Eastern Rebellion - with gamelan as inspiration for new musical expressions
(2025)
author(s): EAA
published in: Norwegian University of Science and Technology
This exposition contains the documentation of Espen Aalberg´s artistic research project “Eastern Rebellion - with gamelan as inspiration for new musical expressions"
"Eastern Rebellion - with gamelan as inspiration for new musical expressions" is focusing on a meeting point where Aalberg, as a musician and composer, has searched for inspiration in gamelan music, instruments, and concepts. Aalberg has a broad practice as a performer and composer/music creator with a professional career in both jazz and classical-contemporary direction. This experience, in collaboration with inspiration and instruments from gamelan, will be illuminated in different musical expressions and contexts.
STUDIES IN KUNSTVAKIDIOTIE
(2024)
author(s): Mirjam van Tilburg
published in: Research Catalogue
Welcome to "Studies in Kunstvakidiotie". Here, you can browse through the photographs, essays, drawings, audio and video clips. ‘Studies in kunstvakidiotie’ is the doctoral research of Mirjam van Tilburg at Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA). This is a study in arts education from within the arts. She tries to shift the dominant image of life-long-learning (LLL) and provide insight into the possibilities that this LLL space also provides to art teachers. By searching in this way, more and more became clear about life-long-learning of art teachers. Therefore, a linear cause-and-effect narrative did not seem to do justice to the subject matter. The term ‘studies’ in the title is sketchy — it also involves repetition and seeking connections and, above all, it is a derivative of studio and study.
Five essays form the markers within ‘Studies in Kunstvakidiotie’. Together, they construct a narrative. The essay ‘(onder)zoek in kunsteducatie’ describes practices and values that stem from Mirjam van Tilburg’s artistic practice: education. The motivation behind this research is that art teachers find LLL events to be limited. The essay ‘LLO als commoning practice’ discusses the possibilities of commoning practices. The examples: The New School Collective and studios are outlined herein. The studios are the experiment within this doctoral research. During the winter of 2020-2021, Mirjam van Tilburg worked with ten art teachers. The experiment of this doctoral project coincided with the Covid-19 crisis. Together they occupied artist studios in Tilburg and Rotterdam to de-automate and look at teaching practices.
The essays ‘Blik’ and ‘Tijd’ therefore propose two topics of conversation within LLL: the ‘aesthetic glance’ and the temporal experience of ‘interruption’. These essays question the efficient and productive order prevailing in the work environment and LLL of art teachers.
The essay ‘Herontdekking van Kunstvakidiotie’ is the story of a change in the craft of art teachers in the first Covid-19 crisis year. The term ‘kunstvakidiotie’ in the title cannot be directly translated into English because it is a compound word and may have specific connotations in the Dutch context. The essay describes how in these studios, art subject teachers had one foothold: artistic fervour.
IMAGINING LIBERATION
(2024)
author(s): Dalia Al Kury
published in: University of Inland Norway
Imagining Liberation is an artistic research project with the aim of investigating methods in speculative nonfiction. This project begins with a question: What kind of cinematic images can arise from imagining a liberated Palestine? Dalia AlKury’s interest in staging simulated pasts in her earlier documentaries and then staging speculations of futures during her PhD research stems from a deep frustration with the lack of art imagining a world that she hopes is possible. Both practices—staging in documentary and speculative fiction—are rooted in posing the question “What if?,” to offer another possible world or narrative. Her work combines these approaches in the realization of her own method in speculative multitemporal nonfiction. Dalia AlKury approaches documentary filmmaking not as a way of documenting reality, but as a way of constructing an alternative one. Her final artistic results are informed by a long legacy of politically poetic Palestinian aesthetics and by grievances over the historical and present day witnessing of the violent ethnic cleansing of her people.
By committing to framing her vignettes in a fictional liberated Palestine, an emancipatory art making process starts to take shape. The process excavates an often-oppressed critical rage and pushes it up to the surface through different narrative tools. Imagining Liberation traces the filmmaker's confrontational journey while experimenting with staging, subverting, futuring, abstracting, and decolonizing to reach a type of catharsis in the face of a continuously fragmented diasporic existence.
By staging her own return to a liberated Palestine in different modes from writing to filming, Dalia AlKury runs into ethical dilemmas questioning her self-censorship, representation of “others” and the elusive role of cinematic catharsis. This book encompasses her critical reflection on the short films , narrative experiments and video diaries created throughout her research. The three main audio-visual works that will be shared and analyzed are Congratulations on Your Return, Levitations, and What if a Tree, What if a Crow?
