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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  Enacting Agential Cuts - Notes on the Untitled 1-3 (2014) (2018) author(s): Heidi Tikka published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  The exposition is a visual-textual essay in which I explore Karen Barad’s agential realism in conversation with my installation “”Untitled 1-3” consisting of three interactive artifacts: knitted dress-like objects, responding to touch. An installation is understood here as an ongoing process of materialization which assumes different instantiations over time. I will approach these in dialogue with Barad’s concept of the “agential cut”, inquiring into three “cuts” in which the installation is enacted in three different configurations.
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  Surface Tension: Material Intra-Actions within Photography (2018) author(s): Jane Vuorinen, Rebecca Najdowski published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  How does photography materially intra-act with other material phenomena and how do these interruptions, entanglements or comings-together reveal new qualities of photographic materiality itself? In this exposition, we use the concept of intra-action to think through and problematize photographic practices by looking at two cases: ‘photo-embroideries’ and ‘landscape photography’. Through these perspectives we propose a new materialist approach to thinking about photography, one that considers and appreciates photographic materiality.
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  Materialising the Social (2018) author(s): Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Socially engaged arts practices make new forms of sociability. They are intra-active, diffractive methods through which we are able to craft new social faces. Quantum literacies are the modes through which socially engaged arts practices occur: they are at once critical, performative, intra-active. Quantum literacies enable us to examine generative intersections between artistic research and academic research regarding life and matter, nature and culture. Taking into account the multiple processes of material-discursive production, translation, transformation, and diffraction that constitute socially engaged arts practice, this paper considers the material-discursive space of socially engaged arts practice as a way of re-assembling and re-making multicultural urban spaces currently fractured by differences in belief. The transversal line of socially engaged art practice with interfaith youth zigzags across, and brings together, a diverse selection of bodies, beliefs, knowledges, skills, and creates a material-discursive documentation of group subjectivity. Through an excavation of my recent arts workshops with interfaith children, I will examine the ways aesthetic practices perform a group subjectivity created through collaboration. Such a bringing together of nature and culture, of different races and beliefs in urban environments, is urgently needed. The British Government spends 40 million pounds on an annual basis on The Prevent scheme. For those unfamiliar with the scheme, Prevent is just one strand of the UK government’s counter terrorism policy which has 4 strands – to Pursue, Protect, Prepare, and Prevent. Through prevent funding, local UK police forces have specialized Prevent officers, and both teachers and children are trained to identify radicalised children. On the southern side of the Globe, between 2015-16 Australian budget committed $22 million to ‘countering violent extremism’. This financial commitment reflects the fact that the everyday atmosphere of Australian life, in addition to British life, is characterised by implicit and explicit relationships to 'terrorism' prevention. This emphasis, indeed this atmosphere, and the financial investment it requires, has not reduced the quantity or severity of terrorist threats. More than anything, increased securitization has inspired a corresponding increase in violence and anxiety. The atmosphere of Islamophobia at the heart of such national imaginings that are mobilised to justify funding ways of ‘countering violent extremism’ is increasing. Taking these nationalizing cultural atmospheres as a point of departure, I look to establish transversal strategies for changing public culture and crafting interfaith belonging in Australia, and in the UK, through arts practices and public aesthetics. This paper reports on the early stages of a trans national art project that is designed to intervene in Islamophobic cultural imaginaries through socially engaged art as a vehicle for relationship building and social cohesion.
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  Situated Knowledge, Transmissions of Practice and Parasitic Endeavors (2018) author(s): Helen Palmer, Victoria Hunter, Jessica Foley, Karolina Kucia published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This paper presents an exchange between four practitioners from distinct disciplines of site dance, philosophy, experimental writing and pedagogy. It presents responses to provocations that position these practices as containers of Situated Knowledge, it interrogates the transmission and reception of practical knowledge, and employs the notion of ‘parasitic endeavor’ as a lens through which to facilitate discussion of of how disciplinary specific practices and emerging knowledges might traverse from one discipline to another and how this knowledge might be articulated and communicated to wider audiences. Informed by Bennett’s notions of ‘vibrant matter’ (2010), Barad’s conception of agency and intra-action (2003), transversality (Guattari, 1964 and Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012) and J.J. Gibson’s theory of affordances (1986) the paper explores how embodied knowledges become activated and mobilised through human-material-world intra-actions and how interdisciplinary engagements facilitate the articulation of such knowledges. The notion of parasitic endeavor employed here alludes to a temporal process in which theoretical paradigms from one discipline are employed within or applied in another for a required period of time to facilitate the articulation of complex intra-active and diffractive human-nonhuman entanglements. This paper seeks to show how distinct practices transmit knowledges beyond disciplinary boundaries. Each respondent will offer a ‘score’ to provoke and support intra-active practice. The score frames a set of instructions, rules or constraints for fellow authors to explore and reflect on their experiences in relation to their own, customary modes of ‘doing’ practice and research. For publication, each contributor will present a response to one or more of these scores, drawing on their own disciplinary methods and working practices to consider how the specificities of their discipline engage creatively with these alternate actions and actors. In this scenario the notion of ‘parasitic endeavor’ is positioned as prodigious and facilitatory; we move through and beyond disciplinary silos, borrow and compare, creating new theoretical and disciplinary entanglements, through which new/augmented modes of thinking/doing might emerge.
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  Trans-becomings in Western classical singing: An intra-active approach (2018) author(s): Milla Kristina Tiainen published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This exposition is an attempt to think transgender existence and experiences in relation to voice and the particular practices of western classical singing. A key source of inspiration for this voice and music-bound line of exploration is our collaboration with Finnish singer, voice teacher and trans man Demian Seesjärvi. Thus, the propositions presented here are meant to take form in-between Seesjärvi’s vocalizations, his spoken and written reflections on his body/voice and artistic activity, and the research interests and concepts that we bring into these encounters. The exposition explores the interrelations of trans existence and vocal art practices through Seesjärvi’s distinctive practice in classical singing. Our accompanying theoretical aim is to participate in recent discussions about how materiality - or better, materialities - matter a great deal in trans ways of being or becoming and the unfolding of trans selves. In particular, we engage with Seesjärvi’s activities as a classically trained singer by asking how his artistry and perhaps the music-cultural field of classical singing more generally prompt important insights into the co-formations of body, voice and sex/gender in trans ways of being. How do material, cultural and discursive aspects interrelate - or, in the terms used in this exposition, intra-act - within these formations? How can new materialist ideas concerning the emergent, instead of passive or predictable, character of matter, and the intra-active occurring of materialities and other phenomena, (e.g. Barad 2003; 2007) advance understandings of materiality, voice and sex/gender in vocal art practices and trans studies of music?
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  Lohdutusten arkisto (An Archive of Consolation) (2017) author(s): Elina Saloranta published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This exposition consists of my video piece Voices of Consolation (2014) and my essay "Lohdutusten arkisto" ("An Archive of Consolation"). The video shows interior paintings by the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916). On the soundtrack a group of people are trying to console the black-clad woman seen in the paintings. In the essay I describe the process of making the piece. The essay's structure reflects the video: the text is like an apartment with several rooms.
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