Spanning opera, film, theatre, and immersive tech, Kasia Głowicka works where emotion, precision, and experimentation collide. As a composer, she’s written VR operas that turn the metaverse into a stage, premiered works at the Venice Biennale and Warsaw Autumn, scored documentaries, and created genre-bending music-theatre for the Polish National Opera and Teatr Studio. Her sound — minimalist in form, cinematic in force — moves between intimate detail and widescreen imagination.
Beyond composing, Głowicka investigates how creativity shapes human connection and decision-making. She leads the Connected Creativity programme and serves as a researcher at the International Music Industry Lab at Inholland University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam. She speaks and teaches on creativity, empathy, and the future of artistic practice, and is currently writing a book that brings these threads together.
Full biographyJul 2026Conference paper - Opera Decolonized: Listening to Afghan Women's Voices (Art of Research, Aalto 2026)
From Silencing to Listening: Opera-Installation as Cross-Cultural Medium for Afghan Women’s Voices
Paper presented at the Art of Research conference at Aalto University (2026)
Summary
Unknown, I Live With You (2018) was built around a problem: how do you bring clandestine writings by Afghan women into a Western artistic space without reproducing the very structures that silenced them? This paper, written as a member of The Airport Society collective, traces the formal decisions behind the opera-installation — venue, costume, casting, composition, audience placement, temporal structure — and argues that each one was an ethical choice as much as an artistic one.
At the heart of the argument is opera’s fundamental strength: a form where music, staging, dramaturgy, costume, and space are genuinely co-equal, demanding total presence from its audience. The paper asks whether that quality can be turned against opera’s own colonial tendencies — and whether a non-hierarchical working process, from democratic decision-making to shared yoga sessions before rehearsals, can mirror and reinforce what happens on the stage.
The paper will be presented at the Art of Research 2026 conference at Aalto University. It is currently available as a preprint on SocArXiv.
Links
Preprint: From Silencing to Listening — SocArXiv
Related links:
Unknown, I Live With You — OperaVision · Afghan Women’s Writing ProjectConference: https://events.aalto.fi/en/3X3IKxA7/g/82Z1zDshz8/art-of-research-2026-4a3bQtTRKz/overview
Citation
Głowicka, Kasia. 2026. “From Silencing to Listening: Opera-Installation as Cross-Cultural Medium for Afghan Women’s Voices.” Preprint. SocArXiv. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/m2hnq_v1.
Jun 2026Conference paper - The Space In-Between: Creative Skill and Cognitive Transitions in the Age of Prompt-Based AI (CHIWORK
The Space In-Between: Creative Skill and Cognitive Transitions in the Age of Prompt-Based AI
Paper presented at the Agency and Skill in Human-AI Interaction workshop, CHIWORK ’26 — the 5th Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work
Summary
Recent neuroscientific evidence is beginning to suggest that prompt-based interaction with large language models reduces brain connectivity and cognitive engagement compared to unaided creative work. For creative practitioners, this is not a peripheral concern — it points to a structural deskilling effect built into how generative AI tools are currently designed.
This paper proposes a practical concept for mitigating that effect: a model of two cognitive modes and three intersections between them, derived from my own compositional practice in algorithmic composition twenty years before generative AI tools became widely available. The framework identifies a single mechanism behind the deskilling effect of prompt-based systems — the elimination of transitions between cognitive modes — and argues that re-introducing those transitions is a teachable, practicable form of resistance.
The argument is grounded historically in Opalescence (2004/5), a piece for three female singers and electronics I composed during my practice-based PhD research at Queen’s University Belfast. At that time, working with algorithmic composition meant something categorically different from what “using AI” means today: there was no prompt field, no conversational layer. To get a system to produce material at all, one had to compose the system itself. Revisiting that practice from a 2026 vantage point makes visible what the prompt-response paradigm has eliminated: the transitions between modes of creative thinking that the cognitive science literature, from Wallas (1926) through to current neuroimaging studies, identifies as the site of creative skill development.
The paper closes with a provocation directed at the creative industry. The same analysis that applies to my own compositional practice applies, with local variation, to advertising, architecture, film, fashion, journalism, design, and the visual arts. What looks today like a productivity gain may, in this reading, be the accelerated obsolescence of an industry’s own workforce. The transition is the skill, and the work now is to make the space between modes inhabitable — in practice, in pedagogy, and eventually in the design of the tools themselves.
Links
Paper (workshop GitHub): Full text HERE
Workshop programme: https://agency-and-skill.github.io
Conference: https://chiwork.org/26/
Citation
Głowicka, K. The Space In-Between: Creative Skill and Cognitive Transitions in the Age of Prompt-Based AI. 5th Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work, Agency and Skill in Human-AI Interaction Workshop, 2026. https://agency-and-skill.github.io/submissions/Glowicka\_2026\_Creative-Skill-and-Cognitive-Transitions-in-the-Age-of-Prompt-Based-AI\_CHIWORK.pdf
Jun 2026The Space In-Between — presented at CHIWORK, Linz
The Space In-Between: Creative Skill and Cognitive Transitions in the Age of Prompt-Based AI was presented at CHIWORK 2026 in Linz.
The question underneath it: when the tools generate, what happens to the skill that used to live in the making?
Sept 2025Article - Why We Still Need to keep making Music in the Age of AI
“it’s not only about what humans create—it’s about how creating makes us human.”
The Struggle Is the Point: Why Human Music-Making Matters in the Age of AI
Originally published at journal.crps.ai on September 22, 2025
In this article, Kasia Głowicka explores why the messy, time-consuming process of creating music is not just valuable—it’s essential to our humanity, even as AI can now generate songs in seconds.
Drawing on neuroscience, creativity research, and her own transformative experiences with composition, she makes a compelling case for why the creative struggle itself is non-negotiable.
The Essential Question Explored
As Kasia frames it: “Why endure the messy, time-consuming frustration of human creativity when a machine can do it within few clicks of a keyboard?”
Her answer is clear: Because the struggle itself is the healing, the growth, the essence of creativity. AI can serve as a tool for rapid prototyping and inspiration. But it cannot replace the fundamental human need to process our experiences through creative expression.
Read the full essay on Medium →
This essay resonates deeply with the philosophy behind works like “Unknown, I Live with You,” where the process of giving voice to silenced stories becomes as important as the finished opera itself.
- 6 Oct 2026 · 16:30Presenting Connected Creativity @InHolland Open Access project, Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDSInholland Academy Amsterdam Sluisbuurt, Pina Bauschplein 4, 1095 PN Amsterdam, Netherlands
- 26 Nov 2026 · 18:00Presenting Decolonizing Opera @Art of Research Conference, Helsinki, FINLANDAalto University, Otakaari 1, 02150 Espoo, Finland
- 23 Jan 2027 · 18:15Try out Nobody's Business @ Studio ARTEk
