Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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  On the Indeterminate Training Technologies of a Reconstructed Bauhaus Choreographer. A Research Practice Between Speculative Historiography, Architectural Invention, and Performative Co-enactment (2023) author(s): Thomas Pearce published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition proposes a method of artistic research that uses (and disobediently misuses) techniques of reconstruction as a mode of performative, artistic, and architectural invention. Our speculative notion of reconstruction challenges inherited disciplinary notions of historiography and simultaneously functions as a propositional and generative tool. The exposition revolves around the discussion of a research and performance project entitled Jakob K., which reconstructs the works of fictional Bauhaus choreographer and gymnastics teacher Jakob Klenke (1874–1941). This reconstruction was the product of a collaboration between performance artists and architectural researchers, involving field work, site-specific re-enactment, 3D scanning, animation, and digital fabrication, and culminated in a series of live performances at Kampnagel (Hamburg) and during the 2019 Bauhaus 100 centennial. The exposition is structured around a series of multimedia sections, each of which departs from an element of the performance’s architectural and medial framing, describes aspects of the artistic research process, and uses these as a lens for theoretical reflection. In analogy to our working method, which created the project as an ongoing layering of spatial and choreographical ‘evidence’, this method of discussing the project consecutively adds layers and connections to the project-assemblage that is Jakob K. Throughout the exposition, a practice emerges that challenges notions of solely human-authored and human-centred design and performance; proposes a set of techno-speculative training practices while challenging historical discourses on body optimisation; and subverts disciplinary uses of technology, prescriptive logics of representation, and techniques of reconstruction, misusing them instead in disobedient ways and reinventing them as creative affordances that can challenge dominant techniques of power.
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  Story in motion: creative collaborations on Tłı̨chǫ lands (2023) author(s): Adolfo Ruiz, Tony Rabesca published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition describes a creative collaboration in the self-governed Tłı̨chǫ region of Canada’s Northwest Territories. As part of this collaboration, Indigenous research methods and participatory experiences facilitated a process by which regional oral history was visualised and translated into animation. As a long-term project, this research was based on relationships through which a non-Indigenous researcher was able to learn and exchange knowledge with elders and youth from the region. Community workshops facilitated image-making, storytelling sessions, and interaction between generations. The animated film that emerged through this research is an embodiment of cultural knowledge and cultural continuity.
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  Spotting A Tree From A Pixel (With Remote Sensing Researchers) (2022) author(s): Sheung Yiu published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition contemplates the collaboration between me, a photographer, and remote sensing researchers from the Department of Geoinformatics at Aalto University, in an ongoing artistic research collaboration called Ground Truth. Ground Truth is a photography project about ‘seeing something when there’s nothing there’. Based in the research group’s initial intent to overcome the spatial resolution limits of satellite imagery, the project now investigates new imaging techniques such as computational photography and hyperspectral imaging of forests, while also referencing photography’s love affair with natural landscapes. Such a comparative approach to natural photography has allowed me to offer a vision that typically escapes human sight perception. I open this auto-theoretical text with a personal experience, namely being on a field trip with remote sensing scientist Daniel Schraik. I use this moment to, among other things, articulate my thoughts on the construction of the ‘real’ in different disciplines. I then contemplate the body of interviews and field trips that became a two-year-long interdisciplinary dialogue, and also brought together two distinct ways of looking at the forest: one symbolized by the camera, another by the terrestrial laser scanner. Inspired by remote sensing concepts such as ground truth and the inverse problem, I have come to examine photography through a new analytical framework. In everyday language, the term ‘ground truth’ refers, in part, to a first-hand experience. In our project, it makes sense, then, that Ground Truth connotes the documentary tradition and the act of witnessing. In the language of science, however, and specifically in remote sensing as a field, ground truth means something different. It refers to data collected on-site, which can then be used to calibrate, to build models, to predict, to interpret, and to decipher information from images; in this case, satellite images. Similarly, our interdisciplinary collaboration functions on another operational layer of photography beneath the immediately visible, one that illustrates an expanded notion of photography across contemporary discourse. Ground Truth interweaves archival imagery, documentary photography, experiment dataset, 3D digital art and conceptual photography. The constellation of employed elements contrasts the representational approaches of drawing and photography with the data-oriented and algorithmic approaches of computer-aided seeing. The two modes together allow for a parallel reading of the forest — one that contextualizes different epistemological regimes that allow for new configurations of the relationship between image and reality.
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  Cajón desastre: notas sobre una investigación artística desordenada (2022) author(s): Paola Villanueva published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This text is a reflection on Cajón desastre, an exhibition that collected around fifty drawings made between 2011 and 2020. This text, together with the exhibition, assembles an artistic research unfolded in time and developed in three layers: the making of the drawings and conceptual openings; 2) the gathering and conceptualization of the drawings under the exhibition project; 3) the text development and consequent assembly of this artistic research. In this research I intend to question the linearity associated with a positivist way of understanding the idea of project and artistic research, and I aimed to make visible subjectivities, knowledge and artistic products in process that are affected by the flexible and discontinuous work of the third spirit of capitalism. To this end, I embody a methodological positioning crossed by the post-qualitative perspective of artistic research, through which to activate, qualify and dignify artistic research “in transition”. In this way, in this text I inquire into the functionality of disorder in investigations that, like Cajón desastre, happens in an interrupted and evolving way. By doing so, I reterritorialize paradigmatic structures about art, research and its processes, approaching the idea of fragmentation as a basis on which to articulate, defend and legitimize other ways of researching and learning from art. Influenced by the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, this text is organized in a series of notes in the middle of a selection of the images that made up the exhibition Cajón desastre. The text is not about the images themselves, but about how they were produced and from what notions of artistic research. Text and images work as an assemblage in process composed of open approaches and multiple outputs, through which I also intend to give value to the knowledge that is generated in movement and when you get lost. In this text, I make room for reflections that were absent in the exhibition experience and add new knowledge two years after the closing of the exhibition.
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  Structures for Freedom: In-performance communication in Traditional musicians in Scotland (2022) author(s): Lori Watson published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition articulates tacit knowledge in processes associated with contemporary Traditional music practice in Scotland. Using a case study experiment and a series of workshop performances recorded in 2008, I examine the processes, communication and performance strengths of four leading Traditional and cross-genre creative musicians. In particular, examples of in-performance communication and collaboration emerge.
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  Curating as graphic design research (2022) author(s): Sara De Bondt published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  In 2019, I curated and designed Off the Grid, an exhibition on post-war Belgian graphic design at Design Museum Gent. The show included public events (Design Museum Gent, 2019–20) and led to a publication (De Bondt, 2022), all of which have been elements of my practice-based doctoral research at KASK School of Arts and Ghent University. Curating Off the Grid allowed me to define my own research area, namely the investigation of graphic design from a specific country and period. The process also raised broader questions around naming, authorship, and canon-formation, which in turn have enriched my practice as a designer and educator. The curatorial thus became a methodology that allowed me to bring the two sides — my historical research and my graphic design practice — together. In this article, I discuss my engagement with graphic design via the curatorial, and how the latter can be deployed for practice-based graphic design research in and beyond exhibition spaces.
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