The Research Catalogue (RC) is a non-commercial, collaboration and publishing platform for artistic research provided by the
Society for Artistic Research. The RC is free to use for artists and
researchers. It
serves also as a backbone for teaching purposes, student assessment, peer review workflows and research funding administration. It strives to be
an open space for experimentation and exchange.
recent activities
Stories Without an Author
(2025)
Jeroen Zwaap
This thesis investigates how narrative agency can emerge collaboratively between human, technological, and more-than-human agents within artistic re- search. In response to the limitations of anthropocentric storytelling, it poses the central question: How does narrative agency emerge in co-creative processes involving human, technological, and more-than-human forces?
The research adopts an experimental, site-specific methodology grounded in transduction-the translation of one form of data or energy into another-to enga- ge with the expressive capacities of more-than-human entities. Three iterations form the core of the investigation: a photogrammetric and sonic exploration of De Nieuwe Passage (The Hague), a real-time collaboration with storm Conall in a city forest, and a durational transduction of Tokyo's soundscape into photo- graphic form. In each case, technologies such as cameras, code, and sensors are treated not as neutral tools, but as hybrid agents participating in narrative formation.
The results demonstrate that narrative meaning can emerge through intra-active, multisensory processes rather than through fixed representation. Each experi- ment reveals how environmental and technological agents shape the unfolding of story, whether through the rhythm of human flows, the shifting forces of weather, or the temporal layers of urban sound.
This thesis concludes that artistic research can facilitate non-anthropocentric storytelling by creating conditions for narrative to arise through entangled rela- tions. It recommends a methodological shift toward collaborative, sensory-ba- sed practices that decenter the human artist and embrace the co-authorship of technological and environmental systems.
Performing Process
(2025)
Emma Cocker, Danica Maier
PERFORMING PROCESS is a research group within the Artistic Research Centre at Nottingham Trent University, co-led by Emma Cocker and Danica Maier, both Associate Professors in Fine Art. We ask: what is at stake in focusing on the process of practice — the embodied, experiential, relational and material dimensions of artistic making, thinking and knowing. What is the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity within artistic research? How might a process-focused exploration intervene in and offer new perspectives on artistic practice and research, perhaps even on the uncertain conditions of contemporary life?
PERFORMING PROCESS has origins in a number of critical precedents: Summer and Winter Lodges originating within the fine art area (practice-research residencies or laboratories dedicated to providing space-time for making-thinking and for exploring the process of practice), collaborative artistic research projects such as No Telos, for exploring the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity; the DREAM seminar series with PhD researchers which focuses specifically on the ‘how-ness’ of practice research by asking - How do we do what we do?
Resistance
(2025)
Tereza Strmisková, Silvia Diveky
Understanding the complexities of current European society is impossible, especially for the younger generations, without knowing and understanding the complex historical developments and narratives. In most EU member states teaching history in the system of formal education is predominantly focused on national, if not patriotic history narratives. The consequence of this approach is that young people have a lack of knowledge about a wider, transnational and shared European history.
recent publications
The Trauma of Looking : Readings and Counter-readings of the representation of femicides in the Greek mainstream media
(2025)
Dafni Melidou
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
Master Photography & Society
The "Trauma of Looking: Readings and Counter-readings of the representation of femicides in theGreek mainstream media" is a work that aims to decode the narrative strategies used by the Greekmainstream media to report sensitive topics related to gender inequalities and gender-basedviolence. In this work I explore the tropes and the effects of media cannibalism, a term which I havecoined and it will be explained further in the text, through the lens of intimate femicides - aphenomenon which has recently entered the wider public discourse in Greece. There is a need frommainstream media to commercialize such crimes and exploit personal dramas. They are treatingreal-life stories as a spectacle, as another true-crime series ready to be consumed by the audience.This globalized "life-as-spectacle" approach, which goes beyond Greece, transmutes our collectivemoral principles into a new culture where violence is always legitimized and thus is made acceptablein society.
The Skateable Realm - Revealing New Affordances Within The Public Realm Through Skateboarding
(2025)
Njål Aleksander Vigdal Granhus
Research Paper of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
MA Interior Architecture (Inside)
Public space is defined as “ an area or place that is open and accessible to all people,
regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age, or socio-economic level. These are public gathering
spaces such as plazas, squares and parks”.
Public spaces that bring together a great diversity of people are therefore
designed as “zero friction” spaces, but when in use, people will experience friction.
This research paper focuses on how one constructs territories within the public realm and how this
can both foster participation for those who can identify themselves with the activities
within the territory and others who do not -to depart from a space. This creates fear
tendencies against the unknown and in order to maintain a certain behavioral control,
objects are being modified, removed and designed to prevent certain behaviors and
user groups from territorializing certain spaces from happening.
One territorial action is found in the action of skateboarding. Skateboarders do not only foresee
opportunities for action through the use of affordances within the public realm, but also
territorialize the space through extractions, additions, and public interactions for their action to
be possible. Skateboarding might be considered an action that excludes certain user groups from using the public space if territorialized by the skating community. Yet, on the contrary, skateboarders see opportunities for action within the public realm through affordances that might not be obvious to
the naked eye and therefore creates another level of interaction and encounters which may alter
the behavioral corollary within the space.
If skateboarders see the user value of public space through affordances and claim elements
within the space through action, does their territorialization of the space actually negatively
impact the space? Or do they introduce a new user value of the space that furthers behavioral actions and introduces new encounters?
Therefore, this research paper reflects on how a skateboarder's perspective of the public realm criticizes how we use space and reveal new design potentials for a multifunctional public space.
The Networked Audience : Algorithms, affordances, and why digital photographs are only a small part of digital photography
(2025)
Will Boase
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
Master Photography & Society
As photographers we make, sell and consume digital images, and the digital space and its audiences are growing exponentially. But every conversation on circulating photography centres on the object, about books or exhibitions. It seemed like there are images, and there is photography. Why are the two diverging? Radio evolved into podcasts. TV turned into TikTok. This thesis, then, sets out to ask what it is that photography says it does, or thinks it does, and what it actually does in the age of the smartphone. Critics love to tell their readers that photography is dead, but for some reason you can find all those same critics cheerfully posting their lunch on Instagram. This thesis is an invitation and a challenge to photography, to admit that things have changed and to embrace this as an opportunity rather than a threat.