Imagining the world through the lens of loser and hoping for a better future
(2025)
author(s): Anna Pierga
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
My thesis is an attempt to create a bridge between my artistic practice and theoretical research behind its themes and topics. I highlight imagination as a tool to recreate one’s world in order to survive a hostile, success-oriented and normative daily reality. The text is divided into three main sections. Each focusing consecutively on childhood,
queerness and examples of imagination in fairy tales and artistic practices; all understood through the lens of failure. I look at childhood as a queer and highly creative universal experience of living on the edge of established social norms.
I draw on queer writtings such as Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstram and Cruising Utopia: Then and There of Queer Futirity by José Esteban Muñoz in search of utopia and longing for a better future.
In the final part of my thesis I refer to Ursula Le Guin’s essays on fantasy and science fiction, fairy tales and artistic practices. I explore various examples of failed heroes and the role of imagination in order to rewrite the present for a queerer future of more possibilities.
Decatastrophizing Failure Through Playfulness
(2025)
author(s): Nicholas Cornia, Arabella Pare
published in: Research Catalogue
This is an invitation to generate your own article about playfulness and its power to reconceive failure in artistic research, through a simple game of chance and knowledge. This text contextualises the game within the experiences of the authors, researchers at Orpheus Instituut, who have been engaged in creating explorative spaces for new types of collaboration, using the principles of playfulness. Through a combination of artistic and theoretical work and practical experience with iterative case studies in which game mechanics are tested, refined, and tested again, the authors are engaged in a process of discovery within a “magic circle”. Open-ended experimentation and collaboration are central areas of focus. Failure is re-conceived as a learning process and its catastrophic effects are integrated into the make-believe space of the game, while the insights and experiences drawn from these failures are retained once we step out of the magic circle.
Fragments in Time
(2022)
author(s): Tobias Leibetseder, Thomas Grill, almut schilling, Till Bovermann
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The processual sculpture "Fragments" is in permanent development and consists of artefacts of the "Rottings Sounds" project of artistic research*. Waste, things collected, things stored and things put aside, texts, pictures, data, sounds etc. are the basis of the shape-changing work. It is located at the Auditorium of Rotting Sounds. For this exposition, media representations of physical fragments have been arranged, then subjected to multiple stages of erosion processes specific to digital data. Object or exhibition, museum or archive, collection or documentation are moments of intrinsic research and decomposition, accompanying the process and resting in the distant but immediate eye of the virtual observer.
*"Rotting Sounds – Embracing the temporal deterioration of digital audio" is a cooperation of the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. It is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) as project AR445-G24.
falling like a monster
(2021)
author(s): Susanna Hast, Maryam Bagheri Nesami
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Falling Like a Monster is a collaborative and creative practice of writing and embodying inter-textuality and multi-modality in order to experiment a non-representational archive known as a two-sided article. This heterogenous crafted piece of writing resists the hegemony of academic and artistic narratives and suggests a transformative knowledge and an alternative practice of political freedom. In our writing, crafting, recording, and failing, we are playing with exhaustion, silence and stillness as monstrous counter-strategies.
Falling Like a Monster is a collaborative and creative practice of writing and embodying inter-textuality and multi-modality in order to experiment a non-representational archive known as a two-sided article. This heterogenous crafted piece of writing resists the hegemony of academic and artistic narratives and suggests a transformative knowledge and an alternative practice of political freedom. In our writing, crafting, recording, and failing, we are playing with exhaustion, silence and stillness as monstrous counter-strategies.open exposition comments (0)