Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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  21. Performing Artistic Research in Music – Performing Music in Artistic Research This issue of Ruukku explores the relationship between artistic research and the performance and presentation of music, asking what kind of music performance practices artistic research produces or enables.
• 20. Artivism Artivism
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  19. Making Artistic Research Public Making something public is intrinsic to both art making and artistic research. This issue of RUUKKU focuses on the variety of ways artistic research is made public and on the effect of published artworks and research on their immediate surroundings, neighborhoods or environments. The issue discusses the relevance of changes and traces that published artworks and artistic research leave in public space and vice versa. The call was opened for researchers and artists to ponder artistic research's relation to its publicity in its diversity.
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  18. Responsibility In this issue of RUUKKU, we are unpacking the notion of responsibility in/with/for arts and artistic research with five expositions and three voices. The RUUKKU issue Responsibility supplements the Art of Research VII conference organized on 3-4 December 2020 at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Finland.
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  17. Everyday Utopias and Artistic Research What kinds of perspectives can artistic research offer in seeking to cultivate political imagination and utopian thought? What kinds of tools and methods does it suggest for social action and thought? How do spaces, materiality and embodiment shape the practices of imagination? How can artistic research contribute to creating more ecologically and socially sustainable societies?
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  16. Working with Vegetal This, the 16th issue of Ruukku – Studies in Artistic Research, focuses on artists, researchers, scholars, and artistic researchers who are working with the vegetal in various ways. In the call we invited artists and researchers with an experience of working with plants and vegetation in different ways to contribute to this issue with expositions or articles, accounts of work in progress, and artistic experiments.
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  15. Slowness and Silence, Inertia and Tranquility The themes of this issue discuss the methodical, conceptual and practical connections of artistic research to slowness and silence, inertia and tranquility. What kinds of dimensions can silence or slowness open up and catalyse in artistic research? What might silence challenge, and what slowness? Depending on the perspective, slowness can either be worth pursuing or it can clearly refer to "retardation" or a lack (e.g. bureaucracy).
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  14. Ecologies of Practice This issue of RUUKKU has its starting point in the Research Pavilion #3 project that brought together more than fifty artist-researchers from twenty countries over a period of twenty months. The project started with an open call for "Research Cells" in April 2018 and evolved through a series of Research Cell Assemblies organised in Helsinki to an intensive period of activity in the context of the Venice Biennale.
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  13. Sonic Art, Sonic Practice, and Sonic Thought: Artistic Research and Music Sound is omnipresent, and we live, think, feel, and experience in and through sound every day. Sound studies have developed mainly in the disciplines of acoustics and music. The former defines sound as mechanical waves while the latter considers it as discrete sounds organised in time. Artistic Research offers us opportunities to study sound from a different perspective. How do we live, think, feel, and experience in and through sound as artistic practitioners? What constitutes such knowledge production, and how does this search for knowledge relate to the other modes of knowledge and experience often associated with ‘music'?
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  12. Peripheries RUUKKU #12 considers the conceptual, methodical, concrete and practical peripheries in the arts. This thematic issue ponders questions concerning what kinds of roles margins, peripheries or fringes have in the arts and artistic research? Can artistic research itself be conceived as a peripheral zone on the edge of the rationalistic scientific world?
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  11. How to do Things with Performance Welcome to this 11th issue of Ruukku - studies in artistic research devoted to performance and performance as research, and the question how to do things with performance. Not only what should be done, but how it should be done is today a question as relevant as ever. And some argue we should actually do less, and think a bit more, for example how we do what we do. In the research project How to do things with performance, we have been asking what can be or could be done with performance and how.
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  10. Catalyses Since its very beginning artistic research has openly or unconsciously deemed as its reason for existence the task of finding new ways of doing things; namely new ways of researching this world and new ways of understanding artistic practice. For many, artistic research could be defined as the amalgam of 'research' and 'artistic practice' reinventing and reconfiguring themselves in each other's shadow.
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  9. Practicing New Materialisms in the Arts This issue dedicates itself to the intersections of new materialist theory and artistic or practice-inspired research through a sustained conceptual focus on intra-action and via a wide variety of previously not presented projects. The distinctive main focus of the issue is the intra-active implementation of the notion of intra-action itself. Instead of taking this concept as a theoretical given, the issue's contributions aim to work with, enact, test, expand, and modify it within diverse intra-active settings comprised of highly varied artistic processes, research questions, disciplinary fields of action, and analytical and political concerns.
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  8. Conditions of Sharing RUUKKU – Studies in Artistic Research issue 8 has been collated under the theme of Conditions of Sharing to supplement the Please Specify! conference organized by Uniarts Helsinki together with the Society for Artistic Research in April 2017. The issue explores new perspectives on conditions of sharing research in the artistic field and thus offers a peer-reviewed platform related to the conference theme.
