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.
A topian artistic methodology
(2022)
author(s): Kevin Walker
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition details a methodology for artistic research based on the book Utopia as Method by sociologist Ruth Levitas. It involves specific methods at three levels of analysis: archaeological, architectural, and ontological. Practical work is produced using archaeological and architectural methods, aimed at triangulating onto contemporary ontological issues. The term ‘topian’ was chosen in order to incorporate both utopian and dystopian perspectives — this term, from the Greek ‘topos’ meaning place, frames an artistic practice in relation to one or more sites of investigation.
The methodology was applied in a residency project split between London and Athens, focused on sculptures from the Parthenon that link the two cities. Museums in both cities served as sites of archaeological and architectural investigation. Work included speculative site mapping and stratigraphy, drawing and photography of artefacts, printmaking, and 3D modelling. Works were exhibited in a group exhibition in Athens, ‘Contemporary Archaeologies’.
PERSPECTIVES TO A LIVING DESIGN MEDIUM: First encounters with a fermented indigo vat
(2021)
author(s): Pirita Hanneli Lauri
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition presents a traditional process of indigo vat dyeing. A fermented indigo vat is an ancient method of dyeing textiles. The process is based on bacterial action, which means that the vat is alive: it is a living design medium. With living design medium, is referred to all material production or means of modification that incorporate simple living organisms such as bacteria. A living design medium also includes and implies a designer perspective.
Biomaterials and biotechnology-based manufacturing methods, often involving living organisms, are increasingly entering the designers’ workspace. This will affect design practices, especially in the more material-centric domains, such as fashion and textile. This study aims to investigate the ‘being’ of a living design medium. However, instead of looking at new biotechnologies or biomaterials, this paper turns to one of the world’s oldest traditions of textile modification, the fermented indigo vat dyeing. By choosing a fresh (or rather ancient) context, this study contributes a new perspective to the ongoing discourse on (bio)materiality.
The article reflects on the practice of indigo vat dyeing from a new materialistic stance. Data consists of self-documentation and reflective writings from and of a dyeing workshop (2019) and experiences of maintaining a fermented indigo vat at home for six months (2020). Data is analysed in hermeneutical iteration and presented through different metaphorical perspectives: the vat as a spirit, the vat as a tool, the vat as a child, and the vat as a living medium.
The main points of the discussion are (1) Indigo practices create awareness of worldly connectedness; in dyeing, I communicate with the whole of the ancient tradition and all of its practitioners. Relationship between dyer and indigo to transcends time and space. (2) While vat dyeing is appreciated as a challenging tool that dyers want to engage with and master, this risks reducing the meaning to its purpose. (3) The use of metaphor-full language within indigo practices grants agency to the vat for practical means; it works as a way to guide us towards interaction within the living medium. (4) The concept of a living medium, as proposed here, draws from Gilles Deleuze and Tim Ingold: it exists in a world of constant becoming and describing it aims to grasp the material flux of the world in its unfolding.
First Draft (in Progress) Touching the surface: Concretising the image through an expansion of traditional aesthetics
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Rosa Marouane
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The field of aesthetics has relied on the visual as crutch for its speculation since the creation of its most fundamental texts. Whether it be through Immanuel Kant’s focus on human critique and its own influence on beauty, or Deleuze’s later texts covering the expanded Movement-image and Time-image, the experience of imagery has been reserved to those capable of sight, and more importantly, those able to testify of this act. Beginning with Jakob Von Uexküll’s ‘Umwelten’, the sensory experience of our environment becomes one formed through the combined input of multiple sensory organs and the processes used to interpret the stimuli these organs encounter. Though the focus of Von Uexküll’s Umwelten remains the visual aspect of this information package: the visual functions as dominant sense whilst the other senses are merely secondary in experiencing space; this interpretation of sensory imaging does begin to differ from what we consider to be traditional Aesthetics, in that it allows for the possibility of imagery existing in the worlds of organisms that either lack or possess higher optical processing capabilities than that of humans, thus opening the speculation on imagery to a wider field of organisms and their individual experience of the visual. Up to the 20th century however, imagery and the aesthetic studies surrounding it focus on an intangible entity, eithered layered on top of or derived from concrete form. The field of aesthetics is overdue a reconfiguration of its approach, and a new wave of aesthetics should be focussed on defying the restrictive visual realm. One proposal to an expansion of this area of research would be to incorporate an affective aspect into image production and dissemination, Affect in this case referring to Brian Massumi’s definition of the phenomenon wherein “to affect is to be affected” and the matter of affect is one of response that is neither physical nor emotional, but rather a mediation between aspects of the two, joining the virtual to the real in one fell swoop even if only temporarily. This applies to the image in the sense that it cannot be fully accessed, its surface tension never breached until either it becomes capable of affect, we become capable of affecting it, or in true Massumi-ian fashion, we develop a mutually affective relationship with imagery. Writers such as Hito Steyerl, who through her essay “In Defense of the Poor image” describes an affective relationship between the audience and image initiated by the propagation inherent to internet culture, and Tavi Meraud, who’s speculation on the surface as providing mediation between the intangible and tangible, introduces us to the touch allowing for a mediated form of seeing through an alternative sensory organ. Through these glimpses into an affective alternative to Aesthetics, we can begin to formulate further knowing that it can exist in a form that goes beyond the traditional non-affective, spectator-image binary; perhaps this can go even further to initiate a dissolution of the optical barrier to entry that imagery has until now maintained. Should the objective of Aesthetics be to further expand its own boundaries to account for an inclusion of sensory imaging into the aesthetic canon? Can imagery be perceived as a concrete, and consequently tactile phenomenon? Could this shifted interpretation of imagery bring us into contact with a concretised universally available image?