Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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  50 Billion Micrograms. In the Search of the Aftermath of an Event (2019) author(s): Christine Hansen published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition provides an example of how art can offer an alternative way of understanding the past through my work “50 Billion Micrograms”. The project explored a forgotten media event from 1979, in which a gigantic meteorite supposedly landed in a remote lake on the west coast of Norway. The exposition attempts to demonstrate how ambiguity was a fuel the project. In the process what I call "fluctuating thinking" was an important method. This meant that I let seemingly irrelevant and speculative elements be part of the process. In this process, the different conceptual and aesthetic elements had to be studied carefully to consider whether random ideas and speculative elements were relevant for the work. However, such an open-ended approach is often fundamental to artistic research, I argue. I had no hope of finding the answer about the meteorite or explaining this natural phenomenon. My interest was to dwell on the uncertainty and keep the wondering alive. What became increasingly important was to explore the search itself through images and sound. The exposition also ask what is an event, what keeps an event alive? Were does fact and fiction interlace?
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  What can a process do? A passage from ritual to rituality (2019) author(s): Usoa Fullaondo published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  In this exposition I try to build new relationships between different creative processes arising from nature, life, and art. This is done by setting up visual, textual, and affective analogies through superimpositions of layers of images, sound, and text based on the book Un Atletismo Afectivo (An Affective Athleticism) (publication on paper, 116 pp, 2016) and the audiovisual work Trenza (Braid) (HD video, 55', 2017). These two works were developed around a particular space, the fields of Aixerrota in Algorta (Bizkaia, Basque Country). The book is an attempt to translate my habitual experience of running through this space into art, while the film mainly focuses on observing and experiencing how the landscape was turned into a space for a festive event. Three separate narrative strands, each referring to a particular process, intertwine. The first of these is filmings of young people's actions as they prepare the space for the International Paella competition. A second strand consists of fragments of a voice-over by David Attenborough from the documentary Bowerbirds: The art of seduction (2000), which shows male bowerbirds building the bowers where they will court the female bird. The third strand includes sequences from my own work, which outline emerging processes of artistic creation and research. The aim of this exposition is to share the singularity of processes in which the need to bond or to attach (Juan Luis Moraza, 2009) instigates a conscientious preparation of space that will allow an event to succeed. It also highlights the way in which some of these processes may interrupt the normal course of things and the self-absorption born from habit by opening up from the individual towards the collective, by confronting the tension resulting from an indeterminate end result, and by re-enacting aesthetic experience through the production of an audiovisual and sculptural landscape. The underlying question of the work relates to the potential of new arrangements of materials to open up new creative processes.
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  The Entanglement of Arts and Sciences. On the Transaction Costs of Transdisciplinary Research Settings (2019) author(s): Martin Tröndle published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  Using the research project eMotion – mapping museum experience as a working example, the exposition examines the advantages and risks, challenges and hurdles, methods and management of projects based on transdisciplinary art research. On the one hand, analysis shows that the participating researchers’ embedded character, in their respective disciplines, requires a specific management in order to increase the formation of group identity and to get used to collective authorship. On the other, it underlines that transdisciplinary research does more than simply shed light on the investigated object from several perspectives. Rather, the integration of the arts can lead to a new epistemology via different forms of data displays such as sonification and image-producing processes, which in turn create a new aesthetic dimension.
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  FanFutures (2019) author(s): Kate McCallum, Kate Monson, Majed Al-Jefri published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  "FanFutures" is a project working with artificial (AI) automatic text generation in an exploration of fan fiction and speculation about possible futures. It is a collaboration between an artist, a computer scientist, and a social scientist — and, in an extended sense, also with the fan fiction community and an AI algorithm. Using a data-set of short sci-fi-esque stories written by anonymous members of the fan fiction community, we taught a natural language processing program to produce its own, entirely new short sci-fi-esque stories. The program takes imagined futures written by amateur writers, rather than institutionally-sanctioned voices, and dreams algorithmically through those voices to produce its own re-imaginings of possible futures. We then turned these stories into films, films that depict a computer’s dreams of the future drawn from a mass of unknown voices, using imagery selected by another algorithm. The outputs are feverish and confused, but, as with human dreams, we have embraced their incoherence, and allowed imagery and atmosphere to come to the fore. The project is inspired by our collective interest in understanding how humans make meaning with and through others — and how others make meaning with and through us. In a moment when our rapidly changing world, with its mass communication, new technologies and changing environment, seems almost intractable, we take a creative and playful approach to representing this complex intra-acting assemblage of human and more-than-human elements, and the possibilities in our world through sensory experience.
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  Additive Photography (2019) author(s): Ives Maes published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  Since the invention of photography, there have been numerous hybrid experiments between photography and sculpture that testify to a continuous influence of sculpture on photography and vice versa. In my own visual work, I am researching the physical, sculptural and architectural aspects of photography. I am analysing a number of historical experiments, from the 16th century camera obscura pavilion to 21st century digital processes, which I apply to my artistic practice. A particularly important example is the photosculpture process of François Willème. In the late 1850s, he aimed at reproducing sculpture with the help of photography, creating a distinctive union between the two media. His method to extrude sculptures from photographs laid the ground principles for the 3D scanner and printer. In this exposition I bring to the fore how the work of Willème propelled its significant influence towards today, and how it inspired me to create new visual work. At the same time, this experience constitutes an exemplary case study on how theoretical research can steer the creation of visual research.
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  The Body + The Lens: Shrink, Wax, Purge, Bleach. (2019) author(s): Tyler Payne published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  "The Body + the Lens: Shrink, Wax, Purge, Bleach" was a creative practice research project that investigated the relationship of (white) women’s embodiment to the lens of gendered advertising. To focus the research, a recently mainstreamed group of female cosmetic rituals were chosen — body-contour wear (SPANX), Brazilian waxing, salt-water cleansing, and fake tanning. The intent of the research was to interrogate the relationship between these body-correcting practices and the idealized image of the "Glossy Magazine Girl" — i.e. preternaturally thin, hairless, and unblemished by shades darker than pink — which now appear with more frequency in women’s everyday life, and have reconfigured the social construction of female gender. The (artistic-research) response to the subject matter was a series of video and photographic works in the genre of self-portraiture. These works attempted to critique the new norms of embodiment emerging through these practices through the researcher’s parodic undergoing of the cosmetic rituals themselves. This "carnal" methodology, following from the methodology of Louis Wacquant, is one that embodies the researcher in the social practices being researched, i.e. body-correcting practices. This method produced research results — embodied and affective — not available to purely observational research, which should interest the artistic research community and feminism generally. The images and videos de-fetishize and denaturalize the embodied product of the cosmetic rituals. My studio-led research reveals the intractable, comic "failures" in the face of the demands placed on the everyday performance of women’s gender. By doing so, it turns these failures to affirmation, as well as critique of the gender norm these practices construct.
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