Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

Visit HUB at i2ads.up.pt/hub

HUB is a peer-reviewed and open-access research journal for reporting on arts, design, and performing arts. It has an international scope with a particular emphasis on practitioner methodologies and the educational impact of artistic research.

HUB's aims are two-fold: to promote a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas to foster new forms of inquiry and documentation of artistic research; to stimulate the debate surrounding the social, cultural, and technological frames of art and design practices.

HUB is published twice a year by i2ADS – Research Institute in Art, Design and Society (University of Porto, Portugal) with the support of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

See HUB Open Calls!

Read the Submissions Guidelines for more information.

• 
  3. HUB Issue #3 / Autumn 2024 / Metabolic Media The essays and expositions in this issue of HUB delve into the concept of metabolic media, exploring the interconnections between biological, technological, cultural, and ecological systems. Guest Co-editors Louise Carver & Jamie Allen.
• 
  2. HUB Issue #2 / Spring 2024 / Varia This issue marks the first year of HUB, which continues to develop work along the lines of artistic research, focusing its attention on multiple creative practices and the transversality of the processes explored.
• 
  1. HUB Issue #1 / Autumn 2023 / Distance For this Autumn issue of HUB, we present a collection of works that results from the interest in broadening the understanding of DISTANCE after our first open call process for Artists, Designers, and Researchers in Art, Design and Society.
• 
  0. HUB Special Issue — Issue #0 / Spring 2023 The first inaugural issue we feature the contributions from invited researchers, relevant within a wide range of areas, reflecting on relevant or emerging topics of research and development within the Arts and Design.

• Dancing Sympathy Beyond Human Failure: Artistic Research as Cosmopolitical Defuturing (2023) author(s): Peter Purg published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  The article explores the concepts, tools and methods that may be taken on board by artistic researchers when venturing into uncertain futures. The approaching hay-day of Artistic Research calls for a repositioning of this academic and cultural avantgarde that is assuming real power and must thus take clear opposition against dominant politics and corporate capitalism keeping the human and non-human kinds in perpetual crisis. Next to Science and Technology, Art has finally reached a status of an equivalued cornerstone, and within this level playing field a new research-based approach is needed where power relationships, decision-making mechanisms, dominant narratives or prevalent aesthetics are boldly investigated and critically questioned, (re)instituting the importance of artistic disruption and establishing art-thinking as the key to not only question but also design pathways to meaningful change. Deeply intertwined research methodologies ranging from social to natural sciences, from humanities via (critically reflected) technologies to the (technologically emancipated) arts, should be left to safely mingle and mutually inspire. Rather than colonizing it with yet another false supremacy, we should be learning from the Global South, where collective dancing, storytelling or performing still presents a norm of how to generate new knowledge or reach consensus. Artistic Research can contribute to crafting better worlds even once AI entities get accepted as fellow researchers (if not dancers), their agency reflected in an attitude of radical sympathy (re)instituting care, justice and solidarity by ways of sound research activism.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  A Model for Understanding the Evolving Role of Graphic Designers in the Era of Artificial Intelligence (2023) author(s): Stig Møller Hansen published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  This paper examines the possible impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on the ever-changing role of graphic designers. As its main contribution, the paper proposes a model based on the intertwining concepts of deduction, induction, and abduction. It argues that deductive and inductive tasks in graphic design can be effectively and advantageously outsourced to AI, while abductive tasks are still best performed by human graphic designers. Additionally, the power balance between humans and AI is discussed, concluding that human graphic designers must play a pivotal role in initiating and critically evaluating the results of any collaboration with AI tools. The model introduces the metaphorical notion of a "disciplinary expertise filter," which serves as a professional quality assurance for AI-based automation and augmentation in the design process. The distinction between "black box" and "clear box" AI systems is briefly discussed to provide a more nuanced understanding of AI as being "a magic tool" for graphic designers. Lastly, the paper presents six perspectives derived from the model, aiming to foster informed discussions and encourage critical reflections among graphic designers regarding their future role in the era of AI.
  open exposition comments (0)
• Designing Agency (2023) author(s): Johanna Drucker published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  As AI systems proliferate, questions about their emergent capacities focus on intelligence, sentience, and control. But the issue of agency, the capacity for action with consequences, brings other design issues into play. Agency takes many forms including mechanical, incidental, probabilistic, and intentional, but is largely assessed on the basis of behaviors. The challenge of designing agency can be met by considering what must be programmed into a system to provide it with the capacity for action, but the distinction between the appearance of agency (simulacral) and actual agency (intentional) is difficult to test. This paper discusses some of the connections between agency and debates in physics about determinism and probability as they relate to the question of human capacities for intentional action and concludes with a discussion of the difficulties of conceptualizing agency without falling into Romantic models of disruptive behavior. No easy answers arise in regard to the problem of designing intentional agency in a way that can be either tested or constrained.
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  Explorations with an Ash Tree (2023) author(s): Annette Arlander published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  In this essay I describe one example of working with a tree (an ash tree on the former post quay on Eckerö Island) and suggest that such artistic methods, like performing with a tree repeatedly or addressing a tree in writing as a performance for camera, serve as useful tools to generate material to reflect upon later. The heightened perceptual awareness and the intensity of the moment of performance helps in articulating observations and ideas that might not have come to the fore in other circumstances.
  open exposition comments (0)
• The sea as a site of curation: Reflections on aesthetics education (2023) author(s): John Baldacchino published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  With the sea as a “site” of curation, a thalassic approach (as that which belongs to the sea), facilitates a showing of those things that converge upon the contingency of daily living. The case for aesthetics is pedagogical, inasmuch as it provides us with a strategy for exiting into the wider world as we move outside the walls of a building (and that of Bildung). Exiting also implies rejecting all those institutionalized constraints that education’s edificial approach brings to learning. Here, in its aporetic nature, art is one of those few human actions which allow us to articulate and enact a sense of being both strangers and homecomers in our own world. In other words, this is a form of curation that is claimed through the autonomy that it portends.
  open exposition comments (1)
• 
  Editorial (last edited: 2024) author(s): Louise Carver, jamie allen, Filipa Cruz, Maria Manuela Bronze da Rocha, Orlando Vieira Francisco connected to: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
  The essays and expositions in this issue of HUB delve into the concept of Metabolic Media, exploring the interconnections between biological, technological, cultural, and ecological systems. Together, they offer a rich tapestry of perspectives, illuminating how processes of exchange, transformation, and interaction underpin the idea of media as metabolic and metabolising. Through this metabolic mosaic, this special issue of HUB presents a dynamic and interconnected view of metabolic media, celebrating how media processes reflect and influence the metabolic flows of life itself. Each contribution invites readers to rethink how artistic, scientific, and technological practices can illuminate the entangled systems that sustain and shape our shared existence. Against a background of shifting, strained or even pathological metabolic relations across scales, forms, zones and bodies, these reflections and interventions intersect with media techniques and technologies as traditionally conceived and emergent, immanent and immediate metabolic flows systems and processes.
  open exposition comments (0)