Sounds of walking: Can sound re-present the embodied experience of movement time and distance in the landscape?
(2024)
author(s): Martin P Eccles
published in: Research Catalogue
In this thesis, having introduced my research questions, in Chapter 2 I present a layered analysis of the important contexts of my practice—walking, sound, walking poetry, and place. In Chapter 3 I present and discuss three works that together explore how it is that I know the world as a sensate embodied walker. In Chapter 4 I develop what I came to call replicated walks—walks made more than once in the same place. Begun in order to re-configure time, they also led me to extend my consideration of place beyond that defined by geography, to place defined by biological phenomena or socio-cultural coherence. In Chapter 5 I describe my emerging ideas of human-scale of place and my underlying ideas of island-ness. Initially I worked on real islands, walking circumferential routes and those defined by chance procedures. From this I developed an imaginary island in the foothills of Northumberland’s Cheviot Hills; made from the human-scale of my embodied walking this led to my creation of an imaginary pandemic island of containment, created in a city, in my locale, made, and made real, by the traces of my embodied walking. Together my works constitute a body of work that represents a contribution to knowledge with specific contributions of: the use of Replicated Walks as a method of experimenting with time and place; Walking Words – the presentation of poetic text in forms (concertina-fold books, scripta continua, scrolls) that requires walking to engage with it, and that also function as metonyms for my original walking act; Walking Islands –the use of human-scale walking to imagine an island into existence, and then invoke the island as a lens through which to continue to pursue the idea. My work also contributes knowledge to the methods of how to record the sounds of the world whilst walking through it, over extended distances and time.
Human Voice and Instrumental Voice: An Investigation of Voicelikeness
(2023)
author(s): Paola Livorsi
published in: Research Catalogue
This artistic research explores the relations between human and instrumental voice (in the case of string instruments), seen from an embodied and performative point of view. The question originates from from my experience of violinist and composer.
Voice is a unique mark of human identity: if this is particularly true for vocal timbre, something similar is at play in the ‘instrumental voice’, as a unique expression of personal and musical identity. This research aims to uncover the importance of the vocal and instrumental relations, acknowledging their common embodied nature and shared origins. As utterances directed at the ‘other’, both human and instrumental voice are deeply relational.
From 2016 to 2022, I investigated the question of voicelikeness between a musician’s voice and their own instrument through five multidisciplinary art projects: in Imaginary Spaces fragments of individual and collective voice inhabited a performative environment shared by musicians and audience; The end of no ending focused on the relationships between two female voices and their mutable surroundings; Between word and life explored the multiple relations of voice and instrument in an electroacoustic space, de-multiplied by bringing in dance and video; Sounding Bodies gathered human and mechanical bodies to explore an unconventional space, inviting the audience to follow their path; Medusa was a music theatre work putting into perspective the question of voicelikeness by evoking Italian Early Baroque music, visual art, and dance.
This artistic research was carried out through an artistic process, with supporting methods such as grounded theory, ethnography, and autoethnography, creating a virtuous cycle between practice and theory, with some interesting and unexpected changes taking place in my artistic journey. The research outcomes consist of a written part combined with a collection of traces, sounds, images, and video examples presented on the Research Catalogue.
The theoretical framework for this inquiry includes recent studies in paleoanthropology, human development, music psychology, and embodiment. Cavarero’s philosophy of voice, Arendt’s philosophy of the ‘in-between’, various philosophies of the ‘other’, as well as a few contributions from psychoanalysis are put in mutual dialogue with my artistic practice.
Among the research outcomes are the re-evaluation of vocal layers in personal and musical identity, considering music making as a relational practice, and an exploration of the porous boundaries between the roles of composer, performer, and listener. In this perspective, the new terms to ‘in-hear’ and to ‘co-hear’ respectively denote an attention to inner sounds, and toward one another in a community of listeners.
