Listening Into the Lattice
(2024)
author(s): Jorge Boehringer
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
This exposition details the opening phase of new research between an experimental sound artist and an archaeologist, with a detailed examination of critical epistemological questions that have arisen from the beginning of this project. Both collaborating researchers are situated within hybrid specialisations. As the project unfolds, archaeo-chemical data is explored and animated through methods developed from intersections of data science and musical practice, resulting in performance and installation environments in which knowledge of material culture of the ancient past may be made present through listening. However, beyond a case study, this exposition points to how interdisciplinary artistic work produces results that have value outside of normative paradigms for any of the fields from which it is derived, while offering critical insight about those fields. This exposition is formed of these insights. Readers are introduced to the structure of the data, its relationship to the materiality of the artefacts described, the technological apparatus and compositional methodology through which the data is sonified, and the new materiality of the resulting artistic experiences.
Sonification exists at a nexus of sound production and listening, interwoven with information. Meaning and interpretations arise from artistic decisions concerning sound composition and the context for listening to take place. Meanwhile, listening teaches us about data and about the physical and cultural spaces into which we project it. In this way, sonification is always already interdisciplinary.
The past is rotting in the future: Exploring the Aesthetics of Absence in the daily life
(2024)
author(s): Alexandra Corcode
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
The Past is Rotting in the Future: Exploring the
Aesthetics of Absence in Daily Life, embarks on an
exploration of absence within the human daily life, examining
its manifestation through relations, processes,
and objects. It seeks to understand how absence is not
merely a void but a significant presence that shapes perception,
memory, and imagination. Through a multi-disciplinary
approach that integrates personal narrative with
academic writing, this research investigates the ways
in which absence is performed, textured, and materialized.
Central to the thesis is how photography, as both a
personal and artistic practice, serves as a critical medium
for discussing and visualizing absence, navigating
through personal experiences of loss, and broader philosophical
questions about how absence influences and
constitutes our understanding of the world.
Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images
(2024)
author(s): Kajsa Dahlberg
published in: Research Catalogue
Informed by queer life practices, theories, and affinities, this documented artistic research project (doctoral thesis) draws from new materialist and post-humanist discourse in order to reconsider what role visual media play in the historical need to separate the human and the environmental. It asks, how do we challenge prevailing perceptions of film and photography as inexorably linked to ideas of progress and modernisation, to linear temporality, spatial separation, and to land-based thought? Based on the acknowledgement that we need to rethink our position as humans within the multiple habitats that make up the world, I investigate the ways in which the apparatus of film, rather than being an extension of human perception, attests to the material interdependences and co-productions that hold a potential for converging human and nonhuman perspectives. "Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images" considers the cinematic space of the ocean alongside Jean Epstein’s film "Le Tempestaire" (1947); it follows early photographic chemical methods involving seaweed to both develop film and to examine the technical intra-activity of human and nonhuman regimes as part of photography itself. Within the scope of this research, I argue and demonstrate how film engages in a sensory and reciprocal involvement with the material world, one that addresses the ability to sense, not just with one’s eyes, but with the entire body.
"Tidal Zones" are real locations, the habitat of a multitude of organisms, and the home of seaweeds. It is a place that is neither land nor sea but constitutes a zone with its own specific relationships and living conditions. In its refusal to be either or, it forms a (non-binary) temporal figuration between presence and absence, solid and liquid, life and death, dictated by the motions of spiral and circular time. This space, "Between Life and Images", is the chemical rockpool (the darkroom) out of which photography and film grew.
The PhD submission consists of four film-works, "The Etna Epigraph" (2022), "Seaweed Film" (2023), "Coenaesthesis – It Is Not Even True That There Is Air Between Us" (2023) and "The Spiral Dramaturgy" (2019) along with the exhibition "The Tidal Zone" shown at Index - The Swedish Con-temporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, from 25 November 2022 to 12 February 2023 and at Havremagasinet, Länskonsthall Boden from 14 October 2023 to 11 February 2024. The films and documentation from the exhibitions are included in the submission, which also includes an “Opening Letter” and two texts called “Filming with the Ocean” and “Methodology of the Spiral”.
This dissertation has been carried out and supervised within the graduate programme in Visual Arts at the Royal Institute of Art. The dissertation is presented at Lund University in the framework of the cooperation agreement between the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University, and the Royal Institute of Art regarding doctoral education in the subject Visual Arts.
HANDLE WITH CARE
(2024)
author(s): Athina Eleftheriou
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
BA Textile and Fashion Design
The aim of this thesis is to explore how setting up interaction between personal memories and the materiality of ordinary used objects contribute in new perspectives within the fashion context.
FACT stage one
(2024)
author(s): Jenny Sunesson
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
The research project FACT stage one aims to test the sonic capacity of fragmenturgy (developed by Sunesson 2014–19) as a method to unsettle polarised positions of areas and sites existing outside of the visual power structures and political strongholds.
The long-term purpose is to develop a Fragmenturgy ACtion Tool (FACT); a transitory toolbox for cultivating fragmenturgy methods and actions.
