Gentle Friction - through temporary territories of culture
(2024)
author(s): Alicia Rottke Fitzpatrick
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Friction between the other is not only inevitable but a necessary part of heterogeneous life. However, this friction can occur on a spectrum, from aggressive, violent manifestations to more gentle, subtle forms. This research explores the latter form of friction within the context of cultural events.
There is a growing rhetoric that cultural events are solely for elitist circles, and if this discourse continues to permeate society, the transformative power of these events will be in jeopardy.
To preserve and reinforce the transformative power of these spaces, this research asks: How do cultural events facilitate moments of gentle friction as a means to foster an understanding of 'the other'?
This research began as an introspective exploration into the author's practice. By unpacking the conditions of conviviality, autonomy, and temporality that ensure the friction remains gentle, the research explores how these conditions can be spatially translated to strengthen the experience in these spaces. Concluding with a set of design tools that can be used to ensure the vitality of cultural events, encouraging diverse participation as a means to protect this necessary form of friction between the other.
Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images
(2024)
author(s): Kajsa Dahlberg
published in: Research Catalogue
Informed by queer life practices, theories, and affinities, this documented artistic research project (doctoral thesis) draws from new materialist and post-humanist discourse in order to reconsider what role visual media play in the historical need to separate the human and the environmental. It asks, how do we challenge prevailing perceptions of film and photography as inexorably linked to ideas of progress and modernisation, to linear temporality, spatial separation, and to land-based thought? Based on the acknowledgement that we need to rethink our position as humans within the multiple habitats that make up the world, I investigate the ways in which the apparatus of film, rather than being an extension of human perception, attests to the material interdependences and co-productions that hold a potential for converging human and nonhuman perspectives. "Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images" considers the cinematic space of the ocean alongside Jean Epstein’s film "Le Tempestaire" (1947); it follows early photographic chemical methods involving seaweed to both develop film and to examine the technical intra-activity of human and nonhuman regimes as part of photography itself. Within the scope of this research, I argue and demonstrate how film engages in a sensory and reciprocal involvement with the material world, one that addresses the ability to sense, not just with one’s eyes, but with the entire body.
"Tidal Zones" are real locations, the habitat of a multitude of organisms, and the home of seaweeds. It is a place that is neither land nor sea but constitutes a zone with its own specific relationships and living conditions. In its refusal to be either or, it forms a (non-binary) temporal figuration between presence and absence, solid and liquid, life and death, dictated by the motions of spiral and circular time. This space, "Between Life and Images", is the chemical rockpool (the darkroom) out of which photography and film grew.
The PhD submission consists of four film-works, "The Etna Epigraph" (2022), "Seaweed Film" (2023), "Coenaesthesis – It Is Not Even True That There Is Air Between Us" (2023) and "The Spiral Dramaturgy" (2019) along with the exhibition "The Tidal Zone" shown at Index - The Swedish Con-temporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, from 25 November 2022 to 12 February 2023 and at Havremagasinet, Länskonsthall Boden from 14 October 2023 to 11 February 2024. The films and documentation from the exhibitions are included in the submission, which also includes an “Opening Letter” and two texts called “Filming with the Ocean” and “Methodology of the Spiral”.
This dissertation has been carried out and supervised within the graduate programme in Visual Arts at the Royal Institute of Art. The dissertation is presented at Lund University in the framework of the cooperation agreement between the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University, and the Royal Institute of Art regarding doctoral education in the subject Visual Arts.
evocations – towards a poetics of documentation
(2023)
author(s): Fernanda Branco
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Every art documentation is an encounter with an artwork in displacement, both in time and space. Yet, the experience of being present in the moment a live art work unfolds is – inevitably – lost in documentation. Evocations – towards a poetics of documentation explores non-conventional documentation to evoke imagination, inspired by the fragmentary, concision and absence found in poetry. This exposition passes through early discussions relating documentation to evidence. It looks into contemporary artists who challenge conventional ways to document, and approaches the act of document as bridging. Insisting on the loss and void inherent in documentation, Fernanda Branco's artistic research: environment embodiment – towards poetic narratives explores the circulatory generative process some non-conventional documentation can have. In the two projects I remember and Traces, the documentation viewer is invited to imagine – rather than to see – what occurred.
