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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  Stitching for Material Sensitivity: From Traditional to Activist Embroidery (2023) author(s): Fabiola Hernandez Cervantes, Maria Huhmarniemi published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Cochineal is an insect that has been used for textile dyeing since pre-Hispanic cultures in Mexico. This exposition discusses the use of the cochineal insect as a natural dye for wool and the bridge between ancient indigenous knowledge and contemporary artistic research. A transatlantic connection is created between the Mexican plateau and the Arctic region, merging traditional knowledge, contemporary art, crafting and conceptualisation through an artistic embroidery initiative involving researchers, craft artists and human rights activists living in the province of Lapland in Finland. Documentary photos of artistic practice and research diaries enhance discussion on sustainability, tradition, craftivism, decolonisation and indigenous knowledge. This exposition embraces collaborative craftivism through a group initiative called Embroidered Stances, discussions about material interconnectedness in a web-of-life conceptual structure that includes sheep wool, cactus, cochineal and ancestral knowledge. The endorsement of material sensitivity is narrated into embroideries by the first author Cervantes and discussed, acknowledging complexities within issues of cultural and ecological sustainability.
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  Life Between Art and Blood (2023) author(s): Heidi Pietarinen, Amna Qureshi published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Artist-researchers Heidi Pietarinen and Amna Qureshi from the University of Lapland have conducted in-depth work on the innovative BioARTech laboratory environment and utilisation of available resources for a bioart project called Life Between Art and (Reindeer) Blood. The aim and focus of the project were to utilise reindeer blood as a reindeer herding by-material instead of treating it as waste material. Both artist-researchers were curious to see how nature as a living design medium becomes perceptible to humans. In this study, a living design medium refers to material production that incorporates simple living organisms such as reindeer blood, material-driven design and co-designing, with an entity having its own agency. Bioart can be used to develop innovative design and art practice to work with nature (biology) and the non-human, such as live tissues (i.e. materials engineered by nature itself), microbes or living organisms (birds, insects, trees and blood), to bring about new design solutions and life processes. Through the arts-based research (ABR) approach, this ground-breaking research aims to develop activities that integrate environmental biotechnology, bioart, surface pattern design, and science.
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  Challenging animal-based food systems: Citizen Surgery on vegan body simulators (2023) author(s): Kaisu Koski published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This article discusses the voices of resistance emerging in the work of the Citizen Surgery Collective, an interdisciplinary practice-based research group I initiated in 2020. The collective consists of artists, critical posthumanists, anthropologists, and activists in the UK and the Netherlands. The collaborative work included in this exposition concerns the relationship between (non)human animal bodies and food, specifically through surgical simulation and sensory skills acquisition. These practices are geared toward multispecies justice, and they form a serial inquiry into ways of challenging animal-based food systems and meat-related cognitive dissonance. Reversely, they investigate ways to train surgical skills with food and by eating instead of using live or dead animal models. Our collective practices re-enact surgical choreographies and dialogue to analyze both the materiality and connotations of the food/body intersection and the process of dissolving interspecies boundaries by eating.
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  Seeding Actions (2022) author(s): Polina Golovátina-Mora, Sunniva Skjøstad Hovde, Tone Pernille Østern connected to: Norwegian University of Science and Technology published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  The exposition shares the collaborative multispecies journey and addresses the issue of art, art-based research and of art-based research publishing. The three processes are seeing as intra-activity between multiple species, materials, media. It does not have a goal as destination but is driven by curiosity and care for and with each other. This ever-expanding becoming creates ever new world and possibilities and so the new knowing-being. The exposition is a map that combines different tracing and it is up to the reader to follow any direction they prefer at the moment.
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  The communication intent in 'matéria disponível’ (‘available matter') (2022) author(s): rosinda casais connected to: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This article is based on the personal work 'matéria disponível’ (2020) by Rosinda Casais and proposes to analyse the importance of communication-driven art in its different stages. This work emerged from the objective to explore the outdoor space as a space to communicate, during the period of the first lock-down (social distancing) due to CoVID-19, from march to june 2020. Crossing this period, she and her 5 years old daughter used the debris that remained in the courtyard of the building, where both live, and started communicating through objects with the neighbours. From the intention to interact with the other, this artwork fulfils itself, broadens and questions the communicative nature of the objects and the artistic practice as well. Concepts, along with the capacity of the objects to change the atmosphere of a place and the common/individual memories, were developed during this work towards a sense of communication from/to it and is discussed here.
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  Strategian sisäistäminen (2022) author(s): Mia Seppälä published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Tämä ekspositio asetettaa yksittäisen taiteellisen teon laajempaan julkiseen keskusteluun yliopistopolitiikan rakenteellisen kehittämisen synnyttämien ajatuksien liepeiltä. Eksposition keskeinen elementti on videoperformanssi ”Internalizing The Strategy”, joka tapahtuu kaikille avoimessa julkisessa paikassa - Eduskuntatalon edessä. Strategia tulee vastaan mitä moninaisimmissa yhteyksissä. Tuntuu siltä, että kaikilla pitää olla oma strategiansa. Kunnat, yritykset, urheiluseurat, päiväkodit, korkeakoulut esittävät kilvan omia strategioitaan, mutta miten on strategian sisäistämisen laita? Yliopistojen strategioissa painotetaan maailman muutoksen mukanaan tuomiin vaatimuksiin reagoimista, johon yliopistoilla on korkeatasoista osaamista tuottavina instituutioina mahdollisuus ja suoranainen velvollisuus. Muutoksesta tuotetaan mielikuvia, jotka esitetään sekä pelottavina uhkakuvina, että mahdollisuuksia tarjoavina positiivisina kehityskulkuina. Asiantuntijakielen tarkoituksena on saada tietyt valinnat tuntumaan tarpeellisilta ja hyödyllisiltä. Tähän kieleen on upotettu tietty edistymisen vaatimus ja lupaus, jota on vaikea vastustaa. Ekspositio pyrkii havainnollistamaan ja koettelemaan strategian sisäistämista taiteellisin keinoin, joka on suhteessa vaatimusten absurdiin luonteeseen. Menetelmänä käytetään tekijän itse kehittelemää "poismaalaamisen" tekniikkaa, jonka lähtökohtana on digitaalisen valokuvan tai tekstin siirtäminen painomenetelmillä maalauspohjalle. Valittu kuva tai teksti liittyy olemassa oleviin rakenteisiin, formaatteihin ja vakiintuneisiin ajattelu- ja menettelytapoihin. Poismaalaamisessa tehdään näkyväksi merkityksen häilyvyys - teksti/kuva on ihmisen mielikuvien rakentama. Se on purettavissa ja uudelleen tulkittavissa. Kuvan rakentaminen tapahtuu strategiatekstin poistamisen kautta. Poistamisen on määrä virittää useita rinnakkaisia tulkintamahdollisuuksia, jotka liittyvät esimerkiksi tekstin/kuvan pysyvyyteen, kirjoittamisen, poispyyhkimisen ja päällekirjoittamisen suhteeseen sekä Taideyliopiston strategian osalta säädösten valta-asemaan.
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