Keywords: voicelikeness, artistic research, in-between, relationality, embodiment, performative space
Performing the ecstasis: An interpretation of Katharine Norman’s Making Place for instrument/s and electronics
(2022)
author(s): Jean Penny
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Katharine Normans’ work Making Place for instrument/s with live electronics (2013/16) combines recorded sounds, images, text, live interactive processing and instrumental music performance to create a unique experience of place. As the performer, I can choose a location, collect photographic images and recorded sounds, and interpret and re-create the score. The score is semi-improvisatory, consisting of many composed and freely pitched musical gestures which trigger text, visual animations and sound processing. This exposition traces the re-conceptualization, adaptation and performance of Making Place for alto flute. A multi-layered experimental methodology evolved that encompassed practice, discussion, description and reflection, with the performance itself forming the pivotal event, the epoché. To begin I share pre-performance thoughts – ideas of re-conceptualization and the construction of method. I follow with an account of pre-performance activities – the walk, collecting materials, transposing the music for alto flute, inserting new artefacts into the software, and rehearsals. Next come descriptions of the performance, and finally, I offer a reflective conclusion to the project. This project illuminated the quotidian through sound, image and text, transforming the everydayness of a walk along a disused railway track, turned walking/cycling track, in Victoria, Australia, into an extraordinary musical work, creating a shift from a knowing about to a knowing from within, from playing and doing to reflective awareness.
SAR 2021 presentation - Dawn Woolley
(2022)
author(s): Dawn Woolley, Jonas Howden Sjøvaag
published in: SAR Conference 2020
What happens to queer community, bodily expression & identity when queer spaces are closed & communities move online? This workshop critically reflects on, & invites participation in, the collaborative project Bois of Isolation: An Instagram platform for people of marginalised genders to share selfies of their spaces & processes of queering gender binaries in the pandemic. The project uses hashtag commons & selfies to challenge the hegemonic visual culture social media can perpetuate: Binarised gender stereotypes, exclusion of bodies deemed ‘other’, & hierarchies of value in which white, able-bodied, heterosexual, young & ‘healthy’ are supreme. Bois of Isolation contributes to communal aesthetic spaces in which bodily & gender plurality & fluidity are expressed & celebrated.
Site Awareness in Music – recontextualizing a sensation of another place
(2020)
author(s): Knut Olaf Sunde
published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
The project argues that a sensation of another place is vital to the recognition of unfamiliar perspectives.
Space and sound are inextricably connected. The surroundings and context are central to how we perceive external stimuli, such as images, events, history, ideas or music. The brain interprets and make choices by association, based on what the body perceives and based on previous knowledge and experience. How humans listen, hear, see, perceive, interpret and react to our surroundings are based on our cognitive structures.
An unformatting of society is needed.
A risk makes the body and brain aware and alert. Adrenalin is released to the blood, enabling the organism to sudden and severe effort. Risk implies something unestablished, uncertain, a danger, something unknown. Risk implies the possibility of failure and ultimately death. Risk increase anxiety and excitement, enabling the alertness needed to maneuver away from or solve problems. When something is at stake, interest is set into play. The unknown is by its very nature beyond the body’s experience.
The project is about increasing the awareness of the situational and contextual implications of music. This is enquired through three works. For each site or situation I work with, I analyze its characteristics, such as acoustical conditions, the relations of the place to its surroundings, the shape of the landscape and historical or political context.
I try to create immersive, audiovisual projects that are connected to a certain place.
I aim to involve qualities and characteristics from the place, shaping a conversation, putting something at stake.
I conceive a music activating the place, making created situations.
I do this because there is a close link between memory, comprehension and place.
The sense of place and ability to navigate is essential to our memory and bodily existence in the world.
Main supervisor: Ole Lützow-Holm
Second supervisor: Marianne Heier
Return to the Site of the Year of the Rooster
(2019)
author(s): Annette Arlander
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition is centred around a video essay, which uses some parts of Animal Years, a series of one-year performance-projects recorded on Harakka Island in the years 2002-2014, as examples to create a form of "digital autotopography". Returning to the site of the performance Year of the Rooster (2006) and Christmas of the Rooster - Tomten (2006) twelve years later serves as a starting point for reflections on the materiality of the site, on the birches growing there as co-performers, and on revisiting and assembling old works as way of doing things with performance.
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).
Practicing art - as a habit? / Att utöva konst - som en vana?
