Exploring plurality of interpretation through annotations in the long 19th century: musician's perspectives and the FAAM project.
(2024)
author(s): Nicholas Cornia
published in: Research Catalogue
The quest of reconciling scholarship and interpretative freedom has always been present in the early music movement discourse, since its 19th century foundations. Confronted with a plurality of performance practices, the performer of Early Music is forced to make interpretative choices, based on musicological research of the sources and their personal taste.
The critical analysis of the sources related to a musical work is often a time-consuming and cumbersome task, usually provided by critical editions made by musicologists. Such editions primarily focus on the composer's agency, neglecting the contribution of a complex network of professions, ranging from editors, conductors, amateur and professional performers and collectors.
The FAAM, Flemish Archive for Annotated Music, is an interdisciplinary project at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp that wishes to explore the possibilities of annotation analysis on music scores for historically informed musicians.
Annotations are a valuable source of information to recollect the decision-making process of musicians of the past. Especially when original musical recordings are not available, the marks provided by these performers of the past are the most intimate and informative connections between modern and ancient musicians.
Contrary to a purely scholarly historically informed practice approach, based on the controversial concept of authenticity, we wish to allow the modern performers to reconcile their practice with the one of their predecessors in a process of dialectic emulation, where artistic process is improved through the past but does not stagnate in it.
Performing with Sonic Tools. An approach to designing and analysing new instruments
(2023)
author(s): Gaute Barlindhaug
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
In recent decades, digital technology has accelerated the development of new musical instruments, not only establishing new techniques for creating sound but also enabling new performance practices. From the perspective of the performer, this has significantly broadened their possibility to express themselves, but through earlier experimentations it has become clear to me that audiences have problem comprehend such use of new musical instruments. In a traditional setting, when an artist performs with an instrument the audience can build on their cumulative experience and knowledge to evaluate the skill of an artist. With new experimental instruments such a strategy to understand a performance is not possible. This text describes my work with the dance performance Sound of Silence, and the creation of a device called the Looping Camera. Base on previous experience from using sensor technology in musical performances combined with theories and about the listeners position, we tried find a new approach to the creation of new sound producing devises that could overcome earlier problems with audience comprehension. With our work we tried to create a device that, even if it was largely unfamiliar for the audience, could establish a sense of meaning for the audience by including references to non-musical media technology. This performance also resulted in the developing of an analytical concept, that of “sonic tools”, that is meant to draw attention to the aesthetics of new an unfamiliar instrument through liberating such tools from the dichotomy of musical vs- nonmusical sounds.
Contemporary Research
(2023)
author(s): Michael Schwab
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
Artistic research is a comparatively recent development. Outside institutional definitions little work has been carried out to situate the phenomenon in a wider history of art as well as knowledge. This speculative article describes the present moment of artistic research as result of two developments: (1) a shift from notions of knowledge to notions of research, and (2), a shift from major to minor forms of making. At the same time, in line with understandings of contemporary art and as contemporary art, artistic research is not understood as historical project that unifies art and science; rather, artistic research is pitched as providing a transdisciplinary ground in which different disciplines and knowledges can enrich each other. On a historical scale, this development is seen as driven by the increased speed and complexity of our current world for which conventional knowledges offers only partial insights arriving often too late for decision-making. Building on Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s concept of experimental systems and his notion of graphematic space, the paper suggests research to create sets of traces as proto-forms underdetermined in their aesthetic and epistemic status and, hence, beyond specific disciplinary contexts. Such space for research is understood as fundamentally artistic, also in opposition to notions of research as output-oriented types of investment. It is suggested that representation as epistemic form has been losing relevance, certainly for the arts and increasingly for the sciences. Artists are tasked to invent new, expositional forms of knowledge over and beyond representation to remain epistemically engaged in today’s fast and complex world.
