Journal for Artistic Research

About this portal
The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) is an international, online, Open Access and peer-reviewed journal for the identification, publication and dissemination of artistic research and its methodologies, from all arts disciplines. With the aim of displaying practice in a manner that respects artists' modes of presentation, JAR abandons the traditional journal article format and offers its contributors a dynamic online canvas where text can be woven together with image, audio and video. These research documents called ‘expositions’ provide a unique reading experience while fulfilling the expectations of scholarly dissemination.
The Journal is underpinned by the Research Catalogue (RC) a searchable, documentary database of artistic research. Anyone can compose an exposition and add it to the RC using the online editor and suitable expositions can be submitted to the editorial board for peer-review and publication in JAR. Read more about submissions or start composing expositions straight away by registering for an account, which is free of charge.
JAR is published by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR).
url:
http://www.jar-online.net/
Recent Activities
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Subtle Ground: Feeling our ways towards a supportive method in ceramic practice
(2022)
author(s): Priska Falin, Helen Felcey
connected to: Aalto University
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition focuses on the exploration and development of Subtle Ground, a method that directs attention during and through making with clay, in the context of creative practices in ceramics. The method takes a non-conventional approach to making; it focuses on being with the material instead of pursuing a conclusion in the creative process. The method directs the practitioner to follow aesthetic qualities in making understood from a pragmatist view on having an experience. In this exposition, the focus is on the author's collaborative work that has shaped the Subtle Ground method, particularly the workshop ‘Sensorial Ground’. In Subtle Ground, the idea of dwelling is emphasized offering the specific approach to making. The method consists of a series of exercises that direct attention towards subtle sense perception within the body. Through working with the Subtle Ground method, we suggest that it is possible to begin to understand the embodied dimension and how it influences creative practice. The Subtle Ground method has been built on the clay’s supportive qualities, bringing together sense perception and physicality, thus understanding the practice’s aesthetic qualities and connections to meditation.
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Experiments in Aural Attention: Listening Away & Lingering Longer
(2022)
author(s): Rebecca Collins
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition puts forward ‘lingering longer’ and ‘listening away’ as potential means to remain with non-semantic possibilities, resisting the tendency to know immediately or to classify — to get lost, albeit momentarily in a more messy moment of being. At stake in this investigation is the recognition that our experience of the world, characterized through a depth of engagement, is not limited to how relations operate on the surface. The direction or orientation of our attention, the intensity with which it is applied, and how it weighs on and shapes our experience implies choice and agency.
Experiment I: Aural + Orientation = Aurientation emulates the experience of a fictional gallery-goer who encounters the sound installation, This is for You (Don’t Treat it like a Telephone) (2012). This piece was developed at the advanced centre for performance and scenography studies (a.pass) in Brussels and aims to consider how sound and the voice shape our orientation, when mediated through objects. Experiment in Aural Attention II: Vibrant Practice details the process undergone for creating Listening to Water (2013), a site-specific investigation into ancient well sites located in Powys and Ceredigion, two counties in Mid West Wales. The work, made in collaboration with Jane Lloyd-Francis and Naomi Heath, considers how a turn towards site, via a process of tuning in to the Welsh landscape, can bring attention to overlooked aspects of our environment.
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Pandemic performance: A Haunting of Haunts
(2022)
author(s): Garrett Lynch IRL
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
During the COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020, galleries, theatres, and performance venues closed in accordance with social distancing, lockdown, and confinement policies. Art practice, and in particular performance art, faced an existential crisis: adapt its form or cease to exist for audiences. To adapt, performance art adopted video on the internet as a means through which to perform posing immense challenges to its understanding of performance, liveness, and what is considered physical or ‘real’. As a response, I started to create a body of work employing the methodology of practice as research (PaR) during periods of confinement of the pandemic.
Titled A Haunting of Haunts (2020–ongoing), the practice is designed to be situated within networks and is therefore classified as networked performance. The practice aims to enable artists to create performance under conditions of social distancing, lockdown, and confinement, to explore the idea of transposing performance from ‘real’ spaces to ‘virtual’ spaces, and to critique video as the dominant and largely accepted visual form employed in networked performance. This exposition proposes that while A Haunting of Haunts facilitates practice and assists in the development of a visual language specific to networks that consists of what are termed as networked images, thereby contributing to networked performance as a field of practice, it also highlights the hauntological condition of such a practice.
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Affective Atmosphere: A Non-Representational Method of Devising Film Performance and Fiction
(2022)
author(s): Pavel Prokopic
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Affective atmosphere is a new method of directing film performance and producing experimental fiction in the tradition of art cinema, which emerged from a wider practice research project entitled Affective Cinema, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. As an approach to filmmaking, affective atmosphere prioritises the becoming of an event over a narrative/production plan, and uses experimental production strategies to maximise the potential of spontaneous directorial decisions and the unpredictable flow of reality for generating alternative narrative/dramatic film structures. The method is rooted in practitioner know-how stimulated by reflection, but also informed by a synthesis of the key concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, and theoretical writings on atmosphere (Böhme, Griffero) and film performance (Benjamin, Del Río). In this way, the project meaningfully applies philosophical concerns to filmmaking, expanding, in the process, on theoretical understanding, while embedding this knowledge tacitly in artistic practice. Furthermore, the research leads to the development of a set of applicable film production methods, unified by a clear rationale and a creative purpose linked to demonstrable outcomes.
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Of Haunted Spaces
(2022)
author(s): Ella Raidel
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Of Haunted Spaces is an art-based research project focusing on Chinese ghost cities. This exposition follows the making of an essay film that combines acting and documenting to indicate the phantasmatic aspect of global capitalism. In China, the need to maintain and boost economic growth through surplus production results in more cities being built than are needed. This exposition investigates how global capitalism is affecting and haunting living conditions today. Urban spaces, which were once a grandiose vision for boosting prosperity through collective fantasy, have now become exhausted and empty sites. Ella Raidel develops a performative documentary film to create a discursive space in which facts, analyses, commentaries, and references are woven into one narrative.
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Petals to Light...Pedagogic Possibilities with Floor Art
(2022)
author(s): Geetanjali Sachdev
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
My research explores rangoli and kolam floor art practices to understand their pedagogical potential for the study of plants. The research involved an analysis of a personal archive of rangoli and kolam images and a series of artistic collaborations. As indigenous art practices, rangoli and kolam have moved beyond traditional media that historically involved powdering rice plant seeds to draw dots and lines with our fingers, and decorating the ground with various flowers, leaves, and twigs. These floor art practices have expanded to incorporate alternative media such as lights, rollers, stencils, coloured beads, and stickers. The pedagogical value of rangoli and kolam floor art practices for plant study lies in the new media and materials that these indigenous ritual practices have embraced. These practices enable interpretations and contemporary adaptations within both traditional and modern contexts, and this allows learners with multi-literacies to access different kinds of knowledge about plants.