(2017)
author(s): Annette Arlander
connected to: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This bilingual exposition (English and Swedish) presents and problematizes the relationship between artistic practice and habit, describing two projects that deal with repetition and place. The projects 'Solsidan' and 'Summer at Söder' were undertaken during the years 2015-2016 in Stockholm. The idea of repetition and returning to the same site were crucial, as in much of my previous works. Unlike them, neither of these two projects involved performances for camera; in both the actual practice consisted of video recording the view. The shift in emphasis from an artistic practice aiming to produce an artwork, into an activity undertaken mainly as an exercise, an activity, could be seen as a strand in the general trend in contemporary art since the 1960s and accentuated in this century towards valuing the 'working' of art above the work of art as an object. This trend can also be related to research and linked to the preference for various terms like practice as research, performance as research, creative arts research or, indeed, artistic research. - This exposition combines a description of the actual practice, with an encounter with the material generated through that practice and proposes that these works can exemplify artistic research as a speculative practice.
A Place for Painting
(2016)
author(s): Andreas Siqueland
published in: Norwegian Artistic Research Programme
My practice as a painter deals with notions of repetition, displacement and reenactment, often in relationship to nature. From 2009 to 2013 I was enrolled in the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo. Through the fellowship I wanted to learn more about the particular circumstances that influence the decision-making taking place on the canvas. I decided to go on a search for A Place for Painting.
For many years I used photographs as a way to remember landscapes. I would use them to go on extended journeys in painting. With the advent of the digital age, the time between taking and developing and distributing images collapsed. At the same time, I saw my paintings gradually shifted in character. It felt as if there was lack of presence in the brushstrokes. I associated this with a dependency on the photographic medium as a model and source material for new painting. Photography seemed to disconnect me from observing what was actually happening on the canvas and how this was related to the outside. To make my experiences visible, I needed a more direct translation of the world. I imagined a search for a place for painting to rediscover the connection painting has to its surroundings. This led to a series of journeys to see how changes in geographical location would influence my work. As part of the investigation, I returned to the tradition of plein air painting. For me, this felt like the most direct way in which I could study how painting interacts with a physical place, while also addressing the subject of place in painting.
Plein air painting necessitated working outside the architectural constraints of the studio. The variables of the outdoors raised fundamental questions about color, light, composition and the act of painting itself. I began experimenting with different studio models that I hoped could open up new relationships to nature and new modes of production. To further explore this repositioning and the interactive relationship that resulted, I decided to build a mobile outdoor studio using my own loft studio in Oslo as a model. The result was Winterstudio. This essay gives an account of the research and thinking that informed the building of this structure, the experience of working within it at two different locations and its subsequent influence on my work in the studio in Oslo. The focus is on a contemporary painting practice, but should be relevant to anyone interested in exploring the conditions and context of artistic production today.
In a Place like this
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Johan Sandborg, Duncan Higgins
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In A place Like This sets out to investigate and expand the issues and critical discourses within Sandborg and Higgins' current collaborative research practice. The central focus for the research is concerned with how art, in this instance photographic and painted image making and text, can be used as an agent or catalyst of understanding and critical reflection.
The research methodology is constructed through photography, painting, drawing and text. This utilises the form of an artist publication as a point of critically engaged dissemination: a place for the tension between conflicting ideas and investigation to be explored through discussion.
The research question is focused on how the production of the image and the act of making images can communicate or describe moments of erasure or remembering in terms of historical and personal narratives with direct reference to moments of violence and place.
This is seen not in terms of a nostalgic remembrance of the past; instead as one that is rife with complicated layers and dynamics where recognition is denied the ability to locate a physical representation. Embedded in this is an exploration of particular questions concerning the ethics of representation: the depiction of ourselves and other? In this sense it brings into question an examination of the act of remembering as a thing in itself, through the production of the image and text, contexts of knowledge and cultural discourses explored through the form of an artists publication.
Nomadic Conversations- Cyprus
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Johan Sandborg
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Nomadic Conversations research approach utilities participatory practices, where ideas and decisions develop through a responsive process in order to address both tangible and intangible knowledge. This is organised as interwoven, overlapping and interrelated meeting points, sites for single or multiple field trips. Nomadic Conversations constitutes characteristics of potential instability, conflict, memory of tragedy and repressed history.