Beauty and the Act of Narrating Material Aesthetics
(2022)
author(s): Maria Høgh-Mikkelsen
published in: Research Catalogue
I have always been very engaged in the phenomenon of beauty. Not in the sense of being pretty, but beauty as that special ambience certain objects or spaces or even humans can have. I wonder and puzzle with questions like:
What makes something beautiful? Can one practise the creation of beauty? How do I create beauty? Is the creation of beauty a matter of talent? Or a matter of professional culture? So, I am not only absorbed in the phenomenon of beauty itself but also in the act of beauty-creation. And in how other people experience the beauty I have created. Where other people see only bricks and numbers, I have always seen patterns in both brick walls and phone numbers. So, if other people don’t see what I see, how do I then communicate with them in objects and spaces?
These are some of the questions I set out to answer in the artistic research project, I call Narrating Material Aesthetics. With the project I want to explore how we as designers embed stories and meaning in the objects we create.
Searching for the Siren | Exploring contemporary vocal aesthetics
(2022)
author(s): Kristia Michael
published in: KC Research Portal
“Searching for the Siren” explores contemporary vocal approaches that mirror the aesthetics and the contemporary perception of defining the elements of Beauty. Specifically, three main thematics are researched: 1) The Folk Voice, which explores how folk elements and timbres enter in classical and popular music, 2) The Extended Voice, which describes the use of extended vocal techniques with reference to technical and physical aspects of timbral contrasts, vocal fry, scream and inhalation phonation, 3) The Absent, Transformed and Replaced Voice which occurred with the technological development. Ends with conclusions around the definition of the mythical creature of the Siren and its relation to the human voice. Every aspect includes personal views, works, performances and syllogisms.
Arcade: A Guide to the Operas in the Doctoral Project "An Operatic Game Changer"
(2022)
author(s): Hedvig Jalhed
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition is a guide to the four ludo-immersive chamber operas in the doctoral project An Operatic Game-Changer. The operas were created during the period 2016–2020 and are contextualized and discussed in the dissertation with the same title, in which the practice of facilitating operas as adventures rather than spectacles is fleshed out. Through these participatory and multi-disciplinary concepts, conceived with the purpose of generating and analyzing live encounters between professional opera artists and co-playing visitors, immersive features are realized and explored.
Arcade is also a kaleidoscopic performance and an exhibition, designed as an operatic amusement park in miniature, with artefacts and excerpts from the operas, and presented live in connection with the public defense of the thesis in 2022 at the Academy of Music and Drama in Gothenburg. This online resource functions as an archive of information about the operatic works and their performances, both for those attending the performance/exhibition in Gothenburg, and for those wanting to learn about the project without experiencing this event.
Exploring and Prototyping the Aesthetics of Felt Time
(2020)
author(s): Elsa Kosmack Vaara, Cheryl Akner Koler
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The intention of this research is to investigate how interaction designers may explore felt time through the culinary practice of sourdough baking. In this exposition we share how the physical experience and manipulation/shaping of time in sourdough baking provides an experience of fulfillment and satisfaction. We show our insights on how interaction designers, and possibly many other communities of practice and discourse, may learn from this.
The goal is to inspire the audience to engage in a broad and critical discourse around felt time and to emphasize the value of prototyping a felt time repertoire in interaction design. The research exploration is built on the collaboration between an interaction designer/researcher, a culinary connoisseur baker and a sculptor/design researcher and teacher.
Aesthetic practices of very slow observation as phenomenological practices: steps to an ecology of cognitive practices
(2020)
author(s): Alex Arteaga
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition presents three aesthetic research practices (framed dialoging, wiriting exploratory essays and the reading circle), one framework for realizing another aesthetic practice of research (notation) and the outline of four concepts originated by pefroming these practices and that, in turn, frame and underpin their performance (aesthetic practices of very slow observation, aesthetic research, aesthetic cognition and aesthetic phenomenology). All these practices and conepts converg towards the central idea in this exposition: the ecology of cognitive practices.
