Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 24. Artist Pedagogy How does an artist teach and do research? How does artistic thinking work as a starting point for pedagogy, and how is it realized in practice? How does making art feed into teaching, and correspondingly, how does pedagogical philosophy serve as inspiration for teaching practices? How is artist pedagogy related to social and ecological issues?
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  23. Re-Imagining This issue addresses the various gestures of going back, returning to take another look, or starting anew. It suggests that research in the context of artistic and creative practice could have a special relation to time; simultaneously attaching itself to a prior moment in time and, from there, propelling imagination to unforeseen futures. The theme "Re-imagining" proposes reassessments where the evaluation of past events, integral to research, is in unison with the anticipation potential, integral to the arts. It wonders about new conceptions of an idea, place, space, object, and ways of doing and making that emerge from a reverse glance — the challenges, updates, and improvements.
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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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  Exhibition Intra-Actions: Experiences, Identities, and Texts in the Making (2018) author(s): Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Zuzana Štefková, Helena Grande Vicente published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This co-authored exposition studies three different art exhibitions as complex phenomena by focusing on how exhibitions happen, are in the making. Based on participatory experience, 'Exhibition Intra-Actions' offers insights to the agential capacities of the exhibition space and art ‘object’ in situations as varied as understanding and experiencing post-internet art, curating a geopolitically sensitive exhibition, and writing a wall text while exhibition is in the making.
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  Aesthetics of inhuman touch: notes for 'vegetalised' performance (2018) author(s): mirko nikolić, Neda Radulovic published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  The article aims to develop the notion of posthuman/ist performance art, drawing from and continuing the line of work developed by Karen Barad. Starting from the critique of anthropocentrism of performance studies, we try and apply the notions of affect and intra-action to account for interspecies entanglements in the context of performance arts. The article will tackle several main issues in attempt to acknowledge more than human agencies participating in the event of performance: how do we understand and reconfigure the notion of body in performance? Whose bodies count as present and who gets the credit as the subject/creator of the performance? As the territory to investigate these questions we look at the vegetal-human co-performances, especially through touching intra-actions. We try to figure what a desiring-touching between these radically different embodiments and modes of being would entail, and, through this critique of performance studies, we make steps towards 'vegetalising' both affect theory and agential realist theory of intra-action.
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  GEOART AS A NEW MATERIALIST PRACTICE. INTRA-ACTIVE BECOMINGS AND ARTISTIC (KNOWLEDGE) PRODUCTION. (2018) author(s): Dorota Golanska published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Situated within a new materialist philosophical framework and inspired by its posthumanistic, postdualistic, and affirmative orientation, this article looks at instances of geoart, understanding it in terms of intra-active knowledge production processes. I look specifically at the artistic projects by Jim Denevan and, by doing so, I intend to examine the concept of a non-academic artistic practice with an aim of exposing that a detailed inspection of the processes involved in the artistic production sheds an altogether different light on the nature of all research practices. As such, it lets us engage more thoroughly with the “how-question” of generating knowledge, highlighting its processual material-semiotic character. As instantiated in my case studies, an inquiry of different relationalities involved in the process of artistic (knowledge) production enables a study of how subject and object emerge as a result of “intra-activity” (Barad 2007). Using his own body as both a tool and an active corporeal entity merging with the surrounding landscape, a geoartist Jim Denevan rhythmically and in a dance-like movement creates ephemeral gigantic drawings on sand, soil, or ice. They emerge out of a dynamic assemblage of the artist’s body (and his tools) and the local geophysical situation (with different sorts of matter or forces present there). The natural environment operates as an agent actively engaged in the whole process of artistic creation—of both making and unmaking of the drawings. When finished by Denevan, his works of art remain dynamic; they are being gradually modified and eventually erased by the undulating waves, tides, gusts of wind, the working of erosion and weathering, until they completely disappear. Focusing on the engagement of the artist with the environment and the random audiences present on site, I want to make clear that such eco-sensitive creation may serve as an illuminating example of what forms the entanglements of art and research could take and what material-semiotic effects such creative activities produce for all actors involved.
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  Ornamenting Vocality. Intra-active methodology for Vocal Meaning-Making. (2018) author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This exposition departs from the silence of a non-existing voice. A voice about to touch the ears and eyes of both author and readers/listeners. A voice already sounding in the head of the author - sounding as thoughts, words, letters and sentences. A non/voice being part of a never ending development of new materialities. An onto-epistemological voice diffracted through a singer's process of making sense of a lesson from a 17th century vocal manuscript. A voice as a mattering method for the art of singing through new materialist theories, vocal and discursive narratives and somatic awareness.
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  Ant-ic Intra-Actions (2018) author(s): Fiona MacDonald published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Ant-ic Intra-Actions – an experiential exploration of artistic co-production with wood ants.
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  Some works and their afterlife (2018) author(s): Mika Elo published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  In this exposition I present a cluster of works with regard to their subtle interconnections, often not consciously constructed or intended in any particular ways at the time of their conception. The afterlife of these works, however, enact aesthetic intra-actions of their ensemble. Shedding light on some parts of this cavernous network of pressing matters I make an attempt of explicating the ways in which artistic thinking might get "diffracted" into many part-processes that are both divergent and entangled. In the course of my presentation, I try to be sensitive towards the fact that these strings of thinking are distributed in a complex manner across the divide of sensibility and intelligibility. In terms of the chosen approach this implies avoiding the use of discursive explanations as the main medium of explication. This "method", if it can be formalized as one, involves priorizing the material circumstances of particular articulations, both verbal and non-verbal, over content-oriented gestures of translation.
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