Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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  The Making of 'Commotion' (2023) author(s): Sara Pinheiro connected to: AMU-Academy of Performing Arts in Prague published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  “Commotion” is a fixed media multichannel composition that revolved around the principles of minimalist music. This exposition aims at understanding these principles while it tries to place the process of composing the piece within the common premises of artistic research. Due to the nature of its context, this approach includes also theories of reception - mostly by exploring themes such as intentionality, interpretation and representation. With this exposition, the author shares technical terminology of sound practices, in order to promote it in contexts predominantly visual-oriented.
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  Running Freight on the River. A Clean Cargo Prefiguration (2023) author(s): Tim Boykett, Tina Auer published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  We are interested in exploring the types of futures that are preferable for us all. Discussions of preferable futures can be made difficult by a lack of understanding of the lived experience of that possible future. We like to think that some wise person once said: “I hear futures and I forget. I see futures and I remember. I do futures and I understand.” In order to explore scenarios of possible futures, we thus look into experiential modalities. This exposition examines our Danube Clean Cargo project. The prefigurative process imagined what small scale localised transport could be like and attempted to run a pilot scheme. Reporting on that, merging the quantitative, qualitative and experiential aspects of the project, we present some resulting insights and imaginations. The project leaves us with speculations and visions drawn out by the process of prefiguration. It also leaves us with questions around heterotopic instantiations, queered economics and the everyday to be pondered as artistic research. This helps us reflect on the process of imagination and speculation, on dreams of various freedoms and the harsh realities of logistics chains. The exposition develops ideas in both internal and external reflective modes. The exposition is oriented along a chart of the Danube river for the region of interest. Along the south bank of the Danube the project and its internal reflections are arrayed as episodic text fragments, leading up to a short vision that echoes older stories of sailing cargo barges. Along the north bank a more external reflection is positioned, bringing the project and its understandings into context with a collection of previous developments and external references. The entire exposition is arranged as a single page paper nautical chart, which in contrast to a digital chart plotter, always displays all of the information and does not hide features. This exposition is part of Curiouser and Curiouser, cried Alice: Rebuilding Janus from Cassandra and Pollyanna (CCA), an art-based research project from Design Investigations (ID2) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Time's Up. It is supported by the Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK) from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): AR561.
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  Performing with Sonic Tools. An approach to designing and analysing new instruments (2023) author(s): Gaute Barlindhaug published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  In recent decades, digital technology has accelerated the development of new musical instruments, not only establishing new techniques for creating sound but also enabling new performance practices. From the perspective of the performer, this has significantly broadened their possibility to express themselves, but through earlier experimentations it has become clear to me that audiences have problem comprehend such use of new musical instruments. In a traditional setting, when an artist performs with an instrument the audience can build on their cumulative experience and knowledge to evaluate the skill of an artist. With new experimental instruments such a strategy to understand a performance is not possible. This text describes my work with the dance performance Sound of Silence, and the creation of a device called the Looping Camera. Base on previous experience from using sensor technology in musical performances combined with theories and about the listeners position, we tried find a new approach to the creation of new sound producing devises that could overcome earlier problems with audience comprehension. With our work we tried to create a device that, even if it was largely unfamiliar for the audience, could establish a sense of meaning for the audience by including references to non-musical media technology. This performance also resulted in the developing of an analytical concept, that of “sonic tools”, that is meant to draw attention to the aesthetics of new an unfamiliar instrument through liberating such tools from the dichotomy of musical vs- nonmusical sounds.
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  Heterotopia of the Practice Room: Casting and Breaking the Illusion of Tristan Murail’s Tellur for Solo Guitar (2023) author(s): Maarten Stragier published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  A combination of highly unusual extended playing techniques with open intabulated notation makes the solo guitar work Tellur altogether unique in Tristan Murail’s catalogue. When placed in the broader discursive context of Murail’s compositional philosophy, this unique configuration of elements causes a quandary. The composer aims to integrate “the totality of sonic phenomena” into his compositional language, and within this context he maintains a traditional view of musical authorship. However, how does a performer reconcile this perspective with a score of which the combination of unconventional techniques and open notation leaves so much of the sonic material to their individual discretion and know-how? This exposition offers the first performance-led study of this conundrum in Murail’s music and writings. Using Lydia Goehr’s historical study of the work-concept as a point of orientation, I explore the functioning of Werktreue in Tellur. I show that the processual structures that should make up its “ideal” score are correlative with the composer’s abstraction of the guitar, which is in its turn correlative with the guitarist’s unconventioned heuristics. I argue that confronting traditional musical authorship with this system of correlation creates a discursive aporia, but not a practical impossibility. Rather the discursive aporia brings to light what I call the “heterotopia of the practice room.” In this heterotopia, I as a performer navigate a musical reality that simultaneously reflects and contests a tradition of classical music performance built around the regulative work-concept.
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  CRITICAL CONFABULATIONS – Corresponding Practices and Mappings (2023) author(s): Jim Harold, Alex Hale published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition is based on an archaeological survey in the landscapes around Kilmartin Glen, Argyll and Bute, western Scotland, and references digital datasets – archaeological reference points –alongside the acts (enactments) of field walking, photography, drawing and poetry – experiences and representational discourses – to consider how land and landscapes may be read as dynamic palimpsestic and multi-dimensional fields of entanglement. Digital datasets were used by the survey to garner fruitful material to aid identification and to analyse (subtle) surface archaeological remains in the inhospitable terrain on the hills bordering Kilmartin Glen. By analysing, categorising and archiving such information, through naming and cataloguing, archaeological methodology effectively orders and tames such wildernesses. We, by contrast, are seeking to draw art and archaeological practices into dialogue with one another in order to assert the importance of recording experiences and random acts as a part of field research and, thereby, to both re-vivify and re-wild our encounters with landscape. Our exposition, and shared practices, intentionally encourage nuances of reading and interpretation that are found at the dialogic intersection between an artist/poet encountering archaeological landscape survey, and an archaeologist experiencing artistic, poetic and linguistic readings of land: reflecting in the process upon contemporary methodologies and underlying theoretical discourses. As such this research sits within the wider contemporary turn towards interdisciplinary practice, and seeks to establish a dialogue across disciplines; between humans and landscapes, practice and matter, that provides emerging approaches and hopes to remind us of the wild experience.
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  The Plane of Cicadas: On the Possibility of Making Kin through Musicking (2023) author(s): Mathew Klotz published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This autoethnographic exposition details a short series of musicking encounters aimed at making kin in a rainforest-covered mountain on unceded Djiru Country on the east coast of Australia. Each encounter consisted of a short hike and a discrete musical encounter with local subjectivities. The inquiry considers the place of the walking in the musicking, and my joint response-ability with my saxophone (or the ways in which we apprehend and respond to other subjectivities) in each encounter. I argue that the hiking and discrete sonic encounters became entangled processes, in which my epistemological capacity and music-making practice were challenged and the possibility of kinship resides.
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