Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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HUB is a peer-reviewed and open-access research journal for reporting on arts, design, and performing arts. It has an international scope with a particular emphasis on practitioner methodologies and the educational impact of artistic research.

HUB's aims are two-fold: to promote a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas to foster new forms of inquiry and documentation of artistic research; to stimulate the debate surrounding the social, cultural, and technological frames of art and design practices.

HUB is published twice a year by i2ADS – Research Institute in Art, Design and Society (University of Porto, Portugal) with the support of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

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Read the Submissions Guidelines for more information.

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  4. HUB Issue #4 / Spring 2025 / Varia This issue of HUB brings together diverse perspectives under the second Varia, showcasing artistic research-based contributions that reflect on contemporary art, design, and society from multiple angles.
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  3. HUB Issue #3 / Autumn 2024 / Metabolic Media The essays and expositions in this issue of HUB delve into the concept of metabolic media, exploring the interconnections between biological, technological, cultural, and ecological systems. Guest Co-editors Louise Carver & Jamie Allen.
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  2. HUB Issue #2 / Spring 2024 / Varia This issue marks the first year of HUB, which continues to develop work along the lines of artistic research, focusing its attention on multiple creative practices and the transversality of the processes explored.
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  1. HUB Issue #1 / Autumn 2023 / Distance For this Autumn issue of HUB, we present a collection of works that results from the interest in broadening the understanding of DISTANCE after our first open call process for Artists, Designers, and Researchers in Art, Design and Society.
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  0. HUB Special Issue — Issue #0 / Spring 2023 The first inaugural issue we feature the contributions from invited researchers, relevant within a wide range of areas, reflecting on relevant or emerging topics of research and development within the Arts and Design.