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  7. Practicing and the Practice of Art Each art genre has its own praxis. The way people practice a specific genre of art tells something essential about the genre and about the artists themselves. A performance, an exhibition, or an artwork is a kind of outcome, but with this RUUKKU issue, we peer inside the making of art, where nothing is yet finished and where the direction is not yet settled. Or is there a specific direction in the first place?
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  6. Change in Artistic Research The present issue, titled Change and Artistic Research, shows how artistic research and the ways in which art is made can contribute to not only societal debate but also to methodologies in other disciplines. Indeed, this focus has prompted artist-researchers to take bold steps forward in the worlds of content and form. In the process, they have borrowed and augmented techniques, not only going beyond the conventional boundaries of research but also forging into new areas of modern art, such as media art blogs and the occupation of urban space.
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  5. Research Gestures The expositions of this issue provide diverse – and in no way definitive – approaches to the role of gestures in artistic research. Ultimately the gesture that they perhaps perform the best is one of opening doors to terrain where methodological, discursive and epistemic stakes still run wild.
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  4. Process in Artistic Research Processes can be examined in relation to a starting point or a destination. Here we might as well begin from the call to this fourth issue of Ruukku. In the call we noted that articulating and opening up artistic processes has been considered one of the main aims of artistic research. Since the 1960s "process" has been one of the magic words of contemporary art, with works of art that transform and evolve through time.
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  3. Materiality in Artistic Research II Like any empty vessel, RUUKKU is potentially useful for storing a variety of materials, whether solid or in a state of flow. Are we now beginning to see the real uses of this hollow container or are we still merely testing how much it can hold before cracking?
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  2. Materiality in Artistic Research The theme of the second issue of RUUKKU came from expositions proposed for the first issue, many of which were connected to the idea of materiality. The ideas were presented both at a conceptual level and as explorations of the characteristics and artistic expression of specific materials. In this issue, we approach materiality as a loose term that encompasses different approaches to art, research, materiality and their intersections.
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  1. Experience and Experimentality in Artistic Research The theme of the first issue of RUUKKU "Experience and experimentality in artistic research" involves questions which relate to both art and research. If the concept of experience refers to past time, experimentality opens up to future. However, it is worth noticing that still during the Middle Ages, experimentum and experientia, experiment and experience, were used more or less synonymously and experiments were not arranged in order to gain new information in a systematic way, unlike in later years.

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  Indigenous Knowledge, Performance Art and the Faltering Act of Translation (2019) author(s): Lea Kantonen, Pekka Kantonen published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  In collaboration with Wixárika teachers and community museum planners we have planned and carried out performance art events in which video footage on pedagogical situations is screened and the teachers explain and practically demonstrate to the audience what happens in the footage – in Dwight Conquergood´s words the teachers "perform their own experience". They present and contextualize the knowledge we have recorded together with them in a fieldwork situation. It is important that our Wixarika co-performers themselves perform as the experts and teachers of the knowledge both in the live event and in the video footage. They have studied both formally in a university and non-formally as apprentices in the shamanistic institution of rukuri+kate that can be dated back to pre-colonial times. We artists-researchers function as documentarists and translators, often hesitating between different translation options. The significations vary from one language to another, from one translation to another. The translation is performed as a hesitant act, open for different meanings.
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  A Singing Orna/Mentor's Performance or Ir/rational Practice (2019) author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This exposition is an orna/mentor’s doing, an attempt, an essay, a performance, a line-of-thinking, a series of relations, a performance-research-model, a beginning of an orna/mentor’s manifesto. It might appear chaotic for some, and inviting for others. Its aim is to allow for the visitor to dive into the ‘orna’ (as in ‘urn’ meaning: an ornamented vase) mentored by a vocal performer. The exposition performs the raw and asymmetric intimacy of a research process searching to penetrate into (while at the same time radically opening up) that-which-is-yet-to-be-known. The performative caring has created an endless amount of philosophizing figures/sounds-in-themselves, as ornamented variations of an original musical score; a translation of one doing of another doing of another doing. Included in this exposition - as yet another ornamented variation – is a ‘peer-review-dialogue’ (a Q & A) between the orna/mentor and a Chorus of Unknown Reviewers. This dialogue has been included to clarify (or perhaps confuse even more) some of the questions that might arise in the mind of the visitor while moving through the exposition.
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  Return to the Site of the Year of the Rooster (2019) author(s): Annette Arlander published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This exposition is centred around a video essay, which uses some parts of Animal Years, a series of one-year performance-projects recorded on Harakka Island in the years 2002-2014, as examples to create a form of "digital autotopography". Returning to the site of the performance Year of the Rooster (2006) and Christmas of the Rooster - Tomten (2006) twelve years later serves as a starting point for reflections on the materiality of the site, on the birches growing there as co-performers, and on revisiting and assembling old works as way of doing things with performance.
