recent activities
EXPERIÊNCIA SENSORIAL DIRECIONADA: Sons do Buriti, Escutar, Sentir e Criar
(2025)
Eunice Maria de Oliveira
Esta pesquisa propõe uma instalação com foco em aprofundar uma experiência sensorial, para despertar a sensibilidade das pessoas, em São Bernardo/MA, no Balneário Rio Buriti. São abordados elementos da escuta sensível e consciente, como forma de valorização dos sons naturais e culturais do local. Para a execução da prática, realizamos algumas etapas, como: determinar local, dia e o horário da atividade; elaboração de um mapa mental contendo todas as ideias; retomada da leitura do mapa mental com novas impressões individuais, pessoais, subjetivas, objetivas; decidir sobre a ação em si. Nos desdobramentos desta ação, que envolve escutar, sentir e criar, observamos que a paisagem sonora, termo criado por Schafer (2009), possui todos os componentes para a criação e sensibilização das pessoas em relação aos seus próprios territórios. O autor demonstra sua preocupação com a qualidade da escuta, que está cada vez mais ameaçada pelo problema da poluição sonora, por isso a necessidade de que a população tenha consciência dos sons que nos rodeiam.
877 Beaivvi (lohket) / 877 Days (count them) -- in progress
(2025)
Svea Vikander
877 Beaivvi (lohket) / 877 Days (Count them) er en kunstnerisk videoeksponering om samenes rettigheter, tid, dokumentasjon og repetisjon. Gjennom 360°-opptak fra Ginalvárri (Guovdageaidnu fjellet), protester (Oslo), språklæring (Guovdageaidnu) og kreftbehandling (Oslo sykkehuser) undersøker prosjektet forholdet mellom evidens, traume og kolonial makt.
Image as Site: Apartment Portraits
(2025)
Ellen J Røed
With Apartment Portraits contemporary music ensemble Lemur and artist Ellen J Røed investigates the rooms we live in through a series of sound and video works for living environments, musicians, microphones, cameras and videographer.
Through video art and contemporary music they explored three apartments in Oslo: The oldest of them is a 1970s apartment at Hovseter, the other two are more recent. One is located on Teaterplassen in Grønland, and was built in the early 2000s, while the last one is in Sørenga, built in 2016.
In the resulting portraits of apartments, subtle and slow panoramic camera strokes through the apartments explores and portrays the relationship between performed sound and living environments. It tells the story both of the rooms, their owners, the performers’ actions as well as those the videographer. Leilighetsportretter is part study, part concert, part installation, part site specific intervention and part architectural field trip in Oslo apartments.
The project is one of four elements in 'Samtaler om rom' – Spatial conversations, where Lemur works in and around the at The National Museum – Architecture´s exhibitions on Norwegian housing architecture. As such the work is part of an interdisciplinary effort to explore new strategies for the presentation of architecture. It is developed within the overlapping research framework Image as Site at Stockholm University of the Arts. Project is supported by The Swedish Research Council, Stockholm University of the Arts, and Norwegian Art Council.
The project was presented at The National Museum – Architecture, Oslo in the framework of
Ultima festival of contemporary music and Kulturnatt Oslo, at Bomuldsfabrikken Kunsthall
and at SKH Research Week 2021.
recent publications
The Viewer as Evidence: A Treatise on Witness, Residue, and Critical Consequence
(2025)
Dorian Vale
The Viewer as Evidence
A Treatise on Witness, Residue, and Critical Consequence
By Dorian Vale
In the age of spectacle and overexposure, the most reliable evidence of a work’s power is not the critic’s opinion — but the condition it leaves the viewer in.
In this foundational treatise, Dorian Vale introduces The Viewer as Evidence — a radical reframing of how art is to be understood, and more importantly, how it is to be held. Rooted in the philosophy of Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC), this theory proposes a departure from analysis as the primary tool of understanding, replacing it with a more intimate, consequential barometer: the residue left upon the witness.
The treatise asserts that the true measure of a work’s meaning is not found in its interpretation, but in the transformation — or disturbance — it imposes upon the beholder. The viewer becomes a living document, an embodied archive of aesthetic consequence. This reframes the critical act not as interpretation, but as custodianship of the aftermath.
Combining insights from aesthetic theory, trauma studies, phenomenology, and moral philosophy, Vale constructs a methodology for reading the viewer, not the object — and insists that this ethical proximity is the only path to a criticism that does not betray the sacred nature of certain works.
Here, criticism is not a language of conquest.
It is the language of aftershock.
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)
Vale, Dorian. The Viewer as Evidence: A Treatise on Witness, Residue, and Critical Consequence. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17055810
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.
The Afterlife of the Work: Viewer as Evidence in Post-Interpretive Criticism
(2025)
DORIAN VALE
The Afterlife of the Work: Viewer as Evidence in Post-Interpretive Criticism
By Dorian Vale
This essay presents one of the central epistemological pillars of Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC): the concept of the viewer as evidence. Dorian Vale challenges the traditional hierarchy where the critic’s interpretation takes precedence over the encounter itself, proposing instead that the afterlife of the artwork—the residue it leaves in the viewer—is its most truthful legacy.
Rather than dissect the work, Vale observes what lingers after it is gone: silence, tremor, unease, reverence. These affective traces are not emotional accidents, but ethical data. The viewer’s internal shift becomes testimony, and the absence of interpretation becomes its own kind of presence.
Rooted in restraint and moral proximity, this essay reframes the act of viewing as sacred evidence collection. The artwork does not exist to be understood; it exists to be endured. And in that endurance, the viewer becomes witness, custodian, and echo.
Vale, Dorian. The Afterlife of the Work: Viewer as Evidence in Post-Interpretive Criticism. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17076535
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.
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)
Hauntmark Theory: The Lingering Weight of Words
(2025)
Dorian Vale
Hauntmark Theory
The Lingering Weight of Words
A Treatise by Dorian Vale
What if language didn’t just describe art — but scarred it?
In this piercing treatise, Dorian Vale introduces Hauntmark Theory, a philosophical framework that confronts the violence embedded in language when used to name, contain, or explain a work of art. The theory proposes that every word leaves a residue, a trace that either preserves presence or disfigures it — and that careless interpretation is not neutral, but haunting.
Drawing on post-linguistic philosophy, trauma theory, and Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC), this work reframes criticism as a moral event, where each act of description leaves behind a mark: some delicate, some damaging, all irreversible. It introduces key concepts such as Hauntmarks, Linguistic Overreach, Descriptive Violence, and the Silent Custodian, arguing that the deepest form of reverence lies not in what we say about art — but in what we choose not to say.
Where previous treatises in the Post-Interpretive Movement reimagined the role of the viewer and the critic, Hauntmark Theory addresses the unspoken aftermath of critique: how words linger in the air around the work, often louder than the work itself.
This is not a call for silence. It is a call for sacred restraint — for a new vocabulary of witness, where words do not eclipse the art, but kneel beside it.
Vale, Dorian. Hauntmark Theory: The Lingering Weight of Words. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17052531
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.
Hauntmark Theory, Dorian Vale, Post-Interpretive Criticism, art criticism ethics, language and art, trauma in art writing, aesthetic linguistics, descriptive violence, semiotics of witnessing, residue in criticism, moral restraint in language, art and silence, linguistic harm in interpretation, reverent art criticism, critical writing and ethics, sacred language, philosophical aesthetics, phenomenology of critique, ethics of naming, poetic restraint, custodial criticism
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)