DESERT DWELLING
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Christine Hansen
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Desert Dwelling is a research project conducted by Associate professor Christine Hansen and Independent Artist Line Anda Dalmar. The desert is used as a site and framework to reflect on landscape, environment and time. In addition, Desert Dwelling endeavor to explore the act of observation and documentation. The project uses common documentation/observation methods such as photography, video and sound. In addition, we employ more obsolete and time-consuming observation means such as drawing, casting and watercolor painting. This is to stress that different observation methods render the world differently, and provide noninterchangeable information about the world. Much of the visual material is from a field study in deserts in California in spring 2018. The study took place mainly in Death Valley and Joshua Tree and had a processual method. We selected a place in the desert and stayed there until we found something interesting to work with. Every day, we made experiences that we built on the next day. The working method focused on the fluid relationship between process, work and documentation.
Curious Arts – No. 5
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Jim Harold, Susan Brind
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'Curious Arts – No. 5'
CCA, Glasgow, 2011
Sculptural and sound installation
In December 2011 the CCA dedicated its major gallery spaces to a two-week programme that developed its support for writing and publishing within contemporary art practice: "This programme will review the progress of 2HB in the form of an exhibition, ... an events programme and place this activity in the broader context of an international book fair where we can consider how books travel and how we travel through books. ... It has felt like the quality and diversity of artistic practice in Glasgow has been accelerated by art writing and journal publishing, as if the intelligence and sensibility of artistic practice in the city has been harnessed to a new force. ... So, we are wondering: what kind of cultural motor is independent publishing in Glasgow, and how does writing act as a motor within the artist's own practice?"
Quoted from CCA, Glasgow - "2HB: What we make with words. Writing and publishing as motors within contemporary art practice", October 2011 (undated). Exhibition curators: Sarah Tripp and Jamie Kenyon.
Exhibiting Artists: Susan Brind & Jim Harold, Ruth Buchanan, Alex Impey, Paul Elliman, Kathryn Elkin, Hannah Ellul, Kate Morrell, Charlotte Prodger, Thom Walker, and Rebecca Wilcox.
Drawing upon research undertaken in the library at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath (an historic house on the east coast of Scotland), and by means of a sculptural sound installation, 'Curious Arts – No. 5 took the viewer on a journey from the private world of the writing desk to the landscape and a place of images, texts and the history of ideas.
Curious Arts – No. 5
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Susan Brind, Jim Harold
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'Curious Arts – No. 5'
CCA, Glasgow, 2011
Sculptural and sound installation
In December 2011 the CCA dedicated its major gallery spaces to a two-week programme that developed its support for writing and publishing within contemporary art practice: "This programme will review the progress of 2HB in the form of an exhibition, ... an events programme and place this activity in the broader context of an international book fair where we can consider how books travel and how we travel through books. ... It has felt like the quality and diversity of artistic practice in Glasgow has been accelerated by art writing and journal publishing, as if the intelligence and sensibility of artistic practice in the city has been harnessed to a new force. ... So, we are wondering: what kind of cultural motor is independent publishing in Glasgow, and how does writing act as a motor within the artist's own practice?"
Quoted from CCA, Glasgow - "2HB: What we make with words. Writing and publishing as motors within contemporary art practice", October 2011 (undated). Exhibition curators: Sarah Tripp and Jamie Kenyon.
Exhibiting Artists: Susan Brind & Jim Harold, Ruth Buchanan, Alex Impey, Paul Elliman, Kathryn Elkin, Hannah Ellul, Kate Morrell, Charlotte Prodger, Thom Walker, and Rebecca Wilcox.
Drawing upon research undertaken in the library at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath (an historic house on the east coast of Scotland), and by means of a sculptural sound installation, 'Curious Arts – No. 5 took the viewer on a journey from the private world of the writing desk to the landscape and a place of images, texts and the history of ideas.
'Curious Arts No. 6'
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Jim Harold, Susan Brind
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'Curious Arts No. 6' (a collaborative artist book work) Published by CCA, Glasgow, 2013.
ISBN: 978-0-9576732-1-2
The book work, 'Curious Arts – No. 6', results from a period of residency and research in the private library at Hospitalfield House in Arbroath on the North-East coast of Scotland. The original owners of the house, Patrick and Elizabeth Allan-Fraser, were both dedicated to the ideals of art and nature and, following their deaths in the late nineteenth century, the House has been run as a trust dedicated to developments in the visual arts, literature and music in Scotland and internationally.
