Newsletter July 2021

1. 2020 Research Catalogue Prize winners
2. Call for 2021 Research Catalogue Prize
3. Journal of Artistic Research (JAR) Issue 23
4. 12^th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research: Care/Dare/Share 2021
5. Website launch: Lost Bergen SAR Crisis Collective! Bergen Conference 2020
6. 13^th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research  – Weimar 2022
7. Special Interest Groups (SIGs) – update
8. Research Catalogue as Learning Platform for Portal Partners
9. Research Catalogue Seminars and Developments
10. SAR’s 2021 General Assembly
11. Welcome to new Institutional and Portal Partner members

 

1. SAR’s 2020 Annual Prize for Best Research Catalogue Exposition

The Executive Board of SAR announced the Annual Prize for Excellent Research Catalogue Exposition 2020 during the SAR International Conference, 7 – 10 April, 2021, Vienna, Austria (online). The Prize Award of 500€ was split between joint winners: 

Christoph Solstreif-Pirker – for "Breathing into the Ecological Trauma: The Case of Gruinard Island" - https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/638234/638235

Ernie Roby-Tomic - for "Reclamation: Exposing Coal Seams and Appalachian Fatalism with Digital Apparatuses" - https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/748182/748183

 

2. Call: SAR’s 2021 Annual Prize for Best Research Catalogue Exposition

The Executive Board of SAR announces the call for the Annual Prize for Excellent Research Catalogue Exposition 2021. The prize aims to foster and encourage innovative, experimental new formats of publication and to give visibility to the qualities of artistic research artefacts. The Executive Board will appoint a jury to assess the submissions. The jury will consist of a member of the SAR Executive Board, a representative from a Portal Partner and a former prize winner. 

 

Facts and figures: 

• Deadline for submission: 31 Jan, 2022.
• Publication period of submission: 1 Jan, 2021 – 31 Dec, 2021. 
• Conditions: The publication/exposition must have been published (not only shared) on the RC platform.

The language in the exposition must be English.

The submission must be identified by the metadata of the exposition:

Author(s), Title, (Date), Research Catalogue URL (format: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/xxxxxx/xxxxxx where the x's are numbers).

• Address for submissions: rc.prize@societyforartisticresearch.org, with SAR Annual Prize for Best Research Catalogue Exposition 2021 in the email subject heading.
• Prize Award: 500€
• Award Ceremony: SAR International Conference, 30 March - 2 April, 2022, Weimar, Germany.

Please note: previous winners of the prize cannot submit for three full years after receiving their award. 

 

3. JAR Issue 23

In the 23^rd issue of the Journal for Artistic Research, JAR Editor in Chief Michael Schwab’s editorial note gives insight into the paradoxical nature of creating, editing, and reading expositions of practice based artistic research. Available in Portuguese and Spanish translations.

The new JAR issue also includes expositions by artistic researchers: Matthias Sildnik, Mira Benjamin, András Blazsek, Fabian Chyle, Monica Clare van der Haagen-Wulff, Yann Coppier, Zubin Kanga, Scott McLaughlin, Michael Lazar.

https://www.jar-online.net/issues/23

 

4. 12^th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research: Care/Dare/Share Digital Online April 2021.

 

The 12^th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research 2021 – took place from Wednesday 7 April to Friday 9 April 2021 – as a digital online event with MDW (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) as host institution and in co-operation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Presenters were asked to relate their presentations to the three attractors: Care/Dare/Share.

For the first time, the SAR conference took place as a collaboration between three arts universities, and for the first time as a completely online event. The conference had close to 50 presentations, more than five hundred registered participants. The decision to distribute the time slots equally for presentations and discussions received positive response from the participants and the presentations from our three keynote speakers – Emma Cocker, Lisa Lim and Jyoti Mistry – all had high numbers of attendees.

To secure a permanent documentation of the conference, each presenter will be invited to create part of a joint RC exposition set up by the Conference Committee and administered by the MDW.

 

5. SAR "Lost Conference 2020… ...Relic Site 2021" inaugurated and published 

 

The Lost Conference Relic Site dedicated to the Crisis Collective! 11th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research, Bergen 2020 was inaugurated and published during the Care Dare Share 12th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research, Vienna Online 2021, April 7-9. The event was attended by conference organisers, various committee members, many contributing authors, and the group of editors, with a lively discussion ensuing on the unexpected positive effects of presenting fragments and unfinished work and returning to an event that didn’t happen.

The site remains freely and permanently accessible here: 

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1157329/1157330

and a corresponding issue was published here: 

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portals/issue?issue=1213711

Issue and site are published just as they were presented at the conference. A revised edition, to be updated every 6 months, will be available on the RC platform. The unanimous and congenial wish of all attending contributors was to keep the Lost Conference project going: Thus Anne-Helen Mydland, the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at University of Bergen (KMD, UiB), generously agreed to keep hosting the site and finance regular updates.   

 

6. 13^th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research – Weimar 2022: Save the Date.

