Soft letting of language — Listening for emergent wor(l)ds
(2025)
author(s): Emma Cocker
published in: Research Catalogue
My presentation for Listen for Beginnings drew on a number of recent collaborations to explore how the ethico-aesthetic practice of listening (and being listened to) has increasingly become a vital thread within my enquiry. The performativity of my presentation involved weaving between different research artefacts and materials generated in and through artistic collaboration (including video and transcript extracts), alongside "thinking with" a wider critical-contextual milieu (specifically the writing of thinkers such as Gemma Corradi Fiumara and Lispeth Lipari) to consider the relational and ethical ramifications of a listening attitude. I explored how forms of languaging developed through listening might in turn call for different kinds of reception (alternative ways of listening and reading), alongside proposing how a ‘listening stance’ might inform an approach to collaboration — collaboration conceived as a mode of in-touch-ness that also allows for adjacency and alongside-ness, for indirectness and obliqueness, for the reciprocity of listening and being listened to. Within this published context, I want to allow a ‘breathing space’ (perhaps even a ‘listening space’) for selected fragments of an emergent vocabulary of/through listening generated from within a process of collaborative research. My paper comprises extracts of conversational transcript from three different collaborative projects where an immanent and reflexive language for attesting to the qualities and conditions of listening emerges in and through a language-based practice that is itself imbued with a listening attitude — one that involves listening to oneself, listening to others, listening for emergent wor(l)ds. The textual extracts have been generated largely through a practice of conversation and/or the experimental reading of conversational transcripts within the following projects: I – “Dorsal Practices” is an artistic research collaboration with Katrina Brown for exploring how a back-oriented awareness and attitude might shape and inform our embodied, affective and relational experience of being-in-the-world; II — “thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices” is an artistic research project involving Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Nicole Wendel (with Sabine Zahn in the first phase) that focuses on ways in which aesthetic research practices enable and realise a specific form of thinking: aesthetic thinking; III — “The Appearance of the More” is an artistic research collaboration with Nicole Wendel for bringing-into-relation the unfolding, embodied processes of drawing and languaging as resonating fields of perception and cooperation.
A Time of Unfulfilled Expectations
(2025)
author(s): Miriana Faieta
published in: Research Catalogue
My doctoral research project explores the use of language and the production of meaning in singing, more specifically in collective vocal improvisation. When we sing together improvising, how do we use language? And how can a different use of language in a community of singers innovate our musical practice? In «Re-voicing the Text. A Collective Practice of Vocal Improvisation», the line between a research presentation and a collective performance is blurred, as well as the boundary between doing research and sharing research. During this session, participants sang together and reflected out loud with me, and I with them, on our native languages and the way a certain use of language might induce us to conceive time in music differently. Our exploration began with Mentre (“While”), a short text by Giorgio Agamben, in which the philosopher proposes using language—and adverbs in particular—as a way of rethinking time.
All Tomorrow´s Parties: post pandemic dancing
(2025)
author(s): Brynjar Åbel Bandlien
published in: Research Catalogue
All Tomorrow´s Parties: post pandemic dancing is an artistic research that undertakes the task of discovering how hiv and aids has affected the Norwegian dance scene in the 1980´s and 1990´s and all the way up until today. Many dancers got infected by the virus, lived with hiv, and died of aids. Who were they? What were they dancing? And what kind of dances would they have danced had they not died too early? By interviewing the survivors, this project aims to map out how the Norwegian dance scene was affected by this pandemic, outline the hole left behind by this generation that disappeared, and try to fill it by creating dances that they could have danced.
tír-éist: collaborative practice with more-than-human colleagues
(2025)
author(s): Shane Finan
published in: Research Catalogue
This paper is an exploration of collaborative artistic practice. Drawing from contemporary philosophy and ethics, it uses practical experience from three collaborative research projects to show how different approaches can be applied in artistic research. The paper draws from three collaborative research projects, each with a slightly different approach. The projects took place between 2018 and 2023, and include collaboration between artists, collaboration with more-than-human colleagues, and research collaboration.
Costumes
(2025)
author(s): Margherita Citi
published in: Research Catalogue
Wearing a garment can serve as a metaphor for inhabiting the city. In both cases, a space built on a human scale is occupied, excluding everything else. Spontaneous vegetation moves slowly, so as not to be noticed. Meanwhile, the city grows and alters it, leaving an indelible mark on its form. The silhouettes of pruned plants, twisted and unnatural, resemble anthropomorphic figures, and the scene becomes suspicious.
The “Costumes” series consists of disguises created from models of plants spotted in urban environments. Their shape prevents other life forms from wearing them.
Silence as Medium
(2025)
author(s): Dorian Vale
published in: Research Catalogue
This text is a sustained philosophical exploration of silence as an aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic medium. It examines silence not as the absence of sound, but as a generative presence that structures perception, meaning, and artistic encounter. Within the framework of Post-Interpretive Criticism, silence is positioned as the original ground from which expression emerges and the final condition to which all expression returns.
The treatise analyzes distinctions between silence as containment and silence as erasure, arguing that the ethical force of silence lies in its use: it can dignify the unsayable or be weaponized to suppress and marginalize. The work draws on cross-disciplinary examples from sculpture, poetry, music, film, and museology, illustrating how restraint shapes the architecture of experience. It argues that silence is foundational to perception, authorship, and criticism, and that the erosion of silence in digital culture has produced a contemporary “poverty of depth” characterized by immediacy without intimacy.
Within the museum context, the text advocates for silence as a curatorial principle—an element of spatial ethics that allows artworks to be encountered with attention rather than overwhelmed by spectacle or interpretive noise. It further articulates the responsibilities of the artist and the critic: the artist must discern which silence they invoke; the critic must understand which silence they break.
This essay contributes to ongoing discussions in contemporary aesthetics, museum studies, and critical theory by reframing silence as an essential but endangered cultural resource. It presents silence as an uncommodifiable medium that resists institutional, linguistic, and commercial capture. The work aligns with and expands the theoretical commitments of the Post-Interpretive Movement, emphasizing moral proximity, restraint, and the ethics of presence.
This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and _Art as Truth: A Treatise_ (Q136329071), _Aesthetic Recursion Theory_ (Q136339843), The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (Q136530009), Canon of Witnesses (Q136565881)
