D.E.A.D.line
(2025)
author(s): s†ëf∆/\/ sch/\efer
published in: Research Catalogue
Experimental article for the Performance Philosophy journal Vol. 9 No. 2 (2024): With the Dead: Performance Philosophy, Dying, and Grief.
Abstract:
The last years the so-called phenomenon “glacier funerals” has appeared and spread globally with the most famous one happening in Iceland (Ok-glacier) in August 2019, followed by amongst others, funerals in Switzerland (Piezol glacier), Mexico (Ayoloco glacier) the United States (Clark glacier). It is one way to cope with ecological grief, an emotional response to the (future) impact of so-called anthropogenic climate change. The funerals differ in execution, but they remain rituals usually performed for humans and are “projected” on glacial beings. This works powerfully for creating awareness of glacier loss and climate change as such. The declared deaths of the glaciers are defined as the loss of the status as a glacier by scientists and are measurable. In this article, I am in for a search for a way to emerge rituals with mountains and glaciers as collaborators, based on a rather personal, partly autobiographic, artistic, and poetic approach, which leads to a better understanding of caring for a mountain and a glacier and bridges the gap between abstract measurable knowledge and a public in a way that it makes the impact of anthropogenic climate collapse sensible.
Design Phenomenographies for Industrial Wastelands
(2025)
author(s): monica tusinean
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The long-neglected industrial wastelands of Romania present themselves as heterotopias in need of help. Post-Communist industrial ruins form a link to a multi-layered and difficult past, and their systemic erasure has contributed to a collective amnesia that perpetuates historical trauma and denies the local population access to the landscapes, natural and artificial, that tie them to a shared past and a collective cultural identity.
This contribution aims to illustrate one methodology of bridging the gap between preservation through museumification and invasive architectural intervention. In this context, artistic and design-driven research practices can enable the emergence of ephemeral creative spaces that foster engagement with industrial heritage and reach beyond commodification and capitalist exploitation.
Graduation Seminar (2021) Arts and Visual Communication
(2023)
author(s): Yamil Hasbun Chavarría, Pamela Jiménez Jiménez
published in: Research Catalogue
Graduation Seminar (2021) Arts and Visual Communication
This document constitutes the memory of the Graduation Seminar of the year 2021 of the School of Art and Visual Communication (EACV) of the National University (UNA), Costa Rica.
The theme endorsed by the Academic Unit for 2021 consists of the project directed by Dr. Phil. Yamil Hasbun Chavarría (EACV) and the M.A. Pamela Jiménez Jiménez (School of Performing Arts): Nodos Activos (Investigación + Practica artística (Spanish for Active nodes: Research + artistic practice).
The Seminar is materialized in 5 associated research projects focused on 5 different topics: Artistic research through dialogical and playful processes; Artistic research in the 4th Industrial revolution; The urge to allow research performed by students to be further and easier exposed; the experience interdisciplinary artistic research; and experiences of meta-artistic research.
Authors/students:
Mariana Cañas Lopez, Gloriana Cordero Rojas, Valeria Esquivel Jiménez, Wensi Fuentes Hernández, Andres garita Briseño, Susana Gonzales Gabrilova, María Gabriela Isturiz Rojas, Valeria Leiva Ruiz, Yendry Madrigal Mora, Mariela Martínez Alfaro, Gabriela Mora Araya, Maria Soledad Morales Brenes, Tifany Perla Brenes, Randy Rojas Diaz, Jose Solano Sanchez
Sonic Information Design
(2018)
author(s): Stephen Barrass
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The International Community for Auditory Display (ICAD) is a multidisciplinary community that includes researchers with backgrounds in music, computer science, psychology, engineering, neuroscience, and the sonic arts. Although this multi-disciplinarity has been beneficial, it has also been the cause of clashes between scientific and artistic research cultures. This paper addresses this divide by proposing design research as a third and complementary approach that is particularly well aligned with the pragmatic and applied nature of the field. The proposal, called sonic information design, is explicitly founded on the design research paradigm. Like other fields of design, sonic information design aspires to make the world a better place, in this case through the use of sound. Design research takes a user-centered approach that includes participatory methods, rapid prototyping, iterative evaluation, situated context, aesthetic considerations, and cultural issues. The results are specific and situated rather than universal and general and may be speculative or provocative, but should provide insights and heuristics that can be reused by others. The strengthening and development of design research in auditory display should lay the path for future commercial applications.
Delta
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Svein Petter Knudsen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The text outlines an artistic research and development project that investigates Open Source and Open Hardware systems as artistic, technological, and pedagogical tools. Positioned at the intersection of artistic practice, technological development, and critical reflection on contemporary production culture, the project explores how open, accessible, and repairable machines can expand design methodologies and challenge proprietary production structures. Central to the research is the act of building as a form of knowledge production, fostering embodied technological understanding and user agency. With a strong ecological, social, and pedagogical sustainability ambition, the project proposes alternative, locally situated production models. A key outcome is the development of a large-scale, open delta-based 3D printer for sustainable materials, enabling artistic exploration at human and architectural scales.
