In a Place like this
(2025)
author(s): Johan Sandborg, Duncan Higgins
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
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.
Ray, where have you been today?
(2025)
author(s): Pietro Fanti
published in: Research Catalogue
Is the reality perceived by someone with dementia less real than our own? Can photography give authority to this alternate reality?
This research, sparked by my newfound relationship with my dementia-affected grandfather Raymond, investigates the family album - often perceived as an unquestionable document - in order to uncover its ambiguities and to question photography in itself as the most trustful record of reality.
The inaccuracy of a medium that aims for objectiveness and is perceived as the bearer of truth, leads me to focus on three different ways of approaching the family archive (collection, editing and manipulation) and the relationship between mortality and memory. By using a mix of photography and photogrammetry, Ray's distorted memories - as he recounted them during his illness - became new images in order to materialise his present parallel truth. Alongside this dreamlike everyday, what has survived of Ray's past is contained in a briefcase: 254 photographs that have been transformed into postcards, travelling keepsakes, ready to be sent. If photography is in itself unreliable, why should the reality of a person who has lost his memory be any less real than our own?
Assembling Hanoi: Metamorphosis of Photographic Images
(2025)
author(s): Lorena Bañares
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
Interested in how photographs are constituted, this exposition situates itself in between materialities of photography to discover how photographs are actualized. Using photography as artistic research practice, it uncovers how matters, sounds, bodies, and machines intra-act within the practice of photography. The inquiry challenges the bifurcation between the outside/inside of the frame, rather it emphasizes its fluid nature. It delves into the cosmogenesis of a photograph exploring the multiple folds and transformations in actualizing a photograph revealing the intricate and dynamic assemblages of humans and non-humans from the outside folding with the inside. Thinking with Gilles Deleuze's concept of the Folds, the exposition was able to surface layers upon layers of bodily and material folds that trouble the traditional notion of photographs as images separated from the outside. In the middle of its messiness, the exposition was able to develop an Applique technique as a method of knowing that emerges from this artistic research practice. What came out are layers of images that describe photography as performative movement of matters and bodies, a metamorphosis of infinite images while navigating the rich culture of Vietnam’s Hanoi capital.
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.
Postdigital Epistemologies of the Photographic Image (PEPI)
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): PEPI
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Postdigital Epistemologies of the Photographic Image (PEPI 2019-2022) is a multidisciplinary research consortium funded by the Academy of Findland. The consortium combines psychology (Helsinki University) , visual studies (Tampere Univesity) and artistic research (Uniarts Helsinki, Academy of Fine Arts). This exposition dcuments the research activities of the part-project at Uniarts Helsinki.
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
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 seeingopen exposition comments (0)