Research Catalogue

This exposition documents my explorations of pondering with pine trees. Tämä ekspositio dokumentoi yritykseni miettiä mäntyjen kanssa. Den här ekspositionen dokumenterar mina försök att fundera med furor.

This exposition is an accompaniment to an artistic research process tied to my dissertation, titled "Towards a Response-able Com-position Practice: Entangling with Humans, More-than-humans & Materials". The exposition provides a condensed and compact format of information allowing the viewer/listener to trace the process, mainly led by graphics, sound files, along with short informational and contextual texts. My research is based on a model that springs from a relational, sympoietic, socio-musical imagination for composition. The research sprang from my interest and desire to attend otherness, for cultivating generative and creative practices through collaborative socio-sonic engagements, first and foremost interested in the interface of connection and co-creation. In the composition model, relationality focuses on perspectives of response-ability in the act of com-posing with human, material and more-than-human agents. I call this model Response-able Com-position (RC), as the aim of the practice is to generate and cultivate various abilities to respond, and trace these responses within the act of com-position. Instead of placing the performer/composer's agency at the center of the composition process, the model widens and shifts the center to other humans, non-humans and materials, where they are not the object of study but the generators of knowledge itself. By privileging such position, the whole proposal revolves around resonances and potentialities consist of listening-within entangled relations. Listening as performative auralities entail, listening through aural analysis, embodied forms of listening (performance) and listening-back to the process and re-evaluating. The study proposed by the model is interested in working through differences in a relational way, enacting a series of collaboratory events through differentiating and entangling agents and selves, within a multivalent plane. Working from within a paradoxical situation, it deals with processes of disruption that leads into new ways of thinking, feeling and acting.

Throughout human history as we know it, there is a range of stories in the arts and the humanities that meet in variations, which shows an old widespread human desire: a wish for as much life as possible, for being immortal or for getting the ability to be everything and to be everywhere- This wish is opposed to the finite nature of the human existence and the knowing about this fact. It has been and can be approached by forms and tools of narration that engage imagination. For the investigation of the ways such practices signify an embodied experience in daily culture, I am approaching the use of language and especially metaphor and its application in therapeutic tools and trauma treatment methods. For this I am exploiting elements from the fields of hypnosis, meditation, neuroscience and lingusitics, along with storytelling patterns in mythology, religion, fairy tales and science fiction, My focus is not on language alone, but on possible combinations with the potentialities of artistic devices. Both, teleportation and transformation can be understood as a three-step processes compiled by: State 1 (before), the in-between moment (the shift) and State 2 (after). Although State 1 and State 2 (before and after teleportation/ transformation) will be respectively studied, a special focus will be given to the middle part of the process, the in-between moment, including time, space, the (technological) device as well as cultural aspects and possibilities. The in-between moment as a moment of trespassing is a point that not much focus has been given in artistic research till now, unlike State 1 and State 2; what exactly happens after Gregor Samsa sleeps as human and before he wakes up as an insect, or what happens right after Alice steps into the mirror and right before she enters Wonderland, what happens while Clark Kent is inside the phone booth (in Greek “thalamus”) are all invisible. The Greek word for the booth is “thalamus”, the same word used for that part of the brain where all senses end up, the relay station for sensory experiences. How to deal with the presence/absence of the body in terms of time and space during the in-between moment and how to stimulate imagination, memory and engage the senses towards the “impossible” using the means that consist a teleportation/transformation device? The aim of my fundamental research-oriented or knowledge-open (erkenntnisoffenen) PhD project is, to proceed without pre-defining the format of the outcome, but letting it evolve through and within the study, investigation and experimentation instead, working on the following groups of objectives and research questions: i. approaching the ‘impossible’, ii. devices, iii. language storytelling) & other media, iv. possible combinations / experiments. Methods used are: reading connected to the main terms, practicing hypnosis, meditation and relevant practices that use language and engage the body, public presentation(s) and interviews with three groups of peers. As peers I consider persons who experience alternative mind sets, indicatively children, people in love and people with schizophrenia. From the very beginning and to this point, the methodology and the format evolve along with the artistic research.

The exposition is a presentation of work in progress, also involving reflective commentary, by two collaborators in a research project titled 'The Observation of Perception: considered through drawing', hosted by i2ADS Research Unit of the Fine Art Faculty of Porto University. The collaborators, a digital visual artist and an analogue-focused fine artist, are respectively involved in the research through visual story-telling and video, and drawing and its audio-visual recording. In the present circumstances, each of the works is considered through its video element specifically in relation to several manifestations of time. In the digital visual artist's case, time is formatted through and as fast-frame and stop-frame, and in the fine artist's case, real-time and a psychoanalytical inflection on real, often appearing in the literature capitalised as Real. The first author, who provides the written reflection, is the fine artist, while substantial visual work, a published paper, and some critical intervention is provided by the digital visual artist as a second author. The first author takes as a directive, aspects of the second author's paper, and reflectively critiques both his and his research collaborator's time-based work in their video manifestations. Theoretical references are to the digital visual artist collaborator Safa Tharib, the philosopher Henri Bergson and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The exposition ends with a question that emerges from the commentary, as to the applicability of the indexical signifier to consideration of digital as well as analogue practice.

This artistic research is a contribution to a larger research project titled ‘The Observation of Perception, considered through drawing’, hosted by i2ADS. The research begins with the hypothesis that perception can be diagrammed, in this case through and as a form of drawing that indicates how perception is for this investigator conceived and works in action. One of the two visual motifs of the work is also a meta-motif, in that as an action-camera placed over the eyes, it is the means by which the investigator records himself at work on the second main motif, which is his image as viewed in a circular hand-held mirror. The investigator approaches the initiative as a question of diagramming the self-same initiative, accepting whatever are its developed implications as the aesthetic of the work. Peirce's division of the diagram into elements of firstness and secondness, with the elusive recognition of diagram as an abstract entity before any communicative purpose, keys into a working practice that in any case veers towards the diagrammatic. The investigator's tendency to audio-visually record his working process has led him to a position where the logistics of the purpose paradoxically reveal the subjectivity – if not absurdity – of the self-same process. In this case, little by little, a contingent factor of a wart takes centre-stage as blind spot; at-once a torn hole within the drawing's material surface, the action camera as an illusory obstruction, and a factor that oscillates with and as the circular self-portrait. The presentation takes the viewer/reader through the process, largely perceptual, that is diagrammed on and as the artifactual outcome, the drawing.

The 12th SAR Conference on Artistic Research of the Society for Artistic Research in 2021 was hosted by mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. It was oriented on the three attractors "care", "dare" and "share" and was the first SAR conference to be organized as a live online event. The online format also reached out in order to facilitate participation by individuals from new geographical regions and invited artistic researchers to share their work, processes, methods, discoveries, knowledge interventions, new insights, and understandings and to engage in exchange—in actions and words, and in ways complex and simple, conventional and unconventional, robust and fragile.
A selection of conference contributions has been assembled for documentation in this roof exposition managed by Jonas Howden Sjøvaag.