Lone Wolves Stick Together: Research as a Journey to an Aesthetic Understanding of Immersion and Participation through VR and roleplaying (LARP)
(2024)
author(s): Nadja Lipsyc
published in: University of Inland Norway
This research explores the artistic and critical potentials of using tools from live action roleplaying (larp) to create narrative VR experiences. In particular, it unfolds the conception, physical play and VR play and production of the live action roleplaying (larp) Lone Wolves Stick Together. Inspired by the film Stalker (1979) by Tarkovsky, Lone Wolves Stick Together stages the immersive environment as an omniscient Sphynx-like character that pushes the players to question one another and to introspect. By using larp and video game design knowledge conjugated to cinematic aesthetics, this research project seeks to honor the creative and narrative potentials of immersion and participation. As such, between 2018 and 2023, this research took the form of classic chamber larps, immersive theater experiences, scenography installation, VR larps (including two other projects: The Space Between Us and Ancient Hours) and a final multimedia installation. The artistic methods rely on principles of environmental design, explored physically through production design and ambisonics, and virtually through a highly reactive virtual environment. The research method is based on a constructivist approach where we experiment to find an answer, not the truth. Here, experimentation is not conceptual but aesthetic: knowledge is lived and felt through artistic experience. Centred around VR and within a film and new media context, this research also develops a reflection on the industrial and technological influences on the creative process and their friction with artistic-research.
Light from aside: A screenwriter’s perspective in virtual reality
(2023)
author(s): Cecilie Levy
published in: University of Inland Norway
This PhD project in artistic research by Cecilie Levy investigates the language of spatial storytelling in virtual reality through artistic research. Drawing on screenwriting practice and theory, as well as creative documentary approaches such as room-scale virtual reality design, the conceptualisation and partial production of the experience Finding Frida is central to this investigation. In its final form, this single-user, room-scale virtual reality experience will be approximately 20 minutes long; it is intended for general audiences, including those who are unfamiliar with virtual reality.
Beyond the reconstruction of a personal narrative – that of forgotten artist Frida Hansen’s life and art – the experience seeks to combine linear storytelling devices with spatial ‘dreamscapes’, giving the spectator access to the protagonist’s private memory world, through representational spaces.
A vertical slice from the VR experience was presented publicly at The Norwegian Film School and at Qvisten XTND in Oslo, June 2023. The vertical slice is a test-scene in VR that will serve as an illustration for the virtual reality concept, giving an impression of transitions, interactivity, and spatial storytelling. The test can be viewed individually in the VR Lab at the NFS (Norwegian Film School) in Oslo and lasts approximately seven minutes per viewer.
An essay, available at this page, presents the conceptual and creative groundwork for the work-in-progress storytelling in Finding Frida. The essay also seeks to convey insights from a writer’s point of view of the hurdles and challenges of transitioning from temporal to spatial storytelling in virtual reality – and the aligning of narrational and stylistic choices in an experiential, technically complex and innovative form. An appendix provides samples from the script at different stages of development.
NUMB - exploring emotionally charged interactions to motivate reflection on non-fiction topics
(2023)
author(s): Elin Festøy
published in: University of Inland Norway
This PhD project in artistic research by Elin Festøy, research fellow at The Norwegian Film School, Innlandet University College, is situated in the field of interactive experiences. Festøy explores how emotionally charged interactions can be used to build trust and communicate non-fiction topics in a way that is more likely to motivate empathy and change. The artistic exploration consists of a consecutive row of conceptual VR experiences. The reflections turn to the role of freedom and agency in interactive experiences and how these can help build a trusting relationship between creator and participant.
Ways of expression: the impact of VFX technology on modern storytelling in film and interactive media production.
(2023)
author(s): Rafal Hanzl
published in: University of Inland Norway
The rapid development and adoption of digital technology expanded horizons of creativity and opened new artistic frontiers. The broad array of options can potentially have a negative effect, however, as artists can become overwhelmed by the means of expression enabled by new methods they could never have imagined were possible.
Visual communication assists storytelling and should be used precisely to emphasize the desired features of a story. In filmmaking, visual effects (VFX) should serve as a creative instrument to strengthen the story and artistic vision and communicate the desired idea to the audience. Using VFX in planning and developing the implementation of artistic ideas can play a key role in contemporary art as well. This challenge of visual communication is all the more noticeable in an emerging medium of virtual reality. I argue that VFX tools facilitates solving artistic problems in the majority of creative activities.
My project investigates the creative and artistic potential of the tools of digital manipulation. The research focuses on two key artistic creations: a feature documentary “In touch” and a virtual reality installation for the Lodz Philharmonic “The Road to Excellence”. Through artistic experiments performed in these two projects, I develop innovative creative methods for a new creative profession in the film and interactive media industry: a digital visual designer. My aim was to explore how this new artistic collaborator contributes to the visual universe of the artistic creation.
