At Cross Purposes, reflections on constellations
(2024)
author(s): Janne Schipper
connected to: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
published in: Research Catalogue
When gazing at the night sky together with someone, it can be challenging to guide the other person’s attention to a specific star or cluster. To completely follow the alignment of the eyes and the tip of the index finger to the object in mind would require us to climb into the other, to see the world through their eyes. How do we know if we have the same star in mind as the person next to us? Are we talking at cross-purposes?
At Cross Purposes, reflections on constellations, comprises three texts by different authors on language, narrative, sign and signification, as well as poetry and anxiety in art.
RÅDJUREN, FLICKORNA, eller PLAY & FAIL
(2024)
author(s): Anna Nygren
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
My research is a failed writer's failed attempt to become a literary scholar. I'm researching from the position of an amoeba in academia – at certain moments I claim to be a Trojan Horse, a Trixster, or something else subversive. But more often than not it just ends up being: failure. I write from a writing-reading position. Where my reading of literature is infiltrated by my writing practice. This exposition is based on my failed dissertation in literature, which I am now trying to recover in the form of an artistic research project. The literary dissertation is about Monika Fagerholm's novel "Who killed Bambi?" (2019), and my failure is the inability to be scientific and detached, to stay within the framework. In the exposition I examine this from a queer/lesbian and neuroqueer/autistic perspective. I start from an emotional (un)knowledge and try to distort ideas and boundaries between failure and play.
Symposium in Motion - Addressing Dizziness. Navigating Possibilities in Collectives.
(2023)
author(s): Ruth Anderwald, Laura Brechmann, Leonhard Grond
published in: Research Catalogue
This process-oriented working symposium discusses ways of localizing, recognizing, approaching, and countering dizziness on different scales and disciplines – from the somatic and the built environment to interspecies and post-colonial contexts. Through the prism of art, architecture, philosophy, somatics, post-colonial theory, and remembrance cultures, we aim to find ways to uncover the layers of physical, social, and architectural dizziness in historical, political, social, fictional, present, and future contexts.
HONEYMOON IN POMPEII - work in progress
(2021)
author(s): Sven Vinge
published in: International Center for Knowledge in the Arts (Denmark)
“HONEYMOON IN POMPEII – work-in-progress” is an artistic research project conducted at the National Film School of Denmark. In it, I explore transmediality through the production of a prototype artwork spanning film, literary text, sculpture, and virtual reality all loosely inspired by the archeological technique used to cast the Pompeian victims of the Vesuvius eruption in 79 ad.
I describe my initial inspiration and how I changed my intentions of exploring a consistent storyworld to more abstract associations and themes and the different collaborative efforts in producing the four parts of the prototype (a test not meant for public exhibition). The prototype ended up consisting of:
1) A film representing a foot specialist helping a costumer try running shoes in a sports store but showing an obsessive interest in her feet and crossing her personal boundaries.
2) A literary text consisting of selected passages of Wilhelm Jensen’s short novel “Gradiva” (1902) translated to Danish in which we meet the young archeologist Norbert Hanold and notice his obsession with an ancient bas-relief portraying a young woman walking.
3) A sculpture consisting of four transparent plastic reliefs depicting a walking woman (copies of the bas-relief described in the novel) suspended in a 1x2x2 meter aluminum frame.
4) An erotic virtual reality experience in which the perceiver’s bodily movements affects the virtual world. When moving, the represented scene freezes and vice versa.
We conducted a test of the joint transmedia artwork with a small group of respondents who answered a questionnaire reflecting on their experience. I reflect on the respondent’s answers and propose further questions and themes that may be interesting to explore through artistic research: How does one explore transmediality not necessarily in relation to a consistent storyworld but also relying on abstract characteristics? What are the limits (if any) between mixed media art, transmedia art, and installation art? How can transmediality be explored as either a goal in itself or as a development tool for artists working with particular media in mind? Could it be beneficial to explore transmediality through the metaphor of archeology and how?
Rehearsal for A Play in Two Acts
(2020)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Play in the format of the philosophical dialogue, 2019
Drama is pretense. But, unlike fiction, a theatrical play is not a pretended representation of a state of affairs; rather it is the pretended state itself, in which the actors pretend to be the characters doing the pretending in the actual performance of the theatrical play. The actor is in this way irrealised in the character. Aside from writing the play, which consists largely in pseudo assertions, the playwright gives the actors directions on how to pretend to make assertions and to perform actions. Therefore, the playwright is writing a recipe for pretense. Instead of pretending to write assertions, the playwright gives directions to the actors on how to enact a pretense.
