Research Catalogue

Unheard landscapes: this metaphor leaves space to imagination, to the un-thought, to the un-known, to past and future, as well as unexplored sound scenarios. It also reaches the field of auditory perception, the acoustic domain. Sound, through auditive qualities, acoustic phenomena, design practices, artistic creations, and listening experiences, offers an inspiring transversal entry onto landscapes and ambiances. Beyond the discussions on “soundscape”, approaching ordinary environments through sounds increases the awareness of our own capacities to feel, while we inhabit and move across different worlds. From an ecological perspective, resonance appears a key word, too. It puts sound and space together. It implies the idea of a plurality of bodies, things and living beings vibrating all together, sharing common contexts of time and space. The act of listening bypasses the passive meaning it usually receives. It contains in itself a completely unexpressed potential, connoted with «project», «pro-action» and «active decision» by individuals. What will be the sounds of the future and the soundscapes in which we will live, or would like to? How can listening practices evolve, how will we listen or how differently could we listen to the world around us, tomorrow? Inhabiting the world brings to us questions about how we want to manage our being in it. How do we want to inhabit the world sonically? How sound and listening do actually affect our way to inhabit it? Have we lost some of our abilities to resonate with the world? What remains to be heard? Where could the practices of listening and attuning take us to?

This exposition serves as an archive for the project "Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees", where Annette Arlander spends time with specific trees and poses for camera together with them. The exposition is under construction

This collaborative and cross-sectoral project addresses places, environments, and spaces beyond mere functional urban endeavors. Within this scope the research activities presented explores possibilities offered when public space is decentralized from the urban norm as means to remediate with lost rural relations and search for ways to drift away from an anthropocentric mindset that fuels the climate crisis. In the past, densification of cities has been considered synonymous with sustainable development, creativity, and innovation. However, a one-sided urban focus leads to disarmament of rural habitats, and further dissociation from human interdependence with non-human nature and its ecological systems made invisible through urban ecologies. Today, adaptation to the most minimal impact of global warming is dependent on the survival of the rural - this artistic research project is therefore primarily informed by activities in rural environments together with other species and ecologies, to challenge urban and human perspectives and what we mean with the word territory. The goal is to investigate how art, design and architectural interventions can foster places of communality, togetherness and interdependency between species based on the urgency to encounter with the challenges of global warming.

The paper conducts an autoethnographic case study of the Amazon Echo smart speaker to explore problems of acoustical privacy at home. A gap in surveillance research is addressed by treating smart speakers as private social media platforms that connect users to sound, devices, and home environments. The concept of aural expectations of home is developed which expresses how dwellers live with and through sound. The paper argues that problems of acoustical boundary control in the domestic sphere not only help understand the communicative and socially connective aspects of smart speakers, but also illuminate surveillance issues as one’s sonic habits at home are rendered as data under the purview of corporations.

This research project was conducted at the National Film School of Denmark. Video Sketching as a Foundational Tool. Video sketching in this context means working in audiovisual form to create an intermedia in the development of a proposed audiovisual work. It is a tool to create the foundation on which further development is based. It is also foundational, in the sense that it’s a method for working with qualities that are native to languages of cinema, and therefore difficult or impossible to manifest in words. The research springs from a personal artistic praxis as a filmmaker, video artist, screenwriter and director with experiences from art installation, narrative fiction and cross-over documentary works, in a Danish and European art house cinema context.

“HONEYMOON IN POMPEII – work-in-progress” is an artistic research project conducted at the National Film School of Denmark. In it, I explore transmediality through the production of a prototype artwork spanning film, literary text, sculpture, and virtual reality all loosely inspired by the archeological technique used to cast the Pompeian victims of the Vesuvius eruption in 79 ad. I describe my initial inspiration and how I changed my intentions of exploring a consistent storyworld to more abstract associations and themes and the different collaborative efforts in producing the four parts of the prototype (a test not meant for public exhibition). The prototype ended up consisting of: 1) A film representing a foot specialist helping a costumer try running shoes in a sports store but showing an obsessive interest in her feet and crossing her personal boundaries. 2) A literary text consisting of selected passages of Wilhelm Jensen’s short novel “Gradiva” (1902) translated to Danish in which we meet the young archeologist Norbert Hanold and notice his obsession with an ancient bas-relief portraying a young woman walking. 3) A sculpture consisting of four transparent plastic reliefs depicting a walking woman (copies of the bas-relief described in the novel) suspended in a 1x2x2 meter aluminum frame. 4) An erotic virtual reality experience in which the perceiver’s bodily movements affects the virtual world. When moving, the represented scene freezes and vice versa. We conducted a test of the joint transmedia artwork with a small group of respondents who answered a questionnaire reflecting on their experience. I reflect on the respondent’s answers and propose further questions and themes that may be interesting to explore through artistic research: How does one explore transmediality not necessarily in relation to a consistent storyworld but also relying on abstract characteristics? What are the limits (if any) between mixed media art, transmedia art, and installation art? How can transmediality be explored as either a goal in itself or as a development tool for artists working with particular media in mind? Could it be beneficial to explore transmediality through the metaphor of archeology and how?