How to Get Rid of Loneliness
(2024)
author(s): Jewellery witch Seraphita
published in: Research Catalogue
"How to Get Rid of Loneliness" refers to a video artwork by Darja Popolitova featured in the Magical Hotspot exhibition at Vent Space Gallery in 2020. In the video, the jewellery witch Seraphita performs a ritual using the Seastone Necklace, a natural stone with a hole worn as a pendant. She taps its surface with her long nails, whispering affirmations as if typing messages on a phone screen. The necklace becomes a ritualistic tool for dispelling loneliness, symbolising a bridge between isolation and connection.
How to Integrate Yourself into Society
(2024)
author(s): Jewellery witch Seraphita
published in: Research Catalogue
"How to Integrate Yourself into Society" is a performative video piece featuring the Ethnic Brooch, created for the exhibition Magical Hotspot at Vent Space Gallery in 2020. The work explores pseudomagic through symbolic ritual and material interaction. In the video, the character Seraphita pricks her finger with the brooch’s needle, allowing blood to drip onto a cracked phone screen. This act symbolises a ritualistic attempt at integration, merging personal identity with digital and societal representations.
The piece employs haptic-visuality, emphasising the tactile experience of the brooch’s needle piercing the skin, creating a visceral connection for the viewer. Close-up shots and textural details enhance the sensory impact, making the act of penetration both symbolically and physically felt. This multisensory approach intensifies the emotional resonance of the ritual, transforming the brooch into a charged object within a speculative, magical context.
Odd New Spring: Towards Evolving Landscapes and a Reorientation in Design Practice (2024)
(2024)
author(s): Siren Elise Wilhelmsen
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
"Odd New Spring: Towards Evolving Landscapes and a Reorientation in Design Practice" is an artistic research PhD project that explores methods for designers to engage with local environments, interdisciplinary communities, and professional fields in new ways. The project repositions unwanted plants, specifically Invasive Alien Plant Species, as a foundation for knowledge creation and new local activities. This approach challenges the perception of these plants as strictly agonistic and reframes them in the context of sustainability, production, and resource management. Through the artistic practice, the plants are connected to stories from the past and visions for the future, encouraging reflection on current classifications and relations.
The work culminated in the exhibition "Odd New Spring" at the University Museum in Bergen's Natural History Collections. Here, experimental artefacts, storytelling objects, interdisciplinary dialogues, and reflections point towards a new design position. The project envisions the designer as a bridge-builder across disciplines, fostering sustainable practices and coexistence within local landscapes.
Supervised by Mette L'orange (architect MNAL and visual artist) and Tim Parry-Williams (Professor of Art: Textiles, KMD).
Photo: Odd New Spring 2024, Siren Elise Wilhelmsen
testing Y1 RC function
(2024)
author(s): Hoai Tran
published in: Research Catalogue
This is a playground to explore RC function. I would like to use Abstract as a into/ summary for this expo.
Heaven on Earth: Revelation of the 10th Avatar
(2024)
author(s): Bradly Couch
published in: Research Catalogue
"Heaven on Earth: Revelation of the 10th Avatar" makes connections between ancient myths and Earth's topography that correspond to Hinduism's ten incarnations of Vishnu, resulting in visual evidence of the prophesied return of Kalki to usher in the Golden Age of Satya Yuga.
When GPT Digested the Medium Hélène Smith
(2024)
author(s): Katerina Undo
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
Exploring synergies between the study of the medium Hélène Smith at the turn of the 20th century and contemporary notions of subjectivity, artificiality and intelligence in the age of AI, the question of locating intelligence will not be a question with a binary answer in this paper. It will be shifted to multiple sites in an assimilative assemblage, exploring how identification might work from a rather metabolic side of the conversation. Weaving a thinking continuum on the evolving human-machine complexes beyond circular debates, Hélène Smith's ambiguous Martian writings are fed into GPT; an act intended as a metaphor and method for overcoming our binary contradiction of intelligence as either “natural” or “artificial”, ultimately generating new subjectivities, fluid variables or even contradictory insights. In this context, a meditation with speculative moments is attempted through human-machine inter-written texts, enacted through inter-twined speeches that reciprocally represent and interpret their own transitive nature.