FACT stage one consists of a comprehensive case study carried out in collaboration with a group of students aged 18–23 based at Uppsala Community College in Sweden, which was explored as a site during 2021.
Image copyright: Christina Hillheim
Epiphanies of an Invisible weave
(2024)
author(s): Jenny Sunesson
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
Epiphanies of an Invisible weave
essay
by Jenny Sunesson, 2022
edited in 2023
Translated by Steven Cuzner
Preface (2023)
Epiphanies of an Invisible weave is an essay written during the processes of two different, yet overlapping, projects; the research project FACT stage one, and the solar driven, sound art project UNDER.
The essay explores the specific capacities and possibilities of sound and listening through the specific mode of field recording, which is the sonic modality that I have exploring for more than 20 years.
The essay aims to shed some light on the site-related, political, and hidden potentials of sound as it examines the possibilities of (re)-learning through listening in relation to both human and more-than-human explorations and possible “epiphanies”, imagining openings beyond stereotypical knowing.
/Jenny Sunesson
Image copyright: Ida Lindgren
In Search of Wool(s)
(2023)
author(s): Bilge Merve Aktaş
published in: Research Catalogue
This project explores the potential futures of wool. Despite being a significant craft material, wool has become a byproduct of sheep and lamb industry in most areas. In many places, fleece and wool use is in decline. Consistent with the global trend, wool production has also declined in the US since the 1940s . When wool is used in textile industries, merino wool from Australia and New Zealand often dominates the scene, thus contributing to the decline in local wool. As a result, large amounts of wool, a material with great qualities, becomes unwanted product and is discarded as a waste.
A project about and with wool can bring new possibilities for the future of wool for producers and craftspeople. In this project, I will research wool's current situation around Asheville by visiting some farms and discussing with craftspeople. This research will draw on the current situation and start contextualizing how wool might be studied.
Foro No.1 Nodos Activos (2022)
(2023)
author(s): Yamil Hasbun Chavarría, Pamela Jiménez Jiménez
published in: Research Catalogue
As the first intermittent forum (or Foro No.1) of the Nodos Activos project, 4 activities were carried out with the participation of Dr. Adriana Raggi, Lic. María Sánchez, and Mstr. Rubén Cerillo from UNAM, Mexico; and Dr. Alejandra Cano and Mag. Diego Romero from the National Pedagogical University of Colombia. Colleagues from Mexico physically visited Costa Rica for the activities, while the later Colombian academics did so digitally. In addition, the Foro No.1 counted with the participation of students, academics and graduates of the four different Centro de Investigación, Docencia y Extensión artística, CIDEA (Spanish for Research, Teaching and Artistic Extension Center). All activities took place on May 19, 20 and 23, 2022.
All participating academics in this forum belong to the Arts and Design Research Network (INV+ART+DIS) in which the Nodos Activos project team is an active member since 2021.
Biopoéticas: convergencias artísticas interespecie
(2022)
author(s): ANA LAURA CANTERA
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Español
En la propuesta se reflexiona sobre las implicancias de concebir obras artísticas en conjunto con seres vivientes no-humanxs y las problemáticas y particularidades que esto conlleva. Asimismo, se propone la terminología de biopoética como alternativa nominal al concepto antropocéntrico y problemático del bioarte desde una concepción más locativa y contextual. Se pretende visualizar las metodologías y los accionares de la materia viva desde el arte contemporáneo latinoamericano y repensar tanto las prácticas como los modos de exhibición.
English
The proposal reflects on the implications of conceiving artistic works in conjunction with non-human living beings, as well as the problems and particularities that this entails. It proposes the biopoetics terminology as a nominal alternative to the anthropocentric and problematic concept of bioart from a more locative and contextual conception. It is intended to visualize methodologies and actions of living matter from contemporary Latin American art rethinking both practices and modes of exhibition.
Hair, Materiality and immanence
(2022)
author(s): Gunilla Pettersson Thafvelin
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
A research on materiality and human hair as material. Can a material on itself create narratives and if so, because of its immanent qualities? What constitutes that presumed immanence?
Corona Influentia och den mörkare materian
(2021)
author(s): Timo Menke
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In my practice as an artist, I constantly return to the dark agency of cosmic and (micro)biological matter. I explore how it may transform, “infect” or enter into symbiotic relationships, that are linguistic, visual, and trans-material in the spirit of Karen Barad. The aim of my work is to offer an outline of what I refer to as a dark enlightenment, by using the ontological and epistemological discourses that humans are entangled in. This text is a manuscript for a performance lecture about bats, viruses, and dark matter, illuminated by a Corona inside Plato’s cave. Similar to and in contrast with the microscopic size of the virus, the pandemic is not here understood as the ultimate disaster, but rather as a footnote in a much vaster narrative that involves a manifold of associated phenomena, related to Timothy Morton’s hyperobject. From the view point of speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and hauntology, the virus may be capable of hiding future consequences that dwell in our darkened contemporary world. In short, the manuscript may be understood as a contribution to the dark microhistory of an infection. The current version of my work was adapted for online publication, with visual elements of composition.
