SUPER(IM)POSITIONS: Subverting Melodramatic Representation Through Personal Unpredictability
(2024)
author(s): Emilio Santoyo
published in: Research Catalogue
This Artistic Research in and through cinema explores the possibilities of using outdated melodramatic elements of cinematic representation in a new way, dissolving the intersection between the personal and the fictional as a tool for creating a redemptive act of filmmaking. "Super (im) positions: Subverting melodramatic representation through personal unpredictability" delves into the transformative potential of these elements within cinematic representation. By dissolving the boundaries between the personal and the fictional, this work engages in a redemptive act of filmmaking that reimagines melodrama. The approach employs a contemporary, polyphonic, and playful film language to propose a new form of melodrama—one that acknowledges its inherent perversity to challenge and deconstruct its toxic narratives.
Rooted in the pervasive influence of telenovelas and melodrama, particularly within Mexican culture, this exploration questions and critiques the genre's impact on cultural and individual perceptions of love and relationships. The research was catalysed by a significant personal and professional rupture, leading to a critical examination of the genre's conventions.
By employing a contemporary, polyphonic, and playful film language, Santoyo reimagines melodrama as a genre capable of portraying complex, personal emotions and generating critical, boundary-pushing narratives. This self-reflective genre deviation, temporarily termed the "New Melodrama," seeks to subvert traditional melodramatic tropes by acknowledging and confronting their perverse nature. Through this approach, Santoyo aims to dismantle the toxic knowledge perpetuated by conventional melodrama, offering a sophisticated and nuanced critique from within the genre itself. His work presents a trojan horse strategy, using the familiar systems of melodramatic representation to question and ultimately transform them, proposing a relevant and self-aware cinematic experience.
Through innovative use of superimpositions and a deliberate deconstruction of melodramatic mise-en-scène, this study aims to create a critical and self-reflective genre deviation termed "New Melodrama." This method seeks to subvert traditional cinematic conventions by integrating multiple perspectives and temporalities, fostering a richer, more complex narrative experience. Ultimately, the research stands as a trojan horse within the film industry, using the very mechanics of melodrama to critique and reinvent it, offering a fresh, introspective take on a genre often dismissed as superficial.
;viewBox(0,0,300,131.01)))
TRAVERSING SONIC TERRITORIES (TST)
(2023)
author(s): Søren Kjærgaard, Torben Snekkestad
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen
What happens when musicians improvising on acoustic instruments sample and exchange their sound libraries? How can such a transgression of sonic territories contribute to an expanded understanding of one’s own sonic identity? And could this b/lending of identities point to a more ambiguous yet vibrant field of intra-play? Departing from these questions, this project intends to challenge our idea of sonic identity as a personal subject-oriented entity, and consequently investigate how a collaborative sharing of sampled sounds, can contribute to an expanded understanding of the sounds we play and are played by. Individual idiomatic approaches to one’s own instrument are thus interfered as we transgress habitual boundaries for action possibilities and musical imagination. The practice circulates from the duo of Torben Snekkestad and Søren Kjærgaard toward external collaborators, where the sharing process involves different approaches to audio sampling and mapping, embedding and embodying, listening and playing with each other’s sonic material to a point where authorship, origin, instrument and sonic identity is diffracted.
Orange Polar Bear - a cross-cultural performance piece for teenagers in Seoul and Birmingham
(2020)
author(s): Peter Wynne-Willson
published in: Research Catalogue
Orange Polar Bear (2014-19) is an innovative bilingual theatre project created by Hanyong Theatre, the National Theatre Company of Korea and Birmingham Repertory Theatre. The main research aims were to develop a methodology for devising and presenting bilingual work in a way that maintains equality between collaborative partners, and, by focusing on the experience of teenagers in Seoul and Birmingham, to consider what young people can teach adults about bridging cross-cultural and language divisions.
