10 - 10 - 10 Edgelands:
(2024)
author(s): O'Brien & O'Brien
published in: Research Catalogue
Operating at the intersection of fine art walking practice, psychogeography, critical animal studies and ecology, the practice of Deep Canine Topography seeks to reframe the humble act of the ‘walkies’ as a co-authored act of ‘making’ or ‘performing’ together.
As part of the practice based element of my PhD thesis, Deep Canine Topography, 10 - 10 - 10 Edge-lands, is a further investigation of the methodologies of Deep Canine Topography (O'Brien & O'Brien 2018). This series operates as a visual and sonic essay for each walk and explores memory, deep topographical imprints, and entropy between wild and post-industrial spaces and sub-urban sprawl, on the edge of the city of Leicester and the county of Leicestershire. During the 2020 Covid 19 pandemic lockdown, as part of permitted exercise, we undertook 10 Walks, of up to 10 miles, within a 10 mile circle of our home, just outside of the city centre. Covid 19 restrictions, remained in place in Leicester longer than in any other UK city or region.
Each title will take you to a different walk.
Click return to return to the title page.
Click Base Map to open a GoogleMap of the walk locations and GPS tracklogs (in a new window).
Clicking on the round MAP circle, on the title page, will take you to the central exposition of my PhD: Deep Canine Topography.
STUDIES IN KUNSTVAKIDIOTIE
(2024)
author(s): Mirjam van Tilburg
published in: Research Catalogue
Welcome to "Studies in Kunstvakidiotie". Here, you can browse through the photographs, essays, drawings, audio and video clips. ‘Studies in kunstvakidiotie’ is the doctoral research of Mirjam van Tilburg at Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA). This is a study in arts education from within the arts. She tries to shift the dominant image of life-long-learning (LLL) and provide insight into the possibilities that this LLL space also provides to art teachers. By searching in this way, more and more became clear about life-long-learning of art teachers. Therefore, a linear cause-and-effect narrative did not seem to do justice to the subject matter. The term ‘studies’ in the title is sketchy — it also involves repetition and seeking connections and, above all, it is a derivative of studio and study.
Five essays form the markers within ‘Studies in Kunstvakidiotie’. Together, they construct a narrative. The essay ‘(onder)zoek in kunsteducatie’ describes practices and values that stem from Mirjam van Tilburg’s artistic practice: education. The motivation behind this research is that art teachers find LLL events to be limited. The essay ‘LLO als commoning practice’ discusses the possibilities of commoning practices. The examples: The New School Collective and studios are outlined herein. The studios are the experiment within this doctoral research. During the winter of 2020-2021, Mirjam van Tilburg worked with ten art teachers. The experiment of this doctoral project coincided with the Covid-19 crisis. Together they occupied artist studios in Tilburg and Rotterdam to de-automate and look at teaching practices.
The essays ‘Blik’ and ‘Tijd’ therefore propose two topics of conversation within LLL: the ‘aesthetic glance’ and the temporal experience of ‘interruption’. These essays question the efficient and productive order prevailing in the work environment and LLL of art teachers.
The essay ‘Herontdekking van Kunstvakidiotie’ is the story of a change in the craft of art teachers in the first Covid-19 crisis year. The term ‘kunstvakidiotie’ in the title cannot be directly translated into English because it is a compound word and may have specific connotations in the Dutch context. The essay describes how in these studios, art subject teachers had one foothold: artistic fervour.
Why I Paint Thousands of Circles
(2024)
author(s): Leanna Moran
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Why I paint Thousands of Circles explores psychological barriers and multilayered themes that stem from a single horrific event that involved Moran’s father and his brother. The artist collates information, photos and constructs an ar(t)chaeological archive where family photos, product imagery, together with newspaper clips to form units of a historical and psychological mind map. The exposition becomes an auto-ethnographical exploration of mid 90's working class North West London. The repetitive painting process, exposed and documented in the exposition, functions as transformative method, where ambiguous feelings of a violent upbringing are directed towards the creation of a visual system with an inherent logic – “creating some kind of beauty out of ugliness.”
ANTICIPATION - Performance, art and design
(2024)
author(s): Sergio Patricio
published in: Research Catalogue
My performance art practice as an artist and researcher has become crucial to test ideas that theoretically catch my interest. For example, years ago I was convinced that performance art compositions were a miracle because of the Chaos theory in physics, where organized chaos was so complex that it was too difficult to perceive the origin, development and end of each action in time-space here and now. Within the context of an event of actions and the probabilities, time stretches out in many directions, making the observable constellation of actions more than chaotic, but four-dimensional almost, in a way that the past, present and future of the actions become one: Anticipation. Therefore, Anticipation in actions becomes crucial to understanding that action could fail even in a prediction, as an action goal is scored to be done, performers in present time-space, live simultaneously in the past present and future of the action, the tension between the action-goal is the vibration, but the anticipation is all the probabilities merge with the past and future of this action. Multidimensional perception requires a performer to perform within an action to improve training and work out through several performance preparations. An example is how to cross at constant speed a mass of crowded people and not change direction. Anticipation switches your present to be merged with your past and future. Such a concept is how I improve daily in my performance lab with the participants of my performance laboratory.
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.
Customized Realities
(2024)
author(s): Sorin
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023.