Ephemer(e)ality Capture: Glitching The Cloud through Photogrammetry
(2021)
author(s): Tom Milnes
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Ephemer(e)ality Capture: Glitch Practices in Photogrammetry details artistic practice using cloud-based photogrammetry that actively invokes glitches through disturbance of the imaging algorithm by utilising optical phenomena. Reflective, transparent, specular and patterned/repetitive objects were used to confuse the imaging algorithm to produce spikes, holes and glitches in the mesh and textures of the 3D objects produced. The research tests the limits of photogrammetry in an effort toward new image-making methods. It builds upon the research of Hito Steyerl’s Ripping Reality: Blind spots and wrecked data in 3D in which she outlines the errors of 3D scanning media in her work and contextualises amongst thought surrounding the objectivity of photographic media. This research explores the potential gaps in Steyerl’s approach, building upon investigations into 3D scanning’s ‘constructed imagery’ through methods which explore ‘fractional space’ more thoroughly through glitches caused by capturing of optical phenomena. Through practice, the research investigates the possibilities of conducting a ‘media archaeological’ investigation of cloud-based technology using methods akin to ‘Thinkering’(Huhtamo) and ‘Zombie Media’ (Hertz & Parikka). These investigations sought to ‘hack’ technologies through focused technical adjustments or adaptations, centred on media that were ‘local’ or accessible to the artist - artists that have been able to open the machine’s hardware to change circuitry or to access and change the software code. With cloud-based media’s materiality being inaccessible, the investigation utilised techniques which actively disrupt and confuse the image-making process; a form of ‘digital détournement’ which develops techniques which reference Guy Debord’s approach to disrupt the powers of image-making culture. The research is discussed with regards to similar approaches in contemporary glitch practices and aesthetics. Prior (2013) posits that glitch practices form a ‘paralogy’ of the Lyotardian notion of ‘performativity’ of the contemporary techno-economic conditions; acknowledging that paralogy is a method that contributes important critical discourses to culture and research. Previously, ‘local’ glitch practices focused on the internal affordances and functionality of the machine, whereas this research demonstrates practice which is focused externally – through the optical nature of images selected to disrupt the algorithm in photogrammetry rather than through ‘hacking’ the algorithm directly. Through these investigations and a discussion of their methodology, the research encourages a critical reflexivity of the artist/user through use of a dynamic methodology. This is to reflect the issues of technological flux which sees imaging algorithms being updated and refined, forcing techniques and practices into obsolescence.
Composing Technique, Performing Technique
(2021)
author(s): Scott McLaughlin, Zubin Kanga, Mira Benjamin
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Technique as the entanglement of composition and performance as an epistemic object (Knorr Cetina) emergent from contingent materiality. Two pieces by Scott McLaughlin—respectively for Zubin Kanga (piano) and Mira Benjamin (violin)—are discussed as case studies of strategies for entwining the specific embodied techniques of instrumental performance with the material agency (Pickering) of the instrument as a 'material indeterminacy' in which knowledge inheres through practice (Spatz). This exposition situates the artistic research as a novel conceptualisation of 'technique' that treats composition and performance not as separate domains but as an Ingoldian 'meshwork' where virtual structures in the performance technique are amplified through processes of listening and through compositional structures into open-ended local feedback loops.
Space, Sound, and the Home(less)
(2021)
author(s): Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Following Rosalyn Deutsche, this essay examines how the binary opposition enforced by the boundaries of domesticity enforce containment and enclosure, particularly of excluded bodies, i.e. the homeless. This enclosure, which is read through Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the decorporealization of space, is enforced primarily through a logic of visuality and compartmentalization. This essay proposes sound as a means to counter these states of enclosure. Using concepts of dwelling (Heidegger), weaving (Ingold), and nomadism (Braidotti), a sonic recorporealization is developed through personal, domestic sound art experimentation and instrument building. The results and repercussions are then examined in the context of the singular home, its local community, and society more broadly, wherein sound is proposed as a means to instigate practices of spatial recorporealization.
Playing against the camera
(2020)
author(s): Erik Friis Reitan
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In this essay I describe two projects within the field of visual art. Both works are examples of how the workflow techniques of digital photography can be modified in order to produce artworks that take on a distinct physicality and objecthood, and, as such, may form a spatial and/or haptic relation with the viewer. I discuss how such an approach relates to the ability of photography to point beyond the physical situation of viewing due to the particular virtuality of the photograph. By relating my work to the ideas of Vilém Flusser and Roland Barthes, recent theory on photography and photographic indexicality, as well as contemporary artistic work, I speculate here on how my own work illuminates perceptions of the photograph and understandings of the role of photography in today’s media culture and economy.