The research resulted in a novel methodology for devising bilingual theatre leading to a cross-cultural performance for young people in two languages, presented in the same form in South Korea and the UK. It was unique among Anglo-Korean collaborations for its focus on the experience of teenagers, and conscious balance of languages, cultures and practices. Additionally, the research demonstrates the value of adopting a child-led approach to creating cross-cultural theatre and has created new insights into long-term approaches to developing fair and equal cross-cultural partnerships.
The poetics of enlivening. Searching for the music drama "Borderlands"
(2020)
author(s): Kerstin Perski
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
From the librettist’s perspective, the traditional working methods which tend to dominate in the creation of new music drama, often result in a situation where the initial intentions are lost along the way. How can we get away from a rigid methodology, where the different professionals involved in the creation of new music drama have to succumb to a procedure which can be likened to a whispering game? A procedure, where the dramatic content, rather than undergoing an emotional enrichment in its transformation into music, often loses the crucial connections to the initial intentions.
This doctoral project aims to reach beyond the whispering game by seeking alternative working methods in the creation of a new music drama with the working title "Borderlands", circling around the subject matter of flight and borders - inner as well as outer. The research identified cross–border methods which, borrowing from the terminology of Martin Buber, can be seen as an attempt to counteract the “I–It” relationship that often results from the genre’s focus on virtuosity. The results might inspire further attempts to find alternative working methods which could ultimately create a stronger “I–Thou” relationship between the performance and the audience.
Artistic research in breeding : The Bifrost Eucalyptus project
(2019)
author(s): Jens Staal
published in: Research Catalogue
Genetic signs of domestication of plants and animals date as far back as the oldest known evidence for other artistic expressions like painting, music and sculpture. Breeding is often seen as a science or a craft and is rarely considered art. The Bifrost art project aims to combine the spectacular bark and growth rate of the rainbow gum Eucalyptus deglupta with the cold hardiness of the cider gum Eucalyptus gunnii and possibly other cold-hardy species. The cold hardiness introgression should make it possible to grow amazing rainbow-colored trees in a European or North American climate. The project has been initiated and is expected to continue for decades or centuries in a distributed, participatory, manner. The project explores breeding as an art form, and through extension landscape and ecosystem manipulations that may last beyond the time when human kind has driven itself to its extinction. The project also questions commonly held beliefs about “pristine” and “natural” as being better than “artificial” and “anthropogenic”.
A Few Notes on Getting Lost (Once Again)
(2019)
author(s): Michelle Teran
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This essay is about risk in artistic research. It is about obstacles and turning points; a shift away from the familiar and move towards an unfamiliar terrain. It begins on a boat, heading to the North of Norway, in the darkness. December 2012 is when I turn away from a media art practice and move towards a more socially-engaged, activist way of working. I depart from Bergen; eventually arriving in Madrid, in the middle of an eviction crisis. Along the journey, I will invite various people to think with me, which takes the work in unplanned and unintended directions. I understand risk in the sense of ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway) until it becomes quite clear what is at stake. It is the risk we will take in finding meaning, by trying to locate the means to exist in and act on the present.
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.
Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation (DCI)
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Søren Kjærgaard
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation: Toward non-local collaborative art practices' investigates the resonances of concepts from quantum theory in the realm of transdisciplinary practice-based artistic research. Throughout a series of protocols using diffractive methodologies, we intend to translate and embody concepts such as spacetime, entanglement, non-locality, uncertainty, indeterminacy, and superpositionality, and embed them as tools for our artistic practices. These concepts were chosen for their singularity in physics, but also for the ways in which they confront ontoepistemic pillars of ‘Modernity’, such as sequentiality, determinacy and separability.
