Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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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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  A topian artistic methodology (2022) author(s): Kevin Walker published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition details a methodology for artistic research based on the book Utopia as Method by sociologist Ruth Levitas. It involves specific methods at three levels of analysis: archaeological, architectural, and ontological. Practical work is produced using archaeological and architectural methods, aimed at triangulating onto contemporary ontological issues. The term ‘topian’ was chosen in order to incorporate both utopian and dystopian perspectives — this term, from the Greek ‘topos’ meaning place, frames an artistic practice in relation to one or more sites of investigation. The methodology was applied in a residency project split between London and Athens, focused on sculptures from the Parthenon that link the two cities. Museums in both cities served as sites of archaeological and architectural investigation. Work included speculative site mapping and stratigraphy, drawing and photography of artefacts, printmaking, and 3D modelling. Works were exhibited in a group exhibition in Athens, ‘Contemporary Archaeologies’.
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  A Performative Response to Sites of Surveillance: The Gorilla Park Project (2022) author(s): Shauna Janssen, Katrina Jurjans, Eduardo Perez Infante, christian scott published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  The key interlocutor for this project is Gorilla Park, an irregular shaped parcel of land located on a disused railway track, in a Montreal neighbourhood called Marconi-Alexandria, currently a rapidly gentrifying quarter of the city. The uneven development in this part of the city is, in part, due to the increasing presence of Big Data and Smart City start-up companies. The politics of the smart city discourse are deeply entangled with ideas of the ‘right to the city,’ and brings into question: who is the smart city for? What is a smart city? Current trends towards connectivity and mediated urban environments are generally predicated upon a ‘digital agenda,’ wherein the privileged position of smart and intelligent technologies is being furthered. In this exposition one of our aims is to problematize urban sites of surveillance through performative and sonic experiments. Due to the global pandemic, however, we began to collaborate remotely and work with the documentation of our temporary occupation and in-situ exploration of Gorilla Park. As such, this exposition foregrounds an unfolding and iterative approach to artistic research that focuses on performative methods of urban research taking place in contested city sites; foregrounding the experimental use of bespoke sound devices and 360˚ video recordings, to situated methods such as walking, and hacking Google Earth imagery.
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