/\/\o\/ing \/\/i†h /\/\ount/\ins. scores / invitations
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): stefan schäfer
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This is a first set of scores and invitations for performers to train with, mountaineers and hikers to use during a mountain visit, students and teachers to start a wide range of discussions about ethical approaches when working with more-than-humans, climate change, commemorative rituals in relation to mountain or landscapes in a broader sense. They can be used in practice and at the same time operate as discussion starters. The scores have been developed in collaboration with the hoch\/ogel /\/\oun†/\in (AU/DE), starting from field work consisting of daily visits to the /\/\oun†/\in in July 2024. Afterwards I shared finding of the excursion with the Embodied Knowledge Research Group of the Lectorate of Theater and Dance at the Amsterdam University of the Arts and formulated this first set of scores and invitations. The set includes characteristics, environments and movements of /\/\oun†/\ins and rockslides in order to perform those at any location. For geological characteristics and movements I reached out to the Technical University of Munich Landslide Research Department who observes, and researches the hoch\/ogel /\/\oun†/\in and its movement and transformation. They provided me with articles and invited me to a course and an excursion. Altogether forms the base for the scores. The scores and invitations are a continuing part of my research with which I contribute to "Landscape Translation" (Pitches, 2020) within the field of performance as well as to artistic research methodology, design methodology and mountaineering. Landscape Translation is the conceptual meeting point between two perspectives of training regimes depending on /\/\oun†/\ins, "either conceptually (as places for training to occur), or formally (as inspiring shapes, figures and metaphors) (Ibid). My contribution focuses on acknowledging the temporality and constant transition of a /\/\oun†/\in and an intimate, reciprocal relationship with the /\/\oun†ain. This set is one of many shapes of how to share these kind of experiences, emotions, relations with other audiences. To outline an ethical and just position the scores and invitations incorporate amongst others the following features of ontologically-oriented-design (Escobar, 2018). They can be seen as hands-on invitations to act in either a /\/\oun†/\in site or any other space. With the development of the research, new features will be added and some of the existing ones might be be adjusted. Ontologically-oriented-design: - promotes convivial and communal instrumentations involving human/nonhumans collectives provoked into existence by ecological breakdowns or shared harm. It imagines designs that take seriously the active powers issuing from nonhumans, and it builds on the positive ontology of vibrant matter, realizing that design situations always involve encounters between human and nonhuman actants of all kinds. - always entails reconnection: with nonhumans, things in their thinghood (adding persons in their personhood), with the earth, with spirit, humans in their radical alterity (decolonially, considering the inclusion of multiple worlds, rather that exclusion). It contributes to dismantling dualisms and take seriously all forms of nondualist existence. Enables ontologies of compassion and care. - explicitly contributes to creating the languages that create the world(s) in which people operate in the creation of domains of conversations for actions, it necessarily moves from design to experience and back - is not a(bout) straightforward fabrication but modes of revealing; it considers retrieving forms of making that are not merely technological (going beyond techno-rationalism), while embracing new creations. It may do so by looking at the entire range of design traditions (within the West and beyond) non-eurocentrically and decolonially. References: Escobar, A., "Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds", Duke University Press, 2018. Pitches, J., "Performing Mountains", Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. (2025-07-14)
/\/\o\/ing \/\/i†h /\/\ount/\ins. de\/eloping co/\/\/\/\e/\/\ora†i\/e ri†uals in coll/\bor/\†ion \/\/i†h †he "dying" hoch\/ogel /\/\oun†ain
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): stefan schäfer
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This paper has been presented at the SIEF ethnography and folklore studies conference 2025 in Aberdeen. For the panel "Unwriting mountain worlds: beyond stereotypes and anthropocentrism". I decided to pre-record reading my paper and present it with a 22. minute video edit of my fieldwork in the summer 2024.
Within the context of the global climate crisis, mourning rituals concerning ecological loss, or future ecological loss of a landscape have gained attention in the last couple of years. In 2019, Iceland held the first glacier funeral for the dead glacier Ok. Almost at the same time, people in Switzerland went on a funeral march to the Pizol glacier. Since then, glacier funerals have been spread globally with the intention of raising awareness for the global climate crisis. Death and commemorative rituals are in this context a powerful manner to do so. A part of the rituals remains pre-dominantly Western and are for a big part copy-pasted around the globe. For example, the text from the plaque in Iceland got translated into Spanish and placed on the remains of the Ayoloco glacier in Mexico. The performed rituals are usually held for other humans and projected on a landscape. Although I understand the benefits, I find both aspects also problematic. First, the predominantly Western-eurocentric rituals, like wearing black, imply a colonialist dispersion of commemorative ritual across the globe. A “one funeral fits all” approach is rooted in a capitalist funeral industry. I claim for rituals emerging in and with a mountain. Characteristics of, and relations with the mountain are essential in this process. Second, the sheer projection of rituals for humans on a mountain keeps up the widespread Western idea that the human stands above nature. I know these points are not the intentions of glacier funeral initiators’, and I am grateful for and inspired by what they do. But my motivation for this paper derives from the mentioned concerns and lead to the following questions:
Regarding a potential “one funeral fits all” tendency which is based on predominantly Western-Eurocentric rituals following a universalist “One-world-world” view, how could and why should rituals for mountains and glaciers operate as counter-perspectives on this tendency?
