Research Catalogue

50 A3 drawings black and coloured markers, including: 3 A3 collages on paper with newspaper cutouts and printed photos. 12 A4 drawings on paper with coloured markers, glued on A3 paper + 1 A3 with black ballpoint pen and markers, glued on A3 paper. 13 A3 drawings on paper with black marker, and red, pale blue, gold, pink and orange markers +1 A3 two-sided. 17 A3 drawings on paper with coloured markers. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover with red nail polish. 1 text drawing on sketchbook cover inside. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover back inside with black, orange and gold markers. 22 A4 drawings with ballpoint pen. 62 pocket sketchbook black marker and ballpoint pen drawings. Some of the above is preparatory work for 4 large prints and 13 paintings. The 12 A4 glued on A3 are preparatory work for a collage on panel. I made the art between 2023-2024, from the perspective of the observer. Most of the research material came out of crime and fraud reports. I started writing the blog afterwards, since the summer of 2024. I adopted the visual vocabulary of the graphic novel, which I partly studied and read a lot about, looking at different graphic artists' work, when I was attending classes at the University of Malmo, Sweden, in 2012, to familiarise myself with elements of game design. Much of this work is, amongst other, about children: how they love, amongst other. I wanted to emphasise that element, by intentionally applying stylistic elements from children's drawings, in a naive and loose architectural composition, using heavily the black marker and stick figures. Adopting this visual approach, I also wanted to evoke a comically sharp, but intimate twist, as commentary, in the British tradition of political satire, to the otherwise dark subject matter. Finally, this artistic style refers to the populist character of actors. The text is written like trip-hop songs: two of the pseudonyms I gave are the artistic names of musicians of colour from the British band "Massive Attack", formed in Bristol. I use heavily popular culture signifiers, names of fictional characters from film, television, music and painting, as reference to actual individuals. Parts of the analysis is inspired by Saul Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's example of mathematical calculation. I used plenty of popular and less popular literary and philosophical references, for the visual art and in the writing. Saul Aaron Kripke was the inventor of the possible worlds philosophical hypothesis, which was seminal for philosophers working in the area of contemporary analytic metaphysics, including the theory of counterparts and the theory of names. He died in 2022. Lauren Berlant was a cultural theorist and gender studies scholar. She died in 2021. The exposition is underpinned by an underlying Marxist interpretation that, in my view, is relevant not just to economists and political philosophers, but also to people working in different sectors of our modern economies of advanced capitalism, such as banking and cybersecurity. In the style of art, as painting, I was inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat's drawings and paintings, which are laden with input from popular media sources, like jazz music and television, recorded in an automatic and naive drawing manner, turned into abstracted paintings. For Nikos ('Ramadan', 'Julien', "Mr X"), Filip ('Philip'), and Brandon ('Magna') - August, September, and October 2024. For "Daddy G" ('Isaac'), 'Eric' ("Her Man"), 'Prudence' ("'Rachel''s Beau", or "Her Man's alter-ego"), 'Moussa', 'Gaetan', 'Mohammed' ('Onzedouze'), 'Hermando', and 'Nessim' - December 2024, January 2025, May, June, August and September 2025. Four men of colour and seven white men - or, more accurately, four and six, or six and four. Who were also targeted, directly and indirectly. Who are not politicians, except for a current one and a former one, but are doing something political, so they must take good care of what they do. See also exposition "The Loot", under 'Art and Activism Exposed as Research Blog'.

Arts-based-philosophy is an emerging research concept at the cutting edge of the arts, philosophy and the Sciences in which cross-disciplinary research collectives align their research practices to finally stage their investigations in field-performances, shared with the public. Our research explores the significance of the HEART in artistic research and performance philosophy from a cross-cultural perspective, partially based on the concepts of the HEART in the works of two artist-philosophers, in which philosophy already became arts-based-philosophy: Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Aurobindo’s poetic opus magnum Savitri. We generally assume that the works of artist-philosophers are not only engaged in “creating concepts” (Deleuze), but their concepts are also meant to be staged artistically to let them bodily matter in fact. The role of the HEART in respect to this process of “bodily mattering” is the core objective under investigation: Firstly, because we hold that atmospheres trigger the HEART of a lived-body to taste the flavor of things it is environmentally engaged with basically in an aesthetic manner (Nietzsche). In this respect the analysis of the classical notion for the aesthete in Indian philosophy and aesthetics, sahṛdaya––which literally means, “somebody, with a HEART”––becomes crucial. Secondly, because the HEART is said to be not just reducible to one’s manifest Nature, but has access to one’s virtual Nature as well. The creation hymn in the oldest of all Vedas (Rgveda) for instance informs us that a HEART is capable of crossing being (sat) & non-being (asat), which makes it fluctuate among these two realms and even allows its aspirations to let virtual possibilities matter. Such concepts show striking similarities with contemporary concepts in philosophy-physics, e.g. the concepts of “virtual particles” and “quantum vacuum fluctuations” (Barad).

