VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research

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VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Visit VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research:
visjournal.nu
VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research is a digital journal presenting artistic research, emphasising the importance of reflection that is interwoven with artistic practice, thereby generating new knowledge. VIS is an open-access publication and uses the Research Catalogue publishing platform for its submission and peer-reviewing processes, as well as for its final publication. It has adopted an approach to peer-reviewing in which, rather than the process being blind, a dialogue is established between author(s) and peer-reviewer.
VIS holds an open call for every issue. Up to seven expositions are selected by the Editorial Committee for further peer-review. Submissions in the Scandinavian languages are actively encouraged, but VIS is also open to contributions in English. Following the appearance of its inaugural Issue 0 in spring 2018, VIS has produced two issues in every subsequent year.
The journal is the result of a cooperation between Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH) and the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills).
The Steering Committee for VIS
Ellen J Røed
, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor, Stockholm University of the Arts
Paula Crabtree, Vice-Chancellor, Stockholm University of the Arts
Anne Gry Haugland, Board member at The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills)
Ann Kroon, Active Director of the Research Office, Stockholm University of the Arts
Morten Schjelderup Wensberg, Chairman, The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills)
Geir Ivar Strøm, Policy director, The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills)
Editorial Committee for VIS
Tale Næss, Dramaturg, playwright and author
Magnus Bärtås, Vice-Rector of Research, University of Arts, Crafts and Design
Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen, Artist
Michael Francis Duch
, Musician, professor, and Deputy Head of Research at NTNU – Department of Music.
Behzad Khosravi Noori, Assistant Professor of Practice, Communication and Design at School Of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, Habib University
Eliot Mmantidi Moleba, Research fellow at The Oslo National Academy of the Arts, KHiO
Cecilia Roos, Vice Rector of Research, Stockholm University of the Arts
Contact:
visjournal@uniarts.se
contact person(s):
Heidi Möller 
url:
http://www.visjournal.nu
Recent Issues
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14. VIS Issue 14
VIS Issue 14 was published on 21 October 2025. The issue features eight expositions within the theme “The Heart of the Experiment (and the art of failure)”. Editor: Michael Duch. Co-editor: Tale Næss.
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13. VIS Issue 13
VIS Issue 13 was published on 18 March 2025. The issue features six expositions within the theme “Brieftopia”. Editor: Behzad Khosravi Noori.
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12. VIS Issue 12
VIS Issue 12 was published on 23 October 2024. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “Contemporary Ar(t)chaeology: A dead-alive of Artistic Re-search and History”. Editors: Behzad Khosravi Noori and Magnus Bärtås.
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11. VIS Issue 11
VIS Issue 11 was published on 2 April 2024. The issue features six expositions within the theme “Play, come what may”. Editors: Cecilia Roos and Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen.
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10. VIS Issue 10
VIS Issue 10 was published on 20 October 2023. The issue features six expositions and a recorded conversation within the theme “Circulating Practices”. Editors: Cecilia Roos and Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen.
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9. VIS Issue 9
VIS Issue 9 was published on 14 March 2023. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “of Memory and Public Space”. Editors: Serge von Arx and Eliot Moleba.
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8. VIS Issue 8
VIS Issue 8 was published 18 November 2022. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “of Rules and Alternatives”. Editors: Serge von Arx and Eliot Moleba.
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7. VIS Issue 7
VIS Issue 7 was published 14 March 2022. The issue features five expositions within the theme “Metamorphoses – Tales of the Ever-Changing”. Editor: Anna Lindal.
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6. VIS Issue 6
VIS Issue 6 was published 19 October 2021. The issue features five expositions within the theme “Contagion”. Editor: Anna Lindal.
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5. VIS Issue 5
VIS Issue 5 was published 15 March 2021. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “One more time, let's do it again!”. Editor: Trond Lossius.
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4. VIS Issue 4
VIS Issue 4 was published 14 October 2020. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “Affecting material and technique”. Editor: Trond Lossius.
