinship between humans and non-humans in music. By foregrounding fragility and unpredictability, the work contributes to a broader understanding of experimental music as a practice of attentiveness and reciprocity within complex systems. keywords: Experimental Music, Feedback, Complex Systems, Improvisation