In this exposition, I discuss the multimedia installation "Esparto, approached", to which I opened doors last May 10th, 2025, in Organo Hall, Helsinki Music Center. "Esparto, approached" is the first of a series of three installations representing the artistic component of my doctoral degree at the Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. The research project in which this installation is contextualized is currently titled "Listening through remembrance: An autoethnography of presence in the age of disposability". In this artistic research, the notions of listening, remembering, and presence-making are interwoven in an attempt to understand how we confer meaning and value on things despite our embeddedness in a world of disposable nature, where things are susceptible to being quickly discarded, replaced, and, therefore, forgotten. This exposition opens up a space of reflection in the aftermath of "Esparto, approached". The installation represented a collective recall of the field practice that led me to search for signs of durability in abandoned contexts of my homeland in rural Southeastern Spain. This exposition poses the following questions about it: What happened? (Description); What does "what happened" mean? (Analysis); And, how does "what happened" keep happening now? (Further becomings). The objective of creating an online exposition right after the event is to open a window to the reflective process of this investigation before its completion, thus making visible its traces. The process itself is therefore turned into an accessible outcome that manifests the continual nature of the project as a whole.

This paper discusses a creative collaboration between two design researchers using text-to-image prompts as a way to think across a range of ideas including the relationships between collage practices and AI image generation – both modes of image-making that create images with images – as well as taking an ‘anarchival’ approach to addressing absence in historical archives. Initial experimentation with prompt-based model DALL-E 2 involved writing multiple prompts to generate images of the extinct King Island dwarf emu; specifically, an emu taken to live in Empress Josephine’s estate outside Paris. There is little visual record of the dwarf emus, and what remains is ambiguous and factually inaccurate. The scarcity of visual reference material provides an interesting case study for how a generative image model might attempt to elaborate a new image about a historical event. The results provide material to help think about how image generation models work, and also how we might visualise the experience of an extinct species. Reflecting on the initial experiments, we began to consider prompting with large-scale image generation models as a way to think-with and speculate, rather than to merely generate. We employ two methods to critique the resulting images: visual content analysis and comparative analysis across image-generation models. We conclude that at a time of both deliberate and accidental miscommunication, it is important for those with expertise in how images ‘work’ to critique and analyse image-generating tools, and consider how working with generative AI might be included as part of an anarchival practice.

Sounds created through reflection played a key role in the belief and ritual traditions of Fennoscandia up until recent times. The Indigenous Sámi considered echoing rocks and mountains to be sacred places where spirits could be met and conversed with. This article examines the role of sound reflections in these historical, little-known traditions using source material gathered from archives and old ethnographic accounts. We analyze the source material using concepts developed by sound studies and the philosophy of sound. We also apply a new materialist approach, which allows echoes to be regarded from a perspective more suitable to the source material: as sound energies transforming reflective material bodies into vibrant and interactive more-than-human beings. Moreover, the new materialist approach enables us to outline a philosophical basis for a materialist understanding of sound reflections and reflective material bodies, as well as the acoustic spaces associated with them. The concept of acousphere is proposed to understand this kind of space of correlation, confluence, and interchange between the human and more-than-human worlds.

This short essay opens ArteActa’s issue AI (and) Art: Poetics of Prompting by proposing to understand generative algorithms as fundamentally metabolic: a dynamic entanglement of data, energy, affect, attention, and ecology. It argues that, given their ubiquity, generative materials can no longer be understood primarily as representations or discrete outputs. Instead, they function as metabolic processes that devour cultural material, extract planetary resources, and reshape perception below the threshold of consciousness. Prompting itself is always an act of transformation rather than merely a symbolic command, and intentional artistic experiments represent only a fraction of a larger infrastructure. The essay thus advocates for a multiscalar understanding of generative media: every prompt is already an ecosystem; every image is already a node in a planetary metabolism.