Matter Dialogues
(2020)
author(s): Otso Tapio Aavanranta
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition relates Claude-Lévi Strauss' concept of bricolage with two examples of the author's artistic praxis, with the aim that the subjective case studies will contribute to highlight a more general methodological standpoint of contemporary artistic creation, namely: the artistic work as a dialogical, enactive process where the discussion with the artistic material takes a guiding role. The proposal intends to resituate a classic concept from structuralist anthropology, which I find strikingly useful for analysing contemporary intermedia artistic processes and works.
The exposition discusses the philosophical implications of a practice that abandons itself to an unforeseen, dialogical relationship with the environment. The oeuvre then becomes an ecological process of using what is offered by the situation, in a constant discussion with the environment. Ideas, forms and materials are engendered, lost and transformed in a dynamic process that resembles a sort of artistic aikido.
The ecological strand of the discussion on bricolage leads to Anna Tsing's "Mushroom at the End of the World" and Timothy Morton’s “Dark Ecology”, where the concept of Nature and the value of naturalness are abolished in favour of a flat relationship between human and her environment: an ecological system between different manifestations of being, where human-made phenomena are not regarded as extra-natural. An artistic practice of bricolage finds a favourable breeding-ground in such a conceptual context.
from foaming exercises to scenarios of co-existencies – anticipating emancipatory practices of space
(2020)
author(s): Maiju Loukola
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
The structure and dynamics of worldly spaces are neighbourhoodly. In them, different kinds of life forms are connected, in a sharing relation, whether they like it or not. The other facet of the same coin is co-isolation and a state of shared closure. Any position from loving and intimate to aggressive or forced, from solidarity to imprisonment, is detached to and depicted through spatial relations. Infected by the “interpretation of foams” in the final volume of Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy, I chose to take foam architecture onto a surgical table and take a closer look at its spatial, material, metaphorical and conceptual implications. I became driven in making inquieries on co-joined spatiality characterized by the “ontological nervousness of the co-existent, the other, the outer”.[1]
The Foaming Exercises installation was part of one of the research cells of the Research Pavilion #3 and became the first part of an (ongoing) examination of spatial co-existencies. Since then, the study has evolved into an ongoing further study on co-joined spatialities in relation to the emancipatory potential of spatial practices in urban context.
Art and Material
(2020)
author(s): Michael Kargl
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
This exhibition discusses the question of what the term material means in relation to artistic work. Starting from a classical understanding that describes the materials of art only retrospectively, the exhibition explores the impossibility of understanding material as something separated from the artist and the working process, and thus as something that can be definitively named. Rather, it is proposed to understand material as something that is subject to constant change and exists as such only at the moment of its comprehension as material. The concept of material thus changes from a fixed fact to a concept of a relational process.
MIXED DOUBLES: COLLABORATIVE WRITING AND PERIPHERAL STRATEGIES
(2019)
author(s): David Carlin, Peta Murray, JOSHUA MICHAEL LOBB, Catherine McKinnon
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition attends to the theme of peripheral spaces, sites, practices, epistemologies and conceptions. It takes the form of a playful, nonfiction archival document that comprises the interleaving of two scripts within a series of photographic images. It stands as trace for an event—originally described as “peripherally performative”—that took place at an academic conference in creative writing in Australia in 2018 (the annual Association of Australian Writing Programs Conference, in Perth). As a research artefact, the methods and mode of presentation of this work are tangential to normative procedures.
This exposition co-mingles the performed accounts of two collaborative writing projects in which the exposition's four authors—Carlin, Murray, McKinnon and Lobb —had been variously enmeshed: the collectively written book project 100 Atmospheres; Studies in Scale and Wonder (Open Humanities Press, 2019), and the Murray/Carlin speculative research endeavour How To Dress For Old Age: an Enquiry with Costumes. Each of these projects experiments with devising creative methods of collaboration so as to approach research questions multifariously and heterogeneously. Slant, in other words.
What does collaboration offer writers and writing processes? How is vision refracted through a multiplicity of gazes? How does the peripheral make itself felt? In an era shaped by critical ecological transformation, the 100 Atmospheres project—speculative, poetic, provocative—pays attention to future ways of being and becoming. In a tightly scripted dialogue, Lobb and McKinnon reflect on a collaborative process involving an interdisciplinary ensemble of 13 people, that uses ‘cross-over writing’. This process allows for fluid boundaries, multiple entries and exits, and other peripheral strategies, to enliven living and practicing in the Anthropocene. This first script is met sideways by the more improvisatory, contingent approach of Murray and Carlin, who re-construct their process of framing and investigating “how to dress for old age,” as a live and unfolding methodology (including costume changes). They report on how, in improvising with writing methods that involve alternating responses, redirections, and unanticipated shifts in focus / tempo, they have been drawn to sport, theatre and domestic metaphors to negotiate evolving rules of engagement and exchange.
The original performance used a length of rope pinned with images to stand in for a tennis net and a backdrop. This malleable object allowed us to demonstrate materially the multiple experiences of collaboration: combative and communal, public and private. In our written document we will use inset photographs (portraits and images of place), columned text and variable typography: these will interrupt and intersect with the ideas discussed in order to amplify the complex interactions central to the collaborative process.