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  Assembling Hanoi: Metamorphosis of Photographic Images (2025) author(s): Lorena Bañares published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  Interested in how photographs are constituted, this exposition situates itself in between materialities of photography to discover how photographs are actualized. Using photography as artistic research practice, it uncovers how matters, sounds, bodies, and machines intra-act within the practice of photography. The inquiry challenges the bifurcation between the outside/inside of the frame, rather it emphasizes its fluid nature. It delves into the cosmogenesis of a photograph exploring the multiple folds and transformations in actualizing a photograph revealing the intricate and dynamic assemblages of humans and non-humans from the outside folding with the inside. Thinking with Gilles Deleuze's concept of the Folds, the exposition was able to surface layers upon layers of bodily and material folds that trouble the traditional notion of photographs as images separated from the outside. In the middle of its messiness, the exposition was able to develop an Applique technique as a method of knowing that emerges from this artistic research practice. What came out are layers of images that describe photography as performative movement of matters and bodies, a metamorphosis of infinite images while navigating the rich culture of Vietnam’s Hanoi capital.
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  The Black Triangle—Commoning Borderland Coal Ecologies (2024) author(s): Caroline Ektander, Carlina Rossee, Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Alexandra Toland published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  Turów is an active open-pit brown coal mine located in the ‘Black Triangle’—a once sensationally polluted industrial region in Central Europe roughly contiguous with the brown-coal belt of Southern Poland, former East Germany and the Czech Republic. The mine, which fell into Polish jurisdiction after the fall of the Soviet Union, epitomises a transnational environmental conflict. Despite the encroaching effects of the Turów mine on its neighbouring European states and its inhabitants, the Polish government refuses to stop coal extraction. The dispute has generated a lot of media and activist attention in past years, but also raises eminent questions about how to make sense of the complexities and contradictions entangled with various regimes of energy. As the human faculties are poorly trained to register and to think meaningfully about the timescales of extraction and its distributed effects, this contribution comes as an invitation to experience energy entanglements otherwise. Challenging the flatness of the common dispute as portrayed in the media, we focus attention on the undercurrents flowing beneath the logics of public discourses about ‘clean’ and ‘green’ transitions and open pathways to sense metabolic flows of energy that permeate and shapeshift in environmental media—over time and space—and ultimately become us. To help us on the way, we ferment vegetables and drink nettle tea sourced from the mining region as a collective, metabolic practice. We add salt to slow down the passing of time. We conserve, observe and finally ingest to highlight the porosity and intimacy of geo-social relations and viscerally process their toxic commonalities.
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  Guilty Pleasures: Immersive Art for the Oral Cavity (2024) author(s): Luke Franzke, Johannes Lucian Reck published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  This paper examines emerging theories of perception and their relation to metabolic processes and presents the interactive installation Guilty Pleasures, informed by these theoretical principles. The metabolic nature of perception is particularly apparent in the experiences relating to the oral cavity, and this work explores this through an intra-oral electronic interface, combined with other modalities for enacting illusory sensations of eating, together with the exploration of the phenomenology of craving and the pica condition.
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  When GPT Digested the Medium Hélène Smith (2024) author(s): Katerina Undo published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  Exploring synergies between the study of the medium Hélène Smith at the turn of the 20th century and contemporary notions of subjectivity, artificiality and intelligence in the age of AI, the question of locating intelligence will not be a question with a binary answer in this paper. It will be shifted to multiple sites in an assimilative assemblage, exploring how identification might work from a rather metabolic side of the conversation. Weaving a thinking continuum on the evolving human-machine complexes beyond circular debates, Hélène Smith's ambiguous Martian writings are fed into GPT; an act intended as a metaphor and method for overcoming our binary contradiction of intelligence as either “natural” or “artificial”, ultimately generating new subjectivities, fluid variables or even contradictory insights. In this context, a meditation with speculative moments is attempted through human-machine inter-written texts, enacted through inter-twined speeches that reciprocally represent and interpret their own transitive nature.
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  Metabolic Drawings – Or: Drawing metabolic (2024) author(s): Teresa Mayr published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) is considered a pioneer of abstract painting. However, she herself hardly saw her artistic works as products or opus, but rather as a coherent system. Accordingly, the contribution presents and unfolds af Klint's paintings as an alternative version of modernism, an ecosystem or digestive system. This also takes up the mediumistic origin of the paintings: af Klint visualises transcendental messages. Looking forward and seeking out new possibilities (Bashkoff, 2018), she paints for a future that she perceives clairvoyantly. In text and images, the piece "Metabolic Drawings – Or: Drawing metabolic" develops a speculative landscape that follows the images and convictions of Hilma af Klint: Historical facts are interwoven with pictorial descriptions and culminate in a utopian or dystopian future. Theoretical approaches from Queer Studies and Speculative Feminism are adopted to critically question the reception of af Klint's paintings and of herself. In a way, the essay can be seen as a digestion of digestion.
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  Breathing with Phytoplankton: Exploring Metabolic Connections with Oceanic Microbes (2024) author(s): Anthea Oestreicher published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  This paper presents an exploration of the interconnectedness between vital metabolic processes of human respiration and phytoplankton photosynthesis. By weaving together ecological sciences with cultural anthropology, eco-feminism, environmental humanities, and artistic practices the paper delves into the intricate metabolic interplay between phytoplankton and humans. Grounded in the notion of "breathing-with," it navigates through physiological, biological, and sensorial dimensions to elucidate the profound connections between respiration and photosynthesis as metabolic media, fostering alliances in multispecies encounters. Drawing inspiration from the biological laboratory and the microscopic realm of chlorophyll-bearing organisms, the transformative power of photosynthesis in shaping the planetary atmosphere and sustaining life is highlighted. While underscoring the pivotal role of phytoplankton in oxygen production and carbon dioxide sequestration, it elucidates the challenges and synergistic impacts of oceanic oxygen depletion driven by anthropogenic activities. Beyond a mere metabolic function, breath emerges as a metaphorical interface for collective action and co-conspiracy, transcending boundaries between human and non-human entities. As such it advocates for a deeper engagement with planetary ecologies and a reimagining of our relationality with the more-than-human world. Through artistic inquiry and experimental methods, the paper invites readers to reflect on the profound implications of our interconnectedness with phytoplankton, urging a renewed commitment to symbiotic coexistence. In this sense, the act of breathing goes beyond its metabolic function, extending as a form of collective agency in confronting the challenges of an ever-changing world.
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