Anton Malarevych: «Dancefloor Ecologies as Collective Instruments: Embodied Archives within Computational Sound Environments»
This practice-based research investigates dancefloor ecologies as collective instruments: situations where bodies, sound systems, archives and computational procedures shape how people listen, move and organise together. It asks how violence, war, displacement and political rupture leave traces in electronic dance music scenes, and how dancefloor infrastructures help affected communities sustain connection and collective memory.
The project works with sonic and media archives from Donbas, (post-)Maidan Ukraine and war-displaced diasporas: DJ sets, underground club recordings, protest-related materials and field recordings. These materials are recomposed as sound spaces that can be navigated through movement sensing, machine listening and participatory tuning. Instead of presenting archives as documentary evidence, the system uses them as constraints for collective improvisation. The research examines how rhythm, timbre, vibration, gesture and spatial arrangement can produce embodied knowledge through repeated artistic iterations.