Stitches and Sutures. Textile Metaphors and Graphic Topologies as Methodological Artistic Tools
(2023)
author(s): Barbara Graf
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Barbara Graf (Center Research Focus, PhD candidate PhD in Art) takes Jacques Lacan’s notions of the ‘upholstery button’ and the ‘suture’ as starting points to explore textile metaphors as methodological tools for her artistic practice, informed by her own bodily sensory experiences and experience of paresthesia as a person affected by MS. Graf’s contribution "Stitches and Sutures" searches for images of the invisible and explores how deeply subjective experiences can be made accessible and adequately expressed.
Reading on Reading: Ecologies of Reading
(2020)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Lena Séraphin, Cordula Daus
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Reading on Reading is a series of experimental reading practices developed collaboratively by Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin whilst working together in the Research Pavilion #3, Venice, 2019, for exploring what alternative modes of sense making are produced when reading is undertaken artistically, as an aesthetic activity.
Reading on Reading explores three interrelated foci: How can aesthetic practices of reading: (1) Shed new light on the phenomenology (or how-ness) of reading? (2) Transform the often-solitary activity of reading into a shared or communal act — and explore what modes of sociality, solidarity and emergent ‘we’ emerge therein? (3) Operate as a disruptive process unsettling normative conventions of reading through focus on the poetic, affective and material dimensions of readerly experience?
Within this artistic research collaboration, we consider the act of reading beyond the relation of the reader to a text read, as a micro-political or ethico-aesthetic practice through which to re-consider — perhaps even re-organise — the relations between self and other(s), self and world. Drawing upon Félix Guattari’s notion of ecosophy with its three ecological registers of environment, social relations and human subjectivity, in this exposition we consider how the modest practice of reading together could contribute to a wider ethico-aesthetic project: for cultivating shared poetics of attention, for the re-sensing of language through embodied vocalisation, for tending to the temporary gatherings of ‘we’ that reading together affords.
The aim of this exposition is to share the reading practices tested and explored in and through the collaboration of three artist researchers, alongside reflection on the questions and concerns emerging within this enquiry. Whilst operating as a document or archive of a specifically time-bound research activity, the intention is that our reading practices have scope to be activated by other readers.
Just a mere Spring to take: Embedding in Capitalocenic Atmospheres
(2019)
author(s): Christoph Solstreif-Pirker
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
30 years after the publication of Félix Guattari’s “The Three Ecologies,” we are facing a turning point in the way we are encountering our environment. Established concepts of “nature” have proved to be considerably part of a grand homocentric design whose spatiality Peter Sloterdijk poignantly defined as the “World Interior of Capital.” To investigate these capitalocenic strata, it becomes necessary to re-territorialize institutionalized debates, conceptions and practices, and perceive contemporary landscapes as manifold, unknown and peripheral alterities.
This research exposition aims to encounter the capitalocenic field, its actors and inherent specificities, and to propose a peripheral methodology for its investigation. According to its etymological roots, periphery not only implies a field or site at “the outer surface”, but also refers to the Greek verb periphérō, meaning “to carry around.” This adds a proto-ethical component, as we become part of a carrying and compassionate interplay with virtual forces of capitalocenic dominance, violence, and destruction.
In this intimate moment of becoming peripheral, we are striving from the grand institutional narrative towards the fragility of an uncertain world interior. To Félix Guattari, this is an act of empathy, of an affective affinity and imaginary re-construction that unfolds new practices, grounds, and epistemologies of how to encounter our manmade planet. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of peripheral discourse on the edge of the planetary crisis, and unfolds a vibrant and democratic borderspace within the all-encompassing ecological trauma.
Departing from Victor Turner’s “social drama” and the unpredictability of a global monetary system, the research exposition focuses on the specific context of Iceland as a knot geographically located within the global fabric of the Capitalocene. Being the site of a massive banking crisis between 2008 and 2011, the island-state is seen as an artificial environment of capitalist warfare, based on an ecosystem of virtual forces that actualize themselves on a social, economic, cultural or ecological level.