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  The experience of ‘something’ in performance (2019) author(s): Tero Nauha published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This paper regards the notion of ‘something’ in the context of performance and performative speech-acts. ‘Something’ is a crisis, an element of systemic cycles: it distorts both as a signal and terminal crisis for any system or standards of thought or practice. My aim is to consider this crisis in loose connection with performativity, economy, and philosophy – or through a broad articulation of ‘performance with something’. We can question why there is a notion of experiencing ‘something’, which does not signify anything but only ‘something.’ Is ‘something’ something else when the quotation marks are left out, when ‘something’ or “something” becomes something? Is something then the act of becoming, eluding us as it moves, escaping its inverted commas? Many concepts can be used to approach this issue, such as Gilles Deleuze’s construction of the terms ‘aliquid’ and ‘sense’. We can regard how decisionality, the term that François Laruelle has proposed as a decisive element for all philosophical inquiries, might cut off something and slice it into pieces. Or we can consider whether something is simply gnosis, an expression of the mystical and mystifying experience of the Gnostics – an approach that recognizes our epoch’s search for a correlation with the paranormal. Still, is something the thing-in-itself, which we may not ever possess except as a correlation with consciousness? We might even ask if something is the foreclosed Real, something that cannot be captured with a noun, something that cannot, in the nature of things – the nature of somethings – be captured at all.
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  Objects that Matter - Performance Art and Objects (2019) author(s): Pilvi Porkola published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  The Study on Objects (2018-) is an ongoing art project that focuses on everyday life objects we are surrounded by. While considering the objects and working with videos, I contemplate the relationship between new materialism and performance art. Feminist new materialism offers a perspective to explore many performance art works that reveal how we are related to objects and how we deal with them.
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  Miten voimme antaa museoesineidän puhua? – osallistavan esityksen käsikirjoitus (2018) author(s): Lea Kantonen, Pekka Kantonen, Katri Hirvonen-Nurmi published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Miten voimme antaa museoesineiden puhua? Abstrakti: Meksikossa läntisessä Sierra Madren vuoristossa asuville wirrarikoille esineillä on erityistä voimaa. Joidenkin wirrarikojen mielestä voimakkaimpien esineiden ja niistä kuvattujen videoiden näkeminen voi kuitenkin olla vaarallista sellaisille ihmisille, jotka eivät ole saaneet erityistä näkemisen kykyä, nierikaa. Tässä esityksessä kysymme, miten me wirrarikakulttuurin ulkopuoliset osallistujat, tutkijat ja taiteilija-tutkijat katsomme wirrarikojen esineitä. Puhuvatko ne meille? Miten voimme antaa niiden puhua? Onko niillä oma ääni ja jos on, onko se poliittinen? Ovatko ne meille vaarallisia? Pohdimme näitä kysymyksiä toimintatutkijoina, taiteellisen ja etnografisen kenttätyön tekijöinä ja yhteisömuseoiden suunnitteluun osallistuvina kehitysyhteistyötekijöinä. Pyrimme rakentamaan dialogia erilaisten taidekäsitysten välillä. Wirrarikayhteisöjen vanhimmat ovat alkaneet suunnitella ja rakentaa yhteisömuseoita, jotta esineiden valmistamisen taito säilyisi tuleville sukupolville. He haluavat, että esineiden valmistusprosesseja kuvataan videolle ja että museoihin kootaan sekä esineitä että niiden valmistusprosesseista kertovia videoita. He osallistuvat aktiivisesti globaaliin alkuperäiskansadiskurssiin ja keskusteluihin museoiden dekolonisaatiosta. Museon suunnittelussa on tärkeä kysyä kriittisiä kysymyksiä, esimerkiksi: Kuka saa valita museossa esiteltävät esineet? Kuka saa katsoa niitä? Kuka saa kertoa niiden tarinan? Tämä ekspositio on wirrarikojen esineitä esittelevän esityksen käsikirjoitus ja dramatisointi, jossa esineistä kerrotaan tarinoita monella äänellä.Videolle kuvatut wirrarikojen puheenvuorot, heidän tarinoissaan esiintyvien inhimillisten ja ei-inhimillisten henkilöiden puheenvuorot, meidän kolmen tutkijan puheenvuorot ja yleisölle esittämämme kysymykset vuorottelevat. Videolla esitettyjen tarinoiden puheenvuorot on käännetty suomeksi. Erilaiset puheenvuorot erotetaan toisistaan typografisin keinoin. Kehotamme lukijaa pysymään valppaana ja kiinnittämään erityistä huomiota siihen, kuka esityksessä puhuu ja kenen ääni kuuluu.
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