Staging Afternoon Landscapes
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Elena Peytchinska, Eva-Maria Schaller
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
With the project "Staging Afternoon Landscapes," we propose an exploration of cross-disciplinary spatial practices: on the one hand, by experimenting with spatial and material constellations of kinship in the context of dance performance, and on the other, by transmedial activating multilayered spatiality, applying drawing as a method for spatial practice.
This research project was conducted during our artist residency at Im_Flieger, Vienna, from March 2024 to January 2025.
Making a Play for Identity: Exploring the Posthuman Condition of Generative AI Through Language-Based Artistic Research
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In this project, we address the relationship between generative AI and principles of play from a posthuman perspective, drawing on our work in Language-Based Artistic Research. We position Language Arts as a committed expressive practice that is productively distinct from creative writing while capable of generating insights relevant both within artistic domains and beyond. Moving past binary positions of technological apocalypse or uncritical affirmation, we adopt an artistically reflexive approach to generative AI and its cultural, particularly posthuman, implications. To illustrate this relationship, we experiment with large and small language models trained to play a game based on the structure of "Who am I," the experience of which we will demonstrate during our presentation. This approach addresses not only the linguistic expression and linguistic constitution of identity but also examines the underlying principles of play itself. Our artistic research draws on James P. Carse’s (1986) and Simon Sinek’s (2019) models of finite and infinite games and explores the challenges of relating these artistic and theoretical frameworks to one another. In our experimental setting—alongside philosophical considerations, game-related elements such as rules and improvisation, and combinatorial aesthetics—we focus on two key areas for artistic investigation through a posthuman lens: First, we explore principles of playful, polyvalent experimentation that resist orientation toward reproducible results or unambiguous truths in a scientific sense. Second, following Johanna Drucker's reflections (2023), we examine the concept of agency as a more relevant focus for AI than intelligence or sentience, distinguishing between AI's core functions of synthesis and simulation and acknowledging that AI's capabilities align more closely with pattern-based processes than with the human concept of creativity. Through this methodological constellation, we combine our fundamental positioning in Language-Based Artistic Research with game theory frameworks to question how generative AI engages with concepts of playability and artificially generated identities. This research contributes to emerging conversations about the nature of machine agency and the evolving boundaries between human and machine-generated expression.
"What the Probes Report": An Exercise in Operative Fiction
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
With Operative Fiction, we introduce a practice of spatial storytelling driven by the dynamics of prepositions rather than verb-centric narratives. Here, the textual body becomes embedded in the medial spatiality of a printed book, digital interface, or performance space. The physical or virtual site of the text thus becomes integral to the storytelling process. Spatial production methods merge into the texture of the text itself; simultaneously, the text reshapes the unfolding of space, place, and site. The material and procedural qualities of the text actively engage and activate the digital interface as a site of narrative unfolding, intertwining textual and spatial experiences.
We begin our first exercise in Operative Fiction with Thomas Ballhausen’s What the Probes Report, transposing the text from the printed page (FLORA, 2020) into the digital interface of a Research Catalogue exposition. The non-human protagonist – emerging through and evolving within the text – disrupts subject-centred narration. It becomes entangled in the linguistic and scenic fabric of its own development, thus, through its procedural logic and function, becoming an active agent in its own staging. A line, speculatively re-enacting the machine's operations, simultaneously traces the topographic texture of the digital landscape.
Using a drawing technique typically applied in performance design drafts, we explore the friction between staging and spacing by deploying minimally visible images and textual cues of direction. The operational plasticity of these technical images enables dramaturgical intensities to gather (staging), while also allowing the story to disperse through the digital architecture of the exposition into hyperlinked virtual spaces (spacing).
Alongside a linear reading mode, which follows the story’s original chronology, we propose a contingent reading mode activated via time codes. These time codes function both as compositional elements within the drawing and as hypertextual links. They suggest the duration and shape of a staged terrain, occasionally layering multiple time zones within a single topographic entity. In this way, the timelines act as more-than-texts, generating a multiplicity of positions and proximities, and intertwining temporal aspects of space with the speculative grammar of the story.
Drawing Across x Along x Between x University Borders
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): DRAWinU
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
CONFERENCE, UNIVERSITY OF PORTO.
October 16, 17, 18th, 2024
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Drawing Across :: Along :: Between University Borders considers the epistemological and transformative potential of drawing research to connect divergent areas in the university today. The conference focuses on drawing-based collaborations between art, science and society to tackle artistic, educational and societal challenges. We invite artists, scientists, educators, students, university policymakers and persons interested in inter-transdisciplinary practices across academia, research, and society to contribute and join the discussion in three possible directions:
ACROSS - In what ways are drawing practitioners challenging the disciplinary strictures that often constrain thinking and acting across divergent areas in the university?
ALONG - How can drawing activities be an ally of STEM education in the university, and how can STEM practices be an ally of drawing education?
BETWEEN - How can drawing-based practices and STEM disciplines collaborate to address the urgency of societal challenges?
With the project "Staging Afternoon Landscapes," we propose an exploration of cross-disciplinary spatial practices: on the one hand, by experimenting with spatial and material constellations of kinship in the context of dance performance, and on the other, by transmedial activating multilayered spatiality, applying drawing as a method for spatial practice. This research project was conducted during our artist residency at Im_Flieger, Vienna, from March 2024 to January 2025.open exposition comments (0)