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3. VIS Issue 3
VIS Issue 3 was published 1 March 2020. The issue features eight expositions within the theme “History Now”. Editor: Magnus Bärtås.
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2. VIS Issue 2
VIS Issue 2 was published 23 September 2019. The Issue features five expositions within the theme ”Estrangement”. Editor: Magnus Bärtås.
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1. VIS Issue 1
Risk – and associated topics such as vulnerability, unguardedness, precariousness, failure and uncanniness – are frequently raised as concerns within artistic research arenas. VIS # 1 – Risk in Artistic Research – jeopardy or validation? moves through more artistically-stylised accounts of ‘danger’ towards the more hopeful linkage of risk with discovery and the reconfiguring of the imagination.
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0. VIS Issue 0
Issue 0 features eight expositions created by researchers within the arts. Every contributor has been carefully chosen and invited by the Editorial Committee, with the view of presenting best practice within the field of artistic research.
The expositions have gone through a dialogue-based peer-review which is something that the Editorial Committee would like to continue to develop in the coming issues, a process intended to be significant for VIS.
Every exposition is presented on the VIS webpage and has an editorial text that explains why the contributor was chosen. The actual exposition itself, on the other hand, will be found in the database of the Research Catalogue. The expositions have their own designs and explore widely different topics, depending upon how each researcher has chosen to work within the offered format.
The Editorial Committee would like to thank all the contributors for their inspiring work which sets the tone admirably for what we hope will follow.
Editorial Committee: Cecilia Roos, Serge von Arx, Anna Lindal, Mia Engberg, Trond Lossius, Magnus Bärtås och Darla Crispin
Recent Activities
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Piskan ställningen
(2021)
author(s): Livia Prawitz
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
The courtyard, laundry room, and areas for beating carpets are collective facilities in the private sphere of the home. In Stockholm you can find carpet hangers in connection to many apartment blocks even though they are very seldom used nowadays. The act of whipping carpets is an act that aims to get rid of the dirt – the remnants of life. Cleaning is a repetitive work, where something needs to be done over and over again without it producing something new.
The project Piskan ställningen consists of an essay, sound pieces, and sketches in different materials and is divided into three parts; the one who beats, the beater itself, and that which constitutes a stand for the beating. The various associations to the carpet hanger and the carpet beater form the basis of the project that centres around questions concerning repetition and productivity, place and time, the boundary between the public and the domestic sphere, and how dangerous the pursuit of alleged purity, hygiene, science, and light can be. Through text, sound and images, personal and collective memories, and the object's associations regarding reproductive labour, city planning, violence, the welfare project, and childish games are intertwined.
The material also contains other associations to control and power – with the whip as a means of threat and punishment, and an exploration of different forms of emptiness in relation to architecture, social structures, and mental space. Through a younger and an elderly woman's narrative voice, we follow an associative thought chain that interweaves the public, the domestic, and a bodily sphere. The setting is a society where she comes home from work to yet another form of monotonous routines, where cars get burned down, and tables are placed under vases, whilst someone has been digging a hole down in the city.
Through sketches in different materials, I approach the carpet beater by exploring its shape. My attempts to repeat the knots lead to a series of variations on the memory of whips where mistakes constitute the basis of new forms. In the project repetition and variations in sound, text, and drawing becomes another way of approaching repetitive work
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Naturfilm
(2021)
author(s): Elisa Rossholm, Anna Sofia Rossholm
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
’Naturfilm’ (nature film) consist of three image based essays that reflect on the relation between mankind and nature in Swedish classical nature documentaries, and also on modernity’s negotiation of the separation of nature and human culture by large. The essays include reflections on landscape, natural resources, species and gender relations, indigenous cultures and media materiality. The essays combine images and voice-over, more specifically a series of drawings of still images from existing film footage combined with fragmentary reflections on the images as media inscription and representation.
The essays are media transformations of existing Swedish documentary films from the peak of the classical era, namely from the late 1930s until the early 1950s. In an ecological context, this period represents what is labeled ‘the great acceleration’, an increased exploitation of natural resources, and to some extent an intensified separation of nature and human activities.
