Running Freight on the River. A Clean Cargo Prefiguration
(2023)
author(s): Tim Boykett, Tina Auer
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
We are interested in exploring the types of futures that are preferable for us all. Discussions of preferable futures can be made difficult by a lack of understanding of the lived experience of that possible future. We like to think that some wise person once said: “I hear futures and I forget. I see futures and I remember. I do futures and I understand.” In order to explore scenarios of possible futures, we thus look into experiential modalities.
This exposition examines our Danube Clean Cargo project. The prefigurative process imagined what small scale localised transport could be like and attempted to run a pilot scheme. Reporting on that, merging the quantitative, qualitative and experiential aspects of the project, we present some resulting insights and imaginations. The project leaves us with speculations and visions drawn out by the process of prefiguration. It also leaves us with questions around heterotopic instantiations, queered economics and the everyday to be pondered as artistic research. This helps us reflect on the process of imagination and speculation, on dreams of various freedoms and the harsh realities of logistics chains.
The exposition develops ideas in both internal and external reflective modes. The exposition is oriented along a chart of the Danube river for the region of interest. Along the south bank of the Danube the project and its internal reflections are arrayed as episodic text fragments, leading up to a short vision that echoes older stories of sailing cargo barges. Along the north bank a more external reflection is positioned, bringing the project and its understandings into context with a collection of previous developments and external references. The entire exposition is arranged as a single page paper nautical chart, which in contrast to a digital chart plotter, always displays all of the information and does not hide features.
This exposition is part of Curiouser and Curiouser, cried Alice: Rebuilding Janus from Cassandra and Pollyanna (CCA), an art-based research project from Design Investigations (ID2) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Time's Up. It is supported by the Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK) from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): AR561.
Swarming Event
(2019)
author(s): Christina Stadlbauer
published in: Research Catalogue
Witnessing a swarm of honeybees flying out of their hive is rare – especially in the urban environments. Because beekeepers manage their bees and take measures to prevent swarming from happening, the emergence of a swarm is regarded as bad beekeeping management. However, this event is a honeybee colony's birth and is an impressive show of nature's excellency.
Throws of Dice
(2019)
author(s): Henna-Riikka Halonen
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
My doctoral research project is a speculative spatial construct, an alternative labyrinthic infrastructure that is flexibly built within and as a response to the artworks it houses.
Existing in tension with the framework affecting it, the artworks and the texts leak out from the structure and are performed in and around the physical floorplan. This format renders the configuration of the research project visible and temporary, with the potential to be reformulated and adapted to future contexts. The labyrinthic structure allows the research to go off in different directions, enabling us to consider the multiple perspectives and modes of writing that constitute its story and the complex infrastructures that might support it.
As a strategy for artistic, social and political engagement and a reaction to a contemporary condition in which our claim to the positions we occupy is increasingly simplified, my research project creates a space of thinking, imagination and resistance. By confusing the functionality of language, it aims to make visible the power dynamics and infrastructures shaping our world. The notion of power is two-fold, the research examines, on the one hand, the complexity of human interactions and positions concerning hegemonic power structures and on the other hand, the relationship between the visual and the verbal and experience and affect.
A number of defining characteristics of our contemporary condition are matters of concern; the speed of the networked globalized economy, the control enacted by states and categorization and exclusion of culture. In artistic research (and the networked world as a whole) there is often a tendency to adopt an overarching view which seeks to unify under a single concept a multiplicity of events. However, here the strategy is to do away with the reductive way of doing theory and instead, to dismantle hierarchical relationships between categories. My research project also contributes to the genealogies of participatory practices and to bridge the gap between language and visual art, I am tapping into similarities and differences of a kind of a virtual staging offered by literature, visual art and digital technologies. I draw from literary strategies of speculative fiction, in particular, those of the French Nouveau Roman.
By using chance, paradox (aporia) and uncertainty as guiding principles and as revelatory tools this research endeavours to deconstruct and divert perception and language, emphasizing absurdity and creating sense rather than meaning. More particularly, the research constantly explores its own limits and reflects its involvement with the social and political structures it is addressing to create or anticipate new modes of existence.
This project requires the reader/viewer's active participation, leaving holes or unknowns in the narrative structure that moves through entangled nodes of connections and different temporalities to suggest alternative and expansive forms of viewing and making art and research.
The research uses my installation/performance Eden The Pow(d)er of Fear (2014) as a frame structure, both as a physical blueprint of a labyrinth and as a story. This approach is not intended as a retrospective view towards the work but proposes instead a speculative re-writing and re-scripting of a work that offers new 'portals' to other works and worlds, through other narrative and theoretical threads opening up new perspectives, concerns, times and spaces. The other works embedded in the structure are the moving image works Moderate Manipulations (2012) and Placeholder (2017).
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.
Reflected Self-Portraits
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Andrew Bracey
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"Reflected Self-Portraits" is a body of practice-research that explores the intersection of subjectivity, appropriation, and the materiality of artworks through a series of self-portraits taken using the reflective surfaces of other artists' works. The project, ongoing since 2007, currently consists of an archive of 778 images. These photographs serve as both a record of the artist’s evolving self and a fragmented representation of another artist's work, operating with a parasitic intent that utilizes a specific material quality without engaging in interpretative dialogue. The work diverges from traditional painting practices and aligns itself with appropriation art, emphasizing "making-looking" through peripheral observation of overlooked elements within artworks. The images reflect a unique engagement with artworks, embodying a speculative approach that questions the boundaries between observer and observed. This interaction challenges the conventional hierarchy of artistic agency, positioning the artist's reflection as a secondary yet integral aspect of the host artwork. A three-part video installation at General Practice, Lincoln, featured a scrolling slideshow of these self-portraits, paired with a text-based screen acknowledging the original artists and a video of a mirror being shattered, symbolizing the ephemeral nature of self-representation. By documenting fleeting interactions with art, "Reflected Self-Portraits" questions the role of subjectivity and authorship in contemporary practice, suggesting a commensal rather than fully parasitic relationship with the original artworks. The project integrates theories from Susan Sontag and Hito Steyerl, contemplating the digital and physical dissemination of images and the shifting aura of artworks. As the photographs transcend traditional gallery spaces into digital realms, the work ultimately redefines the concept of the self-portrait, transforming it into a complex interplay between the self, the artwork, and the ever-expanding digital space.
Scylla’s Opulent Noise Generator (S.O.N.G.)
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Scylla’s Opulent Noise Generator (S.O.N.G.)
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Scylla’s Opulent Noise Generator (S.O.N.G.) is a collective of multi-disciplinary artists living and working in different time zones. S.O.N.G. believes in collectivity to build worlds and imagine art for the future. SONG’s core members are Rut Karin Zettergren (FI), Choterina Freer (U.K.) and Anna Kinbom (SE).With three core members, they regularly expand the framework: inviting multiple artists into their polymorphic practice.
S.O.N.G.’s art practice takes many forms such as: collective drawing and writings; video installations; game creation; performances; seminars; and rituals. Past exhibitions and performances include BFI London Film Festival, Woven Places, AR-exhibition by Swedish Art Associations, Futureless Festival in Stockholm, Tallinn Feminist Forum, and Work Hard! Play Hard! Minsk. With 0s+1s Collective (2013-19) which focus was cyberfeminism they exhibited in Casa Victor Hugo, Cuba, Södertälje konsthall, Göteborgs konsthall and Gotlands Konstmuseum.