Making it my own
(2023)
author(s): Mikael Charlie Bäckman
published in: Research Catalogue
Abstract
In the audio paper which forms the center piece of this exposition I have examined the idiolect of country harmonica player Charlie McCoy. In order to gain a multifarious understanding of McCoy’s idiolect I have made transcriptions of his recordings and interviewed McCoy himself and two other prominent harmonica players. With the aim of obtaining a more refined engagement with the performance, I have sought to embody McCoy’s playing by learning to play my transcriptions. The paper shows the prominent features of McCoy’s idiolect and how he created his idiolect while negotiating the affordances of the diatonic harmonica. The paper also shows how I am using transcriptions of his recordings with the intent of transforming my own artistic voice.
Keywords: Harmonica, Charlie McCoy, Idiolect, Voice, Affordances, Country music
Designing Agency
(2023)
author(s): Johanna Drucker
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
As AI systems proliferate, questions about their emergent capacities focus on intelligence, sentience, and control. But the issue of agency, the capacity for action with consequences, brings other design issues into play. Agency takes many forms including mechanical, incidental, probabilistic, and intentional, but is largely assessed on the basis of behaviors. The challenge of designing agency can be met by considering what must be programmed into a system to provide it with the capacity for action, but the distinction between the appearance of agency (simulacral) and actual agency (intentional) is difficult to test. This paper discusses some of the connections between agency and debates in physics about determinism and probability as they relate to the question of human capacities for intentional action and concludes with a discussion of the difficulties of conceptualizing agency without falling into Romantic models of disruptive behavior. No easy answers arise in regard to the problem of designing intentional agency in a way that can be either tested or constrained.
Explorations with an Ash Tree
(2023)
author(s): Annette Arlander
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
In this essay I describe one example of working with a tree (an ash tree on the former post quay on Eckerö Island) and suggest that such artistic methods, like performing with a tree repeatedly or addressing a tree in writing as a performance for camera, serve as useful tools to generate material to reflect upon later. The heightened perceptual awareness and the intensity of the moment of performance helps in articulating observations and ideas that might not have come to the fore in other circumstances.
The sea as a site of curation: Reflections on aesthetics education
(2023)
author(s): John Baldacchino
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
With the sea as a “site” of curation, a thalassic approach (as that which belongs to the sea), facilitates a showing of those things that converge upon the contingency of daily living. The case for aesthetics is pedagogical, inasmuch as it provides us with a strategy for exiting into the wider world as we move outside the walls of a building (and that of Bildung). Exiting also implies rejecting all those institutionalized constraints that education’s edificial approach brings to learning. Here, in its aporetic nature, art is one of those few human actions which allow us to articulate and enact a sense of being both strangers and homecomers in our own world. In other words, this is a form of curation that is claimed through the autonomy that it portends.
Porous Worlds – the Liminal Spaces of Relief
(2023)
author(s): Pauliina Pöllänen
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
Porous Worlds – the Liminal Spaces of Relief was carried out as an artistic research PhD project in affiliation with The Art Academy, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at the University of Bergen. The project examines the relief, its connections to art, craft, architecture, and ornament, as well as its various dimensions as an artistic medium.
It has been the relief´s in-between status and the lack of contemporary art discourse around it that has informed the questions like: what is at stake working with relief form today? What kind of artistic potential and possibilities does ceramic relief have to offer?
Rethinking WTC: a new interpretation of the Well-Tempered Clavier by J. S. Bach through the prism of the theory of Boleslav Javorsky
(2023)
author(s): Natalya Pasichnyk
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
In this project I sought to get new insights into the interpretational process, to make a contribution to the renewal of methods of working with a musical text, to find a new way to communicate meaning found in music, to broaden the role of the pianist to a co-creative one, and to unfold a new facet of the understanding of the Well-Tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach.
The initial inspiration for this project came from the theory of the Ukrainian-born musicologist Boleslaw Javorsky (1877-1942), the main sense of which can be formulated as: the main foundation of the Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) is the protestant chorales, and that the WTC is an artistic interpretation of images and plots of the Bible.
The use of metaphors, images and narrative is important as a way of working with music for many musicians. For me this way of thinking has always been the most important working method, along with the wide range of other elements within my individual working processes, which inform my artistic practice. I intended to go further and through the creative process during this project develop a new methodological approach in working with the music text. I call the process in search for meaning in preludes and fugues.
I try in this project to tell the story of my personal understanding of this iconic piece, often called the pianist's Bible. The story presented is not merely a descriptive Bible story, but rather a personal reflection over our existence.
My working process began with trying to find and understand the connection between words in the chorales as well as other vocal works of Bach, and the music text of WTC. When analysing the found connection, each prelude and fugue receives a concrete semantic meaning. I decided to place the pieces chronologically according to the meaning I found, so that the entire WTC becomes a unified coherent story, instead of a collection of 48 separate pieces.
I did not attempt to imitate the way of performing that was common during Bach's time, but rather to use all the advantages of the keyboard instrument of our time and all the expressive means it offers to share my findings. By experimenting with interweaving the motives of vocal music with WTC's music texture, I wanted to make my understanding of the genesis of the piece audible, but also to embed my reflections into my playing. It also broadened the role of the pianist to a more co-creative one, which was the common practice in Bach's time, but in an entirely different way. In other words, my intention was to make my interpretation historically informed, but to be faithful to the spirit of the time, rather than to the letter of the time.
The legendary Bach scholar Albert Schweitzer wrote about WTC: "What is gripping, is not the shape, or the structure of the pieces, but the worldview reflected in them". To make my understanding of this worldview audible to all listeners, and to invite them to immerse themselves into Bach’s spiritual universe (where the music's aim is the “recreation of the spirit”), is the overall goal of the project. Bach’s faith generated his music, and so I hope that this music can in turn generate faith, which we need in our current times more than ever.
