Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 
  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
• 
  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.
• 
  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.
• 
  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?
• 
  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.
• 
  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).
• 
  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.
• 
  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'?
• 
  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?
• 
  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.
• 
  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.
• 
  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.
• 
  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.
• 
  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?
• 
  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.
• 
  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.
• 
  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.
• 
  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?
• 
  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.
• 
  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.

• 
  Performative Well-Being: Conditions of Sharing (2018) author(s): Alexander Komlosi published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Since Ruukku 8 has asked us to consider “conditions of sharing”, it seems apt, and interesting, to start this exposition about the conditions of sharing of performative well-being through a dialogue with the conditions of sharing that the Ruukku 8 editors, Mika, Tero, and Leena, have offered us. Here we go!
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  An Obstract for Midpointness (2018) author(s): Andrew Bracey, Steve Dutton published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Our aim here is to both provide a response to the Conference ‘Please Specify!’ and to find an alternate way of ensuring that the intrinsic generative nature of research and art is kept active, akin to the mobius strip-like path of both conclusions, and openings. “Midpointness” is a generative project. It is dismantled and reconstructed through the gradual accretion of surrounding connections, associations and influences of the curators, artists, students and other audiences who contribute to it. These are in the form of artworks, public events, texts, artefacts, performances or other interventions. 'An Obstract for Midpointness' (Obstract)is a piece of artistic research constructed before, during and after, "PLEASE SPECIFY!", The SAR Annual Conference 2017. 'Obstract' is as an element of the ongoing project “Midpointness” that seeks to invite us to consider the ‘work’ of art as art’s labour or task. We seek to explore the dynamics of inner/outer dialogues of the process of artistic work, opening up other potentials that an artist researcher might hope for when he/she explores the generative potential of the work of artistic research directly within and in response to a conference about artistic research. At the centre is spoken text that is a play on the tradition of the conference ‘abstract.’ The abstract is the site of an outline of intention, yet here we couple it with an ‘obstruction’ as a means of aggravating and diverting the attempt at a conclusion towards which an abstract, and indeed a formal presentation, might be aimed. “Obstract” suggests, by a process of intervention that the ‘centre’ (the work and/or the text) and its surrounding universe are completely indivisible. As such the principle of ‘footnotes’ filter through to the whole spoken text; the footnotes being analogous to the surrounding constellations within which the ‘centre’ of the work sits, swapping footnotes for centre and vice versa. The footnotes refer to points both real and imagined in the past, present and future.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  Pyykkiä - Näkökulmia uusmaterialismiin ja performanssiin (2018) author(s): Pilvi Porkola published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Toteutin "The Laundry Case" performanssin Taideyliopiston Teatterikorkeakoulussa pidetyssä SAR -konferenssissa huhtikuussa 2017. Performanssissani pohdin ihmisen ja materian mahdollisuutta tasa-arvoisuuteen esityksessä uusmaterialistisessa viitekehyksessä. Tässä artikkelissa avaan esityksen prosessia ja siihen liittyviä kysymyksiä.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  The aural garden of sounding materials: performing within the materiality of Et in Arcadia ego-music performance (2018) author(s): Assi Karttunen published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  'Et in Arcadia ego'-music performance is an auditory garden deriving its inspiration from 17th-century European meditation gardens. It was premiered at the Helsinki Music Centre in autumn 2016 and performed again in summer 2017 as a part of the Venice Research Pavilion of the University of the Arts Helsinki.The performance was initiated as my KeKe-project 2014 (Sibelius Academy’s former Development Centre, KeKe) and the research question was, how to develop classical music’s performance practices by subtly varying its performative parameters. By pre-recording organic sound material related to wooden instruments like organ pipes, psalteries and harpsichords, including also concrete sounds of wood, cones, stalks and sticks, these sounds were projected into the concert venue and heard among the music repertory and alive improvisations. Moreover, I wanted to pose a question, whether a concert venue could be understood as a compound of resonating elements and shapes. Is it possible to animate the concert venue by studying its auditory features more carefully? The 'Et in Arcadia ego'-performance develops performativity of classical music by subtly varying and extending its performative techniques. This artistic research is articulated in line with phenomenologists such as Don Ihde and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and philosopher Gaston Bachelard.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  Various Writings: Chapter One (2018) author(s): Dion Star, Lizzie Ridout, Maria Christoforidou published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  VARIOUS WRITINGS: CHAPTER I There are rumours that writing will cease, books will die, the digital eye will take over. Standing at the edge of this precipice we look away from these preoccupations. Instead we look back, investigating the act of writing through systematic consideration, attempting to disregard all preconceptions. This exposition focuses on the gestural and uses Vilém Flusser’s concept of ‘pseudo writing’, to analyse the interaction between the physical actions and the technologies of writing. The first act of Various Writings’ was a response to Vilém Flusser’s text The Gesture of Writing. This text radicalised our ideas on what constitutes research and thematised the conditions of sharing in ‘other’ terms. Flusser meticulously disassembles the act of writing. We follow in his footsteps, using personal mythologies, Oulipian constraints / translations, taxonomies and non-verbal conversations as implements to excavate relics of writing. We collect codes, tools, surfaces; test writing against various technologies and translate it into movements, attitudes and objects.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  Silence Ensemble (2018) author(s): Petri Kaverma, Kirsi Heimonen, Anu Vehviläinen published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This exposition describes collaboration between three artist-researchers (Kirsi Heimonen, Anu Vehviläinen, Petri Kaverma) and respectively three art genres (dance, music, fine arts). The incentive for this collaboration stemmed from the notion of ‘silence’. On the one hand, silence offers a conceptual umbrella for this interdisciplinary praxis; on the other hand, using silence was an important methodological solution throughout the collaboration. The artists consider that through their collaborative praxis they have created a specific, practice-based artistic research method. This exposition describes that method by using both individual and shared thinking: the exposition is written partly individually (three columns: ‘silence’, ‘praxis’, ‘writing’), partly together (‘discussion’). In the ‘discussion’, the artists meet each other and reflect their understanding of the idea of artistic research through the notion of silence, within the art institution. The active collaboration entailed seven sessions during the period between Jan 2016 – May 2016, as well as a few preparatory sessions for two conference presentations during the fall of 2016. In March of 2017 the group spent a two-day writing period in Järvenpää to write this exposition.
  open exposition comments (0)