A Name Painting Exercise: Contrasting Artificial and Human Intelligent Responses
(2026)
author(s): KEVIN MICHAEL STEVENSON
published in: Research Catalogue
Name Painting is an activity that has the potential to bring people together to test their opinions and tastes in a phenomenological fashion. This research aim to reveal how such an activity can lead to results that can be expressed through poetry. The arts-based research aims to reflect some of the challenges of engaging with the public for participation in a cultural activity, that of Name Painting, but also aims to show some fruitful ways to display the results in the form of poetry. A.I. is also consulted to provide further contrast with the participant and artist-researcher's approaches to name painting. The thematic and content analysis of the study reveals some of the patterns associated with the results in a mixed methods approach.
TEXT FORMAT The Hijacked Dream in Arts-Based Research: A Work of Surrealist Criticism
(2025)
author(s): Fey (Faith) Harkey, Cassie Fielding
published in: Research Catalogue
Mention of a surrealist form of criticism comes to us through Breton and Polizzotti, but we have little in the way of criteria or techniques for developing and identifying such critiques. This article, then, begins with the inquiry, what is surrealist criticism—or what might it be? The authors then introduce the focus of their own surrealist critique, the research methodology known as arts-based research (ABR). Over the course of their examination, Fielding and Harkey suggest that an egoic, or will-driven, approach to arts-based research must ultimately fail, in that it both denies the spirit of artmaking and disregards autonomy of figures in psyche. Blending academic and surrealist prose, fiction and poetry, the authors explore ways the ABR methodology can fail to serve either art or research. Still, Jungian thought, as well as the surrealist approach, may offer tools to inform an ABR that supports art, psyche, and research. In exploring the personal complex and the collective unconscious, particularly, Harkey and Fielding offer a window on all that can be lost—or gained—when the life of psyche is considered in an arts-based methodology.
Performing the changing landscape
(2024)
author(s): Alžběta Trojanová
connected to: Academy of Performing Arts in Prague
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: 2025)
author(s): Melina Scheuermann
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"the archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive" is both a research output and a method. Driven by the idea of unlearning as a transformative, post-colonial pedagogical practice, I began to think about whether and how an archive could become a site for critical knowledge production in arts education and in the history of education, rather than just documenting my research process.
There is a slight irony, seemingly a paradox in the title of this archive: "the archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive". Unlearning while practising it? The idea is not repetition, unless it is considered repetition in variance, never settled, never fixed. It speaks to my attempt to unlearn hegemonic ways of seeing and educating and to provide pedagogical encounters that foster such unlearning in the fields of arts education and history of education. the archive that i imagine to unlearn the archive makes a contribution to research that interrogates the archives that we as arts educators inherit and raises questions about the purposes and ways of doing histories.
I developed a performative-archival practice as a research methodology that combines visual culture inquiry, post-colonial pedagogy and arts-based practices. "the archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive" departs from two series of object lesson picture books of the so-called object lesson method (Pt. lições de coisas, Germ. Anschauungsunterricht) from the long 19th century that circulated across Imperial Europe as performative scores. The archive is invested in the study of visual representations of modern/colonial Nature and childhood, in the history of visual pedagogies and in how reform education was involved in producing the imperial citizen “at home”.
This work was supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, I.P. under the project with the identifier DOI https://doi.org/10.54499/2022.12937.BD.
to care in a peculiar way (2009)
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Helena Hildur W.
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Is there a method to die?
In the spring of 2009, I attended a course in aesthetic-based qualitative research at Stockholm University. My mother was becoming very weak at the time. As I set out to write on method and methodology within the course, she had to go to hospital for some days during which I kept her company as much as I could. Tests didn't prove anything wrong with her though, and she was sent back home. When she was lifted from the stretcher and gently put her back in her own bed by the transport team, she looked around her and smiled. From the well-known paintings on her walls and the books in her bookshelves, she turned her attention to at me. Still smiling, she looked into my eyes, saying: "And now begins a new and exciting phase in our lives."
Less than a month later, she deceased.
The day after her death, I took one of her carpets on the back of my bike and went to the shore of a lake to clean it, the way she used to do it when I was a child. Out of this situation, the question emerged. Absurd though it seemed, it echoed through my further reading, listening and thinking.
EXPANDING PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY THROUGH PRISON MUSIC MAKING
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Iiris Johanna Elisabet Tarnanen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This research examines how the experience of working with prisoners might expand a musician’s understandings of their professional responsibility. It is an autoethnographic (Ellis & Bochner, 2000), arts-based (Leavy, 2017), examination of a musician-facilitator’s experience in a prison art project in Finland with 4 male prisoners and a group of artists. It consists of a literature review on community music and music making in prisons, a reflexive thematic analysis of the content of diary entries, poetry, and compositions, and final conclusions.
The research strengthens earlier findings that community art projects may expand the art facilitator’s understandings of professional responsibility (Solbrekke & Sugrue, 2011; Sutela et al, 2022) and direct the artist-facilitator to be more involved with their diverse local others (Bartleet & Higgins, 2018). Even though it can be argued whether community art is necessarily enhancing participants’ lives (Baker, 2021; Aakala, 2018), I explore how working with prisoners pushed my professional responsibility in a direction that is valuable for society which needs art professionals who can work in diverse environments (Sutela et al, 2022). Overall, this research contributes to wider discussions on community music and its role, impacts, ethical complexities, possibilities, and challenges in the prison environment.
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.
Name Painting is an activity that has the potential to bring people together to test their opinions and tastes in a phenomenological fashion. This research aim to reveal how such an activity can lead to results that can be expressed through poetry. The arts-based research aims to reflect some of the challenges of engaging with the public for participation in a cultural activity, that of Name Painting, but also aims to show some fruitful ways to display the results in the form of poetry. A.I. is also consulted to provide further contrast with the participant and artist-researcher's approaches to name painting. The thematic and content analysis of the study reveals some of the patterns associated with the results in a mixed methods approach.open exposition comments (0);viewBox(0,0,161.12389,265.47596)))
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.open exposition comments (0)
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.open exposition comments (0)