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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CRITICAL CONFABULATIONS – Corresponding Practices and Mappings
(2023)
author(s): Jim Harold, Alex Hale
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition is based on an archaeological survey in the landscapes around Kilmartin Glen, Argyll and Bute, western Scotland, and references digital datasets – archaeological reference points –alongside the acts (enactments) of field walking, photography, drawing and poetry – experiences and representational discourses – to consider how land and landscapes may be read as dynamic palimpsestic and multi-dimensional fields of entanglement.
Digital datasets were used by the survey to garner fruitful material to aid identification and to analyse (subtle) surface archaeological remains in the inhospitable terrain on the hills bordering Kilmartin Glen. By analysing, categorising and archiving such information, through naming and cataloguing, archaeological methodology effectively orders and tames such wildernesses. We, by contrast, are seeking to draw art and archaeological practices into dialogue with one another in order to assert the importance of recording experiences and random acts as a part of field research and, thereby, to both re-vivify and re-wild our encounters with landscape.
Our exposition, and shared practices, intentionally encourage nuances of reading and interpretation that are found at the dialogic intersection between an artist/poet encountering archaeological landscape survey, and an archaeologist experiencing artistic, poetic and linguistic readings of land: reflecting in the process upon contemporary methodologies and underlying theoretical discourses. As such this research sits within the wider contemporary turn towards interdisciplinary practice, and seeks to establish a dialogue across disciplines; between humans and landscapes, practice and matter, that provides emerging approaches and hopes to remind us of the wild experience.
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The Plane of Cicadas: On the Possibility of Making Kin through Musicking
(2023)
author(s): Mathew Klotz
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This autoethnographic exposition details a short series of musicking encounters aimed at making kin in a rainforest-covered mountain on unceded Djiru Country on the east coast of Australia. Each encounter consisted of a short hike and a discrete musical encounter with local subjectivities. The inquiry considers the place of the walking in the musicking, and my joint response-ability with my saxophone (or the ways in which we apprehend and respond to other subjectivities) in each encounter. I argue that the hiking and discrete sonic encounters became entangled processes, in which my epistemological capacity and music-making practice were challenged and the possibility of kinship resides.
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We Are Public Space: Bodies and Minds in Post-pandemic Cities
(2023)
author(s): Marketa Kinterova
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The project aims to pay heightened attention to public spaces in cities on several levels. The first follows the trend of newly developed privately owned public spaces (known as POPS), which establish a precedent for how corporations and cities define public space and what they prioritize within it. A clear focus on people as consumers – rather than citizens – have several effects, including strict restrictions, the creation of societies of control (Deleuze 1992: 3), and various forms of often indirect exclusion of certain groups of inhabitants.
The second level attempts to accentuate subjective experiences focused on our bodies and making them consciously present in relation to public space. Both layers are a significant component of the performative lecture walks, on the basis of which I introduce the results of interactions with the respondents in my case studies. Finally, I shall describe what cities looked like during the pandemic and consider whether these scenes might be a model for the future. Are we to expect further experiences of empty cities?
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La resistencia de las piedras
(2023)
author(s): alejandra reyero, Maia Navas
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The proposal explores the potential of critical experimental research, turning to medial - material practices of countermemory in the face of historical and contemporary technologies of control. This is an essay on remains of images, sounds and texts that were part of the research process of the short film "Enviado para falsar" (Maia Navas - 2021).
Two spaces: Napalpí (Chaco, Argentina, 1924, where the “Napalpí indigenous massacre” by the National State took place) – Barrio Gran Toba (Resistencia, Chaco, Argentina, 2020, where descendants of qom indigenous communities were monitored by a police drone during the Covid-19 pandemic.). Two temporalities that are abyssed through montage as an aesthetic and epistemic exercise, updating the colonial legacy that operates again under the motto of care, the legality of persecution and the abuse of power.
Against this, we rescue the gesture of the slingshot with which the Qom indigenous community brought down the police drone. We made interventions on the archive material of German anthropologist R. L. Nitsche linked to the 1924 Napalpí massacre and we risked irreverent gestures that operate as a glimpse to evidence its truth as artifice.
We propose exercises with and on visual residues, anachronistic and poetic approaches by superimposing voices and sounds. We fable decolonizing strategies that seek to turn a past into present, by imagining its return as inventive action.
Based on possible temporary deviations from the fall of the drone, operations on the image are detached. A dialogue between objects and intervening actors those who have or have not witnessed the events is traced according to a path of existing letters and publications, which account for the network of relationships between science celebrities, the State and police forces.
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Object theatre exercises unfolding human-object relations in participatory design processes
(2023)
author(s): Merja Ryöppy
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This research exposition presents practical object theatre exercises and investigates how these exercises may enhance the designer’s practice to work with objects in participatory design projects. The study was set up in a theatre-design laboratory in collaboration with researcher and lecturer Sean Myatt from Nottingham Trent University and an international cohort of three design graduates with multidisciplinary backgrounds in design, communication, and social work. The exposition showcases three object theatre exercises – The Object Family Tree, Satelliting Objects, and Dance the Object – which were originally developed for exploring the performativity of readymade objects in theatre workshops. I demonstrate and discuss how these exercises can help designers within participatory design to engage with readymade objects and develop their practice further. I suggest that object theatre research methodology can contribute to participatory design processes by opening new potentials of physical object interaction, inviting unexpected perspectives on human-object relations, and exposing experienced object qualities. The designers in the study were able to consider object materiality, human-object relations, and reflective experiences with objects when designing interactions with non-designer participants in early phases of their participatory design research projects.
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Documenting Sounds in Urban Places: Belfast During Covid-19 Lockdowns 1 and 2
(2023)
author(s): Georgios Varoutsos
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Government-regulated business closures, social distancing from people, and stay-at-home orders emptied the urban environment of the presence of people. This effectively created new sonic relationships between natural and urbanised sounds within our built society. As Covid-19 instilled a state of abandonment from our urban spaces with each variation of lockdowns, there was an opportunity to document these changes through a sonic-journalistic approach. The research is developed through artistic practice-based creative projects that capture the transitional events of Lockdown 1 and Lockdown 2 between March and October 2020 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Fifteen locations and forty-one audio-photographic files were captured during this period, focusing on perceptions and observations of Covid-19 and the sonic effect on urban spaces. This collection of material acts as a documentation of place through sensory information and has been distributed onto online platforms such as soundmaps (soundwalk apps or browser maps), which allow for revising our understanding and reflecting on changes instilled by the pandemic. The creative projects provide a timeframe of how each lockdown changed our relationship with urban spaces during a global pandemic due to the regulations and distancing from others to combat the virus. This exposition discusses the immediate planning and procedures for capturing material during the events of Covid-19, with a review of certain soundscape compositions based on the sonic relationships of urban spaces.