The Ecology of Artistic Research
(2023)
author(s): Elizabeth Torres
published in: Research Catalogue
In the past decade, artistic research has emerged as a prominent means of generating new knowledge while addressing pressing issues such as sustainability and environmental concerns. However, due to its relative newness, the field lacks a clear mainstream understanding regarding its potential, meaning, structures, and limitations. The Ecology of Artistic Research is an interdisciplinary investigation that aims to explore the multifaceted dimensions of the field, with a particular focus on the significance of artistic research to researchers and practitioners themselves, and how they perceive, process, and embody knowledge through their practice. This project seeks to identify sustainable approaches to artistic research, demystify and clarify the language of artistic research for lay audiences, visualize the mechanisms of the field, and visibilize structures and networks that pay closer attention to the narratives of our world in transformation.
The investigation is conducted through a cycle of conversations and artistic responses, with a particular focus on the Nordic countries of Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Through engaging contemporary artistic practitioners, academic institutions and researchers in conversations, the project seeks to gain insight into their work, concerns, and personal experiences. The output of this research takes various interdisciplinary forms, including audiovisual interviews, articles, and a multimedia exposition.
Record, Rewind, Rewrite. Acoustic Historiography with the Presidential Tapes
(2017)
author(s): Monika Dommann
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
A tool of audio manipulation available to all (recording, fast-forwarding and rewinding, dictating, deleting, overwriting, etc.), tape recorders became a universal feature of offices and living rooms in the 1950s. Between 1962 (when John F. Kennedy installed a secret recording system in his Oval Office) and July 1973 (when Richard Nixon’s extensive recording system was revealed in the aftermath of Watergate and switched off on 18 July) (Haldeman 1988: 86), taping was even used by American presidents as a secret memo technique. From the perspective of the history of knowledge and media studies, this article examines the explosive political force of sidestepping the ephemerality of verbal communication through the secret tape recordings, historical and archival examinations of the Presidential Tapes and their remixes in Public History and film projects, where communicative acts once concealed from the public now continue as endless media loops. A paradoxical form of acoustic nostalgia emerges here: It tackles the problem of invisible power and ritualised politics with a sensorially-accessible “presence” and acoustically-perceptible corporeality – drawing on media in the process. The plea for acoustic historiography developed in this article is an examination of the soundscapes previously neglected by historiography but augmented by media history. While historiography, up to the 20th century, could record the sounds, tones and voices of the past only through writing, the Soundscape Projects initiated by R. Murray Schafer since the 1970s used tape to store and document sound and to create acoustic archives. Since the 1990s, the digitalization of analogue magnetic tapes has facilitated previously inconceivable access to acoustic sources and contributed to the rise of Public History within general societal awareness. Acoustic historiography must therefore engage with the media characteristics of recording and playback devices; the social situations in which recordings are produced; the potential of acoustic sources for storage, manipulation and transmission and their use in art, politics and society.