Aesthetics (presentation at CARPA6)
(2019)
author(s): Hanna Järvinen
published in: Research Catalogue
This is the script and work shown at the 6th Colloquium on Artistic Research in Performing Arts in Helsinki 2019. The exposition is intended as an addendum to the forthcoming Conference Proceedings.
Ornamenting Vocality. Intra-active methodology for Vocal Meaning-Making.
(2018)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition departs from the silence of a non-existing voice. A voice about to touch the ears and eyes of both author and readers/listeners. A voice already sounding in the head of the author - sounding as thoughts, words, letters and sentences. A non/voice being part of a never ending development of new materialities. An onto-epistemological voice diffracted through a singer's process of making sense of a lesson from a 17th century vocal manuscript. A voice as a mattering method for the art of singing through new materialist theories, vocal and discursive narratives and somatic awareness.
From Particle Data to Particular Sounds: Reflections on The Affordances of Contemporary Sonification Practices
(2015)
author(s): Thomas Bjørnsten
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article reflects on recent notions about data sonification within sound-based experimental and artistic practices. The intention is not to survey the current state of data sonification methods and techniques as such, but rather to suggest a number of selected points of critique for addressing specific assumptions about processes and discourses related to what we may broadly refer to as sonification. Furthermore, these issues will be addressed by critically asking what we understand by “data” in the first place, as something susceptible to be turned into actual sounding material. Considering how specific discourses and cultural understandings frame contemporary notions of data, the article also includes different examples of alternative, exploratory practices. Thus, one of the aims will partly be to open up a transdisciplinary discussion about the critical affordances and potential pitfalls of data sonification seen both as an aesthetic and a knowledge-producing practice. This involves not only attention toward strictly academic and scientific settings, but also relates to how data sonification ventures are being communicated within broader societal, cultural and art institutional contexts.
a new kind of vaziri
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Puyain Sanati
This exposition is in revision and its share status is: visible to all.
In this exposition I’m showing you my journey for these past two years of investigating my artistic practice through the meeting of identity and aesthetics.
Due to my Iranian background, I have felt a need and curiosity to bring together my Iranian and European identities. This project is a dialogue between myself and music, encompassing sounds, arrangements, physical presence, materiality, technology, context, and politics.
By politics I mean; history, cultural appropriation, diversity, colonisation, beliefs, and the current needs of the western culture.
A project involving confrontations with habits, default parameters, and elements within digital audio workspaces, thereby incorporating scales.
Thy will be done. DOING Theology THROUGH Diffractive Methodology
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The overall purpose of this thesis is to perform and propose diffractive methodology as a means for exploring, reading, learning, and understanding systematic theological discourses beyond binary and oppositional thinking. This methodology is based on performative strategies and feminist new materialist theory, with a specific focus on Karen Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemological agential realism theory; it can also be considered an alternative to a more traditional academic reflexive methodological approach, thus allowing for an infinite number of explorative methods to be developed within its umbrella definition of diffractive methodology. The diffractive analysis in this study is shaped as an intra-active entangled reading of Graham Ward’s Engaged Theology, through Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Performance Aesthetics, and the method I call Voicing-as-Performative-Theology. This thesis is divided into three parts. Part I unfolds relevant terminology. Part II performs the actual diffractive reading analysis. Part III consists of a concluding essay summarizing the outcome of this study’s diffractive reading, as well as opening up suggestions for how diffractive methodology can be applied for developing more performative and diffractive methods as part of future theological research.
The thesis will be presented at University College Stockholm (EHS), in January 8 2024.
SIG 02: Spatial Aesthetics and Artificial Environments
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Emma Margetson, Gerriet K. Sharma, Johannes Scherzer, Andrew Knight-Hill, Constantinos Miltiadis, Elena Ungeheuer, Angela McArthur
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Working space and forum of the - Special Interest Group 2.
A practice based research: On Aesthetic and Political Scenography
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Scenic Voice
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Dear Reader,
This is a research about aesthetic and political scenography.
This is an attempt to create awareness.
