Research Catalogue

This research delves into the enduring human desire for immortality, omnipresence, and boundless existence, contrasting with the finite nature of human life. Employing language tools like metaphor and analogy, the project explores the metaphysical realm embedded in everyday culture, investigating the in-between moment of teleportation and transformation. This moment, often overlooked, is a threshold of change and ambiguity, prompting questions about the body's presence-absence in time and space. The research methodology remains open, evolving organically through exploration, experimentation, and engagement with hypnosis, meditation, storytelling, and somatic practices. In a parallel exploration, the study draws inspiration from the historical origin of the term "Metaphysics," tracing its roots to Aristotle's works beyond the physical world. While acknowledging the dualisms inherent in metaphysics, the research embraces entanglement and recognizes the contemporary relevance of metaphysical inquiries in new materialism. Navigating the nostalgia for the past and the future, the study examines metaphysics as both a connection and a separation, akin to conjoined twins, contributing to ongoing philosophical conversations about existence, agency, and the interconnectedness of the material world.

Illustration as research from within the field is of relatively new practice. The illustrators discourse on representation (Yannicopoulou & Alaca, 2018 ), theory (Male, 2017), and critical writing on illustration practice was hardly found until The Journal of Illustration was first issued in 2014, followed by artistic research through illustration (Black, 2014; Rysjedal, 2019; Spicer, 2019). The History of Illustration was published recently (Doyle, Grove, & Sherman, 2018). The research topic developed as response to a rise in hate crime towards refugees and the targeting of European Jews in recent decade. A pilot project (This Is a Human Being 2016-2019) treated how narratives of the Holocaust may avoid contributing to overwriting of history or cultural appropriation. Asking how illustration in an expanded approach may communicate profound human issues typically considered unrepresentable, this new project hopes to explore representation and the narratives of “us” and “the others” in the contemporary world through illustration as starting-point for cross-disciplinary projects. The participants from different disciplines, will interact democratically on a common humanist themes in order to explore the transformative role of illustration in contemporary communication. Projects developed should afford contemplation of illustration as an enhanced, decelerated way of looking; and drawing as a process for understanding - a way of engaging in understanding the other, as much as expressing one’s own needs (McCartney, 2016). This AR project consists of three symposia and three work packages, and the artistic research unfolds in the symbiosis of these elements. The planned output is the investigation of illustration across media and materials.

What triggered me to start this research is the multiplicity of reality. How something is represented, how it actually is and then how we all perceive it in our very own way. In that sense reality doesn’t exist, only versions of it. The lack of awareness of this multiplicity affects a lot our lives; what we believe, what we take as granted and how he behave.Through this practice based research I am experimenting on how to create moments of surprise and realization for the spectator. I work with copies and representations, replicas as I like to call them. The Replicas can be made of different materials, can be virtual or very physical. Until now I used scale models, mirrors and projections but the list is endless; so are the different ways to use the replicas or the impact that they will have. The way that the replicas are introduced to the spectator and their interaction is also very crucial in my work and another field to research. The movement and the body play a significant role to this. The special relationship that we have with our body, the way that we perceive it and how the movement can reset these relations and affect how we experience things.

Ko = water in Mapundungun (Mapuche language). The reflection revolves around how we divide the waters in time-based media practices in the current context of environmental emergency + war. The analysis begins inspired by the Mapuche people about interconnectedness with rivers and lakes, raising a question about art practices today. Ko's idea is based on how water flows from the sides (positions, political strategies, visions) and divides territories. How to make performance art sustainable? To answer this question, a capsule is presented around the ecology of time-based media as a fluid art practice. To understand in three steps this observation selected exponents from around the world and Austria helps to make a final selection of three performance artists living and working in Vienna, observed as different currents of one sea with leitmotiv and policy paths. The aim is to use this classification to speculate on how they could improve sustainability in the next decade. Ko speculates on how practices use these territories divided as a sea with currents. Where bodies could achieve the awareness needed especially in terms of water crisis scarcity and safe access. The final thought claims attention to fluid thinking to find solutions and build a sustainable community.

The weft is an article that requests to hold time and attention about time-based art practices, especially the ones that rely on time as a medium with the usage of technology and multimedia formats to be presented live in the case of performance art, for example. The article is more than a dialogue of a theory, it is a speculation about the future of these practices in terms of cultural impact and sustainability. The questions and speculations posed a question about the status of these practices within the facilitation in educators and practitioners related to Time.

The exposition focuses on the question of ‘distanciation’ that at-once both distances and furthers one’s understanding of the self through being drawn into a work of text – here taken in a broader sense to include also the visual-material – and geographical and temporal distance. The latter interpretation of distance relates to the artistic research project that contextualises the article, which is in response to a call for drawings on the question of genetics and identity, hosted by i3S (Institute of Investigation and Innovation in Health, Porto University). As part of this author’s response, and as an example that may, through its reading, cause some expansion of one’s notion of self, the novel ‘The Inheritors’ by William Golding is discussed. From the point of view of genetic ancestry, Golding’s novel involves incongruous recognition between a family of Neanderthals and a larger group of Homo sapiens, and a more psychological use of the term ‘other’ for foreignness and one’s negotiation of such initial reaction by oneself. The conjoined question of distanciation and other is considered through reference to a large drawing of the author in progress as part of the ancestry project at the time of writing, and through theoretical reference to the work of Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Lacan and Bracha Ettinger that helps elaborate on distanciation, the psychically interpreted other, and a maternal matrixial idea of pre- and post-natal I and non-I of the self in contiguous relationship not only with psychoanalytical theory, but also with global ancestral mitochondrial DNA.