ART RESEARCH ENVELOPE
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Wera Hippesroither
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The publication Envelope offers insights into ongoing PhD projects by candidates in the PhD programme PhD in Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in an innovative format. The major thrust of “Envelope” presents content supplied by doctoral researchers based on their individual artistic research and provides insights into ongoing work processes. These visual and textual traces reveal the state of the Art within its ongoing research processes. Jointly developed by Margarete Jahrmann, professor of the PhD in Art programme from 2017/18 to 2021, and Alexander Damianisch, director of the Zentrum Fokus Forschung, this open format seeks to reflect on experiences through exchange, as well as document relevant developments in the field of art and research.
And hand, and index, and manual: ongoing explorations of my online choreographies in conjunction with my evolving research.
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Renee Carmichael
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
I have been wanting to start this project for awhile, but I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t have the right connection. But then I started reading “Fenomenología del Fin: Sensibilidad y mutación conectiva” by Franco “Bifo” Berardi—(My first experience reading a theoretical book completely in Spanish, a point that is not to be put aside as something decoded—ah ha!—but to be anded into the conversation, the experience and the process. For me it is already a liminal starting point of not only a new life in Buenos Aires after arriving around 6 weeks ago, but also a new type of conjunción in my research)—and I realised that I did not need a connection. And what now?
The idea here will be to explore my own movements surrounding my research as I read it and process it and note it and write it and digitise it. This very current month, whatever month you find yourself reading this text, I am starting a PhD in Teoría Comparada de las Artes at Universidad Nacional de Tres Febrero in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My topic is around dance and code. I won’t go into details, and anyway, they will probably change depending on what month you are in. Instead I will say that I want to get to the body. To the dance AND to the code there is always a body to be explored.
I am not exactly sure what shape this will take. What I can say now is that I plan to record my movements while thinking through them with the very theories that I am reading. Every once and awhile I might make a connection, a code that can be used for you readers, to also understand, or better yet—use. But the point is more in the exploration, in the conjunctions.
From what I incorporated, conjuncted, from the Spanish and the introduction of Berardi’s book, with the digital, we are moving away from a liminal world of conjunctions, empathic understanding, and instead find ourselves in connections, or clear codes of communication in structures of syntax. This changes the way we perceive the world, which includes our aesthetic sensibility and our emotional sensitivity. Have we lost our ability to experience that which cannot be said, that which is liminal, that which cannot be understood, that which cannot be codified, that which has no syntax, that which can only be felt? And in a very general sense, my research is asking a similar question. It is bringing back the idea of the body as a way of resisting flows of technological power through the conjunction of dance and code. And so why now?
I have often said, in understandable syntax to describe ideas that perhaps only make sense to me, that I often interalise a theory. I make it experience and then I use it to write. I also say I am interested in exploring the liminal. But I always go back to codifying it, to describing it, to writing it. I will of course have to do that to complete the PhD. There is a system in place after all and this system requires a specific syntax. However, here is my chance to remain in the liminal and in the conjunction and in the body as much as possible in order to process the things I am reading, writing and researching in new ways, with my aesthetic sensibility AND my emotional sensitivity.
And let’s see where it goes.
This exposition contains the documentation of Espen Aalberg´s artistic research project “Eastern Rebellion - with gamelan as inspiration for new musical expressions" "Eastern Rebellion - with gamelan as inspiration for new musical expressions" is focusing on a meeting point where Aalberg, as a musician and composer, has searched for inspiration in gamelan music, instruments, and concepts. Aalberg has a broad practice as a performer and composer/music creator with a professional career in both jazz and classical-contemporary direction. This experience, in collaboration with inspiration and instruments from gamelan, will be illuminated in different musical expressions and contexts.open exposition comments (0)
This PhD project in artistic research by Elin Festøy, research fellow at The Norwegian Film School, Innlandet University College, is situated in the field of interactive experiences. Festøy explores how emotionally charged interactions can be used to build trust and communicate non-fiction topics in a way that is more likely to motivate empathy and change. The artistic exploration consists of a consecutive row of conceptual VR experiences. The reflections turn to the role of freedom and agency in interactive experiences and how these can help build a trusting relationship between creator and participant.open exposition comments (0)
The publication Envelope offers insights into ongoing PhD projects by candidates in the PhD programme PhD in Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in an innovative format. The major thrust of “Envelope” presents content supplied by doctoral researchers based on their individual artistic research and provides insights into ongoing work processes. These visual and textual traces reveal the state of the Art within its ongoing research processes. Jointly developed by Margarete Jahrmann, professor of the PhD in Art programme from 2017/18 to 2021, and Alexander Damianisch, director of the Zentrum Fokus Forschung, this open format seeks to reflect on experiences through exchange, as well as document relevant developments in the field of art and research.open exposition comments (0)