This is a composition of images, sounds, and melodies
through an imaginary and personal lens.
This is a formulation of my artistic system.
This is a mixture of concerns, questions and beliefs.
This is my voice.
This voice could be yours.
The Emergent Artistic Object in the Postconceptual Condition
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Jack Segbars
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The dissertation of Jack Segbars investigates the fabric and the infrastructure of contemporary artistic production. The focal question is how the contemporary field of institutional artistic production is organised and how the relations between its actors and functions: artists, curators, institution, governance and theory are structured, and how the artistic object that results from their interaction is produced. The backdrop of this investigation, is the condition of cognitive capitalism. Production and working-relations in late capitalism as analysed by Paolo Virno, are characterized by the primacy of communications. It presumes that no longer there is a clear demarcation between aesthetics, labour and politics in the general make-up of production and economy.The second backdrop is the postconceptual condition, as formulated by British philosopher Peter Osborne. He describes how the authorship of the art-object has shifted to the institutional platform (museum, presentation-space) and how the ‘project’ has become the general form of production. This situation particularly affects artistic production and the relationships between the main actors in regards to who holds the authorship over the artistic object. Both these movements have led to significant changes in how to consider the status of authorship in artistic production. Together they shape the theoretical basis for the research.
HOW DO YOU WORK? Conversations, drawings and responses (Vienna)
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Adelheid Mers
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Preliminarily in 2012, and formally in 2013/14 , I asked experimental musicians and composers in Vienna "How do you work?". Based on those conversations, I created two drawings of what I call each artist's "epistemic engine", or the way I understood them to work. One drawing was a free form exploration, and the other mapped my notes onto the "Fractal 3-line Matrix", a diagrammatic instrument that emerged in my work in 2011, after the informal round of conversations. On sharing the drawings with them, artists were invited to produce a response in a medium of their choice. This project was supported by the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna.
Untitled
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Cecilia Berghäll
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Dear reader,
This is an exposition detailing the reality of how making art can produce and cultivate thought. It is a project that started with a methodical approach to natural light and aesthetics, that due to my empathetic response transformed into something bigger than myself. It became a metaphor for changing perspectives, getting out of comfort zones, putting in the effort, humans helping humans, and spreading ideas through aesthetics and curiosity. It has become a tool to connect and communicate with other people about difficult topics, and the dark side of human experience in an environment that is creative and beautiful.
The exposition is ordered in linear chapters that you can access through the contents. Since the project itself has become a vessel for a number of topics all extremely significant and important. I have added resources as the last chapter. Nothing within the chapters will be discussed in excess but the exposition does contain the mention of suicide, sexual assault, and racism.
- C
First Draft (in Progress) Touching the surface: Concretising the image through an expansion of traditional aesthetics
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Rosa Marouane
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The field of aesthetics has relied on the visual as crutch for its speculation since the creation of its most fundamental texts. Whether it be through Immanuel Kant’s focus on human critique and its own influence on beauty, or Deleuze’s later texts covering the expanded Movement-image and Time-image, the experience of imagery has been reserved to those capable of sight, and more importantly, those able to testify of this act. Beginning with Jakob Von Uexküll’s ‘Umwelten’, the sensory experience of our environment becomes one formed through the combined input of multiple sensory organs and the processes used to interpret the stimuli these organs encounter. Though the focus of Von Uexküll’s Umwelten remains the visual aspect of this information package: the visual functions as dominant sense whilst the other senses are merely secondary in experiencing space; this interpretation of sensory imaging does begin to differ from what we consider to be traditional Aesthetics, in that it allows for the possibility of imagery existing in the worlds of organisms that either lack or possess higher optical processing capabilities than that of humans, thus opening the speculation on imagery to a wider field of organisms and their individual experience of the visual. Up to the 20th century however, imagery