Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

Visit HUB at i2ads.up.pt/hub

HUB is a peer-reviewed and open-access research journal for reporting on arts, design, and performing arts. It has an international scope with a particular emphasis on practitioner methodologies and the educational impact of artistic research.

HUB's aims are two-fold: to promote a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas to foster new forms of inquiry and documentation of artistic research; to stimulate the debate surrounding the social, cultural, and technological frames of art and design practices.

HUB is published twice a year by i2ADS – Research Institute in Art, Design and Society (University of Porto, Portugal) with the support of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

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Read the Submissions Guidelines for more information.

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  3. HUB Issue #3 / Autumn 2024 / Metabolic Media The essays and expositions in this issue of HUB delve into the concept of metabolic media, exploring the interconnections between biological, technological, cultural, and ecological systems. Guest Co-editors Louise Carver & Jamie Allen.
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  2. HUB Issue #2 / Spring 2024 / Varia This issue marks the first year of HUB, which continues to develop work along the lines of artistic research, focusing its attention on multiple creative practices and the transversality of the processes explored.
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  1. HUB Issue #1 / Autumn 2023 / Distance For this Autumn issue of HUB, we present a collection of works that results from the interest in broadening the understanding of DISTANCE after our first open call process for Artists, Designers, and Researchers in Art, Design and Society.
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  0. HUB Special Issue — Issue #0 / Spring 2023 The first inaugural issue we feature the contributions from invited researchers, relevant within a wide range of areas, reflecting on relevant or emerging topics of research and development within the Arts and Design.

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  Matters of Distance: Walter Benjamin’s dialectical Image, the dynamograms of Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, and William Kentridge’s Drawings and the Arrival of fortuna (2023) author(s): derek pigrum published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  What Walter Benjamin calls a ‘dialectical image,’ Aby Warburg a dynamogram and William Kentridge fortuna are a sudden occurence in the distance between the past and a ‘now’ of recognizability of a new constellation. The nature of the vast number of citations that Benjamin compiled from the sources available to him in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris for his Arcades Project, the thousands of reproductions of Renaissance works of art and other contemporary material that Warburg collected to pin to the panels of his Atlas Mnemosyne have their parallel in the printed media of out-of-date illustrated dictionaries, encyclopedias, ledgers and atlases that William Kentridge draws upon. Benjamin’s notation, the panels of Warburg’s Atlas and the print media of Kentridge are seen as expendable, reflective spaces, linked to potentiality but free from the pressure of preservation. The new, unforeseen constellations that arise are posited against a cohesive but reductive linear whole or progression. The montage is the medium used by all three where the intervals or distance between images is what generates the assembly, disassembly and reassembly of images or citations that, in the case of Benjamin, generates fragmentary essays, in Warburg in his convoluted theoretical writings based on the dynamograms he perceived in the panels of the Atlas, and in Kentridge the various stages of his process of drawing that he stop-frame films and projects.
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• Editorial (2023) author(s): Orlando Vieira Francisco, Fabrício Fava, Filipa Cruz, Maria Manuela Bronze da Rocha, Pedro Amado published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  For this edition, we shared questions with the authors based on the strategies and ways of visualizing distance in artistic practice. We asked, after all, how we can understand the aesthetics of DISTANCE, including new narrative and visual devices, to reveal something inevitable or ineffable.
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  Projecting Form, Investigating Distance (2023) author(s): Agnese Cebere published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  This exposition describes a process of investigating projection of form as a bridge between near and far, physical and virtual, anchored in the production of what I call “handheld devices” and a multimedia performance. It explores sympathetic dwelling in the crevices of the clay forms in relation to the smooth openness of the built environment of scientific and institutional space exemplified by the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact at the University of Oregon which graciously hosted me for a Center for Art Research Project Incubator residency and fellowship in 2023. In this text, I take up concepts of information and noise, distance and intimacy, affordances and the dynamics of action.
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  Distance, transmission, and journey in the collective construction of an Itaaká (2023) author(s): Bruno Moreschi, Irineu Nje'a Terena published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  This exhibition discusses the collective construction of an ancestral instrument of the Terena indigenous people in the context of the artistic residency Con/Cri/Tec, held in 2023 at Casa do Povo, in São Paulo. The functions of the itaaká instrument, as well as the process of creating it in the residency, offered decolonial opportunities for understanding the idea of "distance" beyond the non-indigenous scientific view. The first contribution to this expanded understanding of distance comes from the functions of the itaaká, in particular, that of reducing the distance between the terrestrial and the spiritual worlds, based on the idea of "transmission". The second perspective of distance analyzed here came from the experience of building the itaaká, seen in the Terena culture as part of a collective initiation ritual. The making of itaaká performed in the artistic residency showed part of this ritualistic character and how this ancestral instrument relates distance to the idea of collective construction of a "journey".
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  Dissolving distances: Designing close-to-body experiences for remote settings (2023) author(s): Nesli Hazal Oktay published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  I aim to offer embodied intimacy for people who are close by heart but physically apart. Specifically, I explore designing close-to-body experiences at a distance through intimate bio-rings, rings made of natural ingredients. Intimate bio-rings are highly customizable, can be biodegraded, and start dissolving when exposed to humidity e.g.: rain, sweat etc. The idea of creating a non-lasting object to be worn on the body—that required care, that was ambiguous and tangible—was a result of a prior user study of cultural probing and embodied design ideation. I further experimented with intimate bio-rings by making the ring and wearing it in everyday life together with my father, whom I live far away from. In this paper, I showcase a user study with 3 pairs (6 participants) that made intimate bio-rings at their homes while self-reported and self-documented their personal experiences. They then further shared their meaning-makings with me through an interview. Overall, participants found intimate bio-rings to be supporting new understandings about intimacy at a distance. As a result, their experience of "distance" alters slightly or changes completely by i) embarking on a journey, ii) creating time and space to be together, and iii) carrying each other through a tangible object.
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  Contemporary Research (2023) author(s): Michael Schwab published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  Artistic research is a comparatively recent development. Outside institutional definitions little work has been carried out to situate the phenomenon in a wider history of art as well as knowledge. This speculative article describes the present moment of artistic research as result of two developments: (1) a shift from notions of knowledge to notions of research, and (2), a shift from major to minor forms of making. At the same time, in line with understandings of contemporary art and as contemporary art, artistic research is not understood as historical project that unifies art and science; rather, artistic research is pitched as providing a transdisciplinary ground in which different disciplines and knowledges can enrich each other. On a historical scale, this development is seen as driven by the increased speed and complexity of our current world for which conventional knowledges offers only partial insights arriving often too late for decision-making. Building on Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s concept of experimental systems and his notion of graphematic space, the paper suggests research to create sets of traces as proto-forms underdetermined in their aesthetic and epistemic status and, hence, beyond specific disciplinary contexts. Such space for research is understood as fundamentally artistic, also in opposition to notions of research as output-oriented types of investment. It is suggested that representation as epistemic form has been losing relevance, certainly for the arts and increasingly for the sciences. Artists are tasked to invent new, expositional forms of knowledge over and beyond representation to remain epistemically engaged in today’s fast and complex world.
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