Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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  22. Indigeneities This Ruukku issue has been edited as part of the research project Taking Back the Museum – Opening the Space of Community Museums to Recover the Art of Indigenous People (2021–2025), funded by the Kone Foundation, which brings together artistic research and Indigenous studies.
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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.
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  20. Artivism Our Artivism issue is inspired by dismantling the contemporary conception of art and by a space where working methods, contents, and ideals produced by art have changed. This also enables negotiations and struggles between various conceptions of art.
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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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  Taideperustainen toimintatutkimus Lapin ympäristökonflikteissa (2016) author(s): Maria Huhmarniemi published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Tutkimukseni taustalla on moninaiset konfliktit, jotka liittyvät Lapin kaivoshankkeisiin, poronhoitoon, matkailuun ja muuhun luonnonvarojen käyttöön. Ne ovat seurausta luonnonkäytön moninaisista intresseistä ja erilaisista tavoista tulkita historiaa, jolla luonnonvarojen käyttöä oikeutetaan. Tutkimukseni on taideperustainen toimintatutkimus, jonka osana olen tehnyt taiteellisia produktioita ja reflektoinut niitä tutkimusartikkeleissa. Taideperustainen toimintatutkimus etenee sykleissä, jotka sisältävät suunnittelua, teoreettista taustatyötä, taiteellista työskentelyä tai vastaavia interventioita, reflektoivaa tarkastelua, käsitteellistämistä ja tavoitteiden täsmentämistä. Prosessin analyysin aineistoa ovat tuotetut taiteelliset produktiot sekä toiminnan ja kokemusten havainnot ja dokumentit. Särkyvää-näyttelyssä tavoitteenani oli yhteistyö biologien kanssa. Aiheena oli kysymys, joka liittyi luonnonsuojeluun ja vesivoiman rakentamiseen. Marjamatkat-ryhmänäyttely liittyi ulkomaalaisten marjanpoimijoiden ja paikallisten marjastajien ristiriitoihin, mihin tavoitteena oli avata dialogia. Kotipalkisilla-näyttelyssä käsittelin maankäytön ristiriitoja tutkimustietoa tulkiten ja visualisoiden. Tässä artikkelissa esittelen nämä taiteelliset produktiot suhteuttaen ne ympäristötutkimuksen viimeaikaisiin teemoihin. Tämä artikkeli perustuu väitöskirjani käsikirjoitukseen.
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  From 'Highbrow Art' to Participatory Culture – A Potential for Change (2016) author(s): Barbara Lueneburg published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Through the arts research project TransCoding (funded by the Austrian Science Fund as PEEK AR 259-G21) we wish to encourage participation in the development of a musical-multimedia show and an audiovisual installation by offering participatory culture via the web 2.0. Since February 2014, the TransCoding team has built a network of various social media channels around a main hub, the WordPress site what-ifblog.net. Here we introduce our topics of multimedia art and contemporary (art) music, community participation, and the ongoing creation of our show under the categories "Art we love", "You, us and the project", and "Making of", respectively. In a fourth category we choose "identity" as our main topic for the content of the show and the blog. The concept of identity offers a framework for the project that is universally relevant and unites our otherwise diverse international community members. The blog is our main contact point with our community, currently at more than 1000 members, and affords them the opportunity to participate in our project. Via calls for entries we encourage our visitors to contribute images, sounds, and texts that we incorporate in our artwork. Through our social media channels we invite to speak out, share discourse and take influence on the creation of our artwork, thus empowering our followers to express their own identities and participate in the creative process. We afford our community members authority in shaping our work and offer them a platform to meet and make their interest clear. As we invite contributors to exercise influence in the joint artwork, we look at change as viewed through the power relationship between artist and community. The (commonly) hierarchic relationship between the artist and audience/followers is being changed into one of permeability and mutual influence. Consequently we explore not only how the artist as researcher can engender social change, but also how the participating community can do so through their contributions to the project. By delving into the participants' motivations, we learn more about their interests as well as about their reasons for creating and for wanting to be a part of our participatory community. The romantic principle of the individual composer-genius working beyond established rules or external controls is obsolete for us; we investigate the role of the artist within this community and ask how granting creative influence to our community alters traditional (power) models of artist-audience relation and if the interaction consequently adds meaning to both. TransCoding is located at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz/Austria. Contents: 1. Introduction: Introduction to TransCoding-From 'Highbrow Art' to Participatory Culture: what is it about and who is involved? 2. Methodology: Positioning ourselves as researchers and artists in the respective fields and introducing the central artworks and the strategies employed in our research project. 3. Case studies: Detailed investigation on the level and the area in which we grant authority in decision-making to our community. Outline of areas of success and conflict our project yields. 4. Conclusion: Demonstration of how TransCoding engenders social and/or artistic change.
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  Osallisuus ja Poliittiset Eleet (2016) author(s): Susanna Helke published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Onko instrumentaalisen muutosagendan toteuttaminen poliittisen ja yhteiskunnallisen taiteen ainoa mahdollinen muoto? Pohdin tekstissäni oman elokuvantekemiseni ja lajityyppini dokumentaarisen elokuvan reunaehtoja poliittisen ja poeettisen paradoksaalisessa kohtauspisteessä. Miten dokumentaariset esitykset voivat rikkoa lajin perinteestä nousevia asetelmallisia tehtäviä? Millaisen haasteen lajille ominaiselle uhrimotiiville asettaa Jacques Rançièrin ajattelussa keskiössä oleva radikaali tasa-arvoisuuden periaate? Miten voi luoda osallisuuden esityksiä, joissa äänet eivät ole uhrien vaan oman elämänsä täysvaltaisten toimijoiden?
