En egen trykkpresse
(2020)
author(s): Ane Thon Knutsen
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
A Printing Press of One’s Own (En egen trykkpresse) is a practical examination of the relationship between art and technique, hand and spirit, thought and printing ink. The project came out of an interest in the printed medium in a digital age. Book printing has been the dominant technology for setting and mass reproducing of the printed word from when Gutenberg popularized the technique in the 1450s, and until well into the 20th century. Thon Knutsen set out to search for a professional position which allowed her to combine an artistic approach to typography and graphic form with her technical insight and historical knowledge of book printing. She found Virginia Woolf. The canonised modernist author and the feminist icon worked in parallel with both her writing as artistic practice and as typesetter and printer in her own private printing press. Through in-depth close reading of Woolf's authorship, seen through the first-hand experience as typesetter and printer, Thon Knutsen has found new ways to read Woolf, and a direction for her own artistic and research-based practice. Thon Knutsen has recreated the short story that Woolf printed in her debut, The Mark on the Wall, in its whole, but with a new aesthetic appearance. She has done this with a method that Thon Knutsen claims must have been used by Woolf; the thought and the writing must have been influenced by the experience of setting and printing as a pendulum between the spirit that writes and the hand that sets.
Composition as Commentary: Voice and Poetry in Electroacoustic Music
(2020)
author(s): Edmund Hunt
published in: Journal for Artistic Research, Birmingham City University
What is the role of a spoken or sung text in an electroacoustic composition? Does it represent anachronism, assigning the role of communication to the voice and thereby depriving more abstract electroacoustic material of its rhetorical force? Does the disembodied, electroacoustic voice distance the audience from the communicative power of the words that are heard? Although Simon Emmerson argued that the disembodied human voice in acousmatic music can often seem frustrating, this sense of disembodiment might be turned to the composer’s advantage, as the basis of a methodology for creative practice. In the process of developing a methodology to address questions of text, language, voice, and electroacoustic technology, I created two musical compositions. Both works used the untranslated words of an enigmatic Old English poem, ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’. At first glance, the idea of using a text in an obscure or ancient language that carries little or no semantic meaning for the listeners might raise further questions. Is this a deliberate attempt at obfuscation, hiding the paucity of the composer’s ideas behind a veneer of archaism or even naive exoticism? As my investigation progressed, I began to envisage the process of electroacoustic composition as a type of non-linguistic commentary on a text. Rather than hindering the listener’s understanding of a composition inspired by literature, the electroacoustic voice might help to reveal different interpretations of a text, allowing multiple ideas and identities to be heard.
Between Agony and Ecstasy: Investigations into the Meaning of Pain
(2018)
author(s): Barbara Macek
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Pains are moving, alluring us to world-making-activities, attuning our bodies with other bodies and therefore putting us in relation to others. Pains cut into our net of habits, and even the slightest pain causes a transformation. Pains are crushing, deeply distressing, showing us our limitations – but also our capability to go beyond our limits, to outgrow ourselves.
In the course of my literary research for this project I generated 10 PAIN CATEGORIES that I derived from poems, philosophical and literary texts on pain, and my own experiences. These poetical/pictorial categories differ profoundly from pain categories as they are to be found in common pain questionnaires: They refer to the existential dimension of pain and do not differentiate between physical and mental pain in order to overcome the myth of this dichotomy. The next step of my project consisted in going into the field to look at, imagine and feel into pain. I conducted methodical observations in the casualty departments of two Viennese hospitals and developed my own method of "self-reflective observation in the mode of seeing/feeling". The assemblages as part of this exposition present the results of these investigations and reconstruct different perspectives on PAIN as an EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENON.
"What the Probes Report": An Exercise in Operative Fiction
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
With Operative Fiction, we introduce a practice of spatial storytelling driven by the dynamics of prepositions rather than verb-centric narratives. Here, the textual body becomes embedded in the medial spatiality of a printed book, digital interface, or performance space. The physical or virtual site of the text thus becomes integral to the storytelling process. Spatial production methods merge into the texture of the text itself; simultaneously, the text reshapes the unfolding of space, place, and site. The material and procedural qualities of the text actively engage and activate the digital interface as a site of narrative unfolding, intertwining textual and spatial experiences.
We begin our first exercise in Operative Fiction with Thomas Ballhausen’s What the Probes Report, transposing the text from the printed page (FLORA, 2020) into the digital interface of a Research Catalogue exposition. The non-human protagonist – emerging through and evolving within the text – disrupts subject-centred narration. It becomes entangled in the linguistic and scenic fabric of its own development, thus, through its procedural logic and function, becoming an active agent in its own staging. A line, speculatively re-enacting the machine's operations, simultaneously traces the topographic texture of the digital landscape.
Using a drawing technique typically applied in performance design drafts, we explore the friction between staging and spacing by deploying minimally visible images and textual cues of direction. The operational plasticity of these technical images enables dramaturgical intensities to gather (staging), while also allowing the story to disperse through the digital architecture of the exposition into hyperlinked virtual spaces (spacing).
Alongside a linear reading mode, which follows the story’s original chronology, we propose a contingent reading mode activated via time codes. These time codes function both as compositional elements within the drawing and as hypertextual links. They suggest the duration and shape of a staged terrain, occasionally layering multiple time zones within a single topographic entity. In this way, the timelines act as more-than-texts, generating a multiplicity of positions and proximities, and intertwining temporal aspects of space with the speculative grammar of the story.