The artistic research project TiO₂: The Materiality of White (MoW) is led by Associate Professor Marte Johnslien, Department of Art and Craft, Oslo National Academy of the Arts. The project builds on her PhD project White to Earth, completed at the same department in 2020. MoW is funded by the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills (HK-dir) through the Programme for Artistic Research for the period 2022–2026.
The artistic intervention "Foot Baths for All" (2024) emerged from an ethnographic exploration of collective forms of life on wastelands in Switzerland. Ethnographic insights regarding self-organized care, occupation, informal infrastructure, gift economies, and the shared use of water and electricity were fictionalized and recontextualized in the inner city of Zurich, in order to explore new forms of appropriation and participation in urban life.
This exposition aims to share the results and experiences of this research through multiple formats: a video documentation, a how-to guide, and a text that offers insights into the ethnographic research and its translation into an artistic intervention, conceptualizing "Foot Bath Urbanism" as an artistic method for city-making from below.
This project is situated in the field of artistic urban research. It is based on an expanded notion of art that moves beyond institutional contexts to intervene directly in public urban spaces through installations and performative practices, following approaches such as “New Genre Public Art”. The how-to guide is connected to instruction-based art, challenging conventional notions of authorship while emphasizing accessibility, participation, and interactivity, rooted in the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Fluxus movement.
Mention of a surrealist form of criticism comes to us through Breton and Polizzotti, but we have little in the way of criteria or techniques for developing and identifying such critiques. This article, then, begins with the inquiry, what is surrealist criticism—or what might it be? The authors then introduce the focus of their own surrealist critique, the research methodology known as arts-based research (ABR). Over the course of their examination, Fielding and Harkey suggest that an egoic, or will-driven, approach to arts-based research must ultimately fail, in that it both denies the spirit of artmaking and disregards autonomy of figures in psyche. Blending academic and surrealist prose, fiction and poetry, the authors explore ways the ABR methodology can fail to serve either art or research. Still, Jungian thought, as well as the surrealist approach, may offer tools to inform an ABR that supports art, psyche, and research. In exploring the personal complex and the collective unconscious, particularly, Harkey and Fielding offer a window on all that can be lost—or gained—when the life of psyche is considered in an arts-based methodology.
This essay examines the subjective perception of time during the performance of long musical forms from the perspective of the performer. The starting point is the composition "Haltezeit", which works specifically with the stretching of time. Two improvisational performances without an audience will be used to explore how the perception of time changes in the course of performances lasting several hours and how this influences improvisational behavior. Practical experience is combined with concepts from the fields of philosophy, performance studies and musical improvisation research. The artistic experiments show that physical states such as tiredness or tension as well as external disturbances significantly influence the subjective perception of duration. While inner restlessness led to an extended experience of time and more frequent improvisational interventions, calmness and concentration favored a condensed, meditative experience of time with less frequent changes.
Artistic practice thus becomes an experiential space for a qualitative perception of time beyond measurable structures. The essay sees itself as an open research gesture that invites us to perceive time more consciously as a flowing continuum in a performative context.
This article explores the shifting temporality of John Cage’s 4’33” as it propogates through the digital landscape of YouTube. Originally conceived as a timed, almost site-specific performance of shared presence and ambient listening, 4’33” can function surprisingly well online in an environment dedicated to speed, repetition, and distraction. Drawing on seven diverse video performances—ranging from the historically grounded to the amateur and experimental—I examine how silence and time are embodied, marked, framed, and performed in online space. These performances inhabit a paradox: they are situated within a system designed to fragment attention, yet they demand stillness and duration. In doing so, they unsettle the assumptions of immediacy that govern digital spectatorship.
Rather than treat 4’33” as a fixed score, I argue that each video becomes a site of temporal negotiation. The performers use silence as a gestural and visual act, creating tension between embodied time and platform time. They foreground listening not only as acoustic attention but as a durational stance—an insistence on presence within an artwork that privileges absence. The result is a form of quiet resistance to algorithmic rhythm, the embracing of non-playing, a reclaiming of boredom.
These online performances suggest that 4’33” has not lost its edge. Instead, it has adapted, becoming a mirror for contemporary conditions of time, presence, and attention. Silence here is not absence, but an expanded field—where listening, duration, and performance are reimagined in and against the temporal asynchronicities of the digital.
(painting by Morna McGoldrick, 1964)
This article examines an expanded conceptualization of time-based art beyond artworks that unfold consecutively over measurable durations. Typical time-based art was characterized with clear beginning and ending such as performance, cinematic art, moving image, sound art, and computational installation. In contrast, this analysis investigates how static art possesses temporal qualities through alternative means. With the incorporation of “time-based materials” - substances that transform their external forms over time – we establish an alternative time-based art characterized by an imminent temporality.
Historical paintings like Goya’s "The Third of May 1808" and Bruegel’s "The Fall of the Rebel Angels" reveal early attempts to the depiction of time through compositional arrangement and juxtaposition of events. The author extends this tradition by exploring how certain materials possess intrinsic “temporal directionality” – a predictable but fluctuating transformation process. Examples include oxidation of metals that undergo the process of rusting and patination, creating visual changes that occur gradually and unpredictably, embodying what the author terms an imminent quality - known to happen but uncertain in exact duration.
The author makes use of his own artworks as case studies: "Simulacra" (2015), a juxtaposition of photographs of copper armors against the actual deteriorating objects; "The Fall of the Rebel Angels" (2022), a translation of Pieter Bruegel’s painting into an installation using patinated copper; and "Public Cemetery" (2023), an incorporation of natural phenomenon like rain and typhoons as temporal agents. These works demonstrate how materials that vulnerable to intrinsic transformation can create temporal experiences that transcend conventional time-based art definitions, offering new possibilities for expressing time through the interplay of possibility, impossibility, and imminence.
