Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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HUB is a peer-reviewed and open-access research journal for reporting on arts, design, and performing arts. It has an international scope with a particular emphasis on practitioner methodologies and the educational impact of artistic research.

HUB's aims are two-fold: to promote a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas to foster new forms of inquiry and documentation of artistic research; to stimulate the debate surrounding the social, cultural, and technological frames of art and design practices.

HUB is published twice a year by i2ADS – Research Institute in Art, Design and Society (University of Porto, Portugal) with the support of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

See HUB Open Calls!

Read the Submissions Guidelines for more information.

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  3. HUB Issue #3 / Autumn 2024 / Metabolic Media The essays and expositions in this issue of HUB delve into the concept of metabolic media, exploring the interconnections between biological, technological, cultural, and ecological systems. Guest Co-editors Louise Carver & Jamie Allen.
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  2. HUB Issue #2 / Spring 2024 / Varia This issue marks the first year of HUB, which continues to develop work along the lines of artistic research, focusing its attention on multiple creative practices and the transversality of the processes explored.
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  1. HUB Issue #1 / Autumn 2023 / Distance For this Autumn issue of HUB, we present a collection of works that results from the interest in broadening the understanding of DISTANCE after our first open call process for Artists, Designers, and Researchers in Art, Design and Society.
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  0. HUB Special Issue — Issue #0 / Spring 2023 The first inaugural issue we feature the contributions from invited researchers, relevant within a wide range of areas, reflecting on relevant or emerging topics of research and development within the Arts and Design.

