Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 
  The Creative Potential of Evolving Constraints in Peer-to-Peer Reciprocal Coaching: A Three-way Investigation (2024) author(s): Marie Hallager Andersen, Martin Høybye, Alan O'Leary published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition reports and assesses the experience of the project ‘The Creative Potential of Evolving Constraints in Peer-to-Peer Reciprocal Coaching: A Three-way Investigation’ (hereafter 3WI), funded by the Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University. 3WI was designed to gauge the utility of evolving creativity constraints — that is, deliberately adopted restrictions (whether self-imposed or suggested by another) to choices in a given creative project — in the development of projects by the three participants: a dance artist and filmmaker, a songwriter, and an academic video-essayist. The format of 3WI was as follows. At monthly meetings from September to December 2021, each participant presented work in progress and exchanged feedback with the other two participants. Each meeting culminated in the setting of tasks and constraints designed to guide the development of individual projects over the subsequent month. After an introduction to the format and aims of 3WI, the exposition begins with a description of 3WI’s procedural and theoretical coordinates: the Critical Response Process, a formalised protocol for eliciting feedback on creative projects developed by choreographer Liz Lerman; The Five Obstructions (Lars Von Trier and Jørgen Leth, 2003), a film which models the provision of creativity constraints; and theory and scholarship concerning the utility of creativity constraints. The exposition continues with a description of the projects being developed by each participant (a dance performance and dance film; two songs; two sections of an academic videoessay), and an individual and illustrated account of the feedback meetings and development of those projects over the course of 3WI. These accounts are followed by a discussion reflecting on setting and receiving constraints, and an assessment of the experience of the project. We conclude with some contemplation of the ethics of constraint-setting and the lessons of the 3WI experience for other makers. Constraint-based procedures are commonly employed and recognised as generative in artistic and design contexts, and they are also used in experimental academic work. 3WI was an attempt to test the utility of constraint-setting as a form of formative peer-to-peer feedback in the development of real creative projects. This exposition will be of interest to artists and academics interested in deploying creativity constraints for the development of creative and creative-critical projects. It will be particularly relevant for those who work in collaborative and interdisciplinary contexts. Download Accessible PDF
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  Agential Guts — Care and Creativity within the Messy Multi-species Assemblage (2024) author(s): Riina Maaria Hentriika Hannula published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  Agential Guts was an artistic multispecies practice of care; a messy entanglement with goats, soils, microbial companions, and gardening activities. The concern over biodiversity loss and many ecological crises caused by traditional farming led me to learn about alternative soil care and goat-keeping and to invent new modes of relating and caring in a multispecies context. The fieldwork drew from rewilding practices that strive to create biodiverse conditions. Configuring the meanings of multispecies assemblage beyond instrumentalising governance of different species, I followed what I called microbial desires in our relational enactments envisioning microbial and mammalian companionship from the more-than-human standpoint. My kin-making was my object of study from an academic perspective but the companion animals and microbes, soils, and plants were collaborators from the artistic point of view. The premises of new materialist and post-anthropocentric relational ontologies were embodied in our practice, where the matter was perceived as intelligent and affective, and thus able to lead to sources of novel ethical thinking-doing and art. I drew from the arts of noticing and considering collaboration as contamination (Tsing 2015) with messy, microbially saturated milieu. Acknowledging how scientific knowledge is always shaping our affective encounters, I also tried to speculate with what we know about microbes leaking between different bodies. In producing a situated knowledge platform, Agential Guts contributed to both art-based research and social studies of microbes by introducing a speculative and embodied way to create knowledge together with nonhumans. Download Accessible PDF
