Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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  If film is a language, can birds make movies? An essay and two heretical descriptive systems (2017) author(s): Tim Ridlen published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  The work presented here uses the analogy of artists as talking birds and draws on research from cognitive ethology, linguistics, and film studies to ask, what kind of knowledge does art produce? Drawn diagrams and short structural videos illustrate but perhaps complicate or even obfuscate various parts of the text. The starting point is a 1966 film by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 'The Hawks and the Sparrows', alongside his essay published with the script, 'The Cinema of Poetry'. That text made a compelling argument about the nature of cinematic language, while his film imagined a world in which birds could speak. This essay – made up of text, drawn diagrams, and short video loops – takes the next logical step and asks, can birds make movies? The question is left unanswered, at least explicitly, and remains a figure or stand in for artistic forms of knowledge, research, and thought. This essay may not be of interest to those studying linguistics, cognitive ethology, or film history in earnest, but rather to those interested in visual forms of knowledge production and communication, humanistic explorations of the natural sciences, and the history of ideas. This presentation is the first of a three-part series titled 'The Artist’s Field Library', an arrangement of essays and source materials that explore the mutually transformative relationship between art and the university. The second essay in the series deals with academic institutions as the site of artistic and political practices, as well as what stands to be won or lost, and the third deals with critical pedagogy.
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  Talking field: listening to the troubled site (2017) author(s): Budhaditya Chattopadhyay published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition examines my recent multi-channel sound composition 'Decomposing Landscape' (2015), inquiring into the complex, nebulous, and evolving relationship between sound and site that is thoroughly challenged in the practice of phonography or field-recording-based sound artworks dealing with environmentally troubled sites. Phonography-based compositions and sound artworks are developed through location-aware listening and field recordings made at specific sites and landscapes. The compositional strategy in these works relies on artistic interventions through the intricate processes of field recording and processing of recognisable environmental sounds using multi-channel spatialisation techniques. The artistic transformation renders these sounds into a blurry area between compositional abstraction and a portrayal of their site-based origins. The question is, how much spatial information is retained and how much abstraction is deployed in these sound artworks? A discussion of this work sheds light on some approaches and a methodology of handling site-specific evidence in sound art production.
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  Creative practices and public engagement (2017) author(s): Daša Spasojevic, Ana Souto Galvan published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition explores the role of creative practices in creating methods for public engagement and the promotion and recognition of tangible and intangible heritage at a local community level. It argues that principles of participatory design and co-creation have the power to contribute to community social cohesion and development. A literature review covering the main concepts and methods is introduced to provide an appropriate context for the main case study: Mapping Nottingham’s Identity. This research project includes the methodological and conceptual framework that were piloted and tested in collaboration with three localities within Nottingham (Sneinton, Carrington, and West Bridgford), including different stakeholders (community organisations, higher education, primary schools, local authorities, and the general public), producing a variety of outputs (a participatory methods’ toolkit, performative maps, community furniture, exhibition, websites) and reflecting on their role in creating meaningful interactions and place-making.
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  Moving through the double vortex (2017) author(s): Jan Schacher, Patrick Neff published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  Music, when performed live, carries the musician's physicality with it, either embedded within the sound or perceivable through the musician's physical presence. A dancer's movement follows dynamics and expresses shapes that are based on musical phrasing principles and 'kinetic melodies'. The two pieces 'Double Vortex' for trombone, movement, and live-electronics and 'Moving Music' for interactive dance and electronic sounds represent experimental devices for exploring the relationships between musical actions and movement, sound and space, and between instrumental and embodied performance modes. With physical tasks and movement components added to open-form, improvised, and compositional work, the otherwise tacit and taken for granted contributions of the performer's corporeal presence is brought to the foreground. By putting the dancer into the role of an instrumentalist and by setting the trombone player into movement, the intrinsic musicality of movement and the dependence between dance and music is shown. By linking sound and movement in both the corporeal and the technological domains, a shifted relationship is established that generates forms of interaction particular to this specific practice. The work on the two pieces is carried out with a focus on artistic creation, and in parallel becomes the object for observation, trace interpretation, and analysis from the perspective of art as research. The exposition further thematises the methods of trace collection and analysis, as well as the making of maps, diagrams, and assemblages, and addresses the scope of this secondary discursive format. In a movement that goes from media trace to text to sketch, from descriptive to contextual to associative juxtaposition, the exposition speculates about – rather than claims to generate – insights and understanding on corporeality in technologically mediated music and dance performances.
