Journal for Artistic Research

About this portal
The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) is an international, online, Open Access and peer-reviewed journal for the identification, publication and dissemination of artistic research and its methodologies, from all arts disciplines. With the aim of displaying practice in a manner that respects artists' modes of presentation, JAR abandons the traditional journal article format and offers its contributors a dynamic online canvas where text can be woven together with image, audio and video. These research documents called ‘expositions’ provide a unique reading experience while fulfilling the expectations of scholarly dissemination.
The Journal is underpinned by the Research Catalogue (RC) a searchable, documentary database of artistic research. Anyone can compose an exposition and add it to the RC using the online editor and suitable expositions can be submitted to the editorial board for peer-review and publication in JAR. Read more about submissions or start composing expositions straight away by registering for an account, which is free of charge.
JAR is published by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR).
url:
http://www.jar-online.net/
Recent Activities
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Trigger Place - A Game of Sound and Architecture
(2017)
author(s): Matilde Meireles, Diogo Alvim
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
"Play" was a project developed by Matilde Meireles and Diogo Alvim with the participation of experimental filmmaker Richard O'Sullivan. This multilayered performance was specially conceived for the annex of the Physical Education Centre at Queen's University Belfast, a building composed of several squash courts and an audience area. The project encompassed live music (a brass ensemble), electronics, video projections, and a live squash game, all affecting the perception of the site.
This building became the main character of an immersive acoustic experience, where a game of squash was the starting point to explore ideas about architecture and place through sound. The squash courts were subject to acoustic processes extrapolated from two of Alvin Lucier's most important works—"Vespers" and "I am sitting in room". Also the floor markings were manipulated, as a reference to Edward Krasinski's obsession with a never-ending line. These extended beyond the performance space to reveal unexpected connections.
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The Salford samples
(2017)
author(s): Joanne Scott
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The Salford Samples is a practice-as-research project in intermedial place-making. Using materials that arise from the city of Salford, including fragments of its cultural history, an autobiographical audio diary, and images/footage of the place itself, a range of shifting combinations are created. Through the mixing of diverse materials, as part of live performances and in online 'video-texts', issues related to this fast-moving, redeveloping, and conversely traditional and static place, arise. Specifically, questions around 'solastalgia' or 'the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment’ (Albrecht et al. 2007, 95) emerge. In addition, these factors both foster and disrupt 'place-attachment' in a contemporary urban environment.
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Exorcising Unhomely Street: Filmic Intuition and the Representation of Post-concussive Syndrome
(2017)
author(s): Susannah Gent
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
My interdisciplinary, practice-led research involves a diverse methodological approach, including experimental film production, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. In this exposition, I review the role of intuition in creative practice, and the influential factors when the work of art ‘happens’.
The short, experimental film Unhomely Street represents the experience of post-concussive syndrome through a surrealist narrative with historical accounts of atrocity and anti-capitalist polemics. Having employed a new approach to filmmaking — a spontaneous method in which artistic decisions are informed by emotional tone rather than narrative concerns — I reflect upon this creative play. I draw on the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, specifically his view that emotion underpins consciousness, Freud’s theory of the unconscious, and Irving Massey’s understanding of metaphor as the original, pre-linguistic language of thought.
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Stop and go: nodes of transformation and transition
(2017)
author(s): Michael Zinganel, Michael Hieslmair
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Stop and Go is a research project investigating physical and social transformation at nodes and hubs of transnational mobility and migration alongside major pan-European road corridors in a geographic triangle between Vienna, Tallinn, and the Bulgarian-Turkish border. It draws on intensive embedded field trips with a mobile lab (a Ford Transit van) using (deep) mapping, workshops, installations, and exhibitions both on tour and in a stationary work space in a Vienna logistics hub (a former railway station). Intermediate and final results have been represented in diagrammatic drawings, maps, and (animated) graphic novels.
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Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (First Compilation)
(2017)
author(s): Meghan Moe Beitiks
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
'Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience' is a creative exploration of observation and entanglement as tools for negotiating pain. Research on ecology, restoration, and psychology creates a series of videos, images, and performances. How do personal networks of resilience overcome systems of pain, both in human perspectives, and in ecologies? The project explores commonalities in the context of divisive cultural politics.
Artist Meghan Moe Beitiks begins her research with personal interviews. She discusses processes of recovery with people with both personal and professional experiences of trauma and recovery, including an ecological restoration specialist, an animal behaviourist, several survivors of abusive relationships, and many others. Clips from the interviews become the basis for visual and material explorations, generating videos, installations, and images. Stigma and prejudice emerge as barriers to healing – acceptance, observation, and listening, as common tools to accelerate it.
This compilation takes components of Beitiks’s research and arranges them within their own system of exploration. Observers’ perceptions of the work are both assisted and disrupted by audio descriptions. Originally intended to make the works accessible to non-sighted audiences, the descriptions also serve as an exploration of observation and objectivity. A seemingly unrelated pine wallpaper appears to have been unfairly categorised as “masculine,” prompting further questions about categorisation and labelling, as well as depictions of nature. Beitiks’s presence and movement in the work is described as androgynous, their body taking on the narratives described in the interview clips. Boundaries between various disciplines and narratives disappear—we instead experience the labour of connecting disparate entities, despite the limits of our own perceptions.
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This exhibition is an island
(2017)
author(s): Kit Hammonds
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Based around my catalogue essay for Yu-Chen Wang's exhibition 'Nostalgia for the Future' (Taipei Fine Art Museum and Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester, 2016), I consider how exhibition narratives are formed. As an experiment in 'curatorial writing', the essay draws from the evolution of science fiction. The method is discussed as reflective rather than explanatory of the artist's practice.