Applying a situated performative research praxis, the research exposition affirmatively investigates this manifold and monetary-driven spatiality. As the research exposition suggests, performative research allows to confront the unpredictability of the capitalocenic field in all its complexity and to pave the way for “vanquishing [...] or even befriending“ the dominant forms of global financial market capitalism” (Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sensation). “Just a mere Spring to take” is a discursive assemblage of various investigative highlights on a virtual, global and elusive phenomenon, aiming at peripherically unfolding horizons of performative thinking, and enabling a fragile intra-active confrontation with our vertiginous, traumatized but still living cosmos.
ANYWHERE ELSE BUT ME, art and introspection
(2018)
author(s): Antonio Olaio
published in: Research Catalogue
Having Duchamp's epitaph as a starting point, the exposition “Nowhere else but me (art and introspection)” deals with some of the most constant aspects of my research as an artist, through series of paintings, videos, songs, where the relationship between art and self-awareness is more evident and plays a central role in their the conceptual process and in their conceptual scope. But here, instead of emphasizing a unique subjectivity, we realise that an artist’s subjectivity might be a place, a place anywhere. A public space, potencially ubiquitous, as both mind and images might be.
Immersion and proximity: music, sound, and subjectivity in The Memory Dealer
(2015)
author(s): Sarah Hibberd, Nanette Nielsen
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
With a focus on narrative film music techniques and sonic constructions of subjectivity, this article explores the soundtrack of The Memory Dealer. We account for whether and how immersion is achieved and discuss the ways in which TMD brings novelty to the area of sound studies, not least through its relevance for phenomenology. Analyzing participants’ responses, we argue that immersion in TMD is less dependent on a narrative understanding of the soundtrack and more reliant on a particular kind of subjective immersion that is deepened and maintained through sound. We show how, in order to achieve this immersion, the soundtrack needs to support a balance between players’ self-reflection and their self-consciousness: whereas the former can deepen engagement, the latter can be distracting and pull the player out of the experience. The various levels of subjectivity and sonic interaction in TMD reveal new avenues for immersion through sound in pervasive drama.
Clareira
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Ana Miriam Rebelo
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"Clareira" is the result of research on the photographic representation of architecture, as space to be experienced. The project takes Trindade Metro Station, in Porto, as a laboratory for the experimentation of visual strategies that emphasize the photographer’s physical presence and sensorial perception as well as the presences of users. This public space, routinely crossed and appropriated by a great diversity of people, is observed in its relationship with the human and environmental elements that permeate it.
Taking a purposely subjective stance, the work was inspired by the writings of Peter Zumthor, namely in its search for a positioning of the self, and an attitude towards reality, marked by an attentive and available physical presence. This mode of being in space was the basis from which to develop a photographic approach that seeks to communicate subjective experience.
At a time when images are increasingly replacing the experience of architectural space and becoming a basis from which to think architecture, this project seeks to contribute to the affirmation of photographic practice as a research instrument, reflecting on the experience of built space, but also actively participating in the construction of the environments in which we live in, as architecture is also constructed through images.
"Clareira" is a printed publication, comprising a series of formally diversified elements exploring different themes. It was exhibited in its full form at "Encontros da Imagem" (2019) as a "Photobook Awards" finalist, and was part of "Cityzine Collection", an exhibition of alternative publications exploring architecture, city and territory, through photography (2019). This set of images is a short selection, curated by Pedro Leão Neto and Né Santelmo, exhibited at the "Bienal de Fotografia do Porto 2019", at Aliados Metro Station.
Hands caring with mortars: soundscape regarding caring activities (nourishment) of Extremadura’s rurality from a gender perspective. Ajoblanco Quartett
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Carmen García-Gil Simancas
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This research studies daily experiences of caring activities (nourishment) through sound. The aim is to reclaim their value and place within academic studies and epistemology, as well as to document those customs that are slowly fading away. Specifically, it has been chosen the elaboration of ajoblanco (typical south-Spanish food), as it is traditionally prepared with a wood mortar. This object is also used as a musical instrument in Extremadura’s traditional music, which reveals the curiosity around its sound. Furthermore, this research considers spaces and the way of thinking of them from a sound point of view. In conclusion, rural women’s individuality and subjectivity is studied through different ways of making ajoblanco and its soundcape.
