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 <>

Perspectives on time in the music by Stockhausen: the experience of a performer (2025) Karin DE FLEYT
Timelessness and temporality (Kruse, 2011) are widely studied topics in the classical music of the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century, mainly concerning the perspective of musical composition and auditory perception of music. But what is the perspective of temporal layeredness in the performer’s experience? This quote offers a starting point (Noble, 2018): “music whose temporal organisation optimises human information processing and embodiment expresses human time, and music whose temporal organisation subverts or exceeds human information processing and embodiment points outside of human time, to timelessness .” Specialized in the repertoire of Karlheinz Stockhausen, I want to investigate the role of temporality in music from the perspective of a performer. I will delve into the richness of different layers of temporal awareness in an artistic experience through experiential, embodied, and sensorial knowledge, using different temporal compositions by Stockhausen as case studies: HARMONIEN (2006) for flute solo,, Xi (1986) for flute solo and STOP (1969) for ensemble.
open exposition
The Art of Preluding (2025) Jeroen Malaise
The Art of Preluding was once common practice but more or less disappeared during the last century. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in reviving this artform. The content found on the website is the result of years of research in the artistic and pedagogical field, and an academic research project at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp in Belgium. It relies on historical didactic instructions to make preluding at the piano accessible and up-to-date again, and promotes the development of a contemporary approach.
open exposition
Artistic Ecosystems: A Speculative Proposal to Understand Creative Processes (2025) Alicia Reyes
This exposition proposes “artistic ecosystems” as a speculative framework for understanding creative processes shaped by interspecies collaboration and posthuman thought. The entry explores how art involving non-human agencies challenges anthropocentric norms and redefines authorship, participation, and temporality. Through a personal selection of immersive, site-specific, and ecological works by artists such as Westendorp, Eliasson, Huyghe, and Denes, the author outlines the beginnings of a doctoral research trajectory. These projects exemplify sympoietic, open-ended modes of creation, positioning performance and art-making as a fragile, relational ecosystem of human and more-than-human entanglements.
open exposition

recent publications <>

Silence as Medium (2025) Dorian Vale
This text is a sustained philosophical exploration of silence as an aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic medium. It examines silence not as the absence of sound, but as a generative presence that structures perception, meaning, and artistic encounter. Within the framework of Post-Interpretive Criticism, silence is positioned as the original ground from which expression emerges and the final condition to which all expression returns. The treatise analyzes distinctions between silence as containment and silence as erasure, arguing that the ethical force of silence lies in its use: it can dignify the unsayable or be weaponized to suppress and marginalize. The work draws on cross-disciplinary examples from sculpture, poetry, music, film, and museology, illustrating how restraint shapes the architecture of experience. It argues that silence is foundational to perception, authorship, and criticism, and that the erosion of silence in digital culture has produced a contemporary “poverty of depth” characterized by immediacy without intimacy. Within the museum context, the text advocates for silence as a curatorial principle—an element of spatial ethics that allows artworks to be encountered with attention rather than overwhelmed by spectacle or interpretive noise. It further articulates the responsibilities of the artist and the critic: the artist must discern which silence they invoke; the critic must understand which silence they break. This essay contributes to ongoing discussions in contemporary aesthetics, museum studies, and critical theory by reframing silence as an essential but endangered cultural resource. It presents silence as an uncommodifiable medium that resists institutional, linguistic, and commercial capture. The work aligns with and expands the theoretical commitments of the Post-Interpretive Movement, emphasizing moral proximity, restraint, and the ethics of presence. 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)
open exposition
Home page JSS (2025) Journal of Sonic Studies
Home page of the Journal of Sonic Studies
open exposition
Reinventing Regietheater: The Actor-Director Relation in Rehearsals (2025) Johannes Maria Schmit
This thesis investigates the crisis of Regie (i.e. of the agency of directing) in a post-#MeToo landscape. It argues that the outset of this crisis lies in an expansionist gesture – rooted in the avant-gardist ambition to merge art and life – by which directors have conflated artistic mandate with managerial control; a gesture culminating in the toxic institutional cultures painfully exposed during the last decade. Starting from this point of no return, the thesis examines the question of how to acknowledge the fact of directorial power abuse without cutting our practices off from the potential – or even the necessity – of directorial agency as such. Its title “Reinventing Regietheater” thus carries the tension between a historical form of theater (generally known as “directors’ theater”) and a yet-to-be-found future expression. Conceived as artistic research, the discrete focus of the thesis is the rehearsal space and its confines. Within the micro-scale of the latter, the crisis of Regie reverberates first and foremost in the non-foreseeable instances of the actor-director interaction; namely in the increasing scrutiny applied to the tool of improvisation. In contrast to the prevailing strategy of eroding the rehearsal space’s symbolic boundaries (in the interest of directorial accountability), the thesis conceptualizes – practically as well as theoretically – a “Space of Rehearsals” as a heteronomous zone of safe but ecstatic play. This “Space of Rehearsals” is constructed through a rehearsal method informed by the psychoanalytic concept of transference as well as the interaction framework “Wheel of Consent”. To answer its main questions, the thesis presents a “written part” as well as a set of “online resources” containing the documentation and “re-stagings” of the practical experiments. Four “books of Regie” present methodological reflections, a critical genealogy of a theater of directing (based on the author’s symptomatic practice) as well as the central concepts. Three so-called “Pre-studies”, devised through practical work with professional actors/collaborators form the empirical basis of the thesis, sketching out different possibilities for the actor-director relation in a re-invented Regietheater. In the proposition resulting from the above, directorial agency does not necessarily sit with the director. Nevertheless, the disciplinary divide between actor and director is upheld; as well as the radical asymmetry in the distribution of authorial power, albeit in temporally limited and co-curated iterations. The main argument of the thesis is thus that the artistic potential of the historical form of Regietheater can be salvaged without taking a revanchist or revisionist stance: the idiosyncratic directorial agency known as Regie has its place in consent-based rehearsal settings.
open exposition

sar announcements <>

Subscribe to SARA