Research Catalogue

THINKING AESTHETIC THINKING THROUGH AESTHETIC RESEARCH PRACTICES focuses on ways in which aesthetic research practices realize a specific form of thinking: aesthetic thinking. The aim of this project is to explore the following working hypotheses through aesthetic research practices as a foundation for different forms of reflection and dialogue between philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic research. - Firstly, aesthetic research practices systematize forms of preeminently sensorimotor and emotional action, which are neither target-oriented nor will-based. - Secondly, aesthetic action enables and intensifies immediate and unmediated interactions between researchers and the inquired issues, co-constituting a field of nonhierarchical, shared agencies. - Thirdly, aesthetic interaction conditions the ongoing processes of sense-making between researchers and the inquired issues with the agency of destabilizing the habitualized forms and meanings with which these issues appear. - Fourthly, on this basis, aesthetic thinking allows for disclosing new intelligibilities for the researched issues, that is, it enables the potentialities of radically new understandings to arise. Since 2019, we — four artistic researchers: Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Nicole Wendel and Sabine Zahn — have been working together intensively within a series of exploratory sessions or even ‘laboratories’, inquiring through specific aesthetic practices the concept, performance and conditions of and for aesthetic thinking. This exposition presents a set of aesthetic research practices, a series of "Ecologies in Action' (a set of interconnected aesthetic research practices in relation) and research artefacts generated through this research project.

Agential Matter (Invisible Landscapes) was carried out as research fellowship of the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, and in affiliation with The Art Academy, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at the University of Bergen. The project examines performativity of algae, objects and bodies in instances of observation in scientific research, industrial production and artistic encounter, related to kelp forests along the Norwegian Coast. The spaces of investigation are seen as sites of social practice, and performativity as an ongoing dialogue between different parts involved, with matter as an important actant in spaces of transformation.

Open form is a designation on a type of composition that is in some degree open. It is also a term in relation to understanding a genre. This means that I do not include for example Bach´s Die Kunst der Fuge (circa 1740), but Stockhausen´s Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) could be included. This project, however, is centered around the composers from The New York Scool, and composers related to The New York School: Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and Cornelius Cardew. An Open form composition is graphic, text- or number-based. It may also be a combination of these three notational techniques and/or in combination with conventional staff line-notation.

This exposition explores ideas of narrative and storytelling through sculptures and texts raised from a flat sheet, a kind of visual and spoken poetry which is both particular and multiple. In this paper, the key area of investigation will be the relationship between sculptural and spoken narratives in my practice. This is engaged with in four main areas: • The flat sheet and the fold as sites for storytelling • Multiplicities inherent to storytelling • Architecturality and the space between bodies and buildings • Words, text and the voice, and their relationship to sculpture I explore the role of the architectural in the space between sculptural and spoken narratives, both of which are forms that begin with a flat sheet. The research also looks at how one might write about art in order to expand understanding but not reduce it to one meaning, writing around or through objects so as to leave gaps for the imagination and other narratives. The importance of the voice in the telling of these narratives is investigated, as well as the relationship between bodies and buildings.

My research investigated the viability of various electroacoustic music compositional approaches, which were used in a series of works that explored specific relationships between real-world and abstracted sound materials, through the strategic use of pitched, melodic, and non-pitched materials (as well as specific characteristics and behaviours of those materials) as integral elements in the composition. All of the compositions were linked to Greece in various ways, either directly or symbolically. My primary goal was to present transformed aspects of Greece while exploring all of these different levels musically through electroacoustic music. Furthermore, I attempted to explore new electroacoustic music territories by embarking on a journey from real-world instrumental and concrete soundworlds based on aspects of Greek culture (religion, mythology) to abstract soundworlds. Real-world soundworlds are made up of sounds, spaces, and places that have the potential to communicate human experiences such as familiar impressions, aural images, and evocations for the listener. Abstract soundworlds that emerge from real-world ones via various transformation processes include specific sounds, spaces, and places that can be notably different from those that emerge from real-world soundworlds. My main overall goal was to develop innovative techniques and processes that explore the intersections, contrasts, connections, and discourse between the two.

The exposition presents two installations—Mitä uutta kivistä?/Anything new about stones? (2017) and LAB-O(U)RATORY (2019)—and enfolds them in a series of repetitive gestures that stage their methodical entanglement. Both of the installations explore and articulate the research potential of expanded writing. At stake is the ecology of attention in a setting that thematises the co-existence of different modes of articulation, interlinked spatial and temporal arrangements as well as their associative mechanisms. What happens when a spatial constellation is presented on a medially formatted time line? How to focus one’s attention in an associatively saturated literary space? Rather than attaching itself to an already existing theoretical framework or meta-discussions on artistic research, the exposition aims at explicating a singular artistic framework and its constellated structure.