Research Catalogue

This exposition presents the audio recordings produced within the ESP Duos project, a series of remote improvisations performed by long-term collaborators under conditions of complete acoustic and visual separation. Each duo was recorded simultaneously in isolated spaces, without any form of real-time interaction, and later combined into a single auditory perspective available only to the listener. Rather than testing whether musical interaction can be sustained at a distance, the project explores how residual traces of collaboration continue to shape improvisatory behavior when the other performer is imagined rather than perceived. The recordings foreground imagined co-presence as an enacted orientation grounded in embodied memory, shared history, and relational expectation. As artistic outputs, the ESP Duos invite listening not for coordination or synchronization, but for emergent coherence arising from contingency, alignment, divergence, and retrospective sense-making. The exposition situates these recordings as both documents of a research process and autonomous aesthetic artifacts, offering access to a mode of togetherness that persists beyond physical co-presence.

Art activism is powerful. Also known as activist art, protest art, visual activism, artivism and creative activism, it changes lives, situations and is and has been a powerful weapon across a whole spectrum of struggles for justice. Teresa Sanz & Beatriz Rodriguez-Labajos(2021) relay that art activism has the unique ability to bring cohesion and diverse peoples together and it can, as Zeynep Tufekci notes, change the participants (2017). As Steve Duncombe & Steve Lambert (2021) posit, traditional protesting such as marches or squats are no longer as important as they once were. As a result of my own lived experience in activist activities, I very much agree with Andrew Boyd & Dave Oswald Mitchell (2012) that the reason people use art activism is that it works, by enriching and improving protest. In the past, when I lived in a metropolis and was not a parent, I used to be an activist. Now I no longer have immediate access to international headquarters at which to protest and I have to be concerned with being arrested, I am hindered from protesting. This project is an attempt to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism. By devising methods which include at least one of the following: that do not require on-site participation, that can take place outside the public gaze, that reduce the risk of arrest, that open up protest sites that are not “big targets”, that include remote locations, that involve irregular timing, my thesis aims to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism to those who are underserved by more mainstream methods of conducting art activism. Textiles have unique properties that enable them to engage in subterfuge and speak loudly through care and thought(Bryan-Wilson, 2017). They have strong connotations of domesticity, the body and comfort that can be subverted within art activism to reference lack of this domestic warmth and protection(O’Neill, 2022). Being a slow form of art-making, they show care and thought, attention in the making, so that the messaging is reinforced through this intentionality in slow making.

WAP/Walking As Practice Program takes place where the forest meets the sea in the Northern Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden. It is a program for self-identifying walking artists. Exploring and sharing strategies for proximity through artistic expressions in the field of walking practices, creating a transformative, dynamic space for art that engages with life and nature. This involves critical and poetic explorations influenced by the immediate surroundings. We participate in each other’s walkshops or interventions, and we also host Share Sessions to familiarize ourselves with each other’s practices. Additionally, we introduce the Research Catalogue for final dissemination, where each artist create their individual exposition.

The research is based on personal experiences of working as a director and creator in the field of participatory performance. It raises questions about how the specific conditions of the field, where authenticity, presence, and relationality often are prominent aesthetic values, can influence the role of the director and the interaction between director and performer. Furthermore, the project examines how an artistic practice situated in this field and shaped in relation to these values is challenged and conflicted by the shifting and sometimes conflicting management cultures that exist in contemporary performing arts. The project consists of seven documented artistic projects, a reflective lyrical essay, and a summary of methods, all of which examine weakness as a cultural taboo and a potential path to artistic, professional and personal liberation in different ways.

Author: Dorian Vale Affiliation: Museum of One — Registered Archive and Independent Research Institute for Contemporary Aesthetics Museum of One|Written at the Threshold Abstract This essay argues that Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC), through its diagnostic indices, represents the completion of a philosophical project initiated by Edmund Husserl and refined through Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience. Where Husserl sought to unite mathematical rigor with phenomenological inquiry but lacked a suitable domain, and where Dufrenne applied phenomenology to aesthetics but remained purely descriptive, PIC operationalizes their insights through measurable linguistic behavior. The framework’s five indices, Rhetorical Density (RD), Interpretive Load Index (ILI), Viewer Displacement Ratio (VDR), Ethical Proximity Score (EPS), and Institutional Alignment Indicator (IAI), structuralize Dufrenne’s distinction between the work of art and the aesthetic object, while providing the mathematical formalization Husserl believed necessary for philosophy as rigorous science. This essay traces the intellectual lineage from Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology through Dufrenne’s aesthetic application to PIC’s diagnostic formalization, demonstrating how the indices measure whether criticism honors or violates the phenomenological structure of aesthetic encounter. Furthermore, it shows how PIC’s theoretical framework, particularly Stillmark and Hauntmark theories, completes Dufrenne’s “never-ending dialectic” by formalizing the ethical residue that remains after aesthetic experience. This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and Art as Truth: A Treatise (Q136329071), Aesthetic Recursion Theory (Q136339843), The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (Q136530009), Canon of Witnesses (Q136565881),Interpretive Load Index (ILI) (Q137709526), Viewer Displacement Ratio (VDR) (Q137709583) , Ethical Proximity Score (EPS) (Q137709600) , Institutional Alignment Indicator (IAI) (Q137709608), Post-Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Q137711946) Dorian Vale is a chosen pseudonym, not to obscure identity, but to preserve clarity of voice and integrity of message. It creates distance between the writer and the work, allowing the philosophy to stand unclouded by biography. The name exists not to hide, but to honor the seriousness of the task: to speak without spectacle, and to build without needing to be seen. This name is used for all official publications, essays, and theoretical works indexed through DOI-linked repositories including Zenodo, OSF, PhilPapers, and SSRN.

This exposition presents a practice-based research investigation into pattern formation using ASCII and Unicode character systems as primary visual material. Working exclusively within live text environments, the project explores how complex visual and architectural structures emerge from rule-based constraints, repetition, and minimal computational resources. Treating text not as language but as material, the work examines generative logic, duration, and modularity as foundations for sustainable, post-material visual research.