Bachelor Interactive Media Design
In this paper I aim to reveal the influence of echo chambers and the use of echo chambers as a potential tool used as a defense mechanism by the emergent artificial intelligence. We also look at the impact of such defense against our social construct and the availability of genuine human interaction in a world that is
mostly digitally connected then physically .
We investigate in this thesis some contemporary ideas
about our current situation and or potential solution to pop up the bubble of i-reality, a term I used to refer to when thinking about customized reality bubble surrounding every digitally active person.
My research journey starts with reminding us why we do
this research, what is the urgency, and then delving into historical facts and researching contemporary or historical views, analyzing the algorithmic world of social networking and the surprising results
of digital isolation in tiny echo-chambers.
Thus , my research led to several conclusions of how we
might be able to pop up the i-reality bubble and change the grim potential outcome of a world dominated by synthetic life to a world in which we human can cohabitate with a potential self aware synthetic
life .
Gentle Friction - through temporary territories of culture
(2024)
author(s): Alicia Rottke Fitzpatrick
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Friction between the other is not only inevitable but a necessary part of heterogeneous life. However, this friction can occur on a spectrum, from aggressive, violent manifestations to more gentle, subtle forms. This research explores the latter form of friction within the context of cultural events.
There is a growing rhetoric that cultural events are solely for elitist circles, and if this discourse continues to permeate society, the transformative power of these events will be in jeopardy.
To preserve and reinforce the transformative power of these spaces, this research asks: How do cultural events facilitate moments of gentle friction as a means to foster an understanding of 'the other'?
This research began as an introspective exploration into the author's practice. By unpacking the conditions of conviviality, autonomy, and temporality that ensure the friction remains gentle, the research explores how these conditions can be spatially translated to strengthen the experience in these spaces. Concluding with a set of design tools that can be used to ensure the vitality of cultural events, encouraging diverse participation as a means to protect this necessary form of friction between the other.
Co-poiesis: redefining our relationship with the world through filmmaking
(2024)
author(s): Yasmin Henra van Dorp
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
The research question that motivates this study is: what insights can be drawn from collaborative filmmaking that can illuminate new pathways for interacting with the world around us?
Against the backdrop of contemporary societal and environmental divisions, this artistic research explores ways for redefining relationships, both human and nonhuman, through the lens of the philosophical framework of co-poiesis. Using a practice-led research methodology based on the collaborative process of the short documentary "The Spectacle" this study explores how collaborative practice and sensory engagement can serve as a reflective tool, illuminating our relational dynamics and perceptual interactions with each other and our environment.
Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images
(2024)
author(s): Kajsa Dahlberg
published in: Research Catalogue
Informed by queer life practices, theories, and affinities, this documented artistic research project (doctoral thesis) draws from new materialist and post-humanist discourse in order to reconsider what role visual media play in the historical need to separate the human and the environmental. It asks, how do we challenge prevailing perceptions of film and photography as inexorably linked to ideas of progress and modernisation, to linear temporality, spatial separation, and to land-based thought? Based on the acknowledgement that we need to rethink our position as humans within the multiple habitats that make up the world, I investigate the ways in which the apparatus of film, rather than being an extension of human perception, attests to the material interdependences and co-productions that hold a potential for converging human and nonhuman perspectives. "Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images" considers the cinematic space of the ocean alongside Jean Epstein’s film "Le Tempestaire" (1947); it follows early photographic chemical methods involving seaweed to both develop film and to examine the technical intra-activity of human and nonhuman regimes as part of photography itself. Within the scope of this research, I argue and demonstrate how film engages in a sensory and reciprocal involvement with the material world, one that addresses the ability to sense, not just with one’s eyes, but with the entire body.
"Tidal Zones" are real locations, the habitat of a multitude of organisms, and the home of seaweeds. It is a place that is neither land nor sea but constitutes a zone with its own specific relationships and living conditions. In its refusal to be either or, it forms a (non-binary) temporal figuration between presence and absence, solid and liquid, life and death, dictated by the motions of spiral and circular time. This space, "Between Life and Images", is the chemical rockpool (the darkroom) out of which photography and film grew.
The PhD submission consists of four film-works, "The Etna Epigraph" (2022), "Seaweed Film" (2023), "Coenaesthesis – It Is Not Even True That There Is Air Between Us" (2023) and "The Spiral Dramaturgy" (2019) along with the exhibition "The Tidal Zone" shown at Index - The Swedish Con-temporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, from 25 November 2022 to 12 February 2023 and at Havremagasinet, Länskonsthall Boden from 14 October 2023 to 11 February 2024. The films and documentation from the exhibitions are included in the submission, which also includes an “Opening Letter” and two texts called “Filming with the Ocean” and “Methodology of the Spiral”.
This dissertation has been carried out and supervised within the graduate programme in Visual Arts at the Royal Institute of Art. The dissertation is presented at Lund University in the framework of the cooperation agreement between the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University, and the Royal Institute of Art regarding doctoral education in the subject Visual Arts.