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Beyond the Saturation Point
(2021)
author(s): Annette Arlander
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Why does one continue beyond the saturation point? This bilingual exposition discusses repetition and difference while performing with trees, and uses as an example the video Year of the Pig with a Tatarian Maple performed in Nobelparken in Stockholm during 2019 as part of the project Performing with Plants at Stockholm University of the Arts. The exposition consists of a brief version of the video, documentation of the working process, and an essay with references. The aim is to show how repetition produces small (and big) differences and therefore makes a difference. And how it in this case led to a new project, Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees.
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Reiterate, rerun, repeat
(2021)
author(s): Michael Duch, Jeremy Welsh
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Repetition plays a central role in many musical styles and genres. Repetition, rhythm and patterns also play an important part in the visual arts. Here we will show, examine and discuss repetition as a method and main musical element, as well as their correlation with moving images, in a series of audio-visual works we have been working on together since 2016.
Accumulator is one such project and will be the main focus here, where not only repetition, rhythm and patterns appear as musical and visual elements, but is used as an artistic method in itself when repeating performances of a similar material, documenting each one of them and adding the individual performances as layers creating a dense audio-visual orchestral solo performance.
As well as temporal repetition, Accumulator repeats in the spatial dimension, where the staging of a performance features the live performer multiplied, as he is accompanied by pre-recorded video images of himself. According to the spatial characteristics of the given performance space, this repetition of the performer may be frontal / two dimensional, or may extend across several surfaces, creating a surround projection in which the live performer is contained.
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Minuting. Rethinking the Ordinary Through the Ritual of Transversal Listening
(2021)
author(s): Jacek Smolicki
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exploratory essay introduces selected sound recordings along with notes and observations from Minuting – a practice of sonic journaling I have performed daily since July 2010 in numerous locations and settings. I weave these observations together in a way that resonates closely with the idea of repetition, in multiple forms: protest, automation, cycle, and ritual, as well as the repetition inherent to my acts of recording. While introducing sounds from the archive of Minuting, I reflect on how this constrained and systematically enacted form of listening, recording, and re-listening leads to a transversal type of sonic reflexivity. It is a form of alertness to sound that stretches beyond the immediate resonance of the 'now' – towards spatially and temporarily distant, yet to some extent intertwined, objects, subjects, events, and environments. The text evolves across three interrelated layers: annotated recordings from the project's archive, a set of thoughts and associations triggered by re-listening to the material, and a discursive analysis that opens up the project to a dialogue with other thematically resonant debates and practices. Drawing on perspectives from media studies, the philosophy of technology, sound studies and durational art, I discuss Minuting as an art work, a creative constraint and a transversal listening practice. Lastly, I propose it as an existential media technique for composing critical and reflective positions towards one's surrounding space, experience of time, and use of sound technologies.
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BODY FRAGMENTED - temporal expressions
(2020)
author(s): Linnea Bågander
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In response to digital technology, new methods, thinking and aesthetics have emerged that challenge the way we design. In particular, the extraction of movement introduced by motion-capture technology propose a design process wherein the motion rather than the form is used as a material in a design process. In such a process the motion is extracted form a defined set of points that creates a digital representation. In this exposition, the strategies utilized when capturing a motion is translated into the process of garment making with the purpose to challenge bodily aesthetics through dress.
Practically, this exposition builds on two independent studies with the shared aim to define parameters for transformations of the moving body’s expression applied to a garment making process. Yet, the transformation is approached from two perspectives; the first study is non-material and borrows theory and references from the field of dance and motion capturing technology. It maps the body as a point-based system based on the body as a moving form and pin-points body functions that affect these points. This part serves as a foundation for the second study that adds material aspects, in particular, it maps material parameters that relate to how the material is arranged in relation to these points.
In conclusion, strategies of extraction of movement as attachments and the scale of fragmentation of materials are considered the main contribution to the garment making process. As it proposes a new usage of movement, the work has implications for fashion design, costume design but also other body movement-based mediums as it is about the expression of body movement and not just the body as a form.