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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

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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

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  En egen trykkpresse (2020) author(s): Ane Thon Knutsen published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  A Printing Press of One’s Own (En egen trykkpresse) is a practical examination of the relationship between art and technique, hand and spirit, thought and printing ink. The project came out of an interest in the printed medium in a digital age. Book printing has been the dominant technology for setting and mass reproducing of the printed word from when Gutenberg popularized the technique in the 1450s, and until well into the 20th century. Thon Knutsen set out to search for a professional position which allowed her to combine an artistic approach to typography and graphic form with her technical insight and historical knowledge of book printing. She found Virginia Woolf. The canonised modernist author and the feminist icon worked in parallel with both her writing as artistic practice and as typesetter and printer in her own private printing press. Through in-depth close reading of Woolf's authorship, seen through the first-hand experience as typesetter and printer, Thon Knutsen has found new ways to read Woolf, and a direction for her own artistic and research-based practice. Thon Knutsen has recreated the short story that Woolf printed in her debut, The Mark on the Wall, in its whole, but with a new aesthetic appearance. She has done this with a method that Thon Knutsen claims must have been used by Woolf; the thought and the writing must have been influenced by the experience of setting and printing as a pendulum between the spirit that writes and the hand that sets.
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  Reclamation : Exposing Coal Seams and Appalachian Fatalism with Digital Apparatuses (2020) author(s): Ernie Roby-Tomic published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  The mountainous geography of Appalachia has been shaped by the coal industry since the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era of the United States. Mountaintop Removal (MTR) is a controversial and highly destructive surface-mining method flattening the mountains of Appalachian since the 1970s. The rise in massive energy consumption correlated to consumer electronics, automation, and technocratic neoliberalism have irrevocably flattened the surface and culture of Appalachia. Reclamation is the final act in MTR mining in which the mine operator is obligated to ecologically restore the land. Where MTR sites were once hidden away, and even photographing them is considered an act of trespassing, today I can bear witness to the destruction of the mountain topology by connecting to Google's Earth (not to be confused with earth-Earth). Despite the remote locations and inaccessibility of the sites, the data is particularly rich due to the economical advantages of mapping the region for the coal industry. In this exposition, I make my own reclamation as one in the generation born after the boom of coal production and its inevitable decline. I am reclaiming the 3D geospatial data of MTR and mining disaster sites, extracted from the servers of Google Earth. I recontextualize these geospatial assets to compose a visual prosopography of those surfaces.
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  Aural Transposition, Psychogeography and the Ephemeral World (2020) author(s): Katt Hernandez published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  Aural transposition sits at a crossroads between being a tool for practice and creating work, and being a tool that illuminates aspects of another entity. In day-to-day music practice, transposition can be an age-old tool for learning material, or a multi-layered exploration of an object or place. Transposition can also be a means of recreating places, real or imagined, through the transposition of ghost traces back into sound. And the transposition of spaces onto other spaces is possible through multichannel sound arrays. The territory for re-imagining both sound and place lies in the impossible space between the sounding entity at hand and the instrument that transposes it. Just as in the dérive of psychogeography, the spaces between well-trod paths leads to a world beyond the banal. This exposition first situates these practices in psychogeography, and amongst other artists whose work utilizes various transposition, soundwalking or psychogeographical practices. It then discusses those aspects of my own artistic practice and work—across a spectrum of electroacoustic music, improvised violin work and collaborative composition for an ensemble of mechanical string instruments— that are centered around aural transposition as an act of psychogeography.
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  Radical Inside (2020) author(s): Palle Torsson published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
  The goal of this work and of my research is to broaden our understanding of contemporary creative conditions in relation to how technologically constructed systems enable cultural production. The work explores specific systems and pushes the limits of their intended use. In the process, I also hope to reveal the relationship between digital systems and transformative subjects. The work Radical Inside explores 3D models from the largest sharing platform for 3D content. A multiplicity of possibilities opens up as a shift in camera perspective reveals the internal structure of the 3D models. The reorientation points to criticism of how society is structured and imagined by the heteronormative gaze. The unusual angle displaces the normative placement of the model within a reduced and rigid system - the taxonomy and categorization of the platform. From within, I can highlight and explore technology as a fundamentally surreal and queer possibility.
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  Verktøy som materiale (2020) author(s): Øyvind Brandtsegg published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  In this exposition I wish to point to a type of artistic research evolving around development of technology as artistic material, as an extension to the condition of possibility for an artistic expression. The well known distinction between research *for* and research *in* the arts, in my opinion becomes blurred in these type of works. Those tools developed to facilitate the artistic exploration constitute the base material for the artist, and the development of these tools are an intrinsic part of the artistic process. The examples are shown as recorded sound and video, and the technological material is thus still hidden from the reader. They can not see the material itself, just the traces it leaves. I would argue that the artistic process here starts with the investigation of potential, guiding the development of tools, and the tools will have certain affordances correlating with some aspects of the original artistic spark (desire). The artistic process of exploring said affordances will also in many cases lead to unexpected outcomes, in the interaction between human and machine, artist and tool
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  Playing against the camera (2020) author(s): Erik Friis Reitan published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  In this essay I describe two projects within the field of visual art. Both works are examples of how the workflow techniques of digital photography can be modified in order to produce artworks that take on a distinct physicality and objecthood, and, as such, may form a spatial and/or haptic relation with the viewer. I discuss how such an approach relates to the ability of photography to point beyond the physical situation of viewing due to the particular virtuality of the photograph. By relating my work to the ideas of Vilém Flusser and Roland Barthes, recent theory on photography and photographic indexicality, as well as contemporary artistic work, I speculate here on how my own work illuminates perceptions of the photograph and understandings of the role of photography in today’s media culture and economy.
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