Invisible Cities - the experience of negative space
(2024)
author(s): vittoria pavesi
published in: Research Catalogue
"What is today the city, for us? I believe I wrote something like a last love poem to cities, in a time when it’s becoming more and more difficult living them like cities. Maybe we’re coming to a moment of crisis of the urban life, and Invisible cities are a dream born by the heart of unliveable cities." - I. Calvino, Introduction to Città Invisibili, Mondadori 1983
Starting by a confrontation between two historical utopian projects (Arturo Soria’s ciudad lineal and Constant’s New Babylon) I try to investigate with a broad and heterogenous look the idea of adopting path as fundamental topic of the city: whether Soria or Constant, in different ways, suggest an architecture of roaming, a nomadic and virtual space, that is the same space of cosmopolis, an anticipation of globalized culture that’s identified in a flux-condition and not in a stasis-one. Ciudad lineal and New Babylon projects prophetically forestall many tendencies of contemporary urbanity, proposing an idea of cities that are at the same time hyperlocal and hyperplanetary, ahistorical and superficial, acentric and non-identitary, inhabited by people always in movement. Streets don’t conduct anymore just to some places, they are places themselves: the condition of movement, and the street trail that constitutes his support, represents the urban archetype that is the basis of all contemporary architectonical and social disposition. From the description and comparison of these two projects the Generic City emerges, alienate and privatized, where we’re living in nowadays.
FACT stage one
(2024)
author(s): Jenny Sunesson
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
The research project FACT stage one aims to test the sonic capacity of fragmenturgy (developed by Sunesson 2014–19) as a method to unsettle polarised positions of areas and sites existing outside of the visual power structures and political strongholds.
The long-term purpose is to develop a Fragmenturgy ACtion Tool (FACT); a transitory toolbox for cultivating fragmenturgy methods and actions.
FACT stage one consists of a comprehensive case study carried out in collaboration with a group of students aged 18–23 based at Uppsala Community College in Sweden, which was explored as a site during 2021.
Image copyright: Christina Hillheim
Magic and sorcery as creative methodology
(2024)
author(s): Carolina Albuquerque
published in: Research Catalogue
Studies in art production using sorcery, magic and rituals to access the unconsciousness and engage art production and performances. As part of the PhD research and as result of the class of Actual Thought in Arts, this publication aims to demonstrate the possibilities of utilizing ancestral practices to contribute to the creative process. To achieve this, themes such as the unconscious, magic and sorcery, mythology, and decolonialism are intricately connected to the development of art and performance in this context. There is no way to disconnect one area from the other. When discussing magic, it is essential to understand the reasons for its marginalization. Magic has been utilized in numerous rituals, and rituals can be viewed as performances of artistic actions that permeate our unconscious.
NUMB - exploring emotionally charged interactions to motivate reflection on non-fiction topics
(2023)
author(s): Elin Festøy
published in: University of Inland Norway
This PhD project in artistic research by Elin Festøy, research fellow at The Norwegian Film School, Innlandet University College, is situated in the field of interactive experiences. Festøy explores how emotionally charged interactions can be used to build trust and communicate non-fiction topics in a way that is more likely to motivate empathy and change. The artistic exploration consists of a consecutive row of conceptual VR experiences. The reflections turn to the role of freedom and agency in interactive experiences and how these can help build a trusting relationship between creator and participant.
Shamisen som kompositorisk ankerpunkt
(2023)
author(s): Olav Hanem
published in: University of Agder, Faculty of Fine Arts
Denne oppgaven utgjør en del et mitt kunstneriske utviklingsarbeid og fokuseres mot min rolle som komponist, der mine egne originale verk er objektet for utforskning. Hovedformålet med oppgaven er å undersøke innvirkningen japansk tradisjonsmusikk kan ha på min signatur som komponist. For å avgrense oppgaven ytterligere er det japanske musikkinstrumentet shamisen i fokus.
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.
Hennes naglar är Svens, alltid något
(2023)
author(s): Emilie Löfgren
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
En exposition med fyra videoverk i ETC Solpark, Katrineholm.
"Hennes naglar är Svens, alltid något."
"Drömmen"
"Mary var här"
"Tystnaden"
The sea as a site of curation: Reflections on aesthetics education
(2023)
author(s): John Baldacchino
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
With the sea as a “site” of curation, a thalassic approach (as that which belongs to the sea), facilitates a showing of those things that converge upon the contingency of daily living. The case for aesthetics is pedagogical, inasmuch as it provides us with a strategy for exiting into the wider world as we move outside the walls of a building (and that of Bildung). Exiting also implies rejecting all those institutionalized constraints that education’s edificial approach brings to learning. Here, in its aporetic nature, art is one of those few human actions which allow us to articulate and enact a sense of being both strangers and homecomers in our own world. In other words, this is a form of curation that is claimed through the autonomy that it portends.
What is the ART of ADHD Social Media Acting - and how is it artistically relevant for everyone to know?
(2023)
author(s): Alexander Lindman
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
I'm on the path to deneurotypicalize acting technique and understand what a social media actor might be and do and and if there is or should be a difference between a neurotypical and neurodiverse way of applying oneself and communicate with said audience on said platform(s)?
During my work I coined the term 'deneurotypicalize' and a definition of art as ART.
Welcome to my exposition: This part is more to be seen as an extended documentation over my 2 years and also as a compendium to my master thesis published on DIVA and my performance lecture 2nd of May at Stockholm University of the Arts. And/or a thing of its own.
Both the exposition-documentation and the master's thesis is also in this exposition.
