Performing the changing landscape
(2024)
author(s): Alžběta Trojanová
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition refers to arts-based research on simultaneous performative walking and singing practice in a changing environment. The act of walking is put in the context of landscape and singing representing two aspects of relation to the environment – inner and outer landscape. The object of research is traditional and authorial songs and their bodily and sensual interconnection with the process of experiencing landscape. This experience is gained with a group of artists and environmentalists who have over the course of more than a year repetitively walked through the landscape of the natural park Prokop Valley in Prague and its adjacent urban areas. Qualitative research is taken within the project “Walking as a liquid constant in urban space and landscape”. The method of data collection uses mental maps, inspired by the concept of Kevin Lynch, as a means of documentation. The exposition has three parts 1) the opening video essay, 2) Opus caementicium, autoethnographic reflection of the site, where the project takes place, and 3) Fugue of the vanishing world – an essay on the musical aspect of the project. Chapter titles are inspired by musical terminology that has content connotations in the text or mirrors the structuring of text and musical compositions.
reposition #1 Editorial
(2023)
author(s): Alexander Damianisch, Barbara Putz-Plecko
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Welcome Letter and Foreword by Barbara Putz Plecko, Vice-Rector for Research and Alexander Damianisch, Director of Center Research Focus
reposition offers researchers of all disciplines and departments at the Angewandte the opportunity to publish their work according to peer-review principles. Colleagues of any level and doctoral students in arts and sciences are invited to share their work.
This series showcases their diverse approaches to project-oriented research work and presents current insights, captivating research processes, and ongoing projects from a deeply personal perspective that courageously unearth the work-in-progress.
The idea of reposition is to emphasise dynamic approaches that demonstrate the courage to adopt alternative perspectives and a focus that lies always on a dialogue in-between.
Citizen Science - a new field for the arts?
(2023)
author(s): Pamela Marjan Bartar
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Pamela Bartar’s (Center for Didactics of Art and Interdisciplinary Education) contribution "Citizen Science – a new field for the arts?" links Citizen Science with art-based research. Providing an overview of current approaches, Bartar illustrates how contemporary art can significantly contribute to the democratisation of science and the societal proximity of research, particularly focusing on socially engaged practices and collaborative knowledge production.
"Artistic Research on Socially and Environmentally Engaged Art - Ethics of Gathering
(2020)
author(s): Katja Juhola, Maria Huhmarniemi, Kaisa Johanna Raatikainen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Art symposiums and similar gatherings in which international artists come together to collaborate are a longstanding tradition of the global art world. In 2019, artists and environmental researchers and experts were invited to work with a local school on environmental issues to create place-specific art and scientific collaborations. Three interdisciplinary teams focused on locally current topics. In this article, we present the process of one of them: the freshwater pearl mussels sub-project. In addition, we discuss the research practice of the International Socially Engaged Art Symposium and the ethics related to the gathering. The research practice included various forms of dialogue, such as presentations, structured group discussions, reflections, mentoring and art-based practice with community members. Tight living together in a humble, small house supported the dialogue. Environmental issues, critical environmentalist thinking and the ethics of the practices were discussed in the process. The ethical elements of the symposium were considered during the processes of defining the themes and aims, curating and producing the event, respecting peer artists and researchers, interacting respectfully with the surrounding community such as school children and community members in countryside villages, and non-human nature, considering the environmental footprint of the symposium and aiming for a meaningful ecological handprint. The documentation, data collection and research reporting also considered ethical issues. The research is part of a cyclic development of art symposiums as socially and environmentally engaged events.
the archive that i imagine to unlearn the archive
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Melina Scheuermann
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exhibition emerged from the artistic research project PerformArquivo. The project was realised in three main moments during 2024 in Porto : a 6-week long artistic residency, a workshop for professionals in the field of arts and arts education, a publication and this exhibition (work-in-progress).
I departed from the proposal to take up archival documents of my study within the history of education as performative scores and triggers for artistic engagement. In particular, I studied two picture book series of the pedagogical object lesson method (Pt. lições de coisas, Germ. Anschauungsunterricht) that circulated across Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The picture books are traversed by several intersecting discrimination based, amongst others, on gender, race, sex and class.
Through the artistic engagement I reflected on the epistemological, political and ethical implications of archiving and the writing of history and developed a performative-archival practice as an artistic research methodology in the history of education.
The "archive that i imagine to unlearn the archive" is an exhibition of the interventions produced as much as the structure of an archive. I borrow the concept of unlearning from decolonial and postcolonial theorists who discuss it as a practice that challenges the value-based, hegemonic apparatus of knowledge production such as the archive from the inside. There is a slight irony, seemingly a paradox in name of this archive: The archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive. Unlearning something while repeating, practising, constructing it? The idea is not repetition, unless it is always considered repetition in variance and in motion, never settled, never fixed.The method of constructing an archive to unlearn archive imperialism and historicism is a self-reflexive move that embraces and inhabits a problem by playing it out and finding the moment and movements of change and transformation from within. By inhabiting the archive as my research problem, I was faced with the challenge of archiving differently.
As a work-in-progress the archive is going to change. New images might be added, images might be removed or differently contextualised. Current elaborations will evolve. Structural changes of the archive design might occur.
This artistic investigation was realised as part of the project PerformArquivo hosted by Corpo Raíz – Associação Cultural in partnership with Teatro de Ferro, Sekoia – Artes Performativas and the Research Institute in Art, Design and Society (i2ADS).
baseCollective. Philosophy as Artistic Research. Residence in India
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Arno Boehler
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In the research retreat, students from 4 art universities as well as the Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Sciences of the University of Vienna are offered a cross-disciplinary research seminar, in which art students together with master students of the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Vienna collectively develop research strategies in a research retreat in India, in which a research question is addressed with methods and means of artistic & philosophical research. In this retreat, the teaching and research formats "arts-based-philosophy" and "Philosophy On Stage" developed by Böhler & Granzer over 25 years are applied, in which artistic and philosophical research methods are cross-disciplinarily intersected with each other.
Intertwined - What does it mean to be a creative person of faith?
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Joshua Hale, Kelly J. Arbeau
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
From the most religious to the most secular, no artist ever knows exactly where their creative process is leading—but we all seem to have faith that we will get there. Many factors underlying creativity are also crucial to the act of having faith. These shared factors include ambiguity tolerance, openness to mystery, engaging with paradoxical thinking, perseverance, and questioning. Additionally, those who practice each (creativity, faith) share many guiding phrases, such as “take it one step at a time,” “go with your heart,” and “trust the process.” This interdisciplinary arts-based research project explores the experience of being a self-identified creative who practices a faith or religion. The exhibition combines methods from arts-based research, human centered design, and phenomenology to describe the intersections between the creative practices and faith perspectives of 15 individuals. The experience of our participants is that of creativity and faith combining—intertwining—to form an interactional, hybrid experience that is profoundly different from each experience on its own.