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  ANCHORAGE: a phenomenology of outline (2017) author(s): Joe Graham, Steven Dickie, Chantal Faust published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  'ANCHORAGE' constitutes a collaborative piece of phenomenologically inspired drawing research, undertaken by artists Joe Graham, Steven Dickie, and Chantal Faust. Comprising forty drawings plus a written text, the objective is to ‘outline’ an understanding of the phenomenon of outline, described in an effort to overcome the traditionally definitive descriptions of it that abound (Rawson 1987; Maynard 2005; Thomas and Taylor 2003). In this respect, it constitutes both a relocation and an online extension of an earlier stage to the project, published in print: 'ANCHOR' (2015). In outlining an alternative form of reply to the earlier question (what is an outline?), the purpose of 'ANCHORAGE' is to revisit what was left uninspected or simply assumed; namely, whether an invariant understanding of outline in relation to drawing as a form of art might sensibly be defined. To address this notion, a variety of hand drawn ‘outlines’ by Graham, Dickie, and Faust are supplied for analysis, using original material from 'ANCHOR' as a guide. As lead investigator, the text by Graham seeks to unpack these variations as a part of a Husserlian-inspired methodology (Husserl [1950] 1999). This is geared towards seeking what an essential or perhaps even ‘truthful’ understanding of outline might look like, contingent on the drawings presented here.
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  Rudimentariness: a concept for artistic research (2017) author(s): Anik Fournier published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This exhibition explores 'A Way of Making', an ongoing collaborative project in ceramics by curator Frédérique Bergholtz and performance artist Maria Pask. I propose that their investigation of making through ceramics – and, hence, through the hands-on encounter with the materiality of clay – is an intriguing instance of artistic research. Artistic research often refers to a discursive or scientific investigation that informs an artistic practice, or to an ongoing investigation within an existing practice. What interests me in this case is how the research is carried out in a parallel-site of investigation, one that is largely embodied. It is an empirical exploration of a medium and, as complete amateurs to the medium, an investigation of the various possibilities of ‘making’ with it. This form of artistic research aims to tackle the basics of what a curator and an artist are already busy with in their respective artistic professions. My own formative and professional trajectory has meandered through various institutions, including universities, museums, and art academies. I have therefore operated in the tenuous fault lines between different creative practices and forms of knowledge production. 'A Way of Making' is of interest to me precisely for how it calls for an analysis of the relation between different ways of creating and ways of knowing. In following the many facets of 'A Way of Making' over the past few years, I began to see parallels between the artists' investigation of the material of clay and questions that arise for me as a theoretician when working with an artistic practice or artwork. I became particularly interested in the attitude with which the makers approached their site of investigation. This attitude can be identified in many registers of their project, including the way in which performers and audiences are interpolated somatically by the ceramic pieces in various staged encounters. For this exposition, I adopted the concept of 'rudimentariness', as defined by Mireille Rosello in the field of comparative literature, to help define this attitude and to see how it can also operate in a largely non-discursive register. The exposition begins with the makers’ hands-on research, exploring how rudimentariness in making calls forth empirical forms of knowing. In particular, the notion of sensate thinking, as defined by Alexander G. Baumgarten, and theories addressing the intimate relation between the sense of touch and movement and modes of thought are key. The exposition then extends beyond Bergholtz and Pask's project to propose how the attitude of rudimentariness, underpinned by an understanding of sensate thinking and workings of touch, helps articulate what is at stake in the present for artistic research more generally and, specifically, within the growing importance placed on economies of learning in the (Dutch) education system. In creating this exposition, I attempted to follow the lines, curves, and cracks of 'A Way of Making' to investigate the feedback loops between the discursive and the non-discursive. I propose the not-yet of knowledge as a productive site for the emergence of new perspectives and critical standpoints, as well as the transformative effects of such emergent perspectives on existing habits, modes of making, and, ultimately, what is already known.
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