The philosophical dialogue has been an established, although uncommon, method of philosophical writing, which usually deploys fictional characters to present a discussion between several divergent viewpoints on a topic of ordinary or philosophical interest. The juxtaposition and debating of opinions in ordinary uses of language, without prioritizing any opinion, endows the dialogue with open-endedness instead of conclusiveness. As McKeon (in Prince, 1996: 3) argues:
"Dialogue is statement and counterstatement, based on ordinary ways of life and ordinary uses of language, with no possible appeal to a reality beyond opposed opinions except through opinions about reality. Truth is perceived in perspective, and perspectives can be compared, but there is no overarching inclusive perspective."
In this exposition, I exploit the dialogic format to expose the views of Jean-Paul Sartre, a well known philosopher and father of the existentialist philosophical and literary movement, and Maurice Blanchot, a rather obscure philosopher of literature and literary critic. Notably, both Sartre and Blanchot were active in the post second world war period, which significantly shaped their philosophical insights; specifically on modes of writing, including fictional prose, about a variety of topics, from politics, to ethics and aesthetics. Because referencing is rarely used in philosophical dialogues, here I employ full bibliographical referencing in the end. The dialogue presents an advantage for reaching a wider readership, beyond the confines of those with strictly philosophical and academic interests.
Prince, Michael, "Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics and the Novel", Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
The Fourth Wall of Architecture
(2016)
author(s): Bart L. Decroos
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This work is an attempt to combine the fields of architecture, critical theory, and literature. It deals with the question of how an architectural artefact develops its meaning within a larger discourse through its image, and how this relates to the everyday life of the physical space of the artefact.
The work has been developed by translating certain theoretical ideas to a fictional setting in order to explore these ideas through the medium of literature. The theoretical starting point thus takes on the form of characters, dialogues, and events within a specific architectural environment in an attempt to relate these diverse ideas to one another and to the physical space. The resulting short stories have then been translated to images of physical spaces, which try to detect these theoretical ideas on the level of the space itself.
The complete work comprises three short stories, each dealing with a different type of architecture: the single-family house, the hotel room, and the office space.
SPACED, Art Out Of Place
(2015)
author(s): Andrea Pagnes
published in: Research Catalogue
The experiences of the Free University of Liverpool and
the CyberMohalla project as examples of alternative
education.
Published in: ArtLeaks Gazette n.2, June 2014.
Interviews with Massimo Cacciari and Franco Rella
(2015)
author(s): Andrea Pagnes
published in: Research Catalogue
Two conversations I had with eminent philosophers and thinkers Massimo Cacciari and Franco Rella on aesthetics, contemporary art and art theory issues in the mid 90s. The interviews are in Italian language as in origin.
When gazing at the night sky together with someone, it can be challenging to guide the other person’s attention to a specific star or cluster. To completely follow the alignment of the eyes and the tip of the index finger to the object in mind would require us to climb into the other, to see the world through their eyes. How do we know if we have the same star in mind as the person next to us? Are we talking at cross-purposes? At Cross Purposes, reflections on constellations, comprises three texts by different authors on language, narrative, sign and signification, as well as poetry and anxiety in art.open exposition comments (0)
This process-oriented working symposium discusses ways of localizing, recognizing, approaching, and countering dizziness on different scales and disciplines – from the somatic and the built environment to interspecies and post-colonial contexts. Through the prism of art, architecture, philosophy, somatics, post-colonial theory, and remembrance cultures, we aim to find ways to uncover the layers of physical, social, and architectural dizziness in historical, political, social, fictional, present, and future contexts.open exposition comments (0)
The experiences of the Free University of Liverpool and the CyberMohalla project as examples of alternative education. Published in: ArtLeaks Gazette n.2, June 2014.open exposition comments (0)
Two conversations I had with eminent philosophers and thinkers Massimo Cacciari and Franco Rella on aesthetics, contemporary art and art theory issues in the mid 90s. The interviews are in Italian language as in origin.open exposition comments (0)