Research Catalogue

This video essay explores the sacred landscapes of Delphi and Delos, studying their historical significance as a centres of female knowledge, through embodied, intuitive, and affective engagement. Thinking about Ada Lovelace’s notion of poetical science, the site visits seek to trace the contextual and geographical roots of this concept. The film approaches knowledge as a sensuous, relational and embodied process, one that resists dominant rationalist and technocentric paradigms. The voiceover, recorded in Greece, threads reflections from Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa (1976), Karen Barad’s Diffracting Diffraction (2014), and Sasha Biro’s The Oracle as Intermediary (2022) from Otherwise Than Binary, New Feminist Readings in Ancient Philosophy and Culture Decker, J.E., Layne, D.A. and Vilhauer, M. (2022). Through these situated readings, the film proposes curating research and thinking through place as not merely interpretive but performative: an intra-active practice between self, site, and matter. The work explores myth and reverie, positioning the body in context as instrument. It proposes an expanded curatorial methodology rooted in presence, sensual attention, and poetic science - where intuition is included, and the landscape is approached as co-creator.

Focaris parte de la conexión entre el fuego y el hogar como espacios de encuentro, protección y transformación. La obra se desarrolla a través de un diálogo entre la expresión individual y el encuentro colectivo, representado por la reunión en torno a una mesa o una hoguera. Cada bailarín expresa su "fuego interno" en solos apoyados por el grupo, generando conexiones y contrastes a través de la coreografía. La narrativa de la obra está construida bajo la estructura del teatro griego, donde el coro acompaña, enfatiza y dialoga con las acciones individuales. La accesibilidad está integrada en la dramaturgia, transformando la LSC, la audiodescripción y los elementos visuales en recursos estéticos. El papel, como material escénico, simboliza la metamorfosis del fuego: puede ser plegado, roto, iluminado y animado, representando los diferentes estados de la llama y la transmisión de energía. A través de la combinación de movimiento, sonido y visualidad, Focaris no solo busca ser una experiencia sensorial envolvente, sino también un espacio de inclusión donde cada espectador, independiente de sus capacidades sensoriales, pueda conectar con la obra de manera autónoma y significativa.

Work-in-progress for the development of a sensorial piece, first explored during the workshop Augmented Attention Lab.

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.

The fantasy of the algorithm and, by extension, artificial intelligence imagines that each performs by executing an operational task. Yet, based on its inherent computational structure, the digital performance fails to live up to its instrumental promise. This failure foregrounds an occasion for artistic intervention. “The Wager of the Algorithm: Towards a Performatic Gesture” presents a theoretical statement (illustrated via artwork by the author) in which the overall exposition underscores a dialectic within instrumental reason itself. The “prompt” names are a shorthand for the fulcrum of this problematic.