Villivirrestä Virsileikkiin: Virren luomisesta luovaan virteen_Tutkielma_videolinkit
(2023)
author(s): Sirkku Rintamäki
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
Sirkku Rintamäen taiteellisen tohtorintutkinnon tutkielmaan "Villivirrestä Virsileikkiin: Virren luomisesta luovaan virteen" kuuluvat videolinkit.
Video links of Sirkku Rintamäki's doctoral thesis "From Wild Hymns to Hymnplay: From Hymn Creation to the Creative Hymn"
HORSE HORSE O GIRL (?) READ EAT HORSE O.
(2023)
author(s): Anna Nygren
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition is a multimedial, but mostly textual, documentation of years and years of working with horses as a motif and a method for making art, theory, texts, thoughts and feelings. Horses in art has a long history. My take on it is a girlish one; drawing from a feminist, queer and neurodivegrent position. The horse works with embodiment, textualities, reading, love, care, mis/understandings, closeness, sadness, obsessions, un/subjectivities, collectivity, and much more. The horse allows the artist to be a troyan horse within the field of art and academia, but it also shares vulnerabilities an power imbalances. The horse, here, is everything.
Instructions for the viewer/reader: The exposition contains years of work. Please do not watch or read everything (even if you are wellcome to do so). Do act like a horse choosing which leaves of grass to eat. Choose carefully but spontaneously, wander around. A field work. A field of horses.
The impact of the audience on the actresses
(2023)
author(s): Dalida Shaheen
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
Welcome to Dalida Shaheen's exposition Master's candidate in acting program and actress. Firstly, in 2019, I played a role of a woman who got married to a married man, after the series aired to the public the role fired back on me. I observed audience's reaction exceeded everyone’s expectations. The audience is divided into two parts the first part is about the women who expressed their anger in a very aggressive and strong way, and the second part who was exciting to the character. The first part of the audience used several offensive, strong, and insulting words. The audience’s reaction was very emotional, and they used all the tools to express their feelings for example, they used social media platforms and verbal violence when they see me in the street. Hayat is the character I have created to explore my questions in my short fil.
The film is the method I used to explore my questions of what would happen when the audience can’t distinguish between the role and the actor’s real character, What is the impact of the audience on the actresses?
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.
Little Do They Know
(2022)
author(s): Olivia Rowland
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition functions as both a visual and poetic essay, and a manifesto for my methodology of ‘line’. My definition of ‘line’, defined here as:
‘The gestural and abstracting tandem force of drawing-and-writing as a narrative means to express selfhood.’
The exposition posits the methodology of ‘line’ as one alternate artistic means to artistically communicate feminine selfhood. The methodology of line works to resist the internalised assignment of feminine voice to a corporeal body.
Instead, ‘line’ communicates selfhood through poetic means and a sense of fragmented corporeality. Visually, the stark and abstracting nature of the drawn line, and the allegorical, metaphorical nature of writing present an abstracted self that playfully evades full understanding.
The titling phrase ‘Little Do They Know’ intones a kind of secret power on behalf of the speaker, and the presence of secret and intricate worlds to which the gaze of the spectator has limited access. It is on this premise which the exposition operates, articulating the presence (in all its anxiety, instability, rage, joy and frustration) of a playful and evasive selfhood that reclaims agency from the spectator’s gaze.
Do we create enough space for mistakes within the film system?
(2022)
author(s): Carina Randloev
published in: International Center for Knowledge in the Arts (Denmark)
Do we need to make more mistakes to keep the film language alive as cinema window no 1, in a time of high performance streaming platforms? Can we use the open process approach from visual art to do so?
In this exposition I will unfold thematic aspects related to: the audience, the film funding system, open processes, the production value, the space in between (art and film, documentary and fiction), something about language, the mistake, experiments, the ugly, and expectations on format.
The exposition is the result of six months of preliminary Artistic Research conducted at The National Film School of Denmark.
Skendöd/Suspended animation [27 October - 2020-11-13 10:08]
(2022)
author(s): Bella Rune
published in: Research Catalogue
Samband, översättningar och läckage mellan handskapade objekt och digitala formuleringar. Kopplingar mellan textilen och det digitala undersöks genom skulptur. Metoder för gestaltning av konstnärlig forskning genom utställning.
I lost time and space. Where am I? – Erzählen von chronischen Schmerzen
(2021)
author(s): Tabea Rothfuchs
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Was passiert mit der inneren und äusseren Welt eines Menschen, wenn kein medizinisches Verfahren den Ursprung des erlebten Schmerzes (mehr) zu entziffern vermag? Wenn der Schmerz zum eigenständigen Krankheitsbild 'Chronischer Schmerz' geworden ist?
In einer Dialogserie mit Schmerzpatient*innen und Schmerzspezialist*innen erforsche ich in dieser Untersuchung – als Künstlerin und Schmerzerinnernde –, wie chronische Schmerzen das Leben beeinflussen, verändern und welchen Raum sie im Leben der betroffenen und behandelnden Menschen einnehmen. Oder als Kernfrage formuliert: Liegen Menschen mit chronischen Schmerzen im Leben anderer Menschen, in unserer Sozialstruktur und dem politischen System überhaupt drin?
––––
What happens to a person’s inner and outer world when no medical procedure is able to (further) decipher the origin of an ongoing perceived pain? When pain becomes an independent clinical picture called 'chronic pain'? In a series of dialogues with pain patients and specialists, I investigate in this study – as an artist as well as someone who remembers an episode of chronic pain – how chronic pain influences and changes lives and what space it takes in the lives of people affected and those providing treatment. Or expressed as a central question: Is there room for people with chronic pain in the lives of other people, our social structure and the political system at all?
