Research Catalogue

Nine research groups from HKU, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Fontys, and Utrecht University of Applied Sciences are joining forces with UvH and UMCU to bring a new perspective on healthcare through the arts, supported by the SIA-SPRONG grant. Using a transdisciplinary approach, this research group and its partners are developing new methods, practices, and scenarios within healthcare and well-being contexts—not for, but with each other.

This research investigates how local sourcing practices in the Netherlands can enable the reuse of secondary food-related materials for ceramic glaze production, and how the exploration of existing networks through material research can contribute to the development of new cross-sector collaborations. Through a practice-based approach that bridges ceramic production, design research, and the restaurant industry, the study explores the potential of locally available “waste” materials, such as bones, shells, charcoals, and discarded glass, as viable resources for glaze making. The research combines material experimentation with qualitative fieldwork, including interviews and informal discussions with chefs, ceramicists, suppliers, and material practitioners. By tracing the origins, processing, and transformation of these secondary resources, the study critically examines the environmental impact and opacity of conventional glaze supply chains, which often rely on imported raw materials and energy-intensive extraction and transportation processes. Central to the research is the creation of a material archive that documents locally sourced secondary materials and their behavior in glaze recipes. This archive functions not only as a technical tool for ceramic experimentation, but also as a framework for understanding relationships between material flows, human practices, and local infrastructures. Drawing on the concept of “working in the minor key,” the research emphasizes learning through direct engagement, observation, and collaboration rather than predefined systems. The findings suggest that material research can act as a catalyst for new circular practices and cross-sector networks between restaurants and ceramic industry, fostering shared responsibility, creative exchange, and reduced material consumption. By reframing waste as a site of value and knowledge, this study proposes an alternative, locally embedded approach to glaze production that integrates sustainability, and social engagement.

Transmutations seeks to redefine the term transformation through a staged concert — a concert conceived as a work of art in itself. The traditional concert format and conventional performance practices are showing signs of stagnation, thus calling for the emergence of a voice adapted to this transformation. The boundaries of music, especially within the classical realm, have gradually blurred in recent times. Increasingly, artists are exploring the concert as a form of expression that not only integrates other artistic disciplines but also embraces technological advancements. This approach challenges traditional aesthetic conventions and the notion of genre and musical style. The omnipresence of technology in contemporary society underlines the need for research that explores the many possibilities of the concert format. This staged concert aims to redefine the concept of transformation by avoiding any stylistic boundaries. The works of Richard Strauss, John Cage, and Alexander Schubert are included not only for their artistic value but also for their contribution to the very notion of transformation.

MINA is a collaborative project that investigates sharing as a material condition of artistic practice. It seeks to create situations where practices can remain active and in relation, fostering exchanges between different forms of knowledge through situated encounters and provisional configurations. Rather than treating sharing as a discrete act, MINA understands it as an ongoing practice that shapes how attention circulates, how relations are formed, and how practices are sustained over time. Dialogues, exchanges, critiques, and other forms of mutual influence operate here not as supplementary moments, but as constitutive forces within artistic processes, even when their effects are subtle, delayed, or difficult to trace. Working without predefined methods, MINA approaches artistic practice as a field of orientations that emerges through games, conversations, and shared situations. Each encounter becomes a way of testing how sharing can redistribute attention, unsettle habitual positions, and open space for collective thinking.

The Research Through Art & Design (RAD) course for doctoral researchers at Aalto Arts introduces a variety of approaches, methodologies, issues, and concerns in research through practice. In this course, research through practice refers to a broad continuum of artistic research approaches, arts-based, practice-led, and practice-based research approaches, including constructive design research approaches relevant across practices in Aalto University; School of Arts, Design and Architecture. This exposition was created within a Research Catalogue Workshop offered as an additional part of the main course. During this part of the course, the participants are familiarised with the Research Catalogue as a platform and learn how to use it for creating expositions. During the workshop, participants work on their page within this group exposition, based on their current doctoral research or a topic that inspired them during the lectures. The main content is the workshop participants' individual pages within this exposition.

This essay establishes Post‑Interpretive Criticism as a formal break with the dominant aesthetic consensus of the late twentieth century, which treated meaning as something produced through mediation rather than encountered through structure. Surveying post‑1950 traditions across structuralism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, critical theory, and post‑structuralism, the essay identifies a shared assumption underlying their disagreements: interpretation functions as the necessary and ethically justified ground of meaning. Post‑Interpretive Criticism rejects this premise not by proposing an alternative theory of meaning‑production, but by questioning whether production itself is the correct frame. The essay argues that interpretation is not neutral, inevitable, or inherently liberatory, but structurally hazardous. Language, when introduced prematurely or excessively, alters the proportions of the aesthetic encounter, collapsing interval, crowding distance, and displacing presence with discourse. Meaning, on this account, does not originate in interpretation but in a relational field between work and witness that possesses structure prior to mediation. Interpretation is therefore recast as an intervention rather than a foundation—one that must justify itself ethically by preserving proportion rather than overwhelming it. Positioning Post‑Interpretive Criticism against the historical conditions that necessitated interpretive excess in the post‑war period, the essay argues that contemporary aesthetics now faces the inverse problem: interpretive saturation. Where interpretation once functioned as moral responsibility, it now frequently preempts encounter, substituting commentary for perception. Drawing careful distinctions from phenomenological aesthetics, the essay emphasizes that description of experience is insufficient without a discipline governing speech. Post‑Interpretive Criticism introduces restraint as method, silence as ethical posture, and proportion as evaluative criterion. The essay concludes by outlining the institutional, pedagogical, and critical consequences of adopting Post‑Interpretive Criticism, including reduced interpretive authority, contraction of discourse, and the re‑training of attention prior to articulation. It does not argue for universal application, but claims necessity under specific contemporary conditions. Interpretation, once required, is now placed at risk—not because meaning has vanished, but because the encounter has returned as the primary site of aesthetic responsibility. 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) 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.