Research Catalogue

This auto ethnographical research deals with the question how can elements of jazz and maqamat be deeply merged to create new hybrid musical outcomes?. The fieldwork for this research moves between different countries and cultures in a search for understanding this phenomena, The data collected and reflected on include observations, interviews and personal experience as a jazz and ethnic singer, composer and band leader working with musicians from diverse cultures. In addition to original compositions and arrangements trying to find the new meeting point between the two genres of music. I invite you to join me on my journey of discovery.

Brass Art work with scanning technologies such as 3D (Lidar) and 4D (Kinect on-range sensors) to capture collaborative performances in unusual settings. The research foregrounds Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness as a performative method to record the artists’ presence in her Writing Room (Rodmell, UK). The project necessitated a great deal of care as the tiny museum space is usually viewed from behind glass, by the public. Brass Art captured the dynamics of this threshold space without leaving a physical trace. In daring to progress their experimental performative approach using ‘colour filters’ to disrupt the binary shadow realm and exploring the future potential of virtual reality - Brass Art aim to bring this muselogical setting alive for new audiences.

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Out of the struggle of dancers and performers in general to pursue artistic collaboration amidst social distancing restrictions, a particular kind of network artistic practice seems to be nevertheless flourishing; one that relies on webcamsas windows into a shared collaborative space. As part of the ongoing artistic research project Social d[ist]ancing, participants are encouraged to create choreomusical works that delve into the idiosyncrasy of the webcam language, using only freely available tools for networked collaboration. Beyond exploring the aesthetics of this particular medium, the presented case studies also reveal a transformative process that requires artists to re-examine the fundamental conditions for group creativity and artistic collaboration.

Saxophonist Joel Diegert and composer Adrián Artacho began a collaboration in 2014 with a question about real-time electronics in contemporary music: what kind of works could be produced if the electronics were treated as a ‘part of’ the saxophone? In this presentation they look at the composer-performer relationship with a particular interest in projects that employ real-time electronics. They will describe some of the challenges that can arise in co-creative work and offer strategies for collaboration that center on the idea of ‘overlapping competencies’. The work aubiome for soprano saxophone and live electronics, which was developed during Joel’s doctoral research, will be referenced as a case study.

A telematic performance of a simulated Pen and Paper Quartet. Delay chains of both audio and video, as well as, three approaches to work with dynamics are used as main parameters in this digitally mediated live music performance. Part of an artistic research project by Anders Lind at Umeå University in Sweden.

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Art project using research and cross-disciplinary work, applied to contexts in transition and defined by asymmetries, in which ways of living, locations or activities are the result of instability, transience or fragility, circumstances which at the same time demand projects which open up to change these situations. ASYMMETRIES is founded upon applied research, and will attempt to generate projects based on methodologies combining the analysis of spaces with proposals which incorporate structures, components and various agents working to resolve them. This presentation introduces the artistic research carried out in collaboration with social groups in the Ciutat Vella district of the city of Barcelona and that has taken the name of Asymmetries-Abecedarium (2019).

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The 12th SAR Conference on Artistic Research of the Society for Artistic Research in 2021 was hosted by mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. It was oriented on the three attractors "care", "dare" and "share" and was the first SAR conference to be organized as a live online event. The online format also reached out in order to facilitate participation by individuals from new geographical regions and invited artistic researchers to share their work, processes, methods, discoveries, knowledge interventions, new insights, and understandings and to engage in exchange—in actions and words, and in ways complex and simple, conventional and unconventional, robust and fragile.
A selection of conference contributions has been assembled for documentation in this roof exposition managed by Jonas Howden Sjøvaag.

What happens to queer community, bodily expression & identity when queer spaces are closed & communities move online? This workshop critically reflects on, & invites participation in, the collaborative project Bois of Isolation: An Instagram platform for people of marginalised genders to share selfies of their spaces & processes of queering gender binaries in the pandemic. The project uses hashtag commons & selfies to challenge the hegemonic visual culture social media can perpetuate: Binarised gender stereotypes, exclusion of bodies deemed ‘other’, & hierarchies of value in which white, able-bodied, heterosexual, young & ‘healthy’ are supreme. Bois of Isolation contributes to communal aesthetic spaces in which bodily & gender plurality & fluidity are expressed & celebrated.

Your morning routine probably consists of waking up, heading to the loo, washing your hands, face, and teeth, then proceeding to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. You’ll repeat this routine tomorrow but this time, I invite you to perform blindfolded.

Today's situation can be characterised as the result of growing entanglement, simultaneity and proximity within a networked world. At the same time, global instabilities demand new practices of sharing responsibilities. While the data economy stresses the need to interface, to connect, to make compatible, as artists-researchers we look for a new mode of working-together and thinking-with that resists becoming compatible. Individuals should take a respectful and careful distance to one another, and develop a common movement that results in artefacts and propositions that reflect this work process and can coexist in a simultaneous aesthetic experience. The idea of simultaneously relaying as the foundation of a new type of collaborative practice in artistic research for us is captured by the combination of a transformative practice of relaying as described by Isabelle Stengers, and a singularly plural conception of being devised by Jean-Luc Nancy. Relaying then is not seen as a succession of states, as a temporal transition from one to the other, but as suspended in a space of simultaneity, as an ongoing circulation. Presented at SAR Conference 2021.