and the aesthetic studies surrounding it focus on an intangible entity, eithered layered on top of or derived from concrete form. The field of aesthetics is overdue a reconfiguration of its approach, and a new wave of aesthetics should be focussed on defying the restrictive visual realm. One proposal to an expansion of this area of research would be to incorporate an affective aspect into image production and dissemination, Affect in this case referring to Brian Massumi’s definition of the phenomenon wherein “to affect is to be affected” and the matter of affect is one of response that is neither physical nor emotional, but rather a mediation between aspects of the two, joining the virtual to the real in one fell swoop even if only temporarily. This applies to the image in the sense that it cannot be fully accessed, its surface tension never breached until either it becomes capable of affect, we become capable of affecting it, or in true Massumi-ian fashion, we develop a mutually affective relationship with imagery. Writers such as Hito Steyerl, who through her essay “In Defense of the Poor image” describes an affective relationship between the audience and image initiated by the propagation inherent to internet culture, and Tavi Meraud, who’s speculation on the surface as providing mediation between the intangible and tangible, introduces us to the touch allowing for a mediated form of seeing through an alternative sensory organ. Through these glimpses into an affective alternative to Aesthetics, we can begin to formulate further knowing that it can exist in a form that goes beyond the traditional non-affective, spectator-image binary; perhaps this can go even further to initiate a dissolution of the optical barrier to entry that imagery has until now maintained. Should the objective of Aesthetics be to further expand its own boundaries to account for an inclusion of sensory imaging into the aesthetic canon? Can imagery be perceived as a concrete, and consequently tactile phenomenon? Could this shifted interpretation of imagery bring us into contact with a concretised universally available image?
A Study
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): James Wood
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
*
This is a product of a series of performances, educational projects and ruminations in 2015-6. It was improvised and is ever incomplete.
To begin with a general overview, refer to the "Parallels" page. Otherwise, happy travels.
It is a ludic and ergodic text and is not to be considered definitive. Each reading should deepen each previous, and be reliant upon postexpectant and preexisting readings. Consequently, in a formal sense, it owes much to Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Braxton's Tri-Axium Writings. Sections over- and under-lap, alluding freely within and without themselves. There is no correct method of engaging with it, nor a linear approach. "As we will have seen", many sections explain themselves only through others. It is a philosophical matrix, a web contingent upon all strands and - most crucially of all - an investment of the Reader's sense of Self into the work. Like a metaphor, the Reader must place themselves within the work as the absent tenor or vehicle relevant to each piece (leaning on Graham Harman and Jose Ortega y Gasset). In other words, it is an attempt - a nobly failing attempt - to ensure the Reader - the audience - is as much a creator as the writer.
*
Not so very long ago a community of people came together and, after a lengthy and luxurious dinner, after which the group found their prepared topics of conversation too incendiary, fetid or dull to suit the evening, decided to invent Art. During the protracted debates that followed, according to the comprehensive minutes of the gathering, Art’s proportions and dispensations were agreed upon: Art was to have no place within quotidian daily life or public policy; it was to be devoid of both educational merit or impetus; it was to arouse emotion but never too strikingly; and was to be deemed the final topic of conversation at dinner, after its natural locutory progenitors science and politics. Feeling pleased, the group dispersed.
(It is worth perhaps parenthetically noting that the following morning the host of the party – nursing a fiercely raging headache – found and read over the proposal prior to its distribution. After a while he discovered he disagreed with the entire document and, throwing into the fire, rewrote it entirely. Since this was all done in secret and because his friends are that particular type of people, he stills receives no credit whatsoever in the publication of the document.)
compost composition
(last edited: 2015)
author(s): pedi Matthies
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
what does composting as an art form look like? how can the process of decomposition be considered in an aesthetic form? can formal concerns be applied to organic processes?
These are just a couple of questions to start out with. For the last 10 years plant material of various types have been brought together by me, to rot and change form. Branches, tea-bags, dead plant material, bacteria, fungi and the like come together to make compost. The process from death and uselessness to nourishment and potential of organic matter is the object of study.
