What's it like?
(2019)
author(s): Daniela Pascual
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
I don’t know when a thesis begins, but I hope it ends somewhere. For Episodi, I've prepared "What’s it like?" – a juxtaposition of plans, thoughts, desires, and concerns. I suspect you will find contradictions I might not be aware of, and there are many choices left to make. Indeed, while I hope this exposition will help me throughout my thesis, I'm not trying to come to terms with my shortcomings, at least not yet.
PERFORMED REALNESS: On Participatory Art and its Ethics
(2018)
author(s): Johanna Lecklin
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
In my study, Performed Realness: On participatory Art and its Ethics, I address questions stemming from my artistic practice and concerning participatory art, the split between documentary and fiction, performed realness, the ethics of the abovementioned, and authorship. I discuss these topics in dialogue with other artists’ artworks and with theories. Nevertheless, my intent is not to execute a comprehensive study on works, that have the same traits as mine. Works with moving image, my own and other artists’, which leave me to wonder and perplex me were a starting point of my research. – Is this true? Are these people performing or are they just being themselves in front of the camera? Can one be in front of the camera without performing?
Intersecting travelogues: Wandering through practices and archaeologies of space, place and image.
(2017)
author(s): Paul Landon
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
This exposition presents the moving image elements of the doctoral thesis Intersecting travelogues: Wandering through practices and archaeologies of space, place and image.
The text of the thesis is built around an artistic practice that explores architectural and urban space, an exploration that is translated into time based images installed within and responding to interior architectural exhibition spaces. The space of the city and its architectures are scrutinised through their seemingly insignificant details: abandoned or underused buildings, older model cars, deserted streets, details that resonate as markers of changing and forgetting.
The work reconsiders recent concepts of media history and archaeology and relates them to specific questions raised by contemporary artistic practice: to the architectures and spaces of audio-visual presentation, to an archaeology of the city, to the mobile spectator of minimal art and installation practices as it engages with the redeployment of urban space through projection technologies, text and image. It promotes the activities of a corporeal, wandering subject that engages with the spaces of media as sites of forgetting and recall.
The text is structured as a collection of wanderings that are organised into six chapters each presenting experiences of different places visited and the ensuing reflections that these visits spawned. To wander, in the ways in which it is presented in this work, engages with a fragmentary process of seeking out and coming across sites and subjects of enquiry. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, urban wandering entails the use of haptic perception and awareness of the city’s intrinsic details in order to lose oneself in it. Wandering informs and structures the text in terms of instances of arriving in unknown and distant locations as well as of getting lost in a familiar city.
Laatukuvia ja kirjallisia kokeiluja / Genre pictures and experiments in writing
(2017)
author(s): Elina Saloranta
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
GENRE PICTURES AND EXPERIMENTS IN WRITING is a doctoral thesis in article form of the interaction between image, word and sound. It consists of five essays, which have been published or otherwise made accessible to the public in various forums for artistic research, plus a total of seven videoworks. The last of these videos is a wordless epilogue. The thesis also includes an introduction in the form of a letter.
Generational Filming. Video Diary as Experimental and Participatory Research
(2017)
author(s): Pekka Kantonen
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
The subject matter of this research is the method with which I have approached my video archives. I have developed it together with Lea Kantonen, and it is a method of filming, watching and commenting that we have named Generational Filming. We watch and comment our home videos with people from different age groups, different specialists, and other viewers with different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. These discussions are filmed, and then added to the next edition as a new generation of the video to be shown to other audiences. Viewers help us conceptualise both the interpretations and the theorisation of our footage. We have arranged more than fifty screenings in order to analyse the data in a collaborative way.
Generational Filming takes reflexivity to exhaustion or to a kind of saturation point. The chain of watching and commenting changes the meaning of the first shot, of the first generation of the chain. The focus of watching gradually changes from the viewed to the viewer. While listening to the interpretations made by previous viewers the subsequent viewers start to make comparisons between different cultural positions, and self-reflexivity begins to govern the experience of watching. My study concentrates on epistemological issues connected to the documentary approach. My research interest could be distilled into the following questions: What happens when an event is recorded (on film, video, etc.) and the recording is subsequently viewed? What are the truths, meanings and interpretations that emerge in the process of filming, editing, viewing and discussing a video diary? How does the spectator’s experience of watching change when watching filmed comments of that which has just been shown?
