Designed to allow for Emergence: A Learning Rhizome
(2020)
author(s): Alexios Brailas
published in: Research Catalogue
“Systems Theory, Psychology, and Social Media” is an Erasmus course offered by the Department of Psychology at Panteion University, Athens, Greece. In this course, Erasmus students co-create a unique and wonderful multi-cultural mosaic, ‘the difference that makes the difference.’ In addition to lecturing, participants are engaged in intensive group work during the weekly face-to-face meetings. Between the face-to-face meetings, participants create blog reflections, narratives, and multimodal artifacts about their in-class lived experience regarding the impact social technologies and artificial intelligence have on living systems. Backed up by the technological infrastructure, a network of interconnected personal blogs, students develop a reflective group ecology of practice. The whole project is informed by complex systems’ epistemology. This virtual research exposition demonstrates the overall process in a non-linear and multimodal way. Implications for rhizomatic learning theory and education are discussed.
Resurrecting Dead Darlings Exposition
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Ryan Mason, Annamari Keskinen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Situated within the broader discourse of artistic research, Resurrecting Dead Darlings- A Palindromic Process of Artistic Rebirth amplifies the project's commitment to reinvigorating the dialogue between artists and spectators through the process of engaging with dead darlings. It introduces a multimedia archive tailored to enhance performances by allowing deeper insight into the artistic process—highlighting the evolution from initial concept to performance and the subsequent reinvention. This synthesis encapsulates the project's approach to fostering a dynamic interplay between viewing and creating, where spectators are invited into the intimate spheres of artistic reimagining, and creators are offered reflective distance to view their work through the audience's eyes.
This initiative recognizes the evolving nature of artistic research, emphasizing the move towards integrating research-focused methodologies and embracing diverse forms of creation. Doing so enriches the artist/spectator relationship, positioning it as a foundational element that drives the creative cycle forward. The exposition is a tangible interface for this engagement, offering a conduit for transdisciplinary exploration and a deeper mutual appreciation of the artistic journey. It reaffirms the project's role as a vibrant platform for collaboration, discovery, and the continual reshaping of the artistic experience, echoing Thar Be Dragons’ vision for a participatory and reflective artistic culture.
The exposition is a platform for the artists to document their work, acting as a supportive tool and a gentle invitation to convert embodied thinking into words, which can often prove challenging. It embraces a variety of approaches, including texts, sound recordings, and videos, all designed to exist in an adaptive format that accommodates constant evolution and development. The material within doesn’t necessarily explicate the contents of the exposition but rather works as a collaborative interlocutor. While the primary working language is English, Finnish is also occasionally used.
* Dead Darlings are ideas that, for one reason or another, have been set aside, abandoned, or otherwise not realized. They can be scenes, psychophysical movement spaces, modes of performance, or sets of actions based on fictional situations and settings.
From Singer to Reflective Practitioner: Performing and Composing in a Multimedia Environment
(last edited: 2016)
author(s): Aleksandra Popovska
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exegesis comes as result of performing, composing and researching in a multimedia environment over
the past few years. I started working on my projects with the following question in my mind: how can I
improve my own practice?
Asking this led to identification of the problems related to making a live media performance, as well as prompting discussions about the types of knowledge necessary for producing a work of art that includes more than one medium.
Rather than attempting to draw definitive conclusions regarding topics as broad as live media
performance, I summarize and reflect upon the creation process as I experienced it, elucidating my personal
contemplations regarding my experience and practice in multimedia environment.
I will present three projects: ’Bukefalus’, ’Tribute to Morty’, and ’Every. When’, all designed as electroacoustic pieces with video displays. I shall take a
closer look at how the pieces were developed, discuss their cross-disciplinary character, and good and
bad practices involved in them. Finally, I shall focus my attention on how things go in practice when
one is composing and designing an interactive piece using improvisation and different media. In all three
projects I have been involved in different roles, as a performer, composer or designer, and in all of them
collaboration played important role. I made particular choices, sometimes blending my roles and the roles
of the participants.
I hope that my experience as a musician, having passed through both classical and technology-based
educational systems and participating in them in different roles – as performer, concept designer, composer, producer and teacher – will be useful for all creative people coming from the conservatory and wanting towork in the field of multimedia performance.
With this exegesis I would also like to make my own contribution to reflective practice and living theory
(Whitehead, 1998), by exploring improvisation and experimenting in my projects. I will write about how
it has enhanced my own identity as performer, composer and designer, and why and how I have been
committed to sharing its transformational potential with people I collaborate with. Its claim to originality
is that it arrives at a living concept of knowledge transformation through multidimensional reflection; as
a singer who is a composer, as a composer who is a researcher, as a student who has been a teacher, as an
artist who has lived in an imaginative world creating her works, and as a researcher dealing with institutional
policy and educational change. “I am my own informant into different perspectives, and will try through
these personae to have a dialogue between several positions and arrive at a concept that is tested and lived
from several perspectives.” (Spiro, 2008, p. 29)