The research is carried out by a transdisciplinary non-local core ensemble formed by Søren Kjærgaard, Amilcar Packer, and Carla Zaccagnini. The cities we inhabit – Copenhagen, Sao Paulo and Malmö – have been our laboratories. Departing from tools and methods learned from each-other's disciplines, we have been creating scores to guide our relationship to these urban spaces. The scores conduct our collective experiencing of our cities through a practice we call ‘non-local walking’, involving a diffractive methodology of reading and listening, and the entangled collecting of objects, words and other affections found in the urban terrain. These experiments are conceived as a boundary-crossing transdisciplinary methodology through which we seek to engage with a non-local city, creating a relational, critical consciousness and sensing that stimulates unexpected outcomes.
These scored performances have resulted on cartographies, drawings, moving sculptures, audio works and writings. Across these various materializations of the non-local walks, unexpected connections, constellations, and coincidents e/merge, unveiling yet unheard polyphonies that give resonance to these urban spaces, as potentized terrains awaiting (re)circuitry, and, as fields of forces that await to be (re)experienced.
Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation - Toward Non-Local Collaborative Art Practices
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Søren Kjærgaard, Carla Zaccagnini
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
'Diffracting the Copenhagen Interpretation: Toward non-local collaborative art practices' investigates the resonances of concepts from quantum theory in the realm of transdisciplinary practice-based artistic research. Throughout a series of protocols using diffractive methodologies, we intend to translate and embody concepts such as spacetime, entanglement, non-locality, uncertainty, indeterminacy, and superpositionality, and embed them as tools for our artistic practices. These concepts were chosen for their singularity in physics, but also for the ways in which they confront ontoepistemic pillars of ‘Modernity’, such as sequentiality, determinacy and separability.
The research is carried out by a transdisciplinary non-local core ensemble formed by Søren Kjærgaard, Amilcar Packer, and Carla Zaccagnini. The cities we inhabit – Copenhagen, Sao Paulo and Malmö – have been our laboratories. Departing from tools and methods learned from each-other's disciplines, we have been creating scores that guide our simultaneous actions while walking on the street –interacting with public spaces and their characteristics– or while lying asleep –in the most private of spheres.
On the one hand, in a practice we call ‘non-local walking’, scores conduct our collective experiencing of our cities, involving a diffractive methodology of reading and listening, and the entangled collecting of objects, words and other affections found in the urban terrain. On the other hand, the ‘entangling dream practice’ experiment is an attempt without aiming at success of meeting each other in our dreams. Both investigations are conceived as boundary-crossing transdisciplinary methodologies through which we create a relational, critical consciousness and sensing that stimulates unexpected outcomes, embracing failure.
These scored performances have resulted in cartographies, drawings, moving sculptures, audio works and writings. Across these various materializations, unexpected connections, constellations, and coincidences e/merge, unveiling yet unheard polyphonies that give resonance to the urban and mental spaces, as potentized terrains awaiting (re)circuitry, and, as fields of forces that await to be (re)experienced.
Ixodos2019: Notes 1
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Chrystalleni Loizidou, Someone has to do this
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
We hereby begin to frame the internationally collaborative work of Ixodos to be reviewed, and propagated by the Research Catalogue and its affiliate institutions.
This exposition is based on questions initially asked by/with artist Livia Moura, Carolina Cortes, Bianca Berdardo, for Instituto Mesa.
Ixodos is an international platform for transversal-translocal art exchanges, facilitating and accompanying residencies, projects, exhibitions, the sharing of knowledge, and the building of our common soul and greater selves.
These art exchanges are not just between artists and art institutions but also between social, political and ecological projects and movements around the world, starting from Cyprus and Brazil. Ixodos was ritually initiated In June-August 2018 by Carolina Cortes, Chrystalleni Loizidou, Evanthia Tselika, and Livia Moura in Greece and Cyprus, initially in connection with Hippocrates' Garden in the island of Cos, It generated its second residency programme at A Casa Lar, Rio de Janeiro, in June-August 2019.
Ixodos é uma plataforma de intercâmbios, trocas, facilitando e acompanhando residencias, projetos, exposições, o compartilhamento de conhecimento, e a construção e expansão de uma alma comum e de nossas existências.
