Dr Alexandra Huang-Kokina
Digital Research Postdoctoral Fellow, September 2024 - March 2025
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
Dr Alexandra Huang-Kokina is an academic, pianist, and writer whose work explores the intersections of music, literature, intermediality, and digital humanities. Currently based in the U.K. and Sweden, she completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2023 and has held research fellowships at the University of London and Linnaeus University. During her fellowship at IASH, she will concurrently hold a position as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Aesthetics and Business Creativity (ABC) at Lund University in Sweden. Alexandra’s research has appeared in academic journals such as Performance Research(Routledge) and The Modernist Review, with additional publications in the pipeline. Her forthcoming book, The Musical Performativity of Twentieth-Century Piano Novels (Palgrave Macmillan), explores how non-traditional piano performances can act as vehicles for socio-political transgression. Alexandra’s critical research on musical-literary relations informs her innovative approaches to contemporary art music performance—she is the principal investigator of ‘Creative Digital Dynamics’, a practice-led research project and concert series exploring AI and multimedia arts intersections. Based on this project, she presented three chamber music concerts combining classical piano trios with generative AI and organised a conference on music and AI at the University of London in early 2024. Furthermore, her latest initiative, ‘Artificial Emotional Intelligence for Opera Theatre’, integrates cutting-edge AI technologies into experimental opera practices, aiming to enhance audience interaction and immersion through human-artificial co-creativity. The first phase of this project will be executed during her digital research postdoctoral fellowship in Edinburgh.
Personal website: https://alexandrahuangkokina.com/
Project title: Artificial ‘Emotional’ Intelligence for Opera Theatre: Innovating audience engagement in contemporary science-fiction opera
The surge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has sparked debates about its impact on human expression and connection in the creative arts. This project explores how AI may complement and augment embodied dimensions of human artistic creativity in live music performance settings. It uses ‘science-fiction opera’ – an operatic subgenre that integrates sci-fi narratives with speculative technologies – as a pivotal case study to examine AI’s potential and challenges in enhancing audience engagement in a digitally-mediated theatre. Leveraging opera’s capacity for conveying nuanced emotions across artistic mediums, this study evaluates the dynamics of human–machine affective & emotional interaction (i.e., the ways in which performers or audiences engage, interact, and connect with intelligent machines) in contemporary sci-fi opera performances. By employing critical media theories to analyse sci-fi opera’s performance designs, I aim to identify strategies that utilise AI and data-driven technologies to enable real-time, multimodal emotional exchange between the audience and on-stage action at opera events. Based on theoretical insights, I will then develop a conceptual framework to integrate audience-centric emotional feedback into performance settings, thereby pioneering interactive and immersive designs in a prototypical ‘emotionally responsive’ opera theatre. Overall, this project will prototype new critical perspectives for using AI in enhancing audience emotional engagement, making opera more accessibleand desirable for 21st-century audiences. It will also demonstrate how humanistic & artistic research can deepen our understanding of AI, enabling us to reimagine creativity and the ethics of creative work in a progressively AI-driven society.