Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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  'Unfixed Landscape' - Is it possible to define 'place' through artistic practice? (2012) author(s): Ruby Wallis published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition takes the form of a series of experimental and philosophical attempts to represent place through film, photography and drawing. The research is devised through the frame of the self-reflexive auto-ethnographer. I have identified three methodological approaches that question fixed notions of self .The argument is whether it is possible to represent a place without its representation becoming a ‘fixed’ view; and the evasion and determination of a definition of 'place' becomes apparent throughout the body of this research.
  open exposition comments (3)
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  Playing the Spiral Jetty (2012) author(s): Juan Carlos Castro, Daniel T. Barney published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  In this exposition we describe and theorize the evolution of an artistic enquiry entitled Playing the Spiral Jetty. This is accomplished in four parts. In part one we present our understanding of play as research methodology. Then, in part two we narrate and contextualize our encounter of the exhibition Contemporary Masters, an installation of an 18-hole, artist-designed, miniature golf course. In part three we elaborate our improvisations and conceptualizations of Playing the Spiral Jetty. Finally, in part four, we conclude with a theorization of play enacted in our performance. Play, as action and reaction, becomes a non-deterministic tactic or strategy for rethinking and redirecting understandings of and engagements with art. As a research enquiry, play is integrally linked to art making and as such, a way of knowing. The medial space in which play and subsequently art occupy create opportunities for novel ontological understandings.
  open exposition comments (2)
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  Voice (a retracing) (2012) author(s): Vida Midgelow, Tom Williams published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  Voice (a retracing) is a video/sound work which seeks to capture and articulate the dancer's inner experience of movement improvisation. In doing so, this work layers and distorts video images and uses the dancer's spoken voice as the basis for an acousmatic composition. In this exposition Tom Williams (composer) and Vida L Midgelow (dancer and videographer) discuss a creative lexicon emerging from their collaborative processes making this work. Through these conversations they reveal conceptual, contextual and methodological ideas, illuminating their creative practices.
  open exposition comments (3)
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  Actor Self vs. Character Self: An Empirical Exploration (2012) author(s): E. T. Hetzler published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This work combines the results of an online survey about the experience of acting with interviews of many of the respondents to explore how actors describe the relationship between the character they portray in performance and their non-character selves. It also explores the role of emotion in this relationship.
  open exposition comments (2)
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  The taste of tree? (2012) author(s): Deborah Harty, Phil Sawdon published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  The taste of a tree; the connection of [the] senses, the transference of sensations to smell a colour or hear a drawing… Walking around a tree, observing the colour, texture and outline, sitting to draw, to document the actualities of the object … this presents no interest … Walking around [the tree] observing the colour, texture, outline, breathing, mind and body absorbing tree, drawing through sensation the memory of the encounter … that presents the interest. The exposition considers whether the senses are connected and transferable in memory sufficiently to draw the taste of tree through the association of recalled sensations. Adopting Merleau-Ponty’s (2004, p.61) suggestion in The World of Perception, that, ‘[…] every quality is related to qualities associated with other senses. Honey is sugary. Yet sugariness in the realm of taste […] constitutes the same sticky presence as honey in the realm of touch.” humhyphenhum seek to uncover whether it is possible to draw the taste of tree through the association of recalled sensations; are the senses sufficiently connected to be transferable?
  open exposition comments (3)
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  Cargo: Dwelling in the Archive of Slavery at the Cape (2011) author(s): Mark Fleishman published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  In 2006, together with a group of collaborators, representatives from two Cape Town-based performance companies with connections to the University of Cape Town, I set out to create a production on the history of slavery at the Cape. The production, Cargo, was first produced as part of the Spier Arts Summer Season in March 2007 in Stellenbosch and then at the National Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown and the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town later that year. Cargo is the fourth part of a series of productions based on ‘key sites of memory’ in and around the city of Cape Town. The term is taken from Pierre Nora (1989) and refers to a conglomerate of physical, material and archival sites that function to concentrate remembrance in a world in which, to paraphrase James E. Young, the more we monumentalize, the more we seem to have “divested ourselves of the obligation to remember” (2000: 94). In making each of the works in the series, my collaborators and I faced two fundamental and interconnected problems related to the themes of time and silence: How to find an appropriate image in the present for something that has past and how to make the archive speak in unspeakable ways. The productions were created through a dramaturgical process based on the idea of ‘dwelling’ borrowed from the anthropologist Tim Ingold (2000) based on a question posed by Heidegger on the difference between ‘building’ and ‘dwelling’ (1971).
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