Photo Credit:
Performance by Fernanda Branco Traces #3. Drawing documentation and photo by Hilde Grønne Flikke.
Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency - Being and Feeling (Alone, Together)
(2023)
author(s): Lauren O'Neal
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
What "moves" in an exhibition, if not the bodies of artists, audiences, and objects? How does conversation move us? What can speculative artistic research offer? This exposition, "Being & Feeling (Alone Together),” held at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in 2020, is part of my doctoral research project, “Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency.” While some aspects of the project (including the title), were developed before the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the project unfolds in relation to myriad cultural, spatiotemporal, and civic situations that the pandemic produced. This situation required experimental and responsive curatorial methods that encouraged the project to move in unexpected ways.
[This exposition corresponds to Section Seven: Letting Things Move in the printed dissertation.]
You and Me and Everything Around Us
(2021)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Single-channel video with text and voice-over. Invitation at the Women Artists' Movement Show, The Crypt Gallery, London, 2009.
Exploring and Prototyping the Aesthetics of Felt Time
(2020)
author(s): Elsa Kosmack Vaara, Cheryl Akner Koler
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The intention of this research is to investigate how interaction designers may explore felt time through the culinary practice of sourdough baking. In this exposition we share how the physical experience and manipulation/shaping of time in sourdough baking provides an experience of fulfillment and satisfaction. We show our insights on how interaction designers, and possibly many other communities of practice and discourse, may learn from this.
The goal is to inspire the audience to engage in a broad and critical discourse around felt time and to emphasize the value of prototyping a felt time repertoire in interaction design. The research exploration is built on the collaboration between an interaction designer/researcher, a culinary connoisseur baker and a sculptor/design researcher and teacher.
luxurious migrant // performing whiteness
(2020)
author(s): Stacey Sacks
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Stacey Sacks is a PhD candidate in Performing Arts at Stockholm’s University of the Arts. Her Doctoral Project *This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything* takes form as a suite of hyper-disciplinary experiments with mask, clown, stop-motion animation, film, photography, sculpture, text, drawing and performance.
Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of ‘critical intimacy’ the performance-essay 'luxurious migrant' reflects on whiteness and privilege and the performance of it. As an intra-cultural, auto-ethnographic excavation it attempts and possibly fails to critically engage with notions of access, authority and power from within the cultural canon. As such it is a creative experimentation with theory and performance, an exploration of the improvisatory impulse and what it means to be ‘on’ the moment.
Since clown naturally contains transgressive elements, the project explores how the genre can be used in a neo-colonial context to subvert or interrupt the dominant discourse, whether satire and parody function as activism and if it is in fact possible to push back white supremacy through critical engagement and play, starting with a robust self-critique.
You and Me and Everything Around Us
(2020)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Single channel video, 3’, 2008
The probe for the work was the philosophical question what it is to exist in the world: in environments, with others, people, objects, surfaces; and whether the answer can be intuited.
The work evokes the temporality of such experiences, which is contingent upon the ever-changing nature of things. Objects have often had multiple owners, and so they carry traces of previous worlds. When encountering objects new to us, we may find ourselves appropriating them through affective attachment to assimilate them into our world. Inspired by the everyday lives of the house's occupants, the work is also about the affective bonds developed during and because of their temporary co-existence.
Experimentation with overlaying resonates with the artistic expression of overlapping materials, textures, spatial qualities, and reflected images. Photographs, film footage and sounds were recorded in an improvised way over a one year period in an old house in Walthamstow, East London. The artistic treatment of the subject matter as a time-based media assemblage, which exploits the home style video format, critiques popular staged presentations of everyday life, while exploring the house as an evolving over time system.
BC Time-Slip (The Empire Never Ended)
(2019)
author(s): John Cussans
published in: Research Catalogue
BC Time-Slip (The Empire Never Ended) is the first phase of a long-term artistic research project called The Skullcracker Suite. Taking its name from Philip K. Dick's 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip, the project uses the story of Dick's visit to Vancouver in 1972, and his stay at a rehab clinic for First Nations ex-cons, as a pretext to investigate the cultural politics of decolonization in British Columbia since the 1960's from ethnographic, Indigenous and science fictional perspectives, with a specific focus on the potlatch culture of the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples of the Pacific Northwest.