My nature
(2021)
author(s): Kate-Elin Madsen
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
Presentation of drawings and artistic research from 2018/19. Modules of drawings that are put together into large formats and recomposed.Experiments with photographic images, risograph printing and pencil drawing.
Walking to Utopia and Thinking About Art Along the Way
(2021)
author(s): Ulvi Haagensen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Walking through the old town of Tallinn, where everything is quiet because shops, cafés and restaurants are closed, some permanently because of a lack of tourists due to the pandemic and others temporarily because of the current lockdown, I experience the city in a new way. The city is different and no longer am I drawn in by the enticement of what I could or should buy. I no longer peer in the café window to see if there is an available table, in the expectation of a pastry and a coffee. Art galleries and museums are also closed. I’m closed out but this strange situation means there is time to stop, notice and think, space to walk and an opportunity to see things differently. There is freedom to imagine new worlds, other possibilities, and new ways of seeing and being. I look at shop windows, peer into art galleries, think about my own window exhibition in the context of these other windows, and in the process take in a full experience of visual art in the form of installations, performance art and even participation art. At the same time my thoughts take me to completely other utopian worlds where things are quite different. The walk, though initially purposeful, becomes something more than a walk. It starts to meander and – combined with what I see, remember and imagine – it becomes a meandering text with images and ideas that click in and out of focus.
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?
Smitte som skapelsesmaskin
(2021)
author(s): Liv Kristin Holmberg
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The exposition ”Smitte som skapelsemaskin” (Contagion as a creation machine) is based on the artistic project ”Kroppsliturgiske eksperimenter” that explores the boundaries emerging when performing arts and human bodies enter the sacred space of a church. To what extent does the church as a social and architectural environment, shape human conceptions of bodies? What might the history of theology and of the Christian church tell humans about our relationship to our own bodies? The pandemic has put the above questions in a new light: It made the skin a potential carrier of life-threatening infections. At the same time, we suffered the lack of mutual human touch and of physical presence. Caught between the fear of being infected by touch and a hunger for being touched, the project ”Kroppsliturgiske eksperimenter” appears both challenging and attractive. Crisis has produced a desire for new forms of touch, in art and in human life. This contribution to VIS was created in collaboration and dialogue with performer Hanna Barfod, priest, professional singer and research fellow Mathias Gillebo, film photographer and editor Mats Christian Rude Halvorsen and priest Arne Jor.
REPUBLIC OF THE OTHER
(2021)
author(s): Xenia Mura Fink, Jinny Yu
published in: Research Catalogue
REPUBLIC OF THE OTHER is an art collective consisting of and founded by Jinny Yu and Xenia Fink.
A contradiction in itself, REPUBLIC OF THE OTHER reflects our questioning of geographic and national identities defined by borders and boundaries and is the basis of our research on the attraction to form an entity.
Our collaboration started with the urgency to express our resistance against the generalized right-wing tendency, with nation-states and borders strengthening with great force worldwide and with the conviction that we have something to contribute to the discussion.
Manifestos as a subject matter are our way to describe a utopia where we all accept each other as an “other”.
Our practice is executed through exchanging and developing ideas from our respective locations. Remotely sharing thoughts naturally lend to working with text as a medium; when we occasionally do convene, concepts may also take the shape of installations and video work.
Tree Encounters – Berlin Series #takecare
(2021)
author(s): Carmen Raffaela Küster
published in: Research Catalogue
Tree Encounters – artistic dialogues of human and non-human bodies / #Berlin Series –
is the title of an Artistic Research project around the development of special movement forms of the body in suspension. The focus lies on the mutual interdependencies with nature/ the trees (in the urban sourrounding of this specific Berlin Series). In contrast to traditional movement concepts, especially in the classical aerial acrobatics, where an objectified body has cognitively been forced in 'preplanned' forms – in this work the Physical-Intuitive, the body-immanent knowledge is assigned more agency and a leading role. The practical artistic research is documented in this exposition mainly by video.
Photography Bound: Rethinking the Future of Photobooks and Self-publishing
(2020)
author(s): Adria Julia
published in: Research Catalogue
Curated by Antonio Cataldo and Adrià Julià. Organised by Fotogalleriet, Oslo and KMD, University of Bergen. Throughout this three-day event, Adrià Julià's students at the University of Bergen will actively partake and lead discussions
Photo-based books and self-publishing are a vital emancipatory motor of discussion bringing communities across space and time together. The intent of this conference is manifold; firstly it aims to look at the historical structures for production that enable a multiplicity of voices to speak from their subjective positions. Secondly, addressing the current modalities that give contemporary practitioners, designers and publishers advantages and limitations within the field. Thirdly it addresses the future of photo-based publications through grant systems.
To rethink the current moment which is challenging existing structures and demanding systemic change, this seminar represents a desire to rethink the Nordic Photobook Award. Initially, Fotogalleriet ran the award from 2012–18 in order to accompany upcoming voices within the field by co-producing photobooks with chosen candidates.
The seminar's ultimate goal is to evaluate relevant structures of support providing the possibility to continuously provoke theoretical and practical change.
