Passages of Light: Analogue and Digital Moving Image Installation.
(2019)
author(s): Alexander Nevill
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Within a rapidly changing media landscape, light remains an intrinsic and potentially expressive aspect of moving imagery, regardless of the shape, form and resolution that specific capture and display devices might take. The practice of light in moving imagery is typically considered through an arrangement of sources, filters and modifiers that sculpt the aesthetic appearance of a two-dimensional frame and is often studied in relation to mainstream Hollywood films. This practice-research investigation seeks to compliment such discourse by extending the consideration of lighting practices beyond conventional cinematography to an installation context. Through the presentation of several artworks, this exposition reveals a distinction between the light ‘of’ an image and the light ‘within’ an image. It also explores the material considerations of a practitioner’s control of projected light. Each artwork seeks to create an interoperation between analogue and digital moving imagery, weaving together various technologies in order to reveal an array of textures and qualities of light. Drawing primarily on autoethnographic notation captured during the creation of these artworks, as well as discussion of a range of film and video texts, this exposition investigates material tensions of mediated illumination.
Black Lungs
(2019)
author(s): Sepideh Karami
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The ultimate act of taking risk in life lays in the proximity to death. When a risk being taken is prone to fail, failure can potentially become the failure to live. These risky moments involve decisions, dreams, imaginings that motivate one to take action. The motivation is strong enough to push one to a fragile border between death and life.
In this exposition, I situate the discussion of risk in coal mines, investigating the work of coal miners as a craft through which they develop subversive modes of labour. The story in this exposition starts millions of years ago and gives a fictional geological history of Earth, where the formation of coal plays an important role in the planet’s evolution; coal becomes the political summary of Earth, where various moments of risk lead us down into a coal mine. Through a vertical structure poised on the edge of death and life, and by means of writing and drawing, risk is experimented with using concepts such as imprecision, the materiality of darkness, and the fragility of working with such materiality.
FanFutures
(2019)
author(s): Kate McCallum, Kate Monson, Majed Al-Jefri
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
"FanFutures" is a project working with artificial (AI) automatic text generation in an exploration of fan fiction and speculation about possible futures. It is a collaboration between an artist, a computer scientist, and a social scientist — and, in an extended sense, also with the fan fiction community and an AI algorithm.
Using a data-set of short sci-fi-esque stories written by anonymous members of the fan fiction community, we taught a natural language processing program to produce its own, entirely new short sci-fi-esque stories. The program takes imagined futures written by amateur writers, rather than institutionally-sanctioned voices, and dreams algorithmically through those voices to produce its own re-imaginings of possible futures.
We then turned these stories into films, films that depict a computer’s dreams of the future drawn from a mass of unknown voices, using imagery selected by another algorithm. The outputs are feverish and confused, but, as with human dreams, we have embraced their incoherence, and allowed imagery and atmosphere to come to the fore.
The project is inspired by our collective interest in understanding how humans make meaning with and through others — and how others make meaning with and through us. In a moment when our rapidly changing world, with its mass communication, new technologies and changing environment, seems almost intractable, we take a creative and playful approach to representing this complex intra-acting assemblage of human and more-than-human elements, and the possibilities in our world through sensory experience.
Performing the 'Group of the Six'
(2018)
author(s): Federico Forla
published in: KC Research Portal
Name: Federico Forla
Main Subject: Oboe
Research supervisor: Wouter Verschuren
Title of Research:
Performing the 'Group of the Six'
Research Question:
Which are the common aesthetic aspects found in the Group of the Six? How can one exemplify it in the performance?
Summary of Results:
A new French style starts to develop at the beginning of twentieth-century. This style will flourish and develop trough all the century. We can find in the 'Group of the Six' a first controversial example of this new aesthetic. In my research I used historical sources, writings of the composers and writers of the time, together with detailed analysis of representative compositions. Merging all this information, I was able to create a clearer picture of the new French aesthetic of the 'Group of the Six'. Performance practice is a central aspect: specific examples of the aesthetic's reflection in the scores are intended as a suggestion for the execution. A case-study at the end of the research shows a practical example of how the collected information can be used and related within a specific piece.
Biography:
Since the beginning of my musical studies I got really interested in chamber music. It was for me the most direct, simple and democratic way to make music together. In the following years this interest persisted, giving me the urge to explore and experiment new repertoire. My initial period at the Royal Conservatoire was characterized by my first serious approach to French chamber music of twentieth-century. My research was inspired by the issues, doubts and reflections of that period.
Anarchiving (in) Ben Patterson's Variations for Double-Bass
(2018)
author(s): Christopher Williams
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Here I employ techniques of anarchiving to explore the dynamics of notation, improvisatory performance, and analysis in Fluxus artist Ben Patterson's Variations for Double-Bass (1961). Coined by process philosophers Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, the concept of the anarchive refers to "a repertory of traces of collaborative research-creation events. The traces are not inert, but are carriers of potential." Variations' proto-anarchival qualities drive the structure of the exposition, which includes superimposed video documentation from my own performances, as well as brief analytical texts and performance instructions for the reader. I hope that this meta-anarchival process both sheds light on Patterson's work, and shows how documentation and analysis in the spirit of the anarchive can propel experimental (musical) practice forward in unexpected ways.
Can a drawing be rehearsed?; or, There's no bowing in performance art
(2018)
author(s): William Platz
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition combines a practice-led research project titled 'Tullah and Tom: A Drawing Affair' with a reflective analysis of ‘performance drawing’—a tag deployed with increasing frequency in drawing research. Drawing has always been hybridised and concocted with other disciplines and research frameworks, but its contemporary associations with performance art, expanded theatre and the performing arts are under-examined. The co-option of drawing by performance lacks extensive critical engagement, as do significant aspects of the performance drawing process. The subject of this exposition is two of these unexamined aspects—rehearsal and the curtain call. Although there are analogies to be drawn with theatre, this research resists analogy and focuses on these phenomena within the context of drawing practice. Drawing rehearsals and curtain calls are peculiar and specific activities within the performance/drawing nexus, and their examination has yielded significant insight. One private and one public, these ancillary and parasitical processes bracket the performance drawing and fulfil pivotal roles in enacting, re-enacting, and disenthralling the drawing from its performance matrix.