Esta troca artística não é apenas entre artistas e instituições artísticas, mas também de projetos e movimentos sociais, políticos e ecológicos (ambientais) no mundo, começando com Chipre e Brasil.
From One Space to Another - A Journey of Sonic Details
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Helena Persson
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
From One Space to Another is a sound essay in video format of the ongoing research of understanding the world, phenomenons and situations through sound and listening. The ambition is that through the act of listening use the detail as a means of highlighting a phenomenon where sound serves as a deeper means of registering and understanding the environment.
By zooming in we can accumulate knowledge, broaden and expand our perception and comprehension and create greater understanding of the bigger context. This way it might be possible to raise awareness and bring to consciousness the things we might not be aware of and that we sometimes fail to notice.
In this practice-led sound essay you take part of sound art pieces that are intertwined by thoughts and reflections throughout the journey. From One Space to Another presents recordings and compositions of smaller components such as the acoustics of fibers in the trees and the needled thread of embroideries as well as the structural repetitiveness of machinery in the textile industry. At the same time it shows how the recorded material inspires and encourages various kinds of expressions.
This sound and video essay is an independent project within the Master Program Experimental Composition and Creation at the Academy of Music and Drama in Göteborg, Sweden.
Swap Space
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Hanns Holger Rutz, David Pirrò, Nayari Castillo-Rutz, Shane Finan, Franziska Hederer, Jackie Karuti, Alisa Kobzar, Daniele Pozzi
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Swap Space is a pilot project at KUG Graz that focuses on novel forms of collaborative artistic research in which otherness, difference and distance between the participants are central and are brought into a cohesive form via the concept of the spatial. Selected questions and previously sketched procedures are an important part of Swap Space and will be tested for their validity and feasibility in a time-limited experiment among six artists-researchers as a proof-of-concept. Thus, on the one hand, the pilot project provides important data and preliminary results, sets the course and ensures that the future project design is viable. On the other hand, Swap Space takes up new decisive impulses for thought - such as the concept of contact - the elaboration of which aims to determine the form of a multi-year research project.
Schwärmen + Vernetzen
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Hanns Holger Rutz, Nayari Castillo-Rutz
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"Schwärmen + Vernetzen" (swarming and networking) explores the possibilities of transdisciplinary work in art, realising them through forms of "movement profiles", retracing the vacating of individual viewpoints of the participating artists and the emergence of joint forms of movement. The project is a collaboration between writer Gertrude Grossegger, installation arts and trained molecular biologist Nayarí Castillo, and sound artist Hanns Holger Rutz. In order to make novel connections between text, visual elements and sounds possible, the three artists put themselves into an experimental arrangement, topically structured around dynamical systems of swarming and networking, originating from biology; we are interested in systems in which new organisms develop without dissolving their partial structures, individual media, and individual scopes of work. Stages of the project are a series of encounters of the artists, the outcome of each of which is a further development of materials, an intensive retreat over several days, a publication in a literature journal, an exhibition at Akademie Graz, a symposium, and a printed catalog.
ARTISTIC PORTFOLIO
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Esa Kirkkopelto
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Tämä on taiteellinen portfolioni / This is my personal artistic Portfolio
This essay is about risk in artistic research. It is about obstacles and turning points; a shift away from the familiar and move towards an unfamiliar terrain. It begins on a boat, heading to the North of Norway, in the darkness. December 2012 is when I turn away from a media art practice and move towards a more socially-engaged, activist way of working. I depart from Bergen; eventually arriving in Madrid, in the middle of an eviction crisis. Along the journey, I will invite various people to think with me, which takes the work in unplanned and unintended directions. I understand risk in the sense of ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway) until it becomes quite clear what is at stake. It is the risk we will take in finding meaning, by trying to locate the means to exist in and act on the present.open exposition comments (0)