Keywords: soundscape, subjectivity, caring activities, spaces
Clareira: Towards a phenomenological perspective in the representation of architectural space
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Ana Miriam Rebelo
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This paper presents the results of a photography based research project on the representation of architectural space. From a phenomenological perspective, the investigation aimed to find a visual approach that would contribute to the representation of architectural space as a place for experience. Trindade subway station, by architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, was chosen as a case study, functioning as a laboratory for the experimentation of visual strategies that emphasize the physical presence and sensorial perception of the photographer, as well as the presences of users.
This paper was presented at the 5th International Conference "On the surface: photography on architecture" and later published in Sophia Journal
Ana Miriam Rebelo, Fátima Pombo, José Carneiro
Sophia Journal, 4. Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Publicness of Urban Space through Photography and Image
Pedro Leão Neto, Iñaki Berguera (ed.) Scopio Editions. 2019.
A Study
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): James Wood
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
*
This is a product of a series of performances, educational projects and ruminations in 2015-6. It was improvised and is ever incomplete.
To begin with a general overview, refer to the "Parallels" page. Otherwise, happy travels.
It is a ludic and ergodic text and is not to be considered definitive. Each reading should deepen each previous, and be reliant upon postexpectant and preexisting readings. Consequently, in a formal sense, it owes much to Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Braxton's Tri-Axium Writings. Sections over- and under-lap, alluding freely within and without themselves. There is no correct method of engaging with it, nor a linear approach. "As we will have seen", many sections explain themselves only through others. It is a philosophical matrix, a web contingent upon all strands and - most crucially of all - an investment of the Reader's sense of Self into the work. Like a metaphor, the Reader must place themselves within the work as the absent tenor or vehicle relevant to each piece (leaning on Graham Harman and Jose Ortega y Gasset). In other words, it is an attempt - a nobly failing attempt - to ensure the Reader - the audience - is as much a creator as the writer.
*
Not so very long ago a community of people came together and, after a lengthy and luxurious dinner, after which the group found their prepared topics of conversation too incendiary, fetid or dull to suit the evening, decided to invent Art. During the protracted debates that followed, according to the comprehensive minutes of the gathering, Art’s proportions and dispensations were agreed upon: Art was to have no place within quotidian daily life or public policy; it was to be devoid of both educational merit or impetus; it was to arouse emotion but never too strikingly; and was to be deemed the final topic of conversation at dinner, after its natural locutory progenitors science and politics. Feeling pleased, the group dispersed.
(It is worth perhaps parenthetically noting that the following morning the host of the party – nursing a fiercely raging headache – found and read over the proposal prior to its distribution. After a while he discovered he disagreed with the entire document and, throwing into the fire, rewrote it entirely. Since this was all done in secret and because his friends are that particular type of people, he stills receives no credit whatsoever in the publication of the document.)
Barbara Graf (Center Research Focus, PhD candidate PhD in Art) takes Jacques Lacan’s notions of the ‘upholstery button’ and the ‘suture’ as starting points to explore textile metaphors as methodological tools for her artistic practice, informed by her own bodily sensory experiences and experience of paresthesia as a person affected by MS. Graf’s contribution "Stitches and Sutures" searches for images of the invisible and explores how deeply subjective experiences can be made accessible and adequately expressed.open exposition comments (0)
Having Duchamp's epitaph as a starting point, the exposition “Nowhere else but me (art and introspection)” deals with some of the most constant aspects of my research as an artist, through series of paintings, videos, songs, where the relationship between art and self-awareness is more evident and plays a central role in their the conceptual process and in their conceptual scope. But here, instead of emphasizing a unique subjectivity, we realise that an artist’s subjectivity might be a place, a place anywhere. A public space, potencially ubiquitous, as both mind and images might be.open exposition comments (0)