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.
GEOART AS A NEW MATERIALIST PRACTICE. INTRA-ACTIVE BECOMINGS AND ARTISTIC (KNOWLEDGE) PRODUCTION.
(2018)
author(s): Dorota Golanska
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Situated within a new materialist philosophical framework and inspired by its posthumanistic, postdualistic, and affirmative orientation, this article looks at instances of geoart, understanding it in terms of intra-active knowledge production processes. I look specifically at the artistic projects by Jim Denevan and, by doing so, I intend to examine the concept of a non-academic artistic practice with an aim of exposing that a detailed inspection of the processes involved in the artistic production sheds an altogether different light on the nature of all research practices. As such, it lets us engage more thoroughly with the “how-question” of generating knowledge, highlighting its processual material-semiotic character. As instantiated in my case studies, an inquiry of different relationalities involved in the process of artistic (knowledge) production enables a study of how subject and object emerge as a result of “intra-activity” (Barad 2007).
Using his own body as both a tool and an active corporeal entity merging with the surrounding landscape, a geoartist Jim Denevan rhythmically and in a dance-like movement creates ephemeral gigantic drawings on sand, soil, or ice. They emerge out of a dynamic assemblage of the artist’s body (and his tools) and the local geophysical situation (with different sorts of matter or forces present there). The natural environment operates as an agent actively engaged in the whole process of artistic creation—of both making and unmaking of the drawings. When finished by Denevan, his works of art remain dynamic; they are being gradually modified and eventually erased by the undulating waves, tides, gusts of wind, the working of erosion and weathering, until they completely disappear. Focusing on the engagement of the artist with the environment and the random audiences present on site, I want to make clear that such eco-sensitive creation may serve as an illuminating example of what forms the entanglements of art and research could take and what material-semiotic effects such creative activities produce for all actors involved.
Speculation on change from the posture of performance art practice
(2016)
author(s): Tero Nauha
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
In this exposition, change is perceived as an essential part of the paradigm of immanent capitalism, where the transcending immanence articulates the world of capitalism. In other words, capitalism is a system of exchange and economy, where all arrangements within this system are determined by economic functions, such as exchange or constant flux of matter and meanings articulated by sufficient reason. The capital form of thought - that is to say the philosophy of capitalism - is economic, sufficient and productive. The transcending immanence of capitalism produces the world, the immanence of capitalism is a transcending immanence. This exposition is set to inquire how these forms affect the position of artistic practice.
The focus will be on the possible limits of economic and sufficient forms of thought, or what is speculation in this context. In recent discourse on the paradigm of Anthropocene and speculation of nonhuman thought, the distinction between the human and the ‘world not for humans’, or the world in itself and the experience of the world, have instigated another perspective to regard the immanence of capitalism only as an arrangement or ‘pseudo-immanence’. However, due to space constraints, this exposition is a mere introduction to the ongoing research of mine subsequent to the examination of my doctoral research on schizoanalysis and artistic research held on January 2016. In short, I ask: how can we speculate on the limits of change from the perspective of artistic research including the different arrangements of nonhuman thought and the immanent capitalism?
LESSONS in the SHADOWS of DEATH
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Laasonen Belgrano, Price, Hjälm, Carlsson Redell, Ideström
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The research project 'Lessons in the Shadows of Death' explores and exposes an almost lost tradition of public mourning - the Art of Lamentation. The project follows the structure of the 17th century musical genre 'Leçons de Ténèbres' – traditionally composed as vocal ‘lessons’ performed during Easter week contemplating the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and based on the Biblical Lamentations.
The overall purpose is to create and promote an intra-active 'grief-entangled' music practice in relation to public mourning and wounds of loss. Previous artistic research on vocal mad scenes, lamentations and Nothingness (Laasonen Belgrano 2011) and performance philosophical explorations of apophenia and autopoesis (Price 2017) has since 2019 merged and developed into a growing archive investigating ‘ornamentation-as methodology’.
The primary aim of this project is to transform the ornamented music and words of Michel Lambert’s nine Leçons de Tenebres from 1661 into nine video-essays. Together with an international network of artists and scholars we will bring the 17th century musical mourning to a contemporary Jerusalem – a city which lives as a symbol of any falling, wounded and embodied space-time. The project reconfigures the Art of Lamentation as a living practice for a wounded world in need of re-learning how to attend to existential consciousness and communal grief.The research project 'Lessons in the Shadows of Death' explores and exposes an almost lost tradition of public mourning - the Art of Lamentation. The project follows the structure of the 17th century musical genre 'Leçons de Ténèbres' – traditionally composed as vocal ‘lessons’ performed during Easter week contemplating the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and based on the Biblical Lamentations.
The overall purpose is to create and promote an intra-active 'grief-entangled' music practice in relation to public mourning and wounds of loss. Previous artistic research on vocal mad scenes, lamentations and Nothingness (Laasonen Belgrano 2011) and performance philosophical explorations of apophenia and autopoesis (Price 2017) has since 2019 merged and developed into a growing archive investigating ‘ornamentation-as methodology’.
The primary aim of this project is to transform the ornamented music and words of Michel Lambert’s nine Leçons de Tenebres from 1661 into nine video-essays. Together with an international network of artists and scholars we will bring the 17th century musical mourning to a contemporary Jerusalem – a city which lives as a symbol of any falling, wounded and embodied space-time.
The project reconfigures the Art of Lamentation as a living practice for a wounded world in need of re-learning how to attend to existential consciousness and communal grief.
O≡Cyan – for a dark holism to matter
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): TM
connected to: Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Cyan and cyanides and their connected substances, organisms, and processes, constitute subject matter and material subject for the practice-based inquiry of O≡Cyan. Cyan emerges in photochemical and photosynthetic processes imaging us: the CMYK colour space, cyanide poison, cyanobacteria, and cyanotype. Cyanide capsules, cyanobacterial algal bloom and cyanide leaching in gold mining mark their outermost horizon.
Researched with a dark holistic approach, matter, method and medium are conceptually integrated and intrinsic to each other and can give rise to a critical mass of dark holistic and cyanotopic worlding – a network of narratives, phenomena, and matter. methods on the basis of dark materiality surrounding us planetary and concerning us personally, directed towards a History of Darkness - a slowly growing ABC, or material essay for Cyan and cyanides and its dark effects.
How to Do Things with Performance? Miten tehdä asioita esityksellä?
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Annette Arlander, Tero Nauha, Hanna Järvinen, Pilvi Porkola
connected to: University of the Arts Helsinki
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This is the website and the open archive of the four-year research project HOW TO DO THINGS WITH PERFORMANCE? funded by the Finnish Academy.
Nämä ovat nelivuotisen Suomen Akatemian rahoittaman tutkimushankkeen MITEN TEHDÄ ASIOITA ESITYKSELLÄ? verkkosivut ja avoin arkisto.
in progress...open exposition comments (0)
This is the website and the open archive of the four-year research project HOW TO DO THINGS WITH PERFORMANCE? funded by the Finnish Academy. Nämä ovat nelivuotisen Suomen Akatemian rahoittaman tutkimushankkeen MITEN TEHDÄ ASIOITA ESITYKSELLÄ? verkkosivut ja avoin arkisto.open exposition comments (0)