Re-Imagining In Conversation is a research-based sonic venture encompassing speculation, jazz poetics, improvisation, and dreaming. A performative exploration of the in-conversation format, the project moves between shared and diverging research interests, from Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation to Koichi Hagimoto’s Female Voices in Revolution: Autobiography and Collective Memory in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade and Merle Collins’s Angel, which places the orality of Algeria in relation to the oral traditions of the Caribbean.

Jones and Ruddock work with electronics, percussion, and wind, approaching sound as a means through which research can be shared, translated, interrupted, and expanded through improvisation and performance.

Re-Imagining In Conversation takes multiple forms: as live performance, residency, research process, and online audio-essay. Jones and Ruddock have performed at Counterflows Festival, Glasgow; Oscillations Festival, curated by QO2, Brussels; Archive Books x SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; Café OTO, London; Madeira Dig, Portugal; Silent Green, Berlin; and La Chunky, Glasgow. They have held residencies with Akademie Schloss Solitude, in partnership with Liquid Architecture for the Algorithmic Poetry Web Residencies; the Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow; and CCA Annex, where Re-Imagining In Conversation was published as an online audio-research essay in conjunction with Rectangle Studios hosted by CCA Annex. 

In 2023, through Algorithmic Poetry, a fellowship with Akademie Schloss Solitude (DE) and Liquid Architecture (AU), Jones and Ruddock extended Re-Imagining In Conversation through a new strand, A New Poetics. Bringing together interlocutors including Pat Thomas, Azza Zein, and other sound-based practioners and artists, the project moved towards an online improvised score, extending its enquiry into collective composition, listening, and the possibilities of research through improvisation.