SAR Newsletter August 2025

 

Interview with RC Prize Winners Kerstin Frödin and Åsa Unander-Scharin

We are thrilled to share this in-depth interview with Kerstin Frödin and Åsa Unander-Scharin, in which they offer insight into their decades-long collaboration and artistic journey with this piece.

Their collaborative work takes Makoto Shinohara’s composition Fragmente (1968) as its point of departure, expanding it into a contrapuntal dialogue between music and dance where both forms are treated as equal partners. Frödin and Unander-Scharin reflect on how the work’s fragmentary, gestural structure opened space for metaphorical mapping and playful interaction, and how sound and movement became interwoven materials — not merely coexisting, but continuously shaping one another.

Transforming Fragmente² into an exposition for the Research Catalogue became both reflection and discovery: weaving together score annotations, video, text, and metaphorical frameworks into a work that is simultaneously documentation and an artwork in its own right.

Read the full interview here to learn more about Frödin and Unander-Scharin’s creative process, their collaboration, and the artistic methods that underpin their research:

https://societyforartisticresearch.org/rc-prize-2024-winner-interview

 

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The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) Issue 35

JAR Issue 35 was recently published and presents five expositions that examine themes such as collective identity, translation as meaning-making, embodied temporality through dance improvisation, multimodal mediated performance, and the picturesque gaze and reenactment. The contributions explore a wide spectrum of methodologies and formats, including performance, voice, improvisation, music, motion capture, and re-enactment.

Anna Chrtková
Becoming Monika: An Exploration of a World between the Self, Other, I and We

Chanda VanderHart, Rebecca Babb-Nelsen, Eric Stokloßa
Found in Translation: The Poet's Love(r)

Nareeporn Vachananda
Improvising Time: An investigation into the link between time and intersubjectivity in the performance of solo dance improvisation

Olof Misgeld
Motion, Music, Mediation: Bridging Tradition and Technology in Swedish Folk Dance-Music

Rebecca J. Squires, Bart Geerts
The Grand Tour Experiment: A Transformative Traverse of the Picturesque Landscape

 

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JAR Issue 36 Submission deadline 30-09-2025

JAR welcomes submissions—multilingual, multimedia, and multidisciplinary—for its upcoming issues. The next submission deadline is 30 September 2025.

Explore or submit to JAR

JAR also publishes essays and reviews in its Network section, creating a space for broader reflection on artistic research discourse and publishing practice.

https://jar-online.net/en/network

 

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 – New Developments

The Research Catalogue (RC) continues to develop as a robust infrastructure for artistic research. Used worldwide for publishing, documenting, and sharing artistic research and projects, the RC supports a wide range of workflows across individual, institutional, and collective contexts.

Most recentely, key developments have included the activation of a new video transcoder, which means the RC no longer relies on an external service for converting videos to web compatible formats and bandwidth. This switch includes an extension of supported resolutions. RC now supports displaying full 1080p resolution (Full HD, or 1920x1080) as well as previously supported resolutions.

Explore the RC