CONFIRMED SPEAKERS: Terje Abusdal, Abdul Halik Azeez, Heidi Bale Amundsen, Delphine Bedel, Bruno Ceschel, Paul Gangloff, Erik Gant, Hans Gremmen, Roberto Figliulo, Cosmo Großbach, Sohrab Hura, Kay Jun, Aglaia Konrad, Moritz Kung, Silja Leifsdottir, Hailey Loman, Catalina Lozano, Vijai Patchineelam, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger, Mette Sandbye, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Ahlam Shibli, Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir, Ina Steiner, Niclas Östlind, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, and Antonio Zúñiga. With a discussion about Nordic funding with Anne Lise Stenseth (moderator), Tom Klev, Henri Terho, Annika Thörn Legzdins, Klara Þórhallsdóttir and Tine Vindfeld.
Reclamation : Exposing Coal Seams and Appalachian Fatalism with Digital Apparatuses
(2020)
author(s): Ernie Roby-Tomic
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The mountainous geography of Appalachia has been shaped by the coal industry since the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era of the United States. Mountaintop Removal (MTR) is a controversial and highly destructive surface-mining method flattening the mountains of Appalachian since the 1970s. The rise in massive energy consumption correlated to consumer electronics, automation, and technocratic neoliberalism have irrevocably flattened the surface and culture of Appalachia.
Reclamation is the final act in MTR mining in which the mine operator is obligated to ecologically restore the land. Where MTR sites were once hidden away, and even photographing them is considered an act of trespassing, today I can bear witness to the destruction of the mountain topology by connecting to Google's Earth (not to be confused with earth-Earth). Despite the remote locations and inaccessibility of the sites, the data is particularly rich due to the economical advantages of mapping the region for the coal industry.
In this exposition, I make my own reclamation as one in the generation born after the boom of coal production and its inevitable decline. I am reclaiming the 3D geospatial data of MTR and mining disaster sites, extracted from the servers of Google Earth. I recontextualize these geospatial assets to compose a visual prosopography of those surfaces.
Music for the inner ear
(2020)
author(s): Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen
Our fantasy has crumbled - yet we must go into utopia to articulate alternative realities that will allow us to escape the current systems we are living in and by.
What can we do if we only dream pragmatic and rational dreams that speak into already existing paradigms and systems?
When a catastrophic or sudden event occurs we often say that reality exceeds fantasy, this being the exception of the norm, but what if reality exceeding fantasy is in fact the norm - and not vice versa? - what if our fantasy has crumbled in such a degree that we only are capable of imagining realities and solutions which already fit into a dysfunctional system?
Are we doomed? - or do we dare to go full on into utopia?
In the artistic research project; Music for the inner Ear - Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard looks into the realms of imaginary sound and sonic potentiality unfolded within different artistic domains - raising the questions; Is it possible to create imaginary music only audible for the inner ear of the listener & when does something actually exist?
In the project the notion of potentiality is a main driver both in activating the listener but also simply by addressing the potential of potentiality.
Serious Personal Conviction – on measurements of conscience
(2020)
author(s): Björn Larsson, Carl Johan Erikson
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In Serious Personal Conviction – on measurements of conscience, we encounter two groups of people interviewed on different occasions discussing consciousness and ethics in relation to the military system. One of the groups are men that during the 1970s and ‘80s chose to perform non-combatant service and now reflect on the choices they made as 18-year olds. The other group consists of young people of today trying to answer several questions regarding the right to take another person's life. The exposition is part of the artistic research project Refuse to Kill – stories of the conscientious objectors. Our methodology involves a montage of a large number of voices collectively collected through statistical surveys, open-call procedure via advertising in newspapers and the internet, interviews and searches in archives.
Kin Tsugi Gestures
(2019)
author(s): Christina Stadlbauer
published in: Research Catalogue
This durational performance is part of Narratives of Imperfection and was taking place at the exhibition space SOLU, in Helsinki in November 2019.
Speaking directly in an indirect way
(2019)
author(s): Paul Deneer
published in: KC Research Portal
This essay focuses on the connection between personal and artistic growth. The starting point for the essay is my position as a student counsellor at the University of Arts The Hague dealing with students that have personal issues that affect their artistic development. First I take a bigger view by focussing on personal growth in general, from a dialogical perspective. I also make a connection to mental health. With the concepts derived from this wider perspective, I investigate how they could play a role in art. I present material I gathered, about artists who struggle on a personal level with a possible effect on their artistic work. Also in regard to art, I make a connection to mental health. I look back on the reports from my conversations with students, and analyse the data of an interview I did with 14 students. To illustrate my argument, throughout the essay I present cases of students that contacted me during the past years.
The ASC Web: Arts-Infused Facilitation
(2019)
author(s): Judith Marcuse, Flick Harrison
published in: Research Catalogue
The ASC (Art for Social Change) Web is an interactive web page, a pedagogical exposition and a database documentary about Art for Social Change in practice and theory.
600 hours of video have been cut down to 13 hours of insightful, whimsical, serious and thought-provoking conversation about the practice, production and theory of Art for Social Change.
The Body + The Lens: Shrink, Wax, Purge, Bleach.
