Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 2024. ACPA ACPA 2024

• ‘Ūd Taqsīm as a Model of Pre-Composition (last edited: 2023) author(s): Nizar Rohana connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
  In this research project, Nizar Rohana analyzes and reflects on taqsīm recordings by two leading figures of ‘ūd playing who were pillars of modern Arabic music, namely the Egyptians Muḥammad al-Qaṣabjī (1898-1964) and Riyāḍ al-Sunbāṭī (1906-1981). Rohana encodes and underlines their most significant traits in order to:1) enrich and develop my melodic-rhythmic vocabulary;2) deepen my understanding of the structural, melodic and rhythmic processes underlying the genre; 3) design a structural framework or a model for pre-composing taqsīm-like pieces of music. To put it another way, the dissertation discusses the creation of pre-composed taqāsīm. The pieces follow a specific model of pre-composition that was designed while taking al-Qaṣabjī and al-Sunbāṭī’s taqsīm practice as a reference and a source of inspiration. This model contributes to both artistic research and practical knowledge, and provides new insights into structural, melodic and rhythmical processes of the genre. The artistic outcome of this project includes five new works for solo ‘ūd.
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• An improvisatory approach to nineteenth-century music (last edited: 2023) author(s): Bert Mooiman connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
  In the field of Western art music, improvisation has become a much discussed topic. In this interdisciplinary study Bert Mooiman argues that in this context, improvisation is not to be seen as a quasi-autonomous skill or art form, but as an aspect of music-making in general. With this research, Mooiman offers a ‘panorama’ of nineteenth-century styles and situations of music-making that together sketch a picture of improvisatory aspects of nineteenth-century music. Music was generally experienced as a wordless language, and he argues that making music was understood as a rhetorical act: performers strove for musical persuasion. This study focuses on the performer: it explores how performers in the nineteenth century might have thought during the real-time act of music-making, and how performers today might learn to use musical languages from the past actively again. For this last aspect, the area of music theory is relevant; Mooiman concludes his dissertation with a discussion of how traditional music theory is challenged by improvisatory music-making.
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• Van kunstwerk tot religieus ritueel : een onderzoek naar de integratie van performancekunst in de liturgie (last edited: 2023) author(s): Stefan Belderbos connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
  This research of Stefan Belderbos focuses on a new field of artistic research in which a visual artist takes on the role of researcher. The main research question is whether performance art integrated in an ecumenical service, combined with artistic directions from the artist, can enhance the religious experience of those taking part in the church service. I set my research against theology and Ritual Studies by describing my ideal image of a liturgical service and by comparing this personal view with the viewpoints of several theologians. Furthermore I examined the theories of the psychology of religion to search for an description of the concept of religious experience.The artistic experiment I set up in order to answer my main research question comprised a set of church services with several integrated performances. In this research I counted, described and analysed a total number of seven religious experiences. From the description and analyses of the experiences it became clear that these were indeed brought about by the performance rituals in the church services.
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• Figuring things out together: on the relationship between design and collective practice (last edited: 2023) author(s): Anja Groten connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
  This dissertation of Anja Groten explores matters of collectivity, drawing from the experience of working with the Amsterdam-based collective Hackers & Designers (H&D). The main thesis of this research is that conventional design vocabularies are not capable of sufficiently expressing and accounting for collectivities‘ resistance to fixation and stabilization. Collective design as it is discussed here challenges notions of individual authorship, differentiations between disciplines, between product and process or between the user and maker. While collectives shape particular affiliations and commitments, design approaches and aesthetics, they also require perspectives on working and designing together that resist linearity, and a progress-based understanding of a design process. By means of several case studies, it is argued that the fragmentation of social and work relations is as much a characteristic of collective practice as the effort to sustain long-term relationships.Thus, collective practice is not fully deliberate, at least not in the same way as for instance ‘teamwork’, ‘the commons’, or ‘cooperativism’, are purposeful organizational frameworks for living, working or being together. Collective Collective design processes take part in and are a result of particular (often fragile) socio-economic, socio-technical conditions that pervade and shape the ways collectives function.
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• The Emergent Artistic Object in the Postconceptual Condition (last edited: 2023) author(s): Jack Segbars connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
  The dissertation of Jack Segbars investigates the fabric and the infrastructure of contemporary artistic production. The focal question is how the contemporary field of institutional artistic production is organised and how the relations between its actors and functions: artists, curators, institution, governance and theory are structured, and how the artistic object that results from their interaction is produced. The backdrop of this investigation, is the condition of cognitive capitalism. Production and working-relations in late capitalism as analysed by Paolo Virno, are characterized by the primacy of communications. It presumes that no longer there is a clear demarcation between aesthetics, labour and politics in the general make-up of production and economy.The second backdrop is the postconceptual condition, as formulated by British philosopher Peter Osborne. He describes how the authorship of the art-object has shifted to the institutional platform (museum, presentation-space) and how the ‘project’ has become the general form of production. This situation particularly affects artistic production and the relationships between the main actors in regards to who holds the authorship over the artistic object. Both these movements have led to significant changes in how to consider the status of authorship in artistic production. Together they shape the theoretical basis for the research.
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• Taking Place: Parrhesiastic Theater as a model for artistic practice (last edited: 2023) author(s): Eleni Kamma connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
  This research project of Eleni Kamma adresses the question how local and traditional European forms of parrhesiastic theater—by which I mean events, actions, and performances staged by characters who courageously speak their minds through scenes of excess and laughter, that take place in public view and incite the spectator’s agency to speak their own minds—possibly relate to and/or provide new insights into critical artistic practices today. In this context, the project also examines the place and role of caricature today.I approach the issue as an artist-researcher concerned with socially engaged artistic practices. The experience of the playful, humorous, and sharply critical attitude of Gezi Park protesters speaking their minds in Istanbul in 2013 led me to critically reconsider my own courage in positioning myself within contemporary artistic production. Throughout the dissertation I work along a Moebius strip schema, which continually shifts from me as individual artist to dialogic collaborations to writing about the process. The research subject is investigated through a circulation process within which concepts such as communication, dialogue, and listening are continuously performed and put to the test. The dissertation aspires to provide new insights into how tensions between the roles of individual and group, “I” and “we,” may open up a parrhesiastic space for critical artistic practices.
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