mental space embodiments
(2025)
author(s): çifel çifel
published in: Research Catalogue
The concept of spatial context is often presented and visualized commonly through its relation to the built environment. Its significance predominantly plays a fundamental role in understanding the world and forming relations between various diverse experiences, and interpretations of reality. These influences, in which knowledge is produced and transformed by inhabiting the process of being seen, felt, and perceived, overlap where the notion of time unfolds intricate reflections of itself regarding happenings, entities, and physical elements.
By exploring the spatial context in a non-linear timeline, it is possible to identify unique hidden dimensions that enrich the understanding of the totality that is related to spaces and their surroundings. This nonlinearity is achievable through the phenomenological understanding of lived spaces which brings mental, physical, and sensory, at the same time largely subjective realities to conceivable participation. With these guidelines, this research consists of an artistic exploration that aims to visually investigate artistic methods and processes of revealing extended visual qualities of mental space, and what type of connections are intertwined within its architectonic surroundings.
My aim is to phenomenologically uncover hidden dimensions inherited within mental space. Therefore I destabilize conventional meanings of space by visually exploring and rendering the mental and emotional geographies that shape our lived experience, internalizing and revealing the constructedness of mental spatiality through an artistic process that reflects psychogeographic embodying. By challenging linear and objective representations of space by engaging in an artistic exploration of mental and emotional landscapes, I unfold non-linear timelines, subjective lived experiences, and the overlaps of perception and time, where memory and the present co-narrate within us.
Exploring the Efficiency of Artistic Practices within the Context of their Interaction
(2020)
author(s): Andrew Miller
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition presents the artistic research project ‘Exploring the Efficiency of Artistic Practices within the Context of their Interaction’, which examines the ways in which artistic practices interact with one another. It understands practices as the organised media and structures through which a researcher is able to initiate and continue the process of environmental constitution, the embodied process through which the world emerges as meaningful for and with us. The project is situated within the context of a phenomenological approach to consciousness and sense-making. It demonstrates the potential of artistic practices as phenomenological methods; practices not merely for the creation of art but as vehicles for investigation into human experience.
The exposition is separated into two sections:
The first section attempts to present—that is, to make present—the environment as constituted by the researcher through his engagement with the four main artistic practices; descriptive writing, auditory diagramming, sketching and composing. As part of these practices, the initial engagement with the researcher's surroundings was established through the practices of listening and hearing - making this a primarily aural undertaking. The artefacts are given to the reader in a way that hopes to facilitate desired conditions in which the researcher’s perceived environment becomes present. The artefacts relate directly to the practices which allowed the researcher’s understanding of his environment, and are therefore powerful objects, which may allow the reader to come into contact with the same dynamics that allowed the environment to appear in the first place.
The second section contains a reflective text which looks back on this process of environmental constitution in an attempt to understand the role of each artistic practice within the context of their interaction. It also contextualises the project within the framework of artistic research, by understanding the artistic practices not only as methods for art creation, but also as mediators of human experience, and therefore as tools for understanding the way the world emerges with us. The text, therefore, simultaneously addresses the idea of consciousness as an enactive process, one which sees a blurring of agency between researcher, practice and environment.
The reflection is split into two sections, each referring to two different phases of research: the first, an open and generative approach to the engagement of the practices. The second, a pre-determined and deliberate structure for this engagement.