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  Living Lines of the Barely Noticeable (2024) author(s): Linde Ex published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  Living Lines of the Barely Noticeable is a long-term artistic research project aiming to develop distinct artistic approaches to relate to and interact with flying insects and provide the artistic research with a theoretical and practical context by reflecting on relationships and connections with the more-than-human world that occurred within the research. The research aimed to explore ways and manners, that can contribute to more meaningful relationships with a more-than-human entity. This resulted firstly in approaches that explored ways to relate to flying insects: reflective attempts studying glimpses and tatters of ‘insectness’ and the circumstances that shaped the way we related to each other. Secondly, I developed approaches that explored manners of being close to (or intimate with) flying insects. These approaches involved more active, hands-on experiments and attempts to interact with flying insects. Download Accessible PDF
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  The Non-Human Animal Artist: Toward the Presentation of an Artistic Species-Companionship in Circus. (2024) author(s): Franziska Trapp, Natan Alberca, Sabrina Sow published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  How can we practice, think, and write contemporary circus beyond the human? What would it mean to create new modes of performance that would (re)valorize the animal in the ring? This exposition presents an exploration of the inventive, creative, and active dimensions of non-human animals in the context of circus. In 2022, we — Natan Hansi Alberca (multidisciplinary visual artist), Franziska Trapp (dramaturge and researcher), and Sabrina Sow (equestrian artist) — came together to create a vivid dialogue between practice and reflection, artistic and academic research, informed and naive approaches. We now exhibit our exchange through video installations, academic writings, and poems, that expand on, express agreement with, or contradict each other. Our intention is to make perceptible how artistic and reflective processes are fundamentally intertwined. Download Accessible PDF
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  Musical topics, (self-)narrativity and adaptation in my recent composition Pearl (2024) author(s): Matthew Kaner published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition charts the creation and musical-narrative structure of Pearl, my recent composition for symphony chorus, orchestra, and solo baritone: a setting of extracts from the medieval poem Perle, translated into modern English by Simon Armitage, commissioned as part of the BBC Proms in 2022. Envisioned as a contemporary adaptation of the poem’s historically distant, yet somehow timelessly poignant and continually resonant story, Pearl takes the form of a musical narrative that evokes both past and present, through personal and more universal reflections on the nature of loss, grief, and acceptance. By drawing together analytical techniques taken from musical theories of narrative (principally Byron Almén 2008), musical topics, and the adaptation of narratives across media (Marie-Laure Ryan 2014), with a self-narrative approach to documenting my practice in action (as advocated by Christopher Leedham and Martin Scheuregger 2018), I unpack my creative approach to Pearl in what might be understood as ‘bricolage’ as proposed by Robyn Stewart (2007). Constructing a ‘new story’ through a ‘plurality of approaches’, I adopt Stewart’s methodological eclecticism to theorize and situate the work as a musical narrative. However, through the slippage that occurs between narratology and self-narrativization, Pearl is shown to also mirror and situate my personal artistic experiences as a contemporary practitioner. In response to the recent and ongoing debate about the nature and validity of Practice Research in Composition, the article addresses calls to share the ‘messy, complicated, uncertain, and soft’ (Arthur Bochner 2000) aspects of the artistic process suggesting a more open, and even collaborative, role for the sharing of compositional research. Download Accessible PDF
  open exposition comments (0)
• 
  synthetic bodies: protocols for intra-acting (2024) author(s): Lenka Vesela published in: Journal for Artistic Research
  Our bodies are porous entities that interconnect with and depend on the broader collectivity of human and nonhuman life that exists within a shared environment. Using the figuration of synthetic bodies, this exposition aims to examine the relationships in which we are enmeshed as our bodies absorb and excrete chemicals. With a focus on involuntary exposure to industrially manufactured chemicals (as opposed to exposure to naturally occurring chemicals or voluntary experimentation with chemicals of all types), this exposition invites readers to learn about the chemicals to which we are exposed and by which we are affected. With the ubiquity of chemicals in the environment, who are we becoming? How do chemicals affect us and how do we interact with them? How can we live well with chemicals in spite of their potential to harm? Adopting a decolonial feminist, posthumanist, and new materialist approach and embracing queer ecological sensibilities, this exposition develops protocols for embodied and materially embedded research practices that trace the effects of exposure to chemicals in everyday life. In so doing, it aims to demonstrate how we might build resilience through encounters with toxicity, contamination, and impurity. Download Accessible PDF
  open exposition comments (0)