Given the owners’ original ideals, the House, its library and the ensuing years of residencies hosted by the Trust, have secured Hospitalfield as a part of Scotland and the UK’s cultural heritage: it is a hidden gem. Brind & Harold engaged with the House and its collections over a 6-year period. While the intention of this book is, in part, focused by the ethos of the Allan-Fraser’s, the House, its library and collections, 'Curious Arts – No. 6' is a visual and textual analysis of the qualities of the place, particularly those of the eclectic holdings of the library, that focuses on the ideals associated with nature and landscape. The archive comes alive as soon as one asks the question: how might this historical knowledge inform our contemporary understandings of the natural world? To help answer this Brind & Harold commissioned a human geographer, Dr. Nina Morris (Edinburgh University), and the academic and curator, Dr. Francis McKee (CCA, Glasgow) to join their researches into the House and its holdings. The resulting 52 page publication includes their responses as texts, as well as a visual essay by the artists, and includes an introduction by Lucy Byatt, Director of Hospitalfield House.
Published by CCA, Glasgow, 'Curious Arts No. 6' has been produced with substantial financial support from The Royal Society of Edinburgh, along with funding from the Glasgow School of Art’s Research Development Fund, with the intention that it be freely gifted to Scottish public libraries and libraries within institutions of higher education in the UK, and selected art libraries internationally. Whilst we live in an age where the internet is proliferating as one means of knowledge storage and dissemination, private and public libraries remain invaluable as models of knowledge-gathering systems and as archives vital to our deeper understanding of the world. By gifting copies of 'Curious Arts No. 6' to libraries, Brind & Harold hope to symbolically connect the knowledge held in a small private library in Arbroath with libraries and readers elsewhere.
Curious Arts – No. 6
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Susan Brind, Jim Harold
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'Curious Arts No. 6' (a collaborative artist book work) Published by CCA, Glasgow, 2013.
ISBN: 978-0-9576732-1-2
The book work, 'Curious Arts – No. 6', results from a period of residency and research in the private library at Hospitalfield House in Arbroath on the North-East coast of Scotland. The original owners of the house, Patrick and Elizabeth Allan-Fraser, were both dedicated to the ideals of art and nature and, following their deaths in the late nineteenth century, the House has been run as a trust dedicated to developments in the visual arts, literature and music in Scotland and internationally.
Given the owners’ original ideals, the House, its library and the ensuing years of residencies hosted by the Trust, have secured Hospitalfield as a part of Scotland and the UK’s cultural heritage: it is a hidden gem. Brind & Harold engaged with the House and its collections over a 6-year period. While the intention of this book is, in part, focused by the ethos of the Allan-Fraser’s, the House, its library and collections, 'Curious Arts – No. 6' is a visual and textual analysis of the qualities of the place, particularly those of the eclectic holdings of the library, that focuses on the ideals associated with nature and landscape. The archive comes alive as soon as one asks the question: how might this historical knowledge inform our contemporary understandings of the natural world? To help answer this Brind & Harold commissioned a human geographer, Dr. Nina Morris (Edinburgh University), and the academic and curator, Dr. Francis McKee (CCA, Glasgow) to join their researches into the House and its holdings. The resulting 52 page publication includes their responses as texts, as well as a visual essay by the artists, and includes an introduction by Lucy Byatt, Director of Hospitalfield House.
Published by CCA, Glasgow, 'Curious Arts No. 6' has been produced with substantial financial support from The Royal Society of Edinburgh, along with funding from the Glasgow School of Art’s Research Development Fund, with the intention that it be freely gifted to Scottish public libraries and libraries within institutions of higher education in the UK, and selected art libraries internationally. Whilst we live in an age where the internet is proliferating as one means of knowledge storage and dissemination, private and public libraries remain invaluable as models of knowledge-gathering systems and as archives vital to our deeper understanding of the world. By gifting copies of 'Curious Arts No. 6' to libraries, Brind & Harold hope to symbolically connect the knowledge held in a small private library in Arbroath with libraries and readers elsewhere.
In an Image like this
(last edited: 2015)
author(s): Johan Sandborg, Duncan Higgins
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
I am no longer a stranger here,and the response to our misreading,only to see there is a flaw,not in the sense that it is less than perfect,rather that it is unconsidered,left unnoticed,left unopened,left untold,scratching that part of the mind,that can not let go of the conditions,for our seeing