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  Contemporary artworks speak: The traumatic transgenerational memory. (2025) author(s): Marija Griniuk published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  This research investigates the visual narrative built within artworks that deal with colonial memory in Sapmi, and the heavy layers of history in the Baltics, particularly Lithuania during the Soviet era. The research question is: How can themes of Gulag, colonial history and traumatic transgenerational memory be addressed by the artists and by curators in large-scale exhibitions and art venues? The aim of this study is to examine how visual expression is aesthetically communicated by the artists, how their artworks are presented in exhibitions and media channels, and how they are received by audiences. The study examines four cases: artworks and projects by two Sami artists and two Lithuanian artists. The research is conducted as artistic research, where the author acts as the artist, curator, and spectator of the artworks being analyzed. The author has been actively involved in the creative curatorial processes, including designing the curatorial setup of the Sami artists' artworks for their audience. The comparative analysis of the visual expression is done through the reflexive tools of the author. The study's findings provide an outline of the tools that artists use within their artworks, as well as the curatorial strategies applied when presenting those artworks to audiences.
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  Disembodied prosthetics (2025) author(s): Thorolf Thuestad published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  Exploring how artistic experience can be influenced by mimetic recognition of human motion patterns in non-representative kinetic figures. This project investigates imbuing non-representational kinetic figures with human-like movement patterns and examines how these characteristics can modulate the expe rience of such figure(s). The investigation explores whether these motion patterns may facilitate mimetic recognition of human movement patterns and whether such recognition can intensify onlooker engagement with the figure(s) by eliciting affective and emotional responses. Of particular interest is evoking experiences of kinship and relation between humans and non-humans and proposing that the figures’ actions be experienced as an expression of intent on the part of the figures. These topics are approached as artistic motivation and guiding principles for artistic creation and experimentation.
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  Glimpsing Speculative Utopias: Envisioning Futures (2025) author(s): Amna Qureshi published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  This exposition explores the concept of speculative utopias within artistic research, offering glimpses into potential futures at the intersection of artistic imagination and futures thinking. Developed as textual concepts, these speculative utopias serve as vehicles for envisioning inclusive and sustainable futures, addressing complex socio-economic, cultural, and environmental challenges. The study employs a multidisciplinary approach by integrating aerial photography of Iceland’s landscapes with futures thinking methodologies and artistic research practices. These photographs function not merely as documentation but as speculative utopias that prompt critical reflection on climate adaptation, socio-political transformation, and public engagement. A unique aspect of the research is the use of artificial intelligence (ChatGPT), which supported iterative narrative development and reflexive inquiry. Through this exploration, the research offers alternative visions for resilient futures catalysing transformative dialogue and deepening reflection on the politics of the present while imagining possibilities for the world to come.
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  Language in AI Art: Encoding, Folding and Transforming (2025) author(s): Garrett Lynch IRL published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  This article discusses four artworks that employ artificial intelligence (AI) as practice as research (PaR) by artist Garrett Lynch IRL. These are: I’m not Garrett Lynch IRL – DoppelGANger Portraits (2021), a series of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) portraits; TheLastStraw (2021–23), a performative generative artwork for social media; Flag for States of Damage (2018), a performative mixed-reality artwork for the web and The Traveller (2024), a four-channel video installation with artefacts. The objective of the works is two-fold. Firstly, each artwork’s use of AI is distinct yet is intended to form part of a broad ongoing exploration of how networks can be transformative to art practice. The works maintain that AI is a form of network that enables emergence. Not the emergence of intelligence as defined in the field of AI, but instead in the context of art theory a manner in which artworks are expanded, extended or activated beyond their artist/author defined forms. AI as a network is therefore defined as both the generative adversarial network, the input, employed in the formation of the work and the resulting network of artist, artwork and audience that emerges when a work is expanded, extended or activated. Secondly, instrumental in facilitating AI as a network is the use of language as a combined form of encoding and performative utterance (Austin, 2018). Building on a fundamental basis of computing that all digital media is reducible to language, code, and numbers as well as a basis of communication theory that language is a social construct, the works explore language as both form of representation and communication between human and machine. Language enables a process of folding (O’Sullivan, 2005) or flipping (Sloan, 2012) of concepts, media and artefacts between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ spaces, between digital and materialised forms.
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  Assembling Hanoi: Metamorphosis of Photographic Images (2025) author(s): Lorena Bañares published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  Interested in how photographs are constituted, this exposition situates itself in between materialities of photography to discover how photographs are actualized. Using photography as artistic research practice, it uncovers how matters, sounds, bodies, and machines intra-act within the practice of photography. The inquiry challenges the bifurcation between the outside/inside of the frame, rather it emphasizes its fluid nature. It delves into the cosmogenesis of a photograph exploring the multiple folds and transformations in actualizing a photograph revealing the intricate and dynamic assemblages of humans and non-humans from the outside folding with the inside. Thinking with Gilles Deleuze's concept of the Folds, the exposition was able to surface layers upon layers of bodily and material folds that trouble the traditional notion of photographs as images separated from the outside. In the middle of its messiness, the exposition was able to develop an Applique technique as a method of knowing that emerges from this artistic research practice. What came out are layers of images that describe photography as performative movement of matters and bodies, a metamorphosis of infinite images while navigating the rich culture of Vietnam’s Hanoi capital.
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  The Black Triangle—Commoning Borderland Coal Ecologies (2024) author(s): Caroline Ektander, Carlina Rossee, Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Alexandra Toland published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
  Turów is an active open-pit brown coal mine located in the ‘Black Triangle’—a once sensationally polluted industrial region in Central Europe roughly contiguous with the brown-coal belt of Southern Poland, former East Germany and the Czech Republic. The mine, which fell into Polish jurisdiction after the fall of the Soviet Union, epitomises a transnational environmental conflict. Despite the encroaching effects of the Turów mine on its neighbouring European states and its inhabitants, the Polish government refuses to stop coal extraction. The dispute has generated a lot of media and activist attention in past years, but also raises eminent questions about how to make sense of the complexities and contradictions entangled with various regimes of energy. As the human faculties are poorly trained to register and to think meaningfully about the timescales of extraction and its distributed effects, this contribution comes as an invitation to experience energy entanglements otherwise. Challenging the flatness of the common dispute as portrayed in the media, we focus attention on the undercurrents flowing beneath the logics of public discourses about ‘clean’ and ‘green’ transitions and open pathways to sense metabolic flows of energy that permeate and shapeshift in environmental media—over time and space—and ultimately become us. To help us on the way, we ferment vegetables and drink nettle tea sourced from the mining region as a collective, metabolic practice. We add salt to slow down the passing of time. We conserve, observe and finally ingest to highlight the porosity and intimacy of geo-social relations and viscerally process their toxic commonalities.
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