Farzané (Farzaneh Nouri), an Iranian sound artist, creative coder, and researcher based in the Netherlands, works at the intersection of experimental music and computer science. Her ongoing practice-based research focuses on embodied knowledge in human-computer free improvisation. Embracing AI’s fundamental otherness while establishing relational connections, her practice aims to create conditions for genuine encounter and collaborative destabilisation between the artist and the machine. This speculative approach moves beyond technological determinism and cultural essentialism, exploring how human and machine intelligences might co-evolve through creative tension and collaborative aesthetic discovery.
Can you tell us about your background – where and how you grew up, and how music, sound, and art came into your life?
I was born and raised in Iran, where I began classical music training at a young age. While my main studies in school focused on physics and mathematics, I continued with music lessons throughout, primarily classical piano and composition. Electronic music, however, entered my life much later when I was studying my bachelor’s in film at the Art University of Tehran. It was then that I encountered the works of pioneers in electronic music, which sparked my interest in such a different way of thinking about sound. The radically different approach to sound made me listen differently, not only to composed music, but also to my everyday surroundings. Around 2014, I started experimenting with electroacoustic music, combining my classical instruments with digitally produced sounds and exploring digital signal processing. This interest in merging acoustic and electronic elements eventually led me to move to the Netherlands in 2019, where I’ve continued developing my studies and research in experimental computer music.
When and how did the intersection between sound and code/computer science happen in your work?
Studying at the Institute of Sonology marked a turning point in my artistic practice. There, I took programming and music lessons with Bjarni Gunnarsson—one of my all-time favourite artists—which opened up new creative territories for me.
The intersection between sound and code deepened unexpectedly during the lockdown. Having just moved to the Netherlands without my instruments, I dived into SuperCollider programming out of necessity and curiosity, but it quickly became a creative revelation. Working with generative systems and algorithmic composition, I discovered how programming could push my creative process in unexpected directions—generating ideas and developments that wouldn’t have occurred to me through traditional composition methods.
Programming became particularly interesting as a way to combine sound with other disciplines, introducing me to techniques like data sonification and algorithmic composition. Working with generative environments and artificial life slowly started feeling like working with a creative collaborator. This led to my master’s research on machine learning methods in free improvisation, where I began coding my own tools and agents. Later, I started collaborating with dancers and performers, creating interactive installations that explored the intersection of machine learning and sound art. These projects expanded both my artistic vision and technical capabilities.
Through this journey, I’ve also been exploring alternative creative approaches to knowledge representation and interaction design, discovering speculative methods for understanding and creating sound that continue to shape my practice today.
Much has been said in recent years about AI and music, and AI and art—both positive and negative. How do you view this relationship?
I find myself approaching the AI-art relationship with neither technophobic rejection nor naive embrace, but rather with a deep questioning of the underlying logics at play. When I observe the current discourse around AI and music, AI and art, I see most discussions trapped within instrumental thinking. The positive voices celebrate AI’s capacity to generate, optimise, and accelerate creative production. The negative voices fear replacement and obsolescence. Yet both camps operate within the same framework—they’re asking whether AI can do what artists do, whether it can produce what artists produce. In my view, this is precisely the wrong question. I believe the fundamental issue isn’t whether AI can produce art, but how to speculate on immediate encounters between the artist, AI as an entity, and reality itself. AI processes representations of representations; it never encounters the luminous reality from which art actually truly emerges.
This connects to my deeper vision for the future. I hope for a world in which we cultivate a mode of technological coexistence that doesn’t seek to replace human capacities or pursue mere optimisation, but instead dances with them, bringing mutual destabilisation, self-reflection or criticism, and speculative thinking. In such a future, AI would support the natural recursivity of creativity rather than attempt to master it.
What do you think the future of technology/AI/machine intelligence and art/culture and society at large entails? Do you have any dreams about where it could lead?
I envision artistic practices becoming even more essential, not less, as they serve as training grounds for the kind of non-instrumental thinking we need in order to navigate an AI-saturated world. I see artistic practice as the necessary discipline for maintaining direct access to reality’s depths. My dream is for different cultures to develop radically different relationships with AI, grounded in their own cosmotechnical practices. For instance, creating technologies that embrace paradox and oppositional unity, or developing AI systems that honour the unknowable, preserving space for mystery rather than claiming total transparency.
The danger I see is homogenisation and cultural stasis – a single, globalised AI monoculture that reduces all artistic tradition to the same instrumental logic. The possibility that excites me, however, is using AI as a mirror that forces us to rediscover what is irreducibly human, irreducibly embodied, and irreducibly present in artistic creation.
I don’t fear AI replacing artists. I fear artists forgetting what makes them irreplaceable: their capacity for presential knowledge, for immediate experience rather than mediated representations; their embodied access to the “luminous” dimensions of existence that no algorithm can capture because such access requires a mind and body in presence, not a processor in calculation. My ultimate dream is for a future in which AI becomes the catalyst for a renaissance of human creativity— precisely because its limitations illuminate what we have forgotten about the nature of genuine artistic knowledge.
What are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on multiple projects, with a busy couple of months ahead. I’m presenting an audiovisual installation as the output of my residency at Nxt museum, powered by Prosus, which involves working with living organisms and touching upon ideas of acoustemology.
I’m also co-conducting a workshop introducing Premiere EU’s AI-toolbox, along with Instituto Stocos, at Ars Electronica. I’ve worked with the toolbox for performances with dancers and motion-capture suits, and I also contributed to the toolbox with a gesture detection system that I developed in SuperCollider, which I’ill introduce and demonstrate during the workshop.
Another exciting project, which is also under the umbrella of Premiere projects and my collaboration with IDlab, is a VR theatre experience that will premiere on September 18th in Porto, where I’m working as a creative technologist and sound artist. As part of my work at IDlab, I am also working with Tisaly, a performer who will present the initial results of their research project on September 5th at DAS Choreography. In addition, I have some live performances using custom-developed wearable sensors, as well as artist talks—mostly in the Netherlands—at festivals including Rewire, Conflux, and In Resonance. I’lll also be continuing my ongoing research at the Institute of Sonology and IDlab AHK.
Interview Lucia Udvardyova
Photo Guillaume Versteeg