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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  Reconfigured Image (2016) author(s): Tuomo Rainio published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  In this exposition, I will introduce a series of works that were exhibited in my solo exhibitions Notes from the Mouth of Shadows (2013), Reconfigured image (2013) and Possible object (2015). In the exhibitions my main interest was to investigate the transformation of an image-space into a digital realm, where the very basic questions of representing space encounter fundamental changes. More broadly, I will try to introduce my artistic process as a two-direction orbicular movement between concepts, codes and images. I will also try to take note of the translations that occur when working with an idea back and forth between different materials and references. I am interested in the possible errors and misunderstandings that can bring a singular quality to the predetermined iteration. In other words, I will try to define what is being translated by observing what is distinguishable only afterwards. I see an analogy between the structure of a digital image and how the world is perceived as an image – almost as if cosmos would arise from chaos. Any bitmap image actualizes only one of all the possible variations of this specific bitmap and its properties. In a more practical sense, it could be stated that the digital image is always in a process of translation when it is viewed. In short, the digital image is dependent of a translator (computer) by default. My attempt is to activate this dependency and take it from mere automatism to a creative gesture. This attempt could only be meaningful when all the three aspects (concept, code and screen) are taken into account. By activating the process of translation the dependency of the translator can be transformed into a positive, creative act.
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  Dear Rita (2016) author(s): Otso Huopaniemi published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  "Dear Rita," a series of eight letters to Rita Raley (Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara), is a research response to Raley’s presentation “Algorithmic Translations,” which she gave at the "Performance, Technology, Translation" event in New York in April 2015. Organized by The Barnard Center for Translation Studies and the Department of Theatre, the event explored “the theoretical and practical intersections between contemporary technologies of translation and performance.” In addition to presentations by Raley and W. B. Worthen, the symposium included a performance of love.abz, an independent art work and the artistic part of my doctoral degree at University of the Arts Helsinki, Theater Academy. In "Dear Rita," I use screen captures of the Google Translate website to address through translation the many links and questions that arise from Raley’s insightful presentation. I comment on Raley’s discussion of Eric Zboya’s and Baden Pailthorpe’s work, both visual artists and researchers, and relate them to my own ongoing artistic research project into what I call “live writing.” My inquiry deals with a form of improvisatory, collaborative dramatic writing that employs algorithmic mediation and translation. In asking what the task of the machine translator in performance is or could be, I remark on some of the themes Raley discusses, including those relating to authorship, the nature of algorithmic translation, and the gesture of insistent re-translation of already machine translated text.
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  Interruption as Dissenting Gesture (2016) author(s): Sepideh Karami published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  In this exposition I investigate the tactics of interruption as methods of engaging with the institution through artistic research and approaches. This is developed by drawing upon Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘dissensus’, Chantal Mouffe’s ‘strategy of engagement’ and Michel de Certeau's idea of 'tactics'. Art as a dissensual activity turns artistic research into a dissident research that can serve to question academic consensus rather than conforming to its established structure. Interruption becomes a dissenting gesture. I use a fictional and fictitious publication as a tool to 'interrupt' institutions. In this fictitious publication, I have borrowed Lieutenant Fontaine from Robert Bresson’s movie, ‘A Man Escaped’, and have introduced him as a protagonist of 'interrupting architecture', investigating his escape plan as an activity of 'architecting'. The journey of this publication goes through two short architectural narrations of two places: a prison (as discipline) and a library (as dominant discourse). These two narrations are combined with three formulae: amateur, fiction, misperformance or disloyalty; each acts as certain characteristics of dissidence. Together, these aim to raise the question: How do tactics of interruption contribute to dissensus in academia?
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  Miksi minun piti kirjoittaa juuri ruusuista? Autoritaarisuus, autenttisuus ja autoetnografisuus kirjoittamisessa (2015) author(s): Johanna Pentikäinen published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  My essay seeks to discuss the writing process as a very ambivalent object of study, and I aim to use my own experience as a teacher, researcher, and writer in developing the methods for my study. The discourses of creative writing processes produced in classrooms and in textbooks often emphasise certain aspects of the discovering, selecting, producing and editing phases, while language appears as a medium for a set of activities. However, many professional writers have either stated or mentioned that they have a certain need to write or a set of "writing drives" that enforces and leads them to their activity. These driving aspects of motivation and interest are not easily represented in classroom or textbook discourses, due to their unique and particular nature. I have chosen three terms as a starting point for my study: 1) Authority, because all writing needs to face the questions of authority, sometimes in terms of scientific or aesthetic authority, sometimes in terms of what can or cannot be said in a certain context; 2) Authenticity, because both research and fiction writing need a sense of lived experience and/or some references to real life in order to remain vital and expressive, and 3) Autoethnography, because it too uses the experienced reality as its starting point, and manifests how transformation from silence to voicing is the real process in writing. I am studying my ideas by combining autoethnographic and explorative narrative voices, and I use my own prose text ”Why write about Roses” as an example of the construction of the voice.
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  Collaborative Processes and the Crisis of Attentiveness (2015) author(s): Hanna Kuusela published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Collaborative artistic processes have become increasingly popular in the past decades. Different forms of community art, relational art, and participatory art, as well as artistic collaborations, and art collectives have occupied a central role in the art world. Does this collaborative taken on art, with its focus on the artistic process, entail a move towards openness and communality, or is it rather an obligation put on us? Is the growing interest in the artistic process a fruitful approach that enriches our understanding of art, or is it an unfortunate sign of art being subordinated to capitalism that pressures us to produce constantly new products, without critical reflection or qualitative criteria? This exposition investigates this dialectics between artistic processes and art objects by following my own research process on collaborative writing.
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  Keinuva käynti ja muutoksen tila (2015) author(s): Marika Orenius published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  In my text, I ponder a process of making and researching art. As in my doctoral thesis (Home base - bodily response and spatial experiences processed to works of art) I shall now go through the process as an opening to a multiple spatial and temporal thinking. In addition to some philosophical reflection, I approach the social and political meanings of space-time and corporeality. Of these subjects, I have filmed various spaces for my upcoming video installation. The working title of the process is Parousia. The video material shown in the exposition is the raw material of the work.
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