Research Catalogue

Following on from my PhD research, Deeper Canine Topographies continues to explore human-canine cartographies, rhythms, repetitions,micro geographies and relational choreographies towards a proposal for future research.

MA Seminar – Reflection and Method in Artistic Research This MA seminar explores how reflection and method intertwine in artistic research. Through a series of presentations and discussions, the seminar examines how artistic processes can generate knowledge and how this knowledge may be articulated and shared. Invited speakers – Marsha Bradfield (Central Saint Martins, London), Sergej Tchirkov (University of Bergen) and Jostein Gundersen (University of Bergen) – each present distinct approaches to artistic research, spanning visual art, music, and interdisciplinary practice. Their contributions highlight the diversity of methods and the critical importance of situated reflection within creative practice. The seminar concludes with a collective panel conversation focusing on how artistic research can balance openness and rigour, intuition and analysis, collaboration and individual voice.

In the Mirror of Care Work researches skills within Nordic interactive performance practices. Using the mirror as a metaphor for visualisation and connection, artist Inga Gerner Nielsen brings into conversation the work of nurses and interactive performers. By inviting in the perspectives of care workers and looking into the history of their profession, Inga engages in discussions about the politics, mythologies and poetics of her own field. What do we see when we look in the mirror, and when that mirror is a nurse? Do we, as performers – like the nurses were once said to – abide by the feeling of a calling? Does this involve a kind of spiritual care for our audience? And what of the nurses’ working conditions should we perhaps try to adopt as (care giving) performers? The project visited Stockholm (MDT) in September 2023 and Helsinki in January 2024 in a two-day symposium to meet and exchange with local artists about the aspect of care work in their artistic practice . The project is based in a long-term collaboration with the nursing school at UCN Hjørring & Thisted in the north of Denmark. Together with teacher of the History of Nursing, Helle Kronborg Krogsgaard, Inga gerner Nielsen is developing ways of integrating interative performance excersices and visual art into the teaching of 1.st, 4th and 7th semester nursing students.

Name Painting is an activity that has the potential to bring people together to test their opinions and tastes in a phenomenological fashion. This research aim to reveal how such an activity can lead to results that can be expressed through poetry. The arts-based research aims to reflect some of the challenges of engaging with the public for participation in a cultural activity, that of Name Painting, but also aims to show some fruitful ways to display the results in the form of poetry. A.I. is also consulted to provide further contrast with the participant and artist-researcher's approaches to name painting. The thematic and content analysis of the study reveals some of the patterns associated with the results in a mixed methods approach.

The research is based on personal experiences of working as a director and creator in the field of participatory performance. It raises questions about how the specific conditions of the field, where authenticity, presence, and relationality often are prominent aesthetic values, can influence the role of the director and the interaction between director and performer. Furthermore, the project examines how an artistic practice situated in this field and shaped in relation to these values is challenged and conflicted by the shifting and sometimes conflicting management cultures that exist in contemporary performing arts. The project consists of seven documented artistic projects, a reflective lyrical essay, and a summary of methods, all of which examine weakness as a cultural taboo and a potential path to artistic, professional and personal liberation in different ways.

Author: Dorian Vale Affiliation: Museum of One — Registered Archive and Independent Research Institute for Contemporary Aesthetics Museum of One|Written at the Threshold Abstract This essay argues that Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC), through its diagnostic indices, represents the completion of a philosophical project initiated by Edmund Husserl and refined through Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience. Where Husserl sought to unite mathematical rigor with phenomenological inquiry but lacked a suitable domain, and where Dufrenne applied phenomenology to aesthetics but remained purely descriptive, PIC operationalizes their insights through measurable linguistic behavior. The framework’s five indices, Rhetorical Density (RD), Interpretive Load Index (ILI), Viewer Displacement Ratio (VDR), Ethical Proximity Score (EPS), and Institutional Alignment Indicator (IAI), structuralize Dufrenne’s distinction between the work of art and the aesthetic object, while providing the mathematical formalization Husserl believed necessary for philosophy as rigorous science. This essay traces the intellectual lineage from Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology through Dufrenne’s aesthetic application to PIC’s diagnostic formalization, demonstrating how the indices measure whether criticism honors or violates the phenomenological structure of aesthetic encounter. Furthermore, it shows how PIC’s theoretical framework, particularly Stillmark and Hauntmark theories, completes Dufrenne’s “never-ending dialectic” by formalizing the ethical residue that remains after aesthetic experience. This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and Art as Truth: A Treatise (Q136329071), Aesthetic Recursion Theory (Q136339843), The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (Q136530009), Canon of Witnesses (Q136565881),Interpretive Load Index (ILI) (Q137709526), Viewer Displacement Ratio (VDR) (Q137709583) , Ethical Proximity Score (EPS) (Q137709600) , Institutional Alignment Indicator (IAI) (Q137709608), Post-Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Q137711946) Dorian Vale is a chosen pseudonym, not to obscure identity, but to preserve clarity of voice and integrity of message. It creates distance between the writer and the work, allowing the philosophy to stand unclouded by biography. The name exists not to hide, but to honor the seriousness of the task: to speak without spectacle, and to build without needing to be seen. This name is used for all official publications, essays, and theoretical works indexed through DOI-linked repositories including Zenodo, OSF, PhilPapers, and SSRN.