“Searching for the Siren” explores contemporary vocal approaches that mirror the aesthetics and the contemporary perception of defining the elements of Beauty. Specifically, three main thematics are researched: 1) The Folk Voice, which explores how folk elements and timbres enter in classical and popular music, 2) The Extended Voice, which describes the use of extended vocal techniques with reference to technical and physical aspects of timbral contrasts, vocal fry, scream and inhalation phonation, 3) The Absent, Transformed and Replaced Voice which occurred with the technological development. Ends with conclusions around the definition of the mythical creature of the Siren and its relation to the human voice. Every aspect includes personal views, works, performances and syllogisms.open exposition comments (0)
The intention of this research is to investigate how interaction designers may explore felt time through the culinary practice of sourdough baking. In this exposition we share how the physical experience and manipulation/shaping of time in sourdough baking provides an experience of fulfillment and satisfaction. We show our insights on how interaction designers, and possibly many other communities of practice and discourse, may learn from this. The goal is to inspire the audience to engage in a broad and critical discourse around felt time and to emphasize the value of prototyping a felt time repertoire in interaction design. The research exploration is built on the collaboration between an interaction designer/researcher, a culinary connoisseur baker and a sculptor/design researcher and teacher.open exposition comments (0)
This exposition presents three aesthetic research practices (framed dialoging, wiriting exploratory essays and the reading circle), one framework for realizing another aesthetic practice of research (notation) and the outline of four concepts originated by pefroming these practices and that, in turn, frame and underpin their performance (aesthetic practices of very slow observation, aesthetic research, aesthetic cognition and aesthetic phenomenology). All these practices and conepts converg towards the central idea in this exposition: the ecology of cognitive practices.open exposition comments (0)
This exposition departs from the silence of a non-existing voice. A voice about to touch the ears and eyes of both author and readers/listeners. A voice already sounding in the head of the author - sounding as thoughts, words, letters and sentences. A non/voice being part of a never ending development of new materialities. An onto-epistemological voice diffracted through a singer's process of making sense of a lesson from a 17th century vocal manuscript. A voice as a mattering method for the art of singing through new materialist theories, vocal and discursive narratives and somatic awareness.open exposition comments (0)
In this exposition I’m showing you my journey for these past two years of investigating my artistic practice through the meeting of identity and aesthetics. Due to my Iranian background, I have felt a need and curiosity to bring together my Iranian and European identities. This project is a dialogue between myself and music, encompassing sounds, arrangements, physical presence, materiality, technology, context, and politics. By politics I mean; history, cultural appropriation, diversity, colonisation, beliefs, and the current needs of the western culture. A project involving confrontations with habits, default parameters, and elements within digital audio workspaces, thereby incorporating scales.open exposition comments (0)
Working space and forum of the - Special Interest Group 2.open exposition comments (0)
Dear Reader, This is a research about aesthetic and political scenography. This is an attempt to create awareness. This is a composition of images, sounds, and melodies through an imaginary and personal lens. This is a formulation of my artistic system. This is a mixture of concerns, questions and beliefs. This is my voice. This voice could be yours.open exposition comments (0)
Preliminarily in 2012, and formally in 2013/14 , I asked experimental musicians and composers in Vienna "How do you work?". Based on those conversations, I created two drawings of what I call each artist's "epistemic engine", or the way I understood them to work. One drawing was a free form exploration, and the other mapped my notes onto the "Fractal 3-line Matrix", a diagrammatic instrument that emerged in my work in 2011, after the informal round of conversations. On sharing the drawings with them, artists were invited to produce a response in a medium of their choice. This project was supported by the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna.open exposition comments (0)
what does composting as an art form look like? how can the process of decomposition be considered in an aesthetic form? can formal concerns be applied to organic processes? These are just a couple of questions to start out with. For the last 10 years plant material of various types have been brought together by me, to rot and change form. Branches, tea-bags, dead plant material, bacteria, fungi and the like come together to make compost. The process from death and uselessness to nourishment and potential of organic matter is the object of study.open exposition comments (0)