Sounds of walking: Can sound re-present the embodied experience of movement time and distance in the landscape?
(2024)
author(s): Martin P Eccles
published in: Research Catalogue
In this thesis, having introduced my research questions, in Chapter 2 I present a layered analysis of the important contexts of my practice—walking, sound, walking poetry, and place. In Chapter 3 I present and discuss three works that together explore how it is that I know the world as a sensate embodied walker. In Chapter 4 I develop what I came to call replicated walks—walks made more than once in the same place. Begun in order to re-configure time, they also led me to extend my consideration of place beyond that defined by geography, to place defined by biological phenomena or socio-cultural coherence. In Chapter 5 I describe my emerging ideas of human-scale of place and my underlying ideas of island-ness. Initially I worked on real islands, walking circumferential routes and those defined by chance procedures. From this I developed an imaginary island in the foothills of Northumberland’s Cheviot Hills; made from the human-scale of my embodied walking this led to my creation of an imaginary pandemic island of containment, created in a city, in my locale, made, and made real, by the traces of my embodied walking. Together my works constitute a body of work that represents a contribution to knowledge with specific contributions of: the use of Replicated Walks as a method of experimenting with time and place; Walking Words – the presentation of poetic text in forms (concertina-fold books, scripta continua, scrolls) that requires walking to engage with it, and that also function as metonyms for my original walking act; Walking Islands –the use of human-scale walking to imagine an island into existence, and then invoke the island as a lens through which to continue to pursue the idea. My work also contributes knowledge to the methods of how to record the sounds of the world whilst walking through it, over extended distances and time.
Projecting Form, Investigating Distance
(2023)
author(s): Agnese Cebere
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
This exposition describes a process of investigating projection of form as a bridge between near and far, physical and virtual, anchored in the production of what I call “handheld devices” and a multimedia performance. It explores sympathetic dwelling in the crevices of the clay forms in relation to the smooth openness of the built environment of scientific and institutional space exemplified by the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact at the University of Oregon which graciously hosted me for a Center for Art Research Project Incubator residency and fellowship in 2023. In this text, I take up concepts of information and noise, distance and intimacy, affordances and the dynamics of action.
Distanciation and other: implications of distance in an ancestry DNA project
(2023)
author(s): Mike Croft
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
The exposition focuses on the question of ‘distanciation’ that at-once both distances and furthers one’s understanding of the self through being drawn into a work of text – here taken in a broader sense to include also the visual-material – and geographical and temporal distance. The latter interpretation of distance relates to the artistic research project that contextualises the article, which is in response to a call for drawings on the question of genetics and identity, hosted by i3S (Institute of Investigation and Innovation in Health, Porto University). As part of this author’s response, and as an example that may, through its reading, cause some expansion of one’s notion of self, the novel ‘The Inheritors’ by William Golding is discussed. From the point of view of genetic ancestry, Golding’s novel involves incongruous recognition between a family of Neanderthals and a larger group of Homo sapiens, and a more psychological use of the term ‘other’ for foreignness and one’s negotiation of such initial reaction by oneself. The conjoined question of distanciation and other is considered through reference to a large drawing of the author in progress as part of the ancestry project at the time of writing, and through theoretical reference to the work of Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Lacan and Bracha Ettinger that helps elaborate on distanciation, the psychically interpreted other, and a maternal matrixial idea of pre- and post-natal I and non-I of the self in contiguous relationship not only with psychoanalytical theory, but also with global ancestral mitochondrial DNA.
THE [ W A L L S ] WE CREATE : on distance in research practice
(2023)
author(s): Ewa Łączkowska
published in: Research Catalogue
An interactive, mixed-media artistic research process – using somatic experience, dance, listening, storytelling, and visual arts to ponder on the topic of distance in research practice.
The focal point of this research process has been the somatic feeling of distance and entanglement and exploring those through movement - captured on film, inspired by and enriched with music by Ólafur Arnalds.
The written story is a secondary translation of the research process, formed by the somatic exploration, movement experimentation, painting, and the process of film-making. I’ve used watercolors as an aid to help me translate and express the inquiry in the form of text.
Where Can I Wish You Happy? [submitted to Royal Academy of Art, The Hague - 2023-06-29 22:16]
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): He Bo
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
Master of Photography and Society
On 12 May 2008, at 14:28 Beijing time, an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter scale struck my home province of Sichuan, China, killing 69,227 people, leaving 17,923 missing and injuring 374,643 in various degrees across China. At the time, I was at university in another city far from home.
