SAR Newsletter June 2025

 

Portal Partner Meeting – AVU, The Academy of Fine Arts Prague (12–13 June 2025)

Held at Šaloun Studio - AVU, The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, this year’s Portal Partner Meeting brought together Portal Partners, contributors from across the Research Catalogue (RC), the RC Managing Team, and SAR to share RC developments, tools, strategies and experiences.

Day 1 focused on RC structural tools, accessibility, and the Exposition Field Guide with a workshop exploring how to organise portal pages, managing unpublished material, and engaging audiences. This was followed by the RC Librarians’ Group sharing updates addressing metadata, DOIs, and categorisation standards. Highlights included a presentation by the 2024 RC Prize winner Kerstin Frödin and Åsa Unander-Scharin, Fragmente 2, and presentations on the new Media Transcoder, framework transfers, and ongoing platform developments by Casper Schipper and Danielle Pozzi (RC Managing Team). The day ended with collaborative sessions on portal challenges and opportunities.

Day 2 sessions, co-hosted with the COST Action Artistic Intelligence Working Group 3, explored the RC’s role in collective knowledge-making, including a presentation by Andre Guidi and Danielle Pozzi on KOBI - an AI-driven research platform designed to build connections across diverse fields and stimulate creative inquiry - combining collectively authoring an RC Exposition and AI semantic mapping. Jonas Hovden Sjøvaag then showcased a use of automatic data (in the form of a spreadsheet) to RC exposition conversion. The day concluded with in-depth reflections on referencing and research focus in three selected RC expositions.

The annual gathering of portal partners serves as a key meeting point for collaboration, where shared expertise, practical exchange, and strategic dialogue drive meaningful progress in the development, accessibility, and impact of the Research Catalogue as a platform for artistic research—and we deeply appreciate the time, energy, and commitment each partner brings to making this collective effort possible.

Want to learn more about Portal Partnerships? Find out more here!

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SAR Special Interest Groups (SIGs) – Ongoing Initiatives in Artistic Research


If you haven’t visited the SIGs recently, this is a timely reminder to explore their latest updates, projects, and discussions!

SAR hosts a number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that serve as platforms for sustained dialogue, exchange, and experimentation within specific domains of artistic research. These groups continue to develop rich activities, publish materials, and host events across a wide spectrum of interests.

Whether you're already part of one or simply curious about what's currently being explored across the network, these groups remain important nodes in the evolving landscape of artistic research.

You’ll find them all here

And for those developing new collaborative trajectories: SAR continues to welcome proposals for new SIGs. These are opportunities to shape and contribute to focused research dialogues with peers across institutional, disciplinary, and national boundaries. Learn more here!

Current SIGs at a Glance

Language-Based Artistic Research

This SIG focuses on language as both a tool and subject in artistic research, engaging with text-based practices, multimodality, and alternative modes of writing and publishing.
More information

Spatial Aesthetics

This SIG consists of artists, researchers, and theorists working with space, while focusing on specific aspects, processes, approaches or methods, ways of working, constellations of activities or framing patterns, particular projects and lines of enquiry-in-practice.
More information

Arts, Economics and Management Crossings

This SIG addresses the complex relationship between artistic research and value production. It brings artistic practice into dialogue with economic theory and management thinking, engaging themes such as degrowth, care, ecofeminism, and post-capitalist imaginaries.
More information

Sound Research

Bringing together researchers working with and through sound, this SIG highlights sonic methodologies, listening practices, and aural epistemologies – considering political, social, experiential, ecological,feminist, philosophical possibilities via sound.
More information

Facilitation as Creative Practice

Focusing on the role of facilitation in artistic research, this group examines the relational, ethical, and methodological dimensions of enabling and co-creating research processes.
More information

Co-Agency: Artistic Research as Transformative Practice

At their session during this year’s SAR Conference, this SIG explored co-agency through artistic research practices grounded in ecological sensitivity, material thinking, and contextual responsiveness - opening up to resonance and effect, with a curious focus on turns and returns.
More information

Artist Pedagogy Research Group

Dedicated to pedagogical questions from the perspective of artist-researchers, this group asks what it means for artists to teach art, how teaching and learning are enacted and theorised through artistic practice, and looks across the boundaries that have traditionally separated the fields of the arts.
More information

APARN – The Asia Pacific Artistic Research Network

A network focused on sharing methodologies and documenting diverse approaches to artistic-practice-as-research across disciplines and contexts, providing a regional framework for practical collaboration between individuals and institutions in the Asia Pacific region.
More information

 

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Exploring Frameworks for Collective Artistic Intelligence: Highlights from the COST Action Artistic Intelligence Working Group 3 meeting at AVU Prague, June 2025

Convened alongside the second day of the Portal Partner meeting, an intensive two-day working meeting by Working Group 3 of the COST Action Artistic Intelligence took place at the Šaloun Studio – AVU. The meeting focused on participants' experience on current referencing within artistic research (challenges, experiences, opportunities) and the potential for fostering collective artistic intelligence with solutions such as The Research Catalogue (RC).

Working Group members gathered to explore how referencing, technology, and collaborative tools can deepen the role of solutions such as the RC in artistic research.

The aim of this working group is to develop cornerstones of a common reference framework to effectively connect the different lines and link different approaches and projects in artistic research. By activating Artistic Intelligence, this framework will outline a larger, collective impact of artistic research in relation to artistic practices across the different disciplines and in response to societal challenges of the triple transition.

Catch up on the meeting here!

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About the COST Action Artistic Intelligence

Artistic Intelligence (ARTinRARE) is a four-year COST Action running between 2024 and 2028. The primary objective is to advance the (re-)integration of artistic research and conventional modes of inquiry to benefit all forms of knowledge production, including the application of new computational techniques, to practice-based research across the arts.

The emphasis is on advancing artistic research as a field of knowledge formation in terms of its quality, societal impact, and valorisation strategies; enabling deeper integration with conventional forms of research (e.g., STEM, SSH); and facilitating the implementation of artistic research approaches and methods to real-world problems across academia, civil society, public policy, and the private sector.

Artistic Intelligence continues to be open for new members! Don’t hesitate to learn more about the Action—and join or apply as a member—at: https://artisticintelligence.info/

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About COST

COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding agency for research and innovation networks. Our Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and enable scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. This boosts their research, career and innovation.

This work is based upon work from COST Action Artistic Intelligence - CA23158, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).