Considering (future) ecological loss, how can features of ontological design provide methods to emerge commemorative rituals in, with and from a dying landscape, in this case the “dying” Hochvogel mountain?
Breaking Circles
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Sunniva Storlykken Helland
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The project 'Breaking Circles' is matriculated in the field of social design - an area within the design field that has renewed itself in recent years. Social design is user oriented towards vulnerable and exposed groups within society.
Serving a sentence in prison is often associated with a range of penalties. Norway has only one penalty; denial of freedom. The inmates have the same rights as the rest of society, and are supposed to take part of it. The Norwegian Correctional Service’s unofficial slogan reads: ‘better out, than in’ meaning that rehabilitation overcomes penalty. The inmates have both the right and a duty to work, getting educated or attending amendment programs. The goal of their work is to qualify for working life after prison.
Having to go to prison will without a doubt be a personal crisis for anyone, and can lead to loss of jobs, housing, personal economy and social network. Inmates could benefit from building professional networks to avoid seeking out old acquaintances in criminal networks after prison, heading into criminal relapse. Having worked with design projects in the western region of the Norwegian Correctional Service, I have seen the vast areas and systems within prisons and the service that are untouched by design strategy. Design has considerable potential to help inmates benefit from their surrounding systems, both within prison and outside. I aim to use social design to ease inmate’s transitions to becoming potential employees through their work within prison.
To be able to do that, there are several problem areas to address: the content of inmate’s work in prison, inmate’s tools of sentence progress, barriers between prison and society and the lack of established professional networks to prevent criminal networks taking over after serving.
Using graphic design and visual communication in social design can contribute to a dawning interest in design and creative practice to prevent recidivistic crime and social marginalization. Breaking Circles is a project with a strong emphasis on design experiments through field work in a real-life context: prison.
P.A.F (pavement.as.fails)
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Maëlla Castiglione
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
P.A.F. is a project designed to give visibility to road defects that can become obstacles in urban traffic. Taking care of our cities is a real challenge. In Europe, tourist and historic districts are subject to rehabilitation, leaving other areas neglected. Awareness starts with the importance we attach to things. Making things visible is a way of raising awareness. Our cities need to be inclusive, and we need to take care of them in order to take care of our bodies and our uses. The city studied here is Porto (Portugal), but the project is adaptable to a European scale.
Shell-Ter
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Maëlla Castiglione
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Shell-Ter is a microarchitecture project inspired by the shape of seashells. The idea stems from the current housing crisis in Europe. What if we all became homeless? Dystopian thinking here is a space of refuge for human psychology, finding in dystopia a libertarian alternative by thinking in terms of nomadism.
Intertwined - What does it mean to be a creative person of faith?
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Joshua Hale, Kelly J. Arbeau
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
From the most religious to the most secular, no artist ever knows exactly where their creative process is leading—but we all seem to have faith that we will get there. Many factors underlying creativity are also crucial to the act of having faith. These shared factors include ambiguity tolerance, openness to mystery, engaging with paradoxical thinking, perseverance, and questioning. Additionally, those who practice each (creativity, faith) share many guiding phrases, such as “take it one step at a time,” “go with your heart,” and “trust the process.” This interdisciplinary arts-based research project explores the experience of being a self-identified creative who practices a faith or religion. The exhibition combines methods from arts-based research, human centered design, and phenomenology to describe the intersections between the creative practices and faith perspectives of 15 individuals. The experience of our participants is that of creativity and faith combining—intertwining—to form an interactional, hybrid experience that is profoundly different from each experience on its own.
The long-neglected industrial wastelands of Romania present themselves as heterotopias in need of help. Post-Communist industrial ruins form a link to a multi-layered and difficult past, and their systemic erasure has contributed to a collective amnesia that perpetuates historical trauma and denies the local population access to the landscapes, natural and artificial, that tie them to a shared past and a collective cultural identity. This contribution aims to illustrate one methodology of bridging the gap between preservation through museumification and invasive architectural intervention. In this context, artistic and design-driven research practices can enable the emergence of ephemeral creative spaces that foster engagement with industrial heritage and reach beyond commodification and capitalist exploitation.open exposition comments (0)
P.A.F. is a project designed to give visibility to road defects that can become obstacles in urban traffic. Taking care of our cities is a real challenge. In Europe, tourist and historic districts are subject to rehabilitation, leaving other areas neglected. Awareness starts with the importance we attach to things. Making things visible is a way of raising awareness. Our cities need to be inclusive, and we need to take care of them in order to take care of our bodies and our uses. The city studied here is Porto (Portugal), but the project is adaptable to a European scale.open exposition comments (0)
Shell-Ter is a microarchitecture project inspired by the shape of seashells. The idea stems from the current housing crisis in Europe. What if we all became homeless? Dystopian thinking here is a space of refuge for human psychology, finding in dystopia a libertarian alternative by thinking in terms of nomadism.open exposition comments (0)