(2019)
author(s): Tyler Payne
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
"The Body + the Lens: Shrink, Wax, Purge, Bleach" was a creative practice research project that investigated the relationship of (white) women’s embodiment to the lens of gendered advertising. To focus the research, a recently mainstreamed group of female cosmetic rituals were chosen — body-contour wear (SPANX), Brazilian waxing, salt-water cleansing, and fake tanning. The intent of the research was to interrogate the relationship between these body-correcting practices and the idealized image of the "Glossy Magazine Girl" — i.e. preternaturally thin, hairless, and unblemished by shades darker than pink — which now appear with more frequency in women’s everyday life, and have reconfigured the social construction of female gender. The (artistic-research) response to the subject matter was a series of video and photographic works in the genre of self-portraiture. These works attempted to critique the new norms of embodiment emerging through these practices through the researcher’s parodic undergoing of the cosmetic rituals themselves. This "carnal" methodology, following from the methodology of Louis Wacquant, is one that embodies the researcher in the social practices being researched, i.e. body-correcting practices. This method produced research results — embodied and affective — not available to purely observational research, which should interest the artistic research community and feminism generally. The images and videos de-fetishize and denaturalize the embodied product of the cosmetic rituals. My studio-led research reveals the intractable, comic "failures" in the face of the demands placed on the everyday performance of women’s gender. By doing so, it turns these failures to affirmation, as well as critique of the gender norm these practices construct.
Ecorchées
(2018)
author(s): Lisa Salamandra
published in: Research Catalogue
A theoretical linking of my "Raw Women", female figures from the series "Raw Meat" which feature a skinned, cut-up, recomposed body, with the "living dead" figure portrayed in the anatomical charts of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries. I examine how our two images seek the representation of "truths" concerning the human body and its functionning as well as a common truth about the fate of the human flesh, and that of our human condition.
An Obstract for Midpointness
(2018)
author(s): Andrew Bracey, Steve Dutton
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Our aim here is to both provide a response to the Conference ‘Please Specify!’ and to find an alternate way of ensuring that the intrinsic generative nature of research and art is kept active, akin to the mobius strip-like path of both conclusions, and openings.
“Midpointness” is a generative project. It is dismantled and reconstructed through the gradual accretion of surrounding connections, associations and influences of the curators, artists, students and other audiences who contribute to it. These are in the form of artworks, public events, texts, artefacts, performances or other interventions. 'An Obstract for Midpointness' (Obstract)is a piece of artistic research constructed before, during and after, "PLEASE SPECIFY!", The SAR Annual Conference 2017.
'Obstract' is as an element of the ongoing project “Midpointness” that seeks to invite us to consider the ‘work’ of art as art’s labour or task. We seek to explore the dynamics of inner/outer dialogues of the process of artistic work, opening up other potentials that an artist researcher might hope for when he/she explores the generative potential of the work of artistic research directly within and in response to a conference about artistic research.
At the centre is spoken text that is a play on the tradition of the conference ‘abstract.’ The abstract is the site of an outline of intention, yet here we couple it with an ‘obstruction’ as a means of aggravating and diverting the attempt at a conclusion towards which an abstract, and indeed a formal presentation, might be aimed. “Obstract” suggests, by a process of intervention that the ‘centre’ (the work and/or the text) and its surrounding universe are completely indivisible. As such the principle of ‘footnotes’ filter through to the whole spoken text; the footnotes being analogous to the surrounding constellations within which the ‘centre’ of the work sits, swapping footnotes for centre and vice versa. The footnotes refer to points both real and imagined in the past, present and future.
Various Writings: Chapter One
(2018)
author(s): Dion Star, Lizzie Ridout, Maria Christoforidou
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
VARIOUS WRITINGS: CHAPTER I
There are rumours that writing will cease, books will die, the digital eye will take over. Standing at the edge of this precipice we look away from these preoccupations. Instead we look back, investigating the act of writing through systematic consideration, attempting to disregard all preconceptions. This exposition focuses on the gestural and uses Vilém Flusser’s concept of ‘pseudo writing’, to analyse the interaction between the physical actions and the technologies of writing.
The first act of Various Writings’ was a response to Vilém Flusser’s text The Gesture of Writing. This text radicalised our ideas on what constitutes research and thematised the conditions of sharing in ‘other’ terms. Flusser meticulously disassembles the act of writing. We follow in his footsteps, using personal mythologies, Oulipian constraints / translations, taxonomies and non-verbal conversations as implements to excavate relics of writing. We collect codes, tools, surfaces; test writing against various technologies and translate it into movements, attitudes and objects.
This is not / Dette er ikke
(2018)
author(s): Anne Marthe Dyvi
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The language of art is often poetic and abstract.
Reduced and lawless in terms of grammar. I experience the poetic and abstract language as closer to the experienced world than the more concrete and descriptive language that is the norm in the majority of formulations in society. In my artistic practice at the moment, I work with color, movement and time. In the video medium. To say that art is a language is also an assertion, or a worn metaphor. We have no written language rules we agree upon in the arts, no defined alphabet. And maybe that's exactly what the making of art is? Creating form, while challenging form? Being the practitioner, and in that sense defining, in a landscape of concrete and abstract, in definite and indefinite and fluid and solid.
To create while shaping the form of it, is something else than performing within a given formation.
This contribution to a digital catalogue for artistic research are selections of my work, and thoughts, related to it translated into pieces of texts.
