Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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  21. Performing Artistic Research in Music – Performing Music in Artistic Research This issue of Ruukku explores the relationship between artistic research and the performance and presentation of music, asking what kind of music performance practices artistic research produces or enables.
• 20. Artivism Artivism
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  19. Making Artistic Research Public Making something public is intrinsic to both art making and artistic research. This issue of RUUKKU focuses on the variety of ways artistic research is made public and on the effect of published artworks and research on their immediate surroundings, neighborhoods or environments. The issue discusses the relevance of changes and traces that published artworks and artistic research leave in public space and vice versa. The call was opened for researchers and artists to ponder artistic research's relation to its publicity in its diversity.
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  18. Responsibility In this issue of RUUKKU, we are unpacking the notion of responsibility in/with/for arts and artistic research with five expositions and three voices. The RUUKKU issue Responsibility supplements the Art of Research VII conference organized on 3-4 December 2020 at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Finland.
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  17. Everyday Utopias and Artistic Research What kinds of perspectives can artistic research offer in seeking to cultivate political imagination and utopian thought? What kinds of tools and methods does it suggest for social action and thought? How do spaces, materiality and embodiment shape the practices of imagination? How can artistic research contribute to creating more ecologically and socially sustainable societies?
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  16. Working with Vegetal This, the 16th issue of Ruukku – Studies in Artistic Research, focuses on artists, researchers, scholars, and artistic researchers who are working with the vegetal in various ways. In the call we invited artists and researchers with an experience of working with plants and vegetation in different ways to contribute to this issue with expositions or articles, accounts of work in progress, and artistic experiments.
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  15. Slowness and Silence, Inertia and Tranquility The themes of this issue discuss the methodical, conceptual and practical connections of artistic research to slowness and silence, inertia and tranquility. What kinds of dimensions can silence or slowness open up and catalyse in artistic research? What might silence challenge, and what slowness? Depending on the perspective, slowness can either be worth pursuing or it can clearly refer to "retardation" or a lack (e.g. bureaucracy).
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  14. Ecologies of Practice This issue of RUUKKU has its starting point in the Research Pavilion #3 project that brought together more than fifty artist-researchers from twenty countries over a period of twenty months. The project started with an open call for "Research Cells" in April 2018 and evolved through a series of Research Cell Assemblies organised in Helsinki to an intensive period of activity in the context of the Venice Biennale.
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  13. Sonic Art, Sonic Practice, and Sonic Thought: Artistic Research and Music Sound is omnipresent, and we live, think, feel, and experience in and through sound every day. Sound studies have developed mainly in the disciplines of acoustics and music. The former defines sound as mechanical waves while the latter considers it as discrete sounds organised in time. Artistic Research offers us opportunities to study sound from a different perspective. How do we live, think, feel, and experience in and through sound as artistic practitioners? What constitutes such knowledge production, and how does this search for knowledge relate to the other modes of knowledge and experience often associated with ‘music'?
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  12. Peripheries RUUKKU #12 considers the conceptual, methodical, concrete and practical peripheries in the arts. This thematic issue ponders questions concerning what kinds of roles margins, peripheries or fringes have in the arts and artistic research? Can artistic research itself be conceived as a peripheral zone on the edge of the rationalistic scientific world?
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  11. How to do Things with Performance Welcome to this 11th issue of Ruukku - studies in artistic research devoted to performance and performance as research, and the question how to do things with performance. Not only what should be done, but how it should be done is today a question as relevant as ever. And some argue we should actually do less, and think a bit more, for example how we do what we do. In the research project How to do things with performance, we have been asking what can be or could be done with performance and how.
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  10. Catalyses Since its very beginning artistic research has openly or unconsciously deemed as its reason for existence the task of finding new ways of doing things; namely new ways of researching this world and new ways of understanding artistic practice. For many, artistic research could be defined as the amalgam of 'research' and 'artistic practice' reinventing and reconfiguring themselves in each other's shadow.
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  9. Practicing New Materialisms in the Arts This issue dedicates itself to the intersections of new materialist theory and artistic or practice-inspired research through a sustained conceptual focus on intra-action and via a wide variety of previously not presented projects. The distinctive main focus of the issue is the intra-active implementation of the notion of intra-action itself. Instead of taking this concept as a theoretical given, the issue's contributions aim to work with, enact, test, expand, and modify it within diverse intra-active settings comprised of highly varied artistic processes, research questions, disciplinary fields of action, and analytical and political concerns.
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  8. Conditions of Sharing RUUKKU – Studies in Artistic Research issue 8 has been collated under the theme of Conditions of Sharing to supplement the Please Specify! conference organized by Uniarts Helsinki together with the Society for Artistic Research in April 2017. The issue explores new perspectives on conditions of sharing research in the artistic field and thus offers a peer-reviewed platform related to the conference theme.
