Research Catalogue

Jenny Sunesson (b. 1973) is a Swedish artist predominantly working with sound. Her practice ranges from field recording and live collages to conceptual sound art and video. Sunesson uses her own life as a stage for her dark, tragic and sometimes comical re-contextualised work where real and invented characters and derogated stereotypes, collaborate in the alternate story of hierarchies and normative power structures in society.

PERFORMING PROCESS is a research group within the Artistic Research Centre at Nottingham Trent University, co-led by Emma Cocker and Danica Maier, both Associate Professors in Fine Art. We ask: what is at stake in focusing on the process of practice — the embodied, experiential, relational and material dimensions of artistic making, thinking and knowing. What is the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity within artistic research? How might a process-focused exploration intervene in and offer new perspectives on artistic practice and research, perhaps even on the uncertain conditions of contemporary life? PERFORMING PROCESS has origins in a number of critical precedents: Summer and Winter Lodges originating within the fine art area (practice-research residencies or laboratories dedicated to providing space-time for making-thinking and for exploring the process of practice), collaborative artistic research projects such as No Telos, for exploring the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity; the DREAM seminar series with PhD researchers which focuses specifically on the ‘how-ness’ of practice research by asking - How do we do what we do?

This conference will explore how emerging technologies—especially generative AI and blockchain—reimagine the current notions of creative agency. Conveners: Adam Łukawski, Martin Zeilinger Artificial intelligence (AI), with its learning algorithms operating at scale, can mimic human creative agency, and blockchain technologies, through smart contracts, can augment works of art with more or less autonomous behaviours that correspond to the agency of human participants in socio-economic interactions. While such developments can destabilise traditional notions of ownership, provenance, and agency in musical practices, they can also empower artists. Those working creatively with sound and music are today increasingly becoming system-builders and curators of musical ecosystems, turning their focus from the creation of singular, standalone musical works (in any traditional sense of the term) to the design of systems capable of generating artworks. This suggests an evolving role of music-producing systems today: from fixed intellectual constructs and creative expressions to dynamic, more-than-human technological networks that not only actively participate in the production of artworks with increasing levels of agency, but which can themselves be considered as artworks that constitute generative, expressive assemblages. This shift is further emphasised in distributed contexts, where varying levels of automation blur the boundaries between human and non-human contributions, creating environments where agency is negotiated and shared across diverse actants.

The dramaturgy of Conversation aims to tackle different approaches, analyses, and practices of conversations. Several forms of conversations and various related knowledges are questioned from different positions and perspectives. The data studied come from personal, external, or created (for and within the project) archives. In this project, researcher Ingrid Cogne analyses, develops or transforms, re-articulates and re-structures the ways in which one creates, inhabits, and facilitates conversations. The central question of The dramaturgy of Conversation as a methodology is HOW: How can the context, structure, location, and duration of existing or created situations of conversation support the (re-)articulation of the persons involved? How can one use or work with conversations? How can one read, inhabit, and embody the parameters of a conversation? How can one facilitate a conversation? How does a situation itself facilitate the meeting with knowledge? How can one create a situation of conversation that will be the facilitator itself? The dramaturgy of Conversation proposes situations, settings, and protocols of conversations that involve, combine, or isolate various languages (spoken, bodily, and written), “in-between” and relational knowledge, and dialogical methods and processes as well as formats of communication. The dramaturgy of Conversation is a methodology that focuses on “how” practical knowledge can be read, unfolded, and circulated within the “doing”. It is a research project that facilitates the access to the unknown and the inarticulable – navigating between quantity and quality, fiction and reality, material and immaterial, visible and invisible. This research is aproached by the author as the context wherein a self-reflective process can be (re-)articulated and CO- and reciprocal activations of hardly articulable knowledges can be performed. With this re/search, Cogne insists on the need of “conversation” to be practiced and considered as knowledge. Duration: 15.1.2019 – 14.1.2025 Project leader: Ingrid Cogne (IKW) Funded by: FWF - Austrian Science Fund | Elise-Richter PEEK (V709) Institution: IKW, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria

RESPONSIVE SPACE – SOUNDING INTO MATERIALITY (2014–2020) is an in-depth research project into the interrelationship between us and our surroundings. The artworks can be described as large sculptural sound installations which blur the lines between visual art, performing arts and sound art. The works explore space, material, sound, body and time as equal parts in a composition. The main artworks of the research INTERFERENCE, RESONANCE, SEDIMENT, PLACE 1 and PLACE 2 are in a variety of ways inquiries towards an expanded experience of the dialogue between presence and materiality. The artworks are composed environments which respond and take shape and form from their surroundings, seeking to touch proximity zones where we as humans can sense aspects of being closely intertwined with our surroundings. The act of listening is of central importance in the artistic survey. Olaussen stages space utilising the mediums of sound, minimalistic sculpture and dramaturgical structures. This exposition is part of Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen’s artistic research project Responsive Space – Sounding into Materiality (2014–2020) at the Norwegian Theatre Academy, Østfold University College. The project complies with the guidelines for the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme from 2019. Artistic practice and reflection are at the heart of the research programme. Originally published in Norwegian in 2020, this work has now been translated into English by Peter Cripps, with the support of the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills.

This essay explores Nomadic Aesthetics as a post-disciplinary ethical philosophy grounded in movement, displacement, and moral geography. Through the lens of travelling installations, Dorian Vale interrogates how contemporary art carries not only material form but migratory conscience. Installations by artists such as Francis Alÿs, Mona Hatoum, Chiharu Shiota, and Khalil Rabah are examined not as static works, but as mobile testimonies—witnesses to border regimes, global inequality, and spiritual unbelonging. The essay argues that when art moves, it inherits moral weight: the crate becomes a coffin, the gallery a customs post, and the viewer a pilgrim. Nomadic aesthetics reframes mobility not as logistics, but as liturgy. It positions the travelling installation as a modern secular relic—bearing not truth as monument, but truth as residue. This is a theology of movement: truth that survives only by circulation. Title: Nomadic Aesthetics — Travelling Installations as Moral Geography Keywords: Post-Interpretive Criticism, Nomadic Aesthetics, Installation Art, Moral Geography, Migrant Artworks, Travelling Exhibitions, Globalization, Francis Alÿs, Mona Hatoum, Ai Weiwei, Chiharu Shiota, Khalil Rabah, Ethics of Movement, Conscience in Contemporary Art, Aesthetic Displacement, Witnessing, Museum Critique, Portable Truth, Moral Cartography License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Publication Year: 2025 Movement / Framework: Post-Interpretive Criticism (The Museum of One) DOI (Placeholder until generated): [To be automatically assigned by Zenodo] Journal / Series: The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (ISSN 2819-7232) Volume: III Publisher: Museum of One (Registered with Library and Archives Canada) Persistent Identifiers: ORCID: 0009-0004-7737-5094 ISNI: 0000000537155247 Wikidata: Q136308879 (Museum of One)