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  Globalisaation varjoisat huoneet. Liikkuvan kuvan installaatiot eettisen ja poliittisen kohtaamisen tiloina. (2016) author(s): Minna Rainio published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Väitöskirjaani Globalisaation varjoisat huoneet. Kuulumisen ja ulossulkemisen tilat rajanylityksiä käsittelevissä liikkuvan kuvan installaatioissa (Rainio 2015) pohjautuvassa artikkelissani pohdin miten taide – ja omat installaatiomme – osallistuvat yhteiskunnalliseen keskusteluun kansallisista järjestyksistä, muuttoliikkeistä, rajoista ja globaalista eriarvoisuudesta. Monikanavaiset liikkuvan kuvan installaatiot – jotka olen toteuttanut yhdessä kuvataiteilija Mark Robertsin kanssa – pohjautuvat perusteelliseen taustatutkimukseen ja käsittelevät prostituutioon kohdistuvaa naiskauppaa, pakolaisuutta, siirtolaisuutta ja monikulttuurista suomalaisuutta. Taideteokset ovat syntyneet pyrkimyksestä ymmärtää kansallisuuteen liittyviä kuulumisen ja ulossulkemisen prosesseja ja halusta tehdä näkyväksi ja kuuluvaksi tarinoita yhteiskunnan reunoilta, mitkä usein jäävät kertomatta ja kuulematta.
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  Nietzsche 5 : The Fragmentary (2016) author(s): Michael Schwab, Paulo de Assis published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  ‘Nietzsche 5 : The Fragmentary’ is a collaborative research exposition, which presents a number of compositions by the young Friedrich Nietzsche (organised top to bottom) as well as various layers of reflection, interrogation, and speculation (organised left to right). It focuses on a moment of transformation around 1872 when Nietzsche moved from a serious interest in music composition to a career as a writer and philosopher. This period also coincides with the breakdown of Nietzsche’s friendship with Richard Wagner. The exposition suggests that Nietzsche’s own music as well as that of Wagner serves as a (negative) point of reference for the later Nietzsche, whose work, following Maurice Blanchot amongst others, can be characterised through the notion of the fragmentary, which places it also in relation to early Romanticism, in particular the writings of Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Friedrich Hölderlin. While Nietzsche’s more monumental compositions, such as his unfinished Mass (1860) and the symphonic poem Ermanarich (1861), may be more problematic, the exposition suggests that in some smaller pieces – in particular in So lach doch mal (1862) and Das ‘Fragment an sich’ (1871) – a sense of the fragmentary in Nietzsche may already be constructed. Beyond interpretations that focus more narrowly on Nietzsche’s work, this research exposition sets out to render the notion of the fragmentary productive for the wider context of artistic research. It does so with reference to Nietzsche’s notion of the untimely as a way to challenge both the dominant instrumentalisation of research and the notion of contemporaneity that seems central to present-day artistic practice. This not only provides perspectives into artistic epistemologies but also, more concretely, provides the methodology by which the research itself and its exposition have progressed. The overall mode is, thus, also that of the fragmentary, in which various media including text and image as well as audio and video recordings are distributed across a two-dimensional grid allowing multiple relationships and readings to emerge. The research exposition aims not only to discuss but ultimately also to employ the fragmentary so as to touch upon a specific artistic and intellectual motivation that we have come to identify with Nietzsche and which we suggest is also relevant today.
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  Hard Times. Lecture Performance as Gestural Approach to Develop Artistic Work-in-Progress (2016) author(s): Falk Hubner published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Artistic work is often an essential mode of articulation within artistic research, specifically when practice is understood as both source and target domain of the research. Therefore, within the performing arts, both process and product are essential gestures of artistic research and are indeed “justified and critical articulations of an interest in knowledge production." In this exposition, the format of a lecture performance is investigated and discussed as an explicit articulation through which the process of both artistic work and research is shared, rather than functioning merely as a format for disseminating findings. The format of lecture performance that is investigated here frames the artistic work and theoretical-conceptual framework as two distinct, yet interrelated, processes shared with a conference audience. This includes the deliberate choice for a live performance of artistic work-in-progress, adding a gestural and at times very kinaesthetic aspect to otherwise textually-dominated forms of presentation. The exposition as such has two focuses that are strongly related to each other, approaching the form of a feedback loop: on the one hand, the creation process of a new experimental performance work by Falk Hübner is investigated. "Hard Times" refers to the title of this artistic work: I will carry you over hard times. The performance itself is part of an artistic research into reduction in music, a continuation of the completed PhD research of the author (Hübner 2014). On the other hand, the lecture performance that employs this artistic work-in-progress as "material" as well as the related discussions with conference audiences is also explored. The exposition will demonstrate how these conference discussions strongly inform the work process of the specific artistic work in question and attempt to shed an alternative light on the well-known concept of "audience talks", which typically serve to generate feedback and insights into audience perspectives for artists after tryouts or performances of unfinished work. The audiences of conferences are, in most cases, considerably different in nature than "standard" audiences, offering the possibility of insightful input on quite different facets of both artistic work and research process––provoked by the very form of a lecture performance as described above. The exposition suggests that this type of lecture performance, explicitly including the audience at a conference as important source of information, feedback and peer-review, forms a gestural method of artistic research in itself, whose full potential within artistic research is yet to be explored.
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