In every chapter I concentrate on a special phase of the Generational Filming process: the birth of the idea, filming, performing for camera, arranging and indexing the material, editing, screening, commenting, and making new versions of the case study. My research consists of eight case studies. I borrow the term case study from sociology as it corresponds well to the manner in which I have both delimited and approached the areas of study. These eight case studies present an overall view of Generational Filming. With the term case study I refer both to the video and to the writings on it, which have been assembled as chapters in this book. The videos and texts are also case studies in themselves. In five case studies the first generation of video is a home video clip filmed in our home. One case study is based on a filmed song sang by Seto songmothers. One is a dialogical art project made together with a third artist about her summer identity. The eight case study is a museum project with Mexican indigenous people, Wixaritari, in which the method is used for planning a community museum.
I recount the results of each case study and attempt to understand the significance of the method and its position in different academic and artistic discussions. I have categorised these discussions under four headings: Generational Filming in the tradition of moving images, Generational Filming as ethnography, Generational Filming as socially engaged art, and Generational Filming as artistic research.
Doctoral thesis in fine arts includes three exhibitions made with Lea Kantonen: Favourite Place (2004) in the project space of the Museum of Photography Helsinki, Most Important in Life (2005) in Helsinki City Art Museum Meilahti, and Ripples at Home (2011) at Helsinki Kunsthalle. My part in these exhibitions has mostly consisted of the video documentation. In this book I write only about the works presented in the Ripples at Home exhibition.
"Disabled Art" Escapism as Artistic Tactic
(2016)
author(s): Itay Ziv
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
Abstract
Doctoral thesis in fine art, Itay Ziv
” Disabled Art”. Escapism As Artistic Tactic
This doctoral thesis in fine arts addresses the notion of “Disabled art” by developing an artistic idea of escapism and its mechanisms and tools. Investigating the nature of artistic escapism the thesis aims at producing a body of knowledge based on my own activity as a visul artist over the last 15 years – a series of steps influenced by escapist patterns of behaviour I have tried to follow. My work concerns the true ability of art to touch upon agonizing topics such as the Holocaust or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; in more abstract terms, it concerns our instability and sense of belonging in a post-traumatic reality saturated with catastrophic fears. The research focuses on topics that emerge from my artistic practice: authenticity, performativity, lack of hierarchy, anti-heroism, apathy, repetition and vulgarity. In light of these topics I deal with questions such as: What happens when art is not prepared or able to take an active stance with regard to political and social contents? What is the role of an artist when art fails in its efforts to actively engage in our reality and to reflect on it? How does art look like when the artist is simply tired? What is the role of this “disabled” art-making in today's society?
In order to outline the notion of “Disabled Art”, I transform its components into various modes of escapist artistic behaviour. The art of escaping has long been practiced by performers who took bonds and cages as a challenge. Sometimes breaking away from the shackles is a way to catharsis, sometimes it is a mere survival mode. Originally the art of escaping did not feature an overt act in itself but involved instead secretly created illusions, such as a disappearance act or a transmutation. The operation of escaping includes always the danger of failure. Escape artists create an act in which they escape from difficult situations that seemingly threaten their freedom and lives. Using magic tricks and illusions, they manage to break free from the obstacles and traps in which they are imprisoned. Even if escape artists manage to leave their audience amazed and confused, their art builds on the ability to create illusions.
This research builds on a correspondence between two figures: The Escapist Artist (ME) and his research. ME writes letters. Like in my previous art works the ME character is an imaginary and speculative character who’s seeking for communication. In this research the ME is corresponding with another fictitious character – his research. Their combination, Mechanism of Escapism, a basic artistic approach for creating reflection and responses, is explored in this research as an ideological, political and social default position. The Escapist Artist is a metaphorical and fictional character presented in the thesis as a ghost or a shadow symbolizing cases in which one is unable to find one's true place in the world, a place one can call HOME. An Escapist Artist is constantly on the run in the search for his own identity and roots. He keeps on seeking the place where he belongs to, but at the same time, he keeps escaping from it. This escapistic movement indicates the ways in which an artist and art relate to, and are affected by, today's historical, political and social issues.
The research investigates inability in the arts through artistic acts of erasure, disappearance, denial, reluctance, disintegration, absentmindedness, and more. It analyses the artistic escapist approach as a method of expression – an artistic starting point that allows creation out of weakness, avoidance and basic survival instinct. The analysis involves constructing the identity and role of the artist in relation to the function of art today.
The narrative in the written part of the thesis consists of three thematic strands: 1. The transformation process in which one becomes an escapist artist. 2. The way of learning how to cope with this situation. 3. The attempts to reach conclusions evoked by this situation.
, Tero Heikkinen 