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  7. Practicing and the Practice of Art Each art genre has its own praxis. The way people practice a specific genre of art tells something essential about the genre and about the artists themselves. A performance, an exhibition, or an artwork is a kind of outcome, but with this RUUKKU issue, we peer inside the making of art, where nothing is yet finished and where the direction is not yet settled. Or is there a specific direction in the first place?
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  6. Change in Artistic Research The present issue, titled Change and Artistic Research, shows how artistic research and the ways in which art is made can contribute to not only societal debate but also to methodologies in other disciplines. Indeed, this focus has prompted artist-researchers to take bold steps forward in the worlds of content and form. In the process, they have borrowed and augmented techniques, not only going beyond the conventional boundaries of research but also forging into new areas of modern art, such as media art blogs and the occupation of urban space.
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  5. Research Gestures The expositions of this issue provide diverse – and in no way definitive – approaches to the role of gestures in artistic research. Ultimately the gesture that they perhaps perform the best is one of opening doors to terrain where methodological, discursive and epistemic stakes still run wild.
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  4. Process in Artistic Research Processes can be examined in relation to a starting point or a destination. Here we might as well begin from the call to this fourth issue of Ruukku. In the call we noted that articulating and opening up artistic processes has been considered one of the main aims of artistic research. Since the 1960s "process" has been one of the magic words of contemporary art, with works of art that transform and evolve through time.
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  3. Materiality in Artistic Research II Like any empty vessel, RUUKKU is potentially useful for storing a variety of materials, whether solid or in a state of flow. Are we now beginning to see the real uses of this hollow container or are we still merely testing how much it can hold before cracking?
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  2. Materiality in Artistic Research The theme of the second issue of RUUKKU came from expositions proposed for the first issue, many of which were connected to the idea of materiality. The ideas were presented both at a conceptual level and as explorations of the characteristics and artistic expression of specific materials. In this issue, we approach materiality as a loose term that encompasses different approaches to art, research, materiality and their intersections.
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  1. Experience and Experimentality in Artistic Research The theme of the first issue of RUUKKU "Experience and experimentality in artistic research" involves questions which relate to both art and research. If the concept of experience refers to past time, experimentality opens up to future. However, it is worth noticing that still during the Middle Ages, experimentum and experientia, experiment and experience, were used more or less synonymously and experiments were not arranged in order to gain new information in a systematic way, unlike in later years.

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  A Diary on Slowness at Örö Fortress Island (2021) author(s): Francisco Beltrame Trento published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This exposition emerges from the field notes diary of the researcher during their stay in the Ores residency program at Örö Fortress Island. Örö, previously a military fortress, dates from the Russian Empire era and it was closed to visitation until 2015. The piece focuses on the temporalities enacted outside the city, in connection with more-than-human materialities, and, in contrast, discusses the neurotypical constraints of academic spaces. I criticise the (lack of) approach to neurodiversity in educational settings, and the temporalities implied in the required tasks in such settings, even when the subject is physically distant from the academic space. There is a growing interest in Slow scholarship (Ulmer, 2017; 2018). At Örö, I proposed experiments in video, photography and writing, by thinking with slowness in ontological terms. In this diary, slowness is approached conceptually and anecdotally, in a humorous autoethnographic fashion. The residence period coincided with the initial quarantine to neutralise the coronavirus pandemic, which resonated with the text, always existing in between a personal narrative and a conceptual discussion. The exposition features a photographic essay and several video clips.
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  falling like a monster (2021) author(s): Susanna Hast, Maryam Bagheri Nesami published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Falling Like a Monster is a collaborative and creative practice of writing and embodying inter-textuality and multi-modality in order to experiment a non-representational archive known as a two-sided article. This heterogenous crafted piece of writing resists the hegemony of academic and artistic narratives and suggests a transformative knowledge and an alternative practice of political freedom. In our writing, crafting, recording, and failing, we are playing with exhaustion, silence and stillness as monstrous counter-strategies.
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  The Sound of Software Tranquillity (2021) author(s): Erik Natanael Gustafsson, Baudry Benoit published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This exposition is an investigation into software tranquillity through sound. One second of activity on a laptop was recorded by tracing the function calls within the Linux kernel. Can software be wild or calm? If so, what would calm software be like? Imagining that the software could experience its own existence, is the nature of its tranquillity or activity apparent to it? Can we as humans experience the tranquillity of software, if it indeed exists, and can we experience it as tranquil? Listen to fragments of one second worth of real software (in)activity while we present and reflect on the outcomes of this investigation.