Perspectives on time in the music by Stockhausen: the experience of a performer
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Karin DE FLEYT, Federica Bressan
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Timelessness and temporality (Kruse, 2011) are widely studied topics in the classical music of the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century, mainly concerning the perspective of musical composition and auditory perception of music. But what is the perspective of temporal layeredness in the performer’s experience? This quote offers a starting point (Noble, 2018): “music whose temporal organisation optimises human information processing and embodiment expresses human time, and music whose temporal organisation subverts or exceeds human information processing and embodiment points outside of human time, to timelessness .”
Specialized in the repertoire of Karlheinz Stockhausen, I want to investigate the role of temporality in music from the perspective of a performer. I will delve into the richness of different layers of temporal awareness in an artistic experience through experiential, embodied, and sensorial knowledge, using different temporal compositions by Stockhausen as case studies: HARMONIEN (2006) for flute solo,, Xi (1986) for flute solo and STOP (1969) for ensemble.
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.
Peripheral Alacrity - Animation as entry into non-human temporalities
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Devon Pardue
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A master's thesis culminating in a project called Peripheral Alacrity; an audiovisual animation installation utilizing animation at 60fps to investigate the temporal relationship between us and fast-moving organisms on the edges of our senses. My work is informed by a deeply rooted interest and curiosity in the biological sciences and uses ideas found therein to explore the complicated relationships between humans and the rest of the living world. I became particularly interested in the perception of time across species and the potential for animation to serve as an axis into nonhuman temporalities.
How are our relationships with other organisms impacted by our bodies' unique temporality? Fast-living invertebrates like insects are of particular importance because their crucial role in a healthy ecosystem forces us to reconcile with our particular disdain for their speed and our desire for control over our surroundings. That desire to oversee and pin down a version of nature that is ideologically pure has roots in Europatriarchal power structures, so I sought to create a space to recontextualize these encounters as they naturally are in our day-to-day life. The work seeks to capture this particular interaction characterized by fleeting peripheral glimpses of fast-living organisms; from dragonflies to some we only see as a passing blur, and all the abstractions in between. You’re interrupted by a flash of motion and sound from the corner of your eye and by the time you crane your head to look, it is already gone. It is less about seeing, and more about our desire-to-see creating an asymmetrical dance between the viewer and the fleeting subject.
Meta-Landscapes: Expressions of Temporal Consciousness, New Abstractions in Photography
(last edited: 2015)
author(s): Jason Engelund
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Artist Jason Engelund approaches photography by addressing psychological frameworks of different world-time views, and shifts in perceptions of time during individual events. The notion of a “visual time signature” is proposed, a phrase to describe types of temporal consciousness, incorporating cultural and individual time perception as they relate to cognition, experience, and image. Expressions of the “meta-landscape” encompassing both the psychological landscape and actual landscape are pictured and discussed.
The intention of this research is to investigate how interaction designers may explore felt time through the culinary practice of sourdough baking. In this exposition we share how the physical experience and manipulation/shaping of time in sourdough baking provides an experience of fulfillment and satisfaction. We show our insights on how interaction designers, and possibly many other communities of practice and discourse, may learn from this. The goal is to inspire the audience to engage in a broad and critical discourse around felt time and to emphasize the value of prototyping a felt time repertoire in interaction design. The research exploration is built on the collaboration between an interaction designer/researcher, a culinary connoisseur baker and a sculptor/design researcher and teacher.open exposition comments (0)
BC Time-Slip (The Empire Never Ended) is the first phase of a long-term artistic research project called The Skullcracker Suite. Taking its name from Philip K. Dick's 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip, the project uses the story of Dick's visit to Vancouver in 1972, and his stay at a rehab clinic for First Nations ex-cons, as a pretext to investigate the cultural politics of decolonization in British Columbia since the 1960's from ethnographic, Indigenous and science fictional perspectives, with a specific focus on the potlatch culture of the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples of the Pacific Northwest.open exposition comments (0)
Artist Jason Engelund approaches photography by addressing psychological frameworks of different world-time views, and shifts in perceptions of time during individual events. The notion of a “visual time signature” is proposed, a phrase to describe types of temporal consciousness, incorporating cultural and individual time perception as they relate to cognition, experience, and image. Expressions of the “meta-landscape” encompassing both the psychological landscape and actual landscape are pictured and discussed.open exposition comments (0)