In this thesis, My beginning question is how to fit myself who is absent from this earthquake into its history and the memories shaped by it. As a practitioner and researcher of photographic images, I want to reach out beyond the physical and psychological distance to the real memories of the earthquake understand its impact by describing, speculating and analyzing ready-made images about it and by explaining my own visual strategies, such as making and reworking photographs on this topic. These images contain 1) group photos of local people before the earthquake who were separated from each other in life and death by the it, 2) video clips taken by television camera reporters and other anonymous people on the day of the earthquake, and 3) the visual outcomes produced by people who look at or photograph the earthquake ruins which turned into tourist attractions now. In these ways, I highlight that we can encounter actively that earthquake through dealing with photographs about it and new photographic actions since then, in order to find possibilities to shape the postmemories for those Chinese who, like me, were absent or irrelevant at the time of the earthquake.
In September 2022, a new strong earthquake occurred in Sichuan. I regard it as a bridge to relate the 2008 earthquake to present-day China. At that time, China was still in the midst of an extremely rigorous Covid-19 prevention and control phase, with various restrictions trying to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 cascading from the top down. By putting the two earthquakes together to discuss, I argue that Chinese people should remember the disasters of the past so that we can find our place in new dilemmas to deal with them. We should face up to the pain others have experienced and are experiencing and reach out to help, instead of ignoring or avoiding our responsibility. As a Chinese studying an English-taught MA program in the Netherlands, the differences between the Chinese and English contexts, the temporal distance between the current Chinese context and the European historical context were gaps that I could not avoid in this thesis writing. These gaps are reflected by describing and reflecting on my act of going to the former site of the Auschwitz Concentration camp. Acting as a spokesperson, I brought the inappropriate reactions of some Chinese people in the present to the plight of their compatriots to that field of traumatic memories, emphasising the importance of confronting one’s own absence and distance from the disaster from the other’s side.
Peripheries
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Montserrat Fonseca Llach
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The periphery is present in the distance, somehow the periphery finds its identity from the periphery. When the place of origin is out of reach, between signs of strangeness and marks of a foreign place, in a constant tension between “being and not being there”.
Travel, which makes the origin tangible, in a portable dimension of the landscape and its roots even in the distance. The trip implies a fixed point, from which it emerges and from there the "being in transit" becomes a primordial state of leaving and looking for a home.
The body becomes an intermediary of this space "in transit", the only constant territory, as an object that absorbs, adopting foam in constant transformation and flow. Foam that becomes tidal, goes, collects, returns, and from there as a loop, generating ties with the origin.
Collecting Walks
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Elsa van der Linden
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
catching moments by collecting walks
INERTIA, SPEED AND FUTURE: an artistic research on the unknown, from military disruptions to astronomy predictions
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Laetitia Catherine Morais
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The aim of this PhD is to provide an artistic research about unknown territories; pristine, fictitious, distant and immeasurable fields; to find clues or directions to reach them and to make use of the gained knowledge (Erkenntnis) for art practices.
It presents diversified approaches to questions as follows: which are the next boundaries of Art? What are the most advanced methods to move in an unknown field? How long-range observations provide closer approaches? How may advancements in perception inflect new imageries? What is the role of fiction in the development of a future? These main questions may elicit the paradigms of artistic research, once they directly relate with the production of new knowledge throughout artistic conceptualization. These questions invite to a reflection upon the future and how fiction may be introduced to scientific knowledge, in order to maintain an open perception of reality.
Therefore, fFor this analysis, I will focus on the introduction of methodologies - sometimes external to the field of art – such as military and astronomic observations of its surroundings. The military area is pointed out here by its cutting edge approach concerning surveillance, by making the invisible visible and vice-versa, through camouflage and landscape reconnaissance. The astronomic field is also brought to this research by its unstable nature, collapsing time and space, that is, studying data from the past until the present, with the aim to uncover a possible future. The materials used for their observations such as lens, absorbing and reflective surfaces, evoke an imagery (either by literature, music, comics and cinema) related to science-fiction, but they are, nonetheless, the most effective equipment for the observation of far away objects…
Both areas promote incursions into the unknown, throughout practices, techniques and tools that frequently combine two crucial factors: inertia and speed. It is departing from these main concepts that I raise questions around new aesthetics of the future, analyzing military and astronomic techniques used to disrupt or improve perception, and how these have been intercepting with art as a visionary mean. In this sense, I wish to contribute for a broadening conception of the unknown.
Therefore, this project is a gathering of information from different sources of knowledge, a study on space and time, a relocation of imageries – making (thinking and doing) – aesthetics. It is also a key for an artistic discourse capable to dialogue without constraints, combining conceptual objections with experimental practice, applied in diversified fields.