Research Catalogue

This practice PhD will look at new insight into artistic methodology through the lens of autistic stimming, a self-regulating mechanism. The act of stimming is often the only way autistic people can exist or function in the world (Charlton et al. 2020; Kapp et al., 2019), yet it is often vilified by professionals/society as a behaviour that affects autistic people in negative ways and must be prevented (Boyd et al. 2012). During art-making, stimming provides a quilting point between an autistic person and their body. The margins of what constitutes imaginative creative practice is varied and wide, yet there is a knowledge gap in the understanding of how the qualities of autistic and neurodivergent people, and the emotional and sensory chaos that is associated with their experience can be positively employed and harnessed into productive creativity within Visual Arts. This research identifies a contribution to knowledge from an autistic perspective. To explore the qualitative dimension of stimming, a new body of work will be produced, testing it through public facing and interactive processes of exhibitions and screenings. Through collaborative practice in workshops and events at NTU and other research methods, a thorough literature review will be explored. Case studies on other autistic artists who use stimming in their practice will highlight how stimming opens up a wealth of creative possibilities. Additionally a toolkit will be produced offering interactive resources for new insights into artistic methods/methodologies and for good practice for arts organisations working with autistic/neurodivergent artists.

The research project 'Lessons in the Shadows of Death' explores and exposes an almost lost tradition of public mourning - the Art of Lamentation. The project follows the structure of the 17th century musical genre 'Leçons de Ténèbres' – traditionally composed as vocal ‘lessons’ performed during Easter week contemplating the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and based on the Biblical Lamentations. The overall purpose is to create and promote an intra-active 'grief-entangled' music practice in relation to public mourning and wounds of loss. Previous artistic research on vocal mad scenes, lamentations and Nothingness (Laasonen Belgrano 2011) and performance philosophical explorations of apophenia and autopoesis (Price 2017) has since 2019 merged and developed into a growing archive investigating ‘ornamentation-as methodology’. The primary aim of this project is to transform the ornamented music and words of Michel Lambert’s nine Leçons de Tenebres from 1661 into nine video-essays. Together with an international network of artists and scholars we will bring the 17th century musical mourning to a contemporary Jerusalem – a city which lives as a symbol of any falling, wounded and embodied space-time. The project reconfigures the Art of Lamentation as a living practice for a wounded world in need of re-learning how to attend to existential consciousness and communal grief.The research project 'Lessons in the Shadows of Death' explores and exposes an almost lost tradition of public mourning - the Art of Lamentation. The project follows the structure of the 17th century musical genre 'Leçons de Ténèbres' – traditionally composed as vocal ‘lessons’ performed during Easter week contemplating the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and based on the Biblical Lamentations. The overall purpose is to create and promote an intra-active 'grief-entangled' music practice in relation to public mourning and wounds of loss. Previous artistic research on vocal mad scenes, lamentations and Nothingness (Laasonen Belgrano 2011) and performance philosophical explorations of apophenia and autopoesis (Price 2017) has since 2019 merged and developed into a growing archive investigating ‘ornamentation-as methodology’. The primary aim of this project is to transform the ornamented music and words of Michel Lambert’s nine Leçons de Tenebres from 1661 into nine video-essays. Together with an international network of artists and scholars we will bring the 17th century musical mourning to a contemporary Jerusalem – a city which lives as a symbol of any falling, wounded and embodied space-time. The project reconfigures the Art of Lamentation as a living practice for a wounded world in need of re-learning how to attend to existential consciousness and communal grief.

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.

How to document music with non-sonic elements? Or: How to document all the performative qualities of a piece of music that can’t be heard? Beginning with this question our group of researchers, filmmakers and dramaturgs from Birmingham (UK), Frankfurt (Germany) and Fredrikstad (Norway) met between 2019 and 2021 to develop initial ideas and questions, then test them.

BLOD, BLOD(y), BLOD – an exposition of recurring processes, trails and building blocks of the film and research project BLOD through the lens of its methods. The BLOD methods are articulated as a Manifesto, written to accommodate a multitude of contents, forms, and modes of collaboration, while demanding cross-disciplinarity, honesty and risk-taking. The methods are non-linear, looping, and embedded in the manifestations of the research: films, performances, presentations, etc. The BLOD project aims to create multivocal cinematic experiences through embodied practices. The research explores relation-building through a feminist methodology of creating gaps and friction – between audience, story, time, matter, and co-creators. The project asks: how to tell multifaceted, non-exploitive stories of womb-related states of life and death, rarely depicted in cinema? And how to disturb film industry hierarchies through a collaborative practice that maintains individual artistic integrity and promotes collective authorship? The BLOD research shares its outcomes via the mediums of its artistic practice: videos, texts, digital expositions. This exposition is designed to reflect the connections and interactions of the research's building blocks: ideas, places, materials, people, time, experiences, technologies. To enjoy BLOD, BLOD(y), BLOD: move around it with your mouse, follow dotted paths out from the center towards texts, images, and videos. Hover over numbers and words in BOLD to reveal expanding texts. Linger on images and videos for captions, translations, and instructions for further interaction. Along the outer rim of the main page are spiral buttons to take you back to the center with a click. Subpages have links on the main page but are also listed in the Content index in the upper left menu. The exposition is mainly in English. Videos in Swedish have English translation.

A LIST OF NIKOS KOKOLAKIS's WORKS, INCLUDING INSTRUMENTS OF THE OBOE FAMILY (March 2023). A list of Nikos Kokolakis's works, including instruments of the oboe family, was published for the first time, after a personal interview with the composer Nikos Kokolakis about his works, in the frame of a Ph.D. research, about Hellenic (Greek) Oboe Repertoire, of the Ph.D. candidate: Christos Tsogias-Razakov.