SYNSMASKINEN
(2022)
author(s): Frans Jacobi
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
SYNSMASKINEN: an inquiry into contemporary political crises
SYNSMASKINEN is a new artist-group and an inquiry into contemporary political crises. The project will consist of art projects, each exploring a certain aspect or manifestation of contemporary crisis. Together these visions are attempts to unfold a contemporary cosmology; a new political horizon.
SYNSMASKINEN is an artist-group in the sense that each production is made in collaboration between a small group of participants. Each art project will be made by new groups of artists and thinkers. In this sense SYNSMASKINEN will probe the concept of the research-group: What kind of insights does artistic thinking provide? How can collectivity address the political issues of topics in a critical manner?
The name, SYNSMASKINEN is taken from the Danish and Norwegian translations of Paul Virilio’s seminal book on the techniques of perception, La Machine De Vision. The name SYNSMASKINEN contains the methodological program: SYN=vision / MASKIN=machine
SYNSMASKINEN is the third large-scale research-project at Bergen Academy of Art & Design. Following Re-Place and Topographies of the Obsolete the project offers a continuation of and an addition to the new tradition of kunstnerisk utvikling/artistic research at the core the Department of Art. SYNSMASKINEN is organised by professor Frans Jacobi, artistic-research leader Åse Løvgren and research assistant Benedicte Clementsen.
www.synsmaskinen.net
Topographies of the Obsolete
(2022)
author(s): KMD, Arild Berge
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
Topographies of the Obsolete is an artistic research project initiated by Professors Neil Brownsword and Anne Helen Mydland at Bergen Academy of Art and Design (KHiB) in collaboration with partner universities/institutions in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, France and the UK. In 2012 the British Ceramics Biennial invited Bergen Academy of Art and Design (KHiB) to develop a site-specific artistic response to the former Spode Factory in Stoke-on-Trent as a key element of their 2013 exhibition programme. The project explores the landscape and associated histories of post-industry, with an initial emphasis on Stoke-on-Trent, a world-renowned ceramics capital that bears evidence of fluctuations in global fortunes.
Matter, Gesture and Soul
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): MATTER, GESTURE AND SOUL, Eamon O`Kane, Geir Harald Samuelsen, Åsil Bøthun, Elin Tanding Sørensen, Anne-Len Thoresen, Dragos Gheorghiu, Petro Keene
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A cross disciplinary artistic research project that departs from, and investigates several encounters and alignments between Contemporary Art and Archaeology. Its primary goal is to create a broad selection of autonomous and collaborative artistic, poetic and scientific expressions and responses to Prehistoric Art and its contemporary images. It will seek to stimulate a deeper understanding of contemporary and prehistoric artistic expression and the contemporary and prehistoric human condition. The participating artists and archaeologists will create autonomous projects, but also interact with each other in workshops, seminars and collaborative artistic projects.
The secondary goal of Matter, Gesture and Soul is to establish an international cross disciplinary research network at the University of Bergen and strengthen the expertise in cross disciplinary artistic and scientific work
with artistic research as the driving force.
The project is financed by DIKU and UiB and supported by Global Challenges (UiB)
In a Place like this
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Johan Sandborg, Duncan Higgins
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In A place Like This sets out to investigate and expand the issues and critical discourses within Sandborg and Higgins' current collaborative research practice. The central focus for the research is concerned with how art, in this instance photographic and painted image making and text, can be used as an agent or catalyst of understanding and critical reflection.
The research methodology is constructed through photography, painting, drawing and text. This utilises the form of an artist publication as a point of critically engaged dissemination: a place for the tension between conflicting ideas and investigation to be explored through discussion.
The research question is focused on how the production of the image and the act of making images can communicate or describe moments of erasure or remembering in terms of historical and personal narratives with direct reference to moments of violence and place.
This is seen not in terms of a nostalgic remembrance of the past; instead as one that is rife with complicated layers and dynamics where recognition is denied the ability to locate a physical representation. Embedded in this is an exploration of particular questions concerning the ethics of representation: the depiction of ourselves and other? In this sense it brings into question an examination of the act of remembering as a thing in itself, through the production of the image and text, contexts of knowledge and cultural discourses explored through the form of an artists publication.
Dark Matter
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Eamon O`Kane, Geir Harald Samuelsen
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The Irish visual artist Professor Eamon O'Kane is investigating the recent past through a ten-year project at a site in Denmark and is using the archive accumulated from this research as a comparative to the distant past of a Neolithic site, Newgrange in Ireland. O´Kane uses an observation made by Buckminster Fuller where he relates Einstein´s theory of relativity to a deeper understanding of the universe, explaining that when one looks at the night sky one is looking into a type of time machine where it is possible to see stars that have died many thousands of years ago simultaneously with stars which are being born more recently. O´Kane is developing artworks which examine the history of humankind’s relationship to mapping the night sky and the cosmos through mark making and symbols. He compares different approaches throughout the centuries including the stone carvings on passage tombs at Newgrange which date from 3200 BC right up to images of space produced by NASA.