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  Pienenergia, arkisto ja uusi aktivismi (2021) author(s): Marjatta H Oja published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Pienenergia, arkisto ja uusi aktivismi Tilanne -Tasapainoinen suhde ympäristöön - Kuvataiteellinen työskentely - Hitaat linjat - Pienenergia - Arkisto - Aktivismi / Ilmastonmuutos ja Covid-19 Minkälaisia ovat uudet taiteen tekemisen tavat jos meillä on mahdollisuus keskittyä kuulemaan omaa hidasta ja usein huomaamatonta rytmiämme?  Tilanne Tällä hetkellä kun elämme eristyksissä pandemian takia, katseemme ja ajatuksemme suuntautuu elämäämme ja siihen onko se tasapainoisessa suhteessa ympäristöönsä. Ympäristönä voidaan nähdä asuinympäristö ja toiset ihmiset, mutta myös elollinen sekä eloton luonto ja loppujen lopuksi koko maapallo. Miten voisimme avautua korona-ajan eristyksen jälkeen ympäristöömme niin että olisimme valmiita muutokseen uusin tasapainoisemmin ajatuksin?
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  PERSPECTIVES TO A LIVING DESIGN MEDIUM: First encounters with a fermented indigo vat (2021) author(s): Pirita Hanneli Lauri published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  This exposition presents a traditional process of indigo vat dyeing. A fermented indigo vat is an ancient method of dyeing textiles. The process is based on bacterial action, which means that the vat is alive: it is a living design medium. With living design medium, is referred to all material production or means of modification that incorporate simple living organisms such as bacteria. A living design medium also includes and implies a designer perspective. Biomaterials and biotechnology-based manufacturing methods, often involving living organisms, are increasingly entering the designers’ workspace. This will affect design practices, especially in the more material-centric domains, such as fashion and textile. This study aims to investigate the ‘being’ of a living design medium. However, instead of looking at new biotechnologies or biomaterials, this paper turns to one of the world’s oldest traditions of textile modification, the fermented indigo vat dyeing. By choosing a fresh (or rather ancient) context, this study contributes a new perspective to the ongoing discourse on (bio)materiality. The article reflects on the practice of indigo vat dyeing from a new materialistic stance. Data consists of self-documentation and reflective writings from and of a dyeing workshop (2019) and experiences of maintaining a fermented indigo vat at home for six months (2020). Data is analysed in hermeneutical iteration and presented through different metaphorical perspectives: the vat as a spirit, the vat as a tool, the vat as a child, and the vat as a living medium. The main points of the discussion are (1) Indigo practices create awareness of worldly connectedness; in dyeing, I communicate with the whole of the ancient tradition and all of its practitioners. Relationship between dyer and indigo to transcends time and space. (2) While vat dyeing is appreciated as a challenging tool that dyers want to engage with and master, this risks reducing the meaning to its purpose. (3) The use of metaphor-full language within indigo practices grants agency to the vat for practical means; it works as a way to guide us towards interaction within the living medium. (4) The concept of a living medium, as proposed here, draws from Gilles Deleuze and Tim Ingold: it exists in a world of constant becoming and describing it aims to grasp the material flux of the world in its unfolding.
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  Hitaus ja hiljaisuus (2021) author(s): Petri Kaverma published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
  Kirjoituksessani kartoitan, miten hitaus ja hiljaisuus näyttäytyvät taiteellisen tuotantoni aiheina. Tuoreimmillaan nämä teemat konkretisoituivat näyttelyssäni galleria Sculptorissa helmi-maaliskuussa 2020. Hiljaisuus, hitaus ja aika sallivat sen, ettei aivan kaikkea sanota vaan annetaan katsojan tai kuuntelijan omien aistien herätä ja päätelmien muodostua. Jos esittäisin aiheeni paljaana, saattaisin kadottaa mahdollisuuden katsojan/kokijan omaan oivallukseen. Hiljaisuus ja hitaus ovat oivaltamisen prosessissa erinomaisia työkaluja. Tarvitsen niitä myös tutkijan positiossani voidakseni ilmaista silkkihansikkain jotain raudanlujaa. Onko niin, että aineen kooma voittaa sittenkin, vaikka harha kaiken hallinnasta häivähtää mielessä ennen äkkipysähdystä? Kysymys konkretisoituu renkaitten jäljissä ja käsinkoskeltavassa hiljaisuudessa hallitsemattoman liikkeen ja äkkijarrutuksen jälkeen. Vuoden 2020 maailmanlaajuisessa poikkeustilassa hiljaisuuden ja hitauden teemat nousevat esiin entistä ajankohtaisempina. Valmistin juuri tätä teemaa ja juuri tätä ekspositiota varten Hitaus ja hiljaisuus -ääniteoksen. Sekin löytyy käsittelemieni teemojen joukosta kun on aikaa ja malttaa etsiä.
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