Our visual and verbal approaches assert tactics of peripherality to examine that which is often overlooked, irrelevant or superficial, and serve as a counterpoint to normative methods. Our approaches argue for a different kind of sensitivity in practice, one which pays heed to the dance of agency between subjects and objects.
Sounding Out Vacancy: Performing (anything but) Empty Space
(2019)
author(s): Julieanna Preston
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition translates the intentions and experience of the 2014 performance Sounding Out Vacancy as a piece of spatial writing structured by four voices operating in unison to contest ‘emptiness’ as a condition of interior space. The seven-day performance occurred in a street-level urban central business district retail shop that, like many other ‘for lease’ properties in the city, had stood empty for several months. Its glass façade obscured from view, the performance broadcast sounds continuously from the interior space to the general public as an alternative advertisement of the shop’s availability. During the nine-to-five work day, sounds were harvested from the interior where construction hand tools and material surfaces interacted as a process of virtual renovation. While the city slept, the ambient sounds of the space persisted and put the shop’s vacancy into question.
Using wool’s agency to design and make felted artefacts
(2019)
author(s): Bilge Merve Aktaş
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition presents an explorative project that examines employing material as a reference point for designing and making an artefact. The material’s effects on designing and making have been elaborated upon from many angles. This exposition also examines how material affects designing and making processes from the perspective of material agency. This study argues that by observing a material’s behaviour from the perspective of agency, one can genuinely understand what the material does, and accordingly can find ways to collaborate with it in the process of designing and making artefacts. The discussion is articulated through a designer’s project in felting by employing a practice-led research approach that examined the decision-making processes through written reflections and visual documentation. This examination suggests that by including material as a reference point, design and making can reflect the ecology of the material in a way that combines human power with the activeness of the material.
The Lost and Found project: Imagineering Fragmedialities
(2019)
author(s): Jenny Sunesson
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The Lost and Found project began as an attempt to challenge my own sound making in opposition to a linear, capitalist, narrative tradition, dominated by visual culture.
I wanted to explore the possibilities of sound as a counterpart material risking our perception of what sound is and what it can do.
To reach beyond my own aesthetic and sociocultural baggage, I started to experiment with chance operated live performance as a method.
By multilayering uncategorised sound scraps the work emerged to “produce itself” and I began to catch glimpses of alternative sound worlds and sites.
I called the method fragmenturgy (fragmented dramaturgy) and the alternative realities that were created; fragmedialities (fragmented mediality, fragmented reality).
The aural garden of sounding materials: performing within the materiality of Et in Arcadia ego-music performance
(2018)
author(s): Assi Karttunen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
'Et in Arcadia ego'-music performance is an auditory garden deriving its inspiration from 17th-century European meditation gardens. It was premiered at the Helsinki Music Centre in autumn 2016 and performed again in summer 2017 as a part of the Venice Research Pavilion of the University of the Arts Helsinki.The performance was initiated as my KeKe-project 2014 (Sibelius Academy’s former Development Centre, KeKe) and the research question was, how to develop classical music’s performance practices by subtly varying its performative parameters. By pre-recording organic sound material related to wooden instruments like organ pipes, psalteries and harpsichords, including also concrete sounds of wood, cones, stalks and sticks, these sounds were projected into the concert venue and heard among the music repertory and alive improvisations. Moreover, I wanted to pose a question, whether a concert venue could be understood as a compound of resonating elements and shapes. Is it possible to animate the concert venue by studying its auditory features more carefully? The 'Et in Arcadia ego'-performance develops performativity of classical music by subtly varying and extending its performative techniques. This artistic research is articulated in line with phenomenologists such as Don Ihde and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and philosopher Gaston Bachelard.
Surface Tension: Material Intra-Actions within Photography
(2018)
author(s): Jane Vuorinen, Rebecca Najdowski
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
How does photography materially intra-act with other material phenomena and how do these interruptions, entanglements or comings-together reveal new qualities of photographic materiality itself? In this exposition, we use the concept of intra-action to think through and problematize photographic practices by looking at two cases: ‘photo-embroideries’ and ‘landscape photography’. Through these perspectives we propose a new materialist approach to thinking about photography, one that considers and appreciates photographic materiality.
Still Moving
(2017)
author(s): Juriaan Achthoven, Rhian Morris
published in: Research Catalogue
The startingpoint of "Still Moving" has been: to map and perform an artistic process in which the aim is to create a scenographic poem. If poetry is about 'feeling in language' (Eliot), then scenographic poetry is about feeling in the materiality of a spatial-temporal composition. We have started to work with an actor, live video technology and 'Four Quartets' by T.S. Eliot. Throughout the process the main ingredients have shifted towards: the breath of the actor, a lot of soil and sensor-technology. The research question has been evolving from an interest in the concept of 'presence', towards an interest in rhythms of the body in relation to rhythms of the earth, towards an interest in the materiality of the ingredients.