Autoimmune diseases have become a global health problem, with rising numbers of people affected. But cause and genesis of these diseases are still unresolved, so finding new ways to understand the underlying processes is in demand. Aiming at a new conception of autoimmunity I developed a technique titled “Exercises in Existential Eccentricity” (EEE) within the framework of autoethnography and the biophilosophy of Helmuth Plessner. The EEE were designed to investigate autoimmunity in a practical and daring way by exposing the researcher in her vulnerability as being affected by a chronic autoimmune disease. The results are expected to expand our understanding of autoimmunity and provide new images to help people cope with autoimmune diseases.

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In June 2019 The Freestyle Orchestra, a collective of classical musicians, headlined at City Recital Hall in Sydney, performing two modern violin concertos to a full house — a feat in itself. Within the performance the ensemble — besides playing their instruments — tumbled, swung from rigging, danced, improvised, handbalanced and spat fire, collectively blurring the performance aesthetics of contemporary circus and classical music. This performance was the culmination and dissemination of their ongoing research process which pushes the physical and disciplinary limits of what classical musicians do, explores how to share the movement and aesthetic they perceive in some music with a broader audience, and questions how embodied knowledge transfers/translates across disciplines. Exposition made by Jonas Sjøvaag

Unearthing means to dig something up, to uncover it and bring it to light. It is a transitive verb, an archaeological action onto an object, often from the past; clearly, a method of artistic research. Through archival, fictional and performative examples, I propose Un·Earthing as a complimentary interpretation in relation to future life in outer space, akin to notions of un-learning or de-colonizing. Un·Earthing, used intransitive, is the transformational process humans have been starting to undergo since the Space Age by leaving Earth and at the same time, realizing our own planet’s importance for life, both human and non-human. Un·Earthing is triggered by the unknown, unprecedented distance & isolation, at same time it creates a new consciousness for caring and sharing.

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Mapping the Unseen investigated unseen, undiscussed topics - topics that are absent from public discourse, because of their implicit social taboo potential. The artistic research was carried out by means of mapping, encompassing performative interventions and an interactive archive. It was realised with artists and art groups in four countries: Croatia, Iran, Bangladesh and Austria. The research method was interwoven with transdisciplinary methods. Enabling a visualisation of the respective topics and generating dialogue through participatory processes were at the core of this project.

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An Ecology of Care provides a philosophical basis for developing practical and aesthetic ways to requalify and improve the experience of being-in-the-city. This experience involves the relationship with spatial boundaries that inform gestures in the urban environment, such as fences and walls or social and political limits; it also implies our being sensitive to temporal boundaries that tacitly shape our perception of the city, such as disposable architectures, working rhythms and natural cycles. In this video paper, we focus on a common performance-drawing project, carried out in two different cities: Helsinki and Porto. Through several actions, we pretend to challenge the dichotomy between human gestures and natural cycles and address the complexity of the relationships between spatial boundaries and the idiorhythm of walking in the city. Our project begins with the premise that the observation of gestures allows us to understand the way we exist in the world. Also, the re-enactment of those gestures in art practice allows us to understand, in an embodied way, the existential and social changes we are currently undertaking. In “Follow me”, a drawing performed on the fence surrounding the construction of the new KuvA (Helsinki), we problematise drawing as an act of care and relation, built upon idiorhythmic, embodied and communal gestures in a shared space. In “Insula Perdita” we re-enact the death of palm trees in the city of Porto and the inevitable natural cycles and changes that moulds the perception of the city as a frame and ecosystem. Both practices explore approaches to the Ecology of Care as a frame for artistic research, through the geographical concept of Throwntogetherness: to perform/draw as a responsive relationship between human and non-human (objects, plants, animals) to emphasize the interdependence between non-human and everyday life gestures in building the value of communality.

In their Paper Performance ‘Elastic Ekphrastic,’ Korsten & De Jong will test the translatability of an ‘original.’ They will explore what narrative is formed out of the context of instruments of translation. What is the agency of misunderstanding, misinterpreting and miscommunication? And if one translates, does one free a text from a fixed meaning or does one force the text in yet another prison of meaning? Korsten & De Jong conduct artistic research through recorded dialogues over the phone with bad connections and interruptions. After transcribing the dialogues, they combine different conversations, they switch position, manipulate the texts and translate them. They will attend the conference via a live conversation in a long distance call with Austrian interpreters that live outside of Austria. This paper performance also reflects on the current SARS-CoV-19 measures in which live communication is a dangerous action forcing the dialogue to take place behind plexiglass panels and computer screens. “If science attempts to understand the phenomena of the world, this understanding is communicable only when the world re-emerges through the scientist’s instruments – either through statistics, or formulae, or diagrams, or images. Thus, it can be argued that the world is presented after undergoing a treatment of translation. (12)”