Some pieces of text along with some video pieces as well as a print from a video, a so-called 'still'. They are selected to function in different constellations, and for several reasons. A collage as a method and a way to relate to my own work, and with the selection, emphasizes the content of the texts. I apply my own thesis discussed in the text upon my contribution 'here' *. My contribution appears in Vis – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research. The digital is representation. It is not. It is equally important to me that this contributed in form acknowledges that making a presence in an internet-based database is not without hyperlinks. It appears because the other is.
* Where is 'here', what is 'here'?
(Video and video with sound.)
The visual material in this exposition is from the videos 'La ditt liv vitne'(2017), 'Essay on Colour'(2017) and Perceptual Cycle (2016). By Anne Marthe Dyvi.
Self-portraiture: on photography’s reflexive surface
(2016)
author(s): Elisavet Kalpaxi
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition deals with narcissism, narrativity, self-portraiture, and photography. It illustrates a practice-based research project instigated in 2007 that aims to decode and recover narcissism as a useful sense-making scenario or system. This approach can help make sense of photography and self-portraiture in the present, and can be employed in the development of visual strategies in photographic self-portraiture.
Here I present the practical work that was produced and the theory that influenced my practice: namely, the revaluation of the relationship between self-portraiture and narcissism, and ideas from the semiotics of photography and narrative theory. The three main sections of the exposition illustrate the chronological development of my work, and each section is divided into two parts.
The first part of each section presents the practical work, whereas the second part illustrates the theoretical aspect of this project, which stems from a wish to reflect on my own art practice and increase my understanding of self-portraiture, while also interrogating narrative codes and devices in photography, such as the double, mise en abyme, and mirroring structures, and their association with narcissism. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, semiotics, and narratology, I argue that narcissism in self-portraiture can simultaneously represent an imaginary withdrawal of the artist, a structure within the work, and a vehicle for narrativity. By eluding structured language systems, narcissism provides a vocabulary for narrativising procedures, as well as meeting the artist’s/viewer’s modes of engagement.
These ideas informed the practical component of the research project and provided the basis for a number of visual strategies employed in the development of the photographic self-portraits that are presented in the second part of each section. In these sections, I also explain the different strategies adopted in producing my images: the role of codes, narrative devices, layering, and reframing for understanding the density of an image and its inherent narcissism. In the process I propose that narcissism should receive a much more central role in the consideration of images and the way they communicate with a contemporary audience.
Mycological provisions
(2016)
author(s): Christopher Lee Kennedy
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition considers the use of mycology and chance operation as a method and material for arts-based research. The exposition details a series of mushroom hunting excursions designed to engage four artist-teachers in collaborative dialogue about their practice and identity. As participant and researcher converse, the hunts unfold as dérive-like encounters with a landscape interrupted through chance and embodied experience. The project draws from the work of artist and composer John Cage, who used fungi and mushroom hunting as one of many devices for exploring sound and its relationship to environment. Contextual research and documentation offer a glimpse into this process, while considering unstructured, kinetic, and uncertain ways of knowing in qualitative and arts-based research. The aim is to explore mycology as a post-formal lens for understanding the pedagogical and creative practices of the artist-teacher as a networked, fluid, and relational system.
Intersections of creative praxis and urban exploration
(2015)
author(s): David Prescott-Steed
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Since the 1960s, walking artists have documented the multifarious relationship between humans and their built environments. By turning walking into art, key figures such as Bruce Nauman, Richard Long, Marina Abramović, and Hamish Fulton paved the way for future practitioners, such as Janet Cardiff, Tim Brennan, Tim Knowles, and Rachel Clewlow, among others, who continue to use walking as an opportunity creatively to investigate notions of place, identity, time, consciousness, and heritage. Whether walking fosters new artistic inquiry or remains its product, what a vast majority of walking artists have in common is that they pursue a form of praxis on the surfaces of their habitats.
This practice-led research project contributes to creative walking praxis by pursuing notions of cultural identity through an engagement with sub-suburban infrastructure. By developing sound-based, visual, and textual interactions with subterranean space – specifically stormwater drains – this project seeks to investigate alternative ontologies of everyday life.
Spacing matters: Alternative Thinking about the Nature of Space
(2015)
author(s): Monica Raya
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
I would like to present my inter-textual reading of some theories concerning the nature of space and my reflections upon the materiality of it. I aim to open an alternative way to think about scenography. I would like to expose the theoretical process, the visual documentation and the artistic outcomes of a particular scenic event.
So far, I have used my artistic practice as a method of inquiry and it is not my interest to offer an objective approach to the knowledge of space. In my process, I have found that reflective practice has been a central productive mode for my creativity. I intend to evaluate the unintended and unexpected findings in my work, and make them available for other practitioners.
New interpretations of visual culture may contribute to the generation of extended knowledge. New insights about well-known concepts may provoke different outcomes, some of which may go beyond the basic concepts of the discipline of origin.
I am interested in sensuality as an object of analysis and reconsideration of human experience. I am excited to engage with the visual, not simply as a mode of recording data or illustrating texts, but ‘as a medium through which new knowledge and critiques may be created’ (Pink 2007, 13). I propose to connect various sources of knowledge in a way that brings alternatives to think as an architect, as a scenographer, as performance designer and as a teacher.
As much as I would like to situate the outcomes of my artistic research in the field of performance design, I hope my reflections may cross several disciplines.