This page is meant to give insight into our process of creation.
Material in the artistic process
(2017)
author(s): Michael Kargl
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
The materials used in a work of art are not necessarily determined from the start. The contemporary artistic work process involves a great deal of experimenting in order to arrive at the most suitable material to realize an idea. In this test phase one also risks altering the complete work, its parameters, characteristics, and not least its final appearance. This process of material-based transformation has a two-fold effect: first, on the artwork itself (its haptic conditions), and then on its perception, which in turn influences the specific form of aesthetic recognition actuated by the artwork.
Co-relation that is not – photography and coming into the materiality
(2015)
author(s): Ari Kakkinen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Sure a photograph can be divided in its mental image and its image-object. These kind of duals follow our tradition, our metaphysics.
When we rather think our corporeality as becoming to or becoming of the corpus instead of the separation of the mind and the body, we can or we even have to think the same way with photography, which traditionally has been located in-between of the nature and the culture.
This essay aims at figuring out the question of the materiality of a photograph when we have to think otherwise than with the difference between mind and body, inside and outside etc. The text argues that the ”material core” is not the origin of the materiality of the photograph, but that the essential center appears only as a trace. Instead of referring to a distant object or a distant instant the trace is the distance itself, its differing and deferring.
The materiality of the photograph consists of its materialities. In a way it is like our bodies are – actual and real, partly serving us, yet also mute and unresponsive, giving the possibility of being. Being itself, becoming.
The first impression on your skin
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Anna Andrejew
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
An eco-feminist perspective on photography
Our vision has untapped, forgotten or perhaps undervalued potentials. These potentials lie within what I would like to coin “the peripheral gaze”. It is at the outskirts and at those distant horizons that I believe great insights lie. It is the gaze of interconnected matter.
At the level of matter we are all equal: everyone and everything consists of matter. Looking with a “peripheral gaze” means seeing which materials are co-performing the image and seeing the ecological interconnections.
Word and Whetstone: Perspectives on Writing at the Intersection of Art and Academia
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Maya Rasker
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This research of Maya Rasker in only available in Dutch. The English version will be ready later in 2023.
The position of writing within the domain of artistic academic research is not self-evident. In academia, standard practice is to use writing for the transfer of knowledge: it is a means of communication. In the practice of (nonlinguistic) artistic research, the outcome is also often contextualized in a written argument. This leads to the paradox that, if writing as an art form is to be relevant in and for artistic academic research, it must relate discursively to itself in its own medium in order to achieve that relevance. This paradox has been embraced in this dissertation and research.'Word and Whetstone. Perspectives on writing at the intersection of art and academia' is the outcome of inquiry into the epistemological possibilities and characteristics of writing. The question is whether and how writing as a communication vehicle and as an art form can also serve as a knowledge generator. To investigate this, the practice of writing is thought of as an experimental system, analogous to the scientific experiment. Processes of narrating and annotating generate a dialogical encounter for new insights as well as providing a structure. The material is both the object of research and method.
Effacer-Voir
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Lynn Kodeih
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Réfléchir aux politiques de l’image, par le biais de l’intime, du fragment et de la matière. Aborder la matérialité avec la maladresse d’une apprentie. Jouer de sa vulnérabilité, transformer sa fragilité en action. Effacer pour voir.
Meaning Containers
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Stefania Castelblanco Perez
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The meaning containers project explores manifestations of social and cultural resistance in craft practices. The Meaning Containers are artisanal bags inspired by raffia palm objects from the Democratic Republic of Congo preserved in the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm. They are mainly inspired by a beanie initiation hat and amulet bags made with raffia palm. The meaning containers bags were part of a group exhibition called “Renegotiating Material Culture”, the result of a yearlong partnership between the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm and Research Lab at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design. One of the main objectives of the research project consisted in exploring how the museum and its collection can inspire our contemporary craft and also how craft can explore the museum.
Resorting to the traditional Congolese Raffia palm weaving and beadwork techniques, these bags combine raffia palm with polypropylene and plastic bags used to store and transport cobalt and other precious minerals in the contemporary DRC. As a bag designer, I wanted to create bags using materiality and shape as communicative interfaces. Objects can be containers of social and cultural meaning and can tell the relationship that exists between communities and makers with their natural environment and social context. This presentation consists of a long abstract and photo diary of my research work.
Tracing ghosts: documenting and conserving the performative
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): sian Hutchings, Samuel Barry
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Can an interpretation behave as a synergy of a performative act through its documentation and its conservation?
MATERIAL STRATEGIES
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Sage Canellis, Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk, Electa Behrens
connected to: Norwegian Artistic Research Programme
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Material strategies explores ways of practicing materiality in relation to artistic processes of creation. It responds and aims to contribute to questions related to sustainability and the antropocene, identity and subject formations, and appropriation and cultural exchange.
With reference to object oriented philosophy and new materialism as an ethical ground, the proposed research project will investigate voice and body as material in relation to spaces, architecture and objects. How can we as artists to a greater extent listen to the agency of the material and let it shape our artistic work? How do human ideas, emotions, visions and memories come into play when the artistic strategy calls for less power and control over the material? How are performative and material practices articulating the embodied nature of memory?
