Alienation: Regarding the Art, the Artist and the Audience.
(2024)
author(s): Julien Hamilton
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Art Academy, The Hague, 2024
BA Fine Arts
In the landscape of modern society, alienation is a common denominator to the experience of individuals. Whether this is due to society’s perpetual acceleration, or the experience of life through the ever-present lens of consumerism, alienation is an unmissable part of the contemporary human experience.
This extends to the art world, where the chasm separating an ever-booming global market for the arts, and institutions struggling to get their pre-covid-19 visitor numbers highlight the disparities in the experience of art today.
These disparities will ultimately transpire in the experience of the viewer. But how, and why can art be a catalyst for alienation in late-contemporary society?
This Graduation Research Paper is an attempt at exploring the relationship between the artwork, the audience, and the artist, so as to attempt and provide a comprehensive notion of the ways in which relationships form around artworks, notably through communication theory. This GRP will also explore examples of elements of influence in the formation of communicative structures between the art and the audience. Notably, this paper will discuss the myth of the artist, and its influence as an authority in the experience of art, as well as the influence of spatial context on the reception of art.
The paper will conclude that the artist possesses limited agency in the reception of their artworks, and that in order to provide an honest experience to a contemporary audience, the artist must seek to understand and deconstruct the codes which surround the audience's consumption of 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 .
Redundant Perception: An Artist's Enquiry
(2017)
author(s): Christopher Hollins
published in: Research Catalogue
Living things often display redundant and unused appendages of physical characteristics that once served to give them an advantage in the struggle for life. Examples would be the flightless wings of penguins and ostriches, and the vestige of a tail in we humans; which is made of three small loosely fused bones called the coccyx. This is known as the ‘tail-bone’ because it is considered the remains of the full tail that our ape-like ancestors once possessed. It is also probable that our brains generate the remaining impulses from an older redundant power of perception that once gave our distant ancestors an ‘animal’ awareness of objects and events. This experience of mind now lies buried behind our modern day thought processes, and for any artist aware of this the implications are that the way we create art through intelligent learned ideas hides an experience of deeper natural form. A state of mind therefore exists that once allowed us to conceive of the world in a natural way, but artists have always created intelligently structured artificial images rather than the spontaneous intuitive results need to glimpse the instinctive insight. Art has always worked to suppress rather than reveal an original way of sensing sight, shape, sound, and movement, and it is this realisation that I believe was the motivation for challenging the established principles of art upheld by the founding pioneers of modernism.
Artistic Research Does Not Exist … And How She Managed Not to Be Afraid
(2016)
author(s): Julian Klein
published in: Research Catalogue
“Fine, then,” fluted Fay, “sing me the reasons why you don’t exist, and I will whisper to you why you don’t have to be afraid – as long as you accompany me on the guitar.” – “But I can’t play the guitar!” –
“If you don’t exist,” continued Fay, “then you can also play the guitar, because you actually do exist, otherwise you wouldn’t be afraid of not existing, and from one such a false premise follows the entire universe.”
And so she played and played, sang her favorite fears and listened to Fay's eleven chords of consolation.
Can Philosophy Exist?
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Photography with sound and net art, drawing, found folk sculpture with digital drawing, readymades, 2012, 2020, 2021. Accompanied by archival material.
The exposition exposes the question of what is artistic research. Usurping the mini-essayist format, which is traditionally associated with research in say the area of philosophy, the exposition formally operates on different levels. I selectively included visual art research material from my own artistic archive, as well as anonymous material that's readily available from the internet and in film archives. In this way, I wanted to emphasise the role of archiving and using archives in the artistic process, as an element of artistic research and artistic production that might involve remediation. Taking that we live in a largely theoretic culture, which means that we use external information systems for storage and retrieval of written, visual and other material, the implication is that art is part of this theoretical system.
Moreover, I specifically problematise the notion of value in relation to the visual arts by using the popular media figures of the counterfeit and the impostor, with reference to the so-called "impostor syndrome", correlated with being a minority of some sort in one's field: "A different thought is that two people may be answerable to the very same standard of success or competence, yet be subject to different epistemic standards for reasonable belief in their respective success or competence. This would be an example of pragmatic encroachment." (Katherine Hawley, "What is Impostor Syndrome?", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93, 2019). I use visual art and figurative examples as illustrations, adapting from methods, such as the example, used in analytic philosophy.
I suggest that some artworks operate as philosophical provocations of the archive: "The artwork just exists", as Frank Stella argued. Artworks and archival artistic material are offered for aesthetic contemplation; they don't possess any "magical" qualities, they don't cause any phenomena or events in the world. In this view, I ordered this exposition as a design proposal for two independent, yet interconnected exhibitions: one for the final artistic exhibition show; and one as a general overview for the artist's studio, set up as a stand alone, if parallel, exhibition.
Art and the Philosophies of East & West
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Christopher Healey
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Art arises either in parallel with or in response to the implicit or explicit philosophies of a culture. Aesthetics and artistic processes have traditionally varied across cultures as a result. For example, the so-called "Western" Classical music tradition which has been influential and widespread throughout much of Europe is distinctly different from the artistic traditions that existed in Japan. Indeed, Japan presents an interesting example for comparison not only because its religo-philosophy is distinct from the Christianity, but because its location resulted in long periods of isolation from other cultures. It is only comparatively recently that the culture of Japan and that of Europe (as disparate as it may be) made meaningful contact.
This essay explores how Japanese art and European art were historically distinct, as well as examining the more recent examples of how this cross-cultural contact has influenced some notable composers.