 

The 13th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research scheduled from March 30th to April 1st, 2022, will be hosted for the first time in Germany. The event will be a cooperation between the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the Society for Artistic Research and consist of one 24-hour event online, and three days of live, on-site events in Weimar.

The call for submissions will be launched soon!

 

7. Call for Establishing SAR Special Interest Groups – SIGs

The Executive Board is delighted to invite expressions of interest for establishing a Special Interest Group (SIG). SIGs may be suggested, organised, and moderated by any SAR member (individual members, representatives of institutional members) with the aim of conducting a particular activity, theme or focus area under the umbrella of SAR and promoting the activity and its results within the SAR community. Endorsement of SIGs is handled by the Executive Board on the basis of a short proposal, including names of group moderator(s) and of at least three confirmed additional group members. SIGs will be provided with a free SAR Announcement and meeting venues in cooperation with the annual SAR conference while enhanced visibility with respect to presentation of SIGs on RC is currently discussed and to be announced soon.

If you’re interested in initiating such a SIG, please get in touch with the Executive Board‘s contact persons for SIGs: Jaana Erkkilä-Hill (jaana.erkkila-hill@uniarts.fi) and Michaela Glanz (m.glanz@akbild.ac.at). 

For the general conditions for establishing a SIG see also: https://societyforartisticresearch.org/events/events/sar-special-interest-groups/

 

8. The Research Catalogue (RC) – Now also with the option as a teaching/learning and examination platform for portal partners

https://www.researchcatalogue.net

The RC functions as a platform for the dissemination of peer-reviewed content and publications, for student’s presentation of work and the assessment of such work – as well as for self-published research outcomes. The Research Catalogue is provided by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR).

RC enables students, artists and researchers to deviate from the standard format of academic presentations, journal articles and/or research repositories:

• Because images and sounds are not subordinate to, but fundamentally on a par with the text;
• Because of the opportunity provided to break out of the linear narrative structure;
• Because it facilities continuous (and collaborative) research activity from notation/documenting research processes and initial outcomes to fully elaborated publications.

The RC offers an online platform in which sound, images, video and text can be combined in an integrated format for presentation, and in which the visual disposition and the focus on different media formats can be decided by the author themself.

The RC is available as a unique portal option for institutions and on-line journals.

As Portal Partner the RC offers a range of opportunities, such as:

• Institutional documentation and publication platform
• Institutional archive, repository
• Research documentation and collaborative workspace for staff and students
• Research managing tool (e.g. application system)
• Online rich media platform for peer reviewed journals.

For these purposes, the RC hosts several public portals for institutional presentation and archiving of research outcomes that are all peer-reviewed by that portal’s own criteria. At this stage approx. 20 institutions have subscribed as portal partners – not all of them are yet publicly active.

SAR Portal Partners have the option of an internal (closed) portal for student related activities at bachelor, master and/or doctoral level. This internal platform may be used for student’s presentation of work outcomes, for teaching and learning (including supervision) purposes and for online assessment of student examination work. The institution can decide what part(s) of such material should be archived and/or shown on their public portal.

For more information contact SAR Executive Officer Johan A Haarberg – johan.haarberg@uib.no

 

9. Research Catalogue Developments and Thematic Seminars

With support from several of our portal partners, SAR is now committed to a further development of the Research Catalogue (RC). In early January this year we presented the new personal Media Repository. This new feature is available for all registered users and will simplify regular documentation of research projects. Later this year, a further development will offer the opportunity to combine both the graphical and a new version of the linear (text based) editors in the same exposition. We have also started the development of a new feature for grouping several users within a portal and providing a space for presentation of research projects on the front pages of the RC.

SAR now arranges regular thematic seminar for our portal partners, with focus on a variety of features and qualities available within the Research Catalogue platform. These seminars take place approx. once a month and will start up again on the 15^th of September 10.30-12:00 CEST.

In May this year SAR arranged a webinar for our membership, as an introduction to individual use of the RC. This was conducted by our two RC Admin Officers Luc Döbereiner and Casper Schipper. We had near one hundred registered participants and received a lot of positive feedback for this event.

We are planning a similar webinar for our members (both institutional and individual) on 30^th September 10:00-12:00 CEST.

 

10. SAR General Assembly 2021

The SAR GA took place the day after the conference ended: On Saturday 10^th April at 10:30 around 60 people attended the first GA online event. Both institutional representatives and individual members attended.

The General Assembly endorsed the annual reports for the two last periods, the financial reports for 2019 and 2020 and working budget for 2021. There were no elections during this GA, due to the change of election periods endorsed by the GA in Zurich in 2019.

 

11. New Portal Partners and Institutional Members:

The Executive Board welcomes three new portal partners so far this year:

• INN University / Norwegian Film School
• JAMU – Janacek Academy of Performing Arts, Brno
• Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts, Cyprus University of Technology

 

We also welcome the institutional membership requests from

• IKG - Instituto Katarina Gurska, Madrid
• LUCA School of Arts, Brussel
• Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London