The project will further develop pedagogical areas that are fundamental to the teaching practices at NTA. Professor in Dramaturgy and Performance Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk will lead the project reflecting her recent PhD project Theatre-ting, toward a materialist practice of staging documents, which deals with object oriented philosophy as a framework for investigating dramaturgical practice and the ethics connected to staging documents. Other involved staff members are: Assistant professor Øystein Elle, Professor in scenography Jakob Oredsson, Assistant professor Electa Behrens, and research fellow Ingvild Holm.
We arranged a two days international seminar at VEGA scene in Oslo on 28. February and 1. March 2019.A two weeks practical workshop, culminating in a public presentation and discussion happens between 29. April and 10. May 2019.
Powers of Divergence – Online Repository
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Lucia D'Errico
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition is thought as an online repository of media for the book "Powers of Divergence". Exposition and book, in combination, are part of my doctoral dissertation, and should be read together.
The research project which this exposition refers to is integral part of the five-year research programme Experimentation vs Interpretation – Exploring New Paths in Music Performance in the Twenty-First Century or MusicExperiment21, funded by the European Research Council, hosted at the Orpheus Institute of Ghent (BE), and led by Paulo de Assis. The programme has explored and developed notions of “experimentation” in order to propose new performance practices of Western notated art music.
This research project proposes a move beyond commonly accepted codes and conventions of musical interpretation. Crucially based on a strong creative and practical component, it presents a new approach to the performance of Western notated art music. In this new approach, corresponding to an artistic practice supported by reflections and research, the performance of past musical works is not regarded in its reiterative, reconstructive, or reproductive function. This new practice instead insists on performance as a locus of experimentation, where “what we know” about a given musical work is problematised. The performative moment becomes both a creative and a critical act, through which new epistemic and aesthetic properties of the musical work emerge.
This new practice insists on the unbridgeable divergence between codification (score) and materiality (sounds, gestures). Rather than being minimised, this divergence is amplified, so that performance happens through sounds and gestures unrecognisable as belonging to the original work as an interpreter would approach it. Instead of relying on the culturally constructed system through which symbolic categories are biunivocally connected to material events, this practice exposes the arbitrariness of such a system, together with the boundaries of its epistemic implications.
The activity of interpreters and executants focuses on the balance between objectivity (the instructions contained in the score, the “facts” accumulated around the musical work, etc.) and subjectivity (the performer’s freedom, his/her expressivity, etc.). This new practice goes beyond both objectivity and subjectivity, embracing an experimental approach to music performance that challenges traditional notions of interpretation. Whereas execution and interpretation relate to an ideal and aprioristic sonic image of the musical work (as Platonic copies), the performance practice proposed here posits itself as production of simulacra: thus performance becomes a sonic “image” that relates to what is different from it (the score) by means of difference, and not by attempting to construct a (supposed) identity. In this process, internal resemblance is negated, together with the idea of composition as origin and performance as its telos.
The Drawing Board #6
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Rhiannon Jones
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Traci Kelly and Rhiannon Jones
Writing as object.
Writing as materiality.
Writing through the body.
Writing the subject into being.
A laboured breath, a subversive gesture, a consideration of materiality and difference are the urgent concerns of Traci Kelly and Rhiannon Jones as they write through the body. Resisting narrative and authorship they seek the preform and fractured modes of writing that adhere to a multivalent feminine.
This entry is offered as a sharing of some of the documentation gathered from an emerging body of work-in-progress. There have been encounters with other artists and researchers during the two-month residency, including Terry Shave, who made Kick and Kiss in response to witnessing the collaboration.
The artists have utilised this collaboration to destabilise language and expose its underlying structures. This project offers a feminine approach to writing, which often has a male primacy. The artists are interested in preform, sounds that do not yet make words and the performative quality of the body as both a written language and as a site of inscription. The installation of their residency documentation explores place and plays with the shifting roles of the readerly and the writerly, whether through body or physical spaces the work inhabits.
The Drawing Board
The Drawing Board is a space for handwritten performances that aims to turn a corridor into a destination and to return the walls of an old school building in Nottingham to their former use as a place of display. Curated by Michael Pinchbeck, The Drawing Board explores how we write, how we perform writing and how writing performs.
