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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  What calls for thinking? (2014) author(s): Mika Elo published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  My video "Mitä ajattelu kutsuu?" exposed here, audiovisually mimics, translates, challenges and transposes Martin Heidegger's essay "Was heißt Denken?". A compilation of passages of Heidegger's essay, which I have translated into Finnish for this purpose, makes up the voice-over accompanying the images in the video. The exposition also includes these passages in Finnish and German writing. The visual language of the video, in turn, edges Heidegger's pondering out of its focus by turning itself towards a series of questions deriving from the margins and lacunae of the essay. In its own peculiar way, the video is a call for thinking. Further, a text, entitled "conversation" in the menu, addresses some aspects of Heidegger's essay as if seen through the video. The conversation revolves around the questions of language and translation. Its form reflects the density and multifaceted character of the audiovisual material. Finally, "epilogue" attempts at unfolding a question concerning "intelligent design" that arises from the material. Here, my main point of reference is Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of struction.
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  Tactile Resonance in Art (2014) author(s): Arild Berg published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Materiality concerns the relationship between humans and the physical world. This study explores the relationship between materiality and material-based art through an art project created together with nurses working in a ward for elderly patients in a mental health care facility. In this study, the material physicality activated the bodily senses and unlocked the memories of the participants. The materialization of the art objects was related to communication both in art-based research methods and in the hospital practice by contributing in a special way to the dialogue with sensory presence and tactile resonance.
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  Connection to materiality: Engaging with Ceramic practice (2014) author(s): Priska Falin connected to: Aalto University published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This exposition introduces an exploration of ceramic material from the perspective of an artist-researcher. The ceramic material is explored through aesthetics and making. In this exposition the material connection is understood as a broad term introducing the idea of different levels of involvement with the material. The material connections are reflected from two different perspectives, giving a more holistic idea of what influences the act of making and perception. In this exposition, I explore the material connections mainly from the subjective perspective of a ceramic practitioner and partly from the perspective of the viewers who have no prior experience of the processes of making. Together with the written content, I show different works e.g. videos and a sound file that reveal parts of the processes in ceramic practice. The video and sound works are discussed here as process aesthetics, exposing the experiences, that have aesthetic quality, in the context of making. Through these examples I discuss different levels of engagement with the material and its processes. The aim is to open the material connections in a different light describing the idea of diverse levels of engagement in the ceramic practice.
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• Those Lips Were Made to Suck that Button (2013) author(s): Taina Riikonen published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  In this liquid text/sound, the act of recording breastfeeding is explored in terms of artistic research as machinic liminality and embodied listening. In line with Felix Guattari’s notion of a machine as a prerequisite of technology, the highly intimate recording of neonatal nutrition is explored as an artistic inquiry, which is dependent on the interconnecting processes of the machinic assemblage (the coupling of a baby and a breast). Listening to breastfeeding through the headphones with a microphone touching the skin, produces a particular technology of recording that is noisy in its radical exclusion of other sounds, temporalities and spaces, as well as in its endless counter-oscillation and intrusiveness. The theoretical rhizomes of the article draw from the work of Luce Irigaray, Felix Guattari and Jean-Luc Nancy. The qualities of recording the breastfeeding are analysed through visceral parameters based on touch, embodied listening, and recording as a corporeal-political activity.
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  Kokemuksen symbolit – pohdintoja nuotinnoksen ja soivan välisestä suhteesta (2013) author(s): Pasi Lyytikäinen published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  In my article ‘Symbols of the Experience’, I will approach artistic research through the relationship of a musical idea and the notation of it. How can experimental musical ideas be translated to notation, so that other musicians can understand the notation in a similar way? How does the tradition of notation guide me as a composer? How have workshops with other musicians guided my way of notating music? In this article, I will focus on the relationship between the notation and what is sounding – in general and with reference to my own work.
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  Tilakokemuksia esitysinstallaatiossa (2013) author(s): Elina Lifländer published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  In this writing, I open up the process of a previous site-specific live installation which I was involved in: Between two skies (2012). This piece is the first part of my doctoral thesis in artistic research, dealing with the spatial experience and the transformation of the scenographer’s working methods. The concept of the event was mainly formed collectively by the discussions and experiments of the working group. In this text, I observe the spatial experience from three points of view: via my own experience, from the perception of the visitors and connecting it to a wider perspective, namely reflecting the nature of the live installation to the art critic Claire Bishop’s thoughts and examples in the book Installation Art, A Critical History (2005) and Anna Moszynska's book Sculpture Now (2013). In the end, I am summing up the kind of impact this process and these three different views have had on my research and how the thoughts and questions have evolved during the preparations.
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