All rights Kelly and Jones 2018
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 BA Textile and Fashion Design The aim of this thesis is to explore how setting up interaction between personal memories and the materiality of ordinary used objects contribute in new perspectives within the fashion context.open exposition comments (0)
The research project FACT stage one aims to test the sonic capacity of fragmenturgy (developed by Sunesson 2014–19) as a method to unsettle polarised positions of areas and sites existing outside of the visual power structures and political strongholds. The long-term purpose is to develop a Fragmenturgy ACtion Tool (FACT); a transitory toolbox for cultivating fragmenturgy methods and actions. FACT stage one consists of a comprehensive case study carried out in collaboration with a group of students aged 18–23 based at Uppsala Community College in Sweden, which was explored as a site during 2021. Image copyright: Christina Hillheimopen exposition comments (0)
Epiphanies of an Invisible weave essay by Jenny Sunesson, 2022 edited in 2023 Translated by Steven Cuzner Preface (2023) Epiphanies of an Invisible weave is an essay written during the processes of two different, yet overlapping, projects; the research project FACT stage one, and the solar driven, sound art project UNDER. The essay explores the specific capacities and possibilities of sound and listening through the specific mode of field recording, which is the sonic modality that I have exploring for more than 20 years. The essay aims to shed some light on the site-related, political, and hidden potentials of sound as it examines the possibilities of (re)-learning through listening in relation to both human and more-than-human explorations and possible “epiphanies”, imagining openings beyond stereotypical knowing. /Jenny Sunesson Image copyright: Ida Lindgrenopen exposition comments (0)
A research on materiality and human hair as material. Can a material on itself create narratives and if so, because of its immanent qualities? What constitutes that presumed immanence?open exposition comments (0)
Technique as the entanglement of composition and performance as an epistemic object (Knorr Cetina) emergent from contingent materiality. Two pieces by Scott McLaughlin—respectively for Zubin Kanga (piano) and Mira Benjamin (violin)—are discussed as case studies of strategies for entwining the specific embodied techniques of instrumental performance with the material agency (Pickering) of the instrument as a 'material indeterminacy' in which knowledge inheres through practice (Spatz). This exposition situates the artistic research as a novel conceptualisation of 'technique' that treats composition and performance not as separate domains but as an Ingoldian 'meshwork' where virtual structures in the performance technique are amplified through processes of listening and through compositional structures into open-ended local feedback loops.open exposition comments (0)
In this essay I describe two projects within the field of visual art. Both works are examples of how the workflow techniques of digital photography can be modified in order to produce artworks that take on a distinct physicality and objecthood, and, as such, may form a spatial and/or haptic relation with the viewer. I discuss how such an approach relates to the ability of photography to point beyond the physical situation of viewing due to the particular virtuality of the photograph. By relating my work to the ideas of Vilém Flusser and Roland Barthes, recent theory on photography and photographic indexicality, as well as contemporary artistic work, I speculate here on how my own work illuminates perceptions of the photograph and understandings of the role of photography in today’s media culture and economy.open exposition comments (0)
This exhibition discusses the question of what the term material means in relation to artistic work. Starting from a classical understanding that describes the materials of art only retrospectively, the exhibition explores the impossibility of understanding material as something separated from the artist and the working process, and thus as something that can be definitively named. Rather, it is proposed to understand material as something that is subject to constant change and exists as such only at the moment of its comprehension as material. The concept of material thus changes from a fixed fact to a concept of a relational process.open exposition comments (0)
The Lost and Found project began as an attempt to challenge my own sound making in opposition to a linear, capitalist, narrative tradition, dominated by visual culture. I wanted to explore the possibilities of sound as a counterpart material risking our perception of what sound is and what it can do. To reach beyond my own aesthetic and sociocultural baggage, I started to experiment with chance operated live performance as a method. By multilayering uncategorised sound scraps the work emerged to “produce itself” and I began to catch glimpses of alternative sound worlds and sites. I called the method fragmenturgy (fragmented dramaturgy) and the alternative realities that were created; fragmedialities (fragmented mediality, fragmented reality).open exposition comments (0)
How does photography materially intra-act with other material phenomena and how do these interruptions, entanglements or comings-together reveal new qualities of photographic materiality itself? In this exposition, we use the concept of intra-action to think through and problematize photographic practices by looking at two cases: ‘photo-embroideries’ and ‘landscape photography’. Through these perspectives we propose a new materialist approach to thinking about photography, one that considers and appreciates photographic materiality.open exposition comments (0)
The startingpoint of "Still Moving" has been: to map and perform an artistic process in which the aim is to create a scenographic poem. If poetry is about 'feeling in language' (Eliot), then scenographic poetry is about feeling in the materiality of a spatial-temporal composition. We have started to work with an actor, live video technology and 'Four Quartets' by T.S. Eliot. Throughout the process the main ingredients have shifted towards: the breath of the actor, a lot of soil and sensor-technology. The research question has been evolving from an interest in the concept of 'presence', towards an interest in rhythms of the body in relation to rhythms of the earth, towards an interest in the materiality of the ingredients. This page is meant to give insight into our process of creation.open exposition comments (0)
An eco-feminist perspective on photography Our vision has untapped, forgotten or perhaps undervalued potentials. These potentials lie within what I would like to coin “the peripheral gaze”. It is at the outskirts and at those distant horizons that I believe great insights lie. It is the gaze of interconnected matter. At the level of matter we are all equal: everyone and everything consists of matter. Looking with a “peripheral gaze” means seeing which materials are co-performing the image and seeing the ecological interconnections.open exposition comments (0)