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Vis – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research

VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research is a digital journal about Artistic Research in the Nordic region. The journal is the result of a cooperation between Stockholm University of the Arts and Norwegian Artistic Research Programme. The purpose of the journal is to serve as a basic source of knowledge for anyone who wants to learn and immerse themselves in artistic research in the Nordic region. VIS website was released 9 April 2018 together with the first Issue – 0.

Every Issue will feature 5–10 Peer-Reviewed expositions and the journal will come out two times a year.

With this journal, we hope to contribute to insight, knowledge and awareness of methods, ethics and context in artistic processes.

The Steering Committee for VIS
Paula Crabtree, Vice-Chancellor, Stockholm University of the Arts
Johan Scott, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Stockholm University of the Arts
Jenny Tyllström, Director of the Research Office, Stockholm University of the Arts
Cecilie Broch Knudsen, Chairman, Norwegian Artistic Research program
Hans Knut Sveen, Deputy Chairman of the Board, Norwegian Artistic Research program
Geir Strøm, Administrative Leader, Norwegian Artistic Research program

Editorial Committee for VIS, 2019–
Cecilia Roos, Vice Rector of Research, Stockholm University of the Arts
Anna Lindal, Head of Departement, Stockholm University of the Arts
Magnus Bärtås, Professor, University of Arts, Crafts and Design
Darla M Crispin, Director of Arne Nordheim Center, NMH
Serge von Arx, Artistic Director Scenography Ostfold University College
Trond Lossius, Head of Research, Oslo National Academy of the Arts

Contact:
visjournal@uniarts.se



contact person(s): Heidi Möller

url: http://www.visjournal.nu

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  1. VIS Issue 1 Risk – and associated topics such as vulnerability, unguardedness, precariousness, failure and uncanniness – are frequently raised as concerns within artistic research arenas. VIS # 1 – Risk in Artistic Research – jeopardy or validation? moves through more artistically-stylised accounts of ‘danger’ towards the more hopeful linkage of risk with discovery and the reconfiguring of the imagination.
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  0. VIS Issue 0 Issue 0 features eight expositions created by researchers within the arts. Every contributor has been carefully chosen and invited by the Editorial Committee, with the view of presenting best practice within the field of artistic research.
  The expositions have gone through a dialogue-based peer-review which is something that the Editorial Committee would like to continue to develop in the coming issues, a process intended to be significant for VIS.
  Every exposition is presented on the VIS webpage and has an editorial text that explains why the contributor was chosen. The actual exposition itself, on the other hand, will be found in the database of the Research Catalogue. The expositions have their own designs and explore widely different topics, depending upon how each researcher has chosen to work within the offered format.
  
  The Editorial Committee would like to thank all the contributors for their inspiring work which sets the tone admirably for what we hope will follow.
  
  Editorial Committee: Cecilia Roos, Serge von Arx, Anna Lindal, Mia Engberg, Trond Lossius, Magnus Bärtås och Darla Crispin

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  Black Lungs (2019) author(s): Sepideh Karami published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  The ultimate act of taking risk in life lays in the proximity to death. When a risk being taken is prone to fail, failure can potentially become the failure to live. These risky moments involve decisions, dreams, imaginings that motivate one to take action. The motivation is strong enough to push one to a fragile border between death and life. In this exposition, I situate the discussion of risk in coal mines, investigating the work of coal miners as a craft through which they develop subversive modes of labour. The story in this exposition starts millions of years ago and gives a fictional geological history of Earth, where the formation of coal plays an important role in the planet’s evolution; coal becomes the political summary of Earth, where various moments of risk lead us down into a coal mine. Through a vertical structure poised on the edge of death and life, and by means of writing and drawing, risk is experimented with using concepts such as imprecision, the materiality of darkness, and the fragility of working with such materiality.
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  The Lost and Found project: Imagineering Fragmedialities (2019) author(s): Jenny Sunesson published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  The Lost and Found project began as an attempt to challenge my own sound making in opposition to a linear, capitalist, narrative tradition, dominated by visual culture. I wanted to explore the possibilities of sound as a counterpart material risking our perception of what sound is and what it can do. To reach beyond my own aesthetic and sociocultural baggage, I started to experiment with chance operated live performance as a method. By multilayering uncategorised sound scraps the work emerged to “produce itself” and I began to catch glimpses of alternative sound worlds and sites. I called the method fragmenturgy (fragmented dramaturgy) and the alternative realities that were created; fragmedialities (fragmented mediality, fragmented reality).
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  Oppdagelse og navngivning (2019) author(s): Asle Nilsen, Niklas Adam, Eirik Arthur Blekesaune, Piotr Pajchel published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  There is a fundamental enthusiasm and curiosity that drives our attitude towards experimentation. Free basic research is the fundament for all new apprehensions. Each production leads us into new landscapes. Experimentation is artistic immersion.The concept of risk and possible failure is a natural part of this experimentation.Without taking risk, art would remain stagnant, and the creative spirit would be wasted on our own fears. In this exposition we will elucidate some of the many fields of interest and tools for expression we have worked with during the development of our latest production – HANNAH – which premiered September 2017 at Henie Onstad Art Center in Oslo in connection with the Ultima Festival. In HANNAH Verdensteatret works with elaborate spatial compositions that provokes a state of absorption in an immersive audio-visual space. These compositions consists of material generated in an electronic feedback system. This material forms a sedimentation process that unfolds as a fixed attention towards exhaustion and the act of observing slow changes. Like a physical object slowly affect its surroundings. A production from Verdensteatret is a glimpse of a present, a state of transitions and passages through phenomenons. The present is a memory in motion. At the same time, there has never been so much past as right now.
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  A Few Notes on Getting Lost (Once Again) (2019) author(s): Michelle Teran published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  This essay is about risk in artistic research. It is about obstacles and turning points; a shift away from the familiar and move towards an unfamiliar terrain. It begins on a boat, heading to the North of Norway, in the darkness. December 2012 is when I turn away from a media art practice and move towards a more socially-engaged, activist way of working. I depart from Bergen; eventually arriving in Madrid, in the middle of an eviction crisis. Along the journey, I will invite various people to think with me, which takes the work in unplanned and unintended directions. I understand risk in the sense of ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway) until it becomes quite clear what is at stake. It is the risk we will take in finding meaning, by trying to locate the means to exist in and act on the present.
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  (Not so) Casual Conversations: Experiments in Attunement as Method in Investigative Art Practice (2019) author(s): Livia Daza-Paris published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition considers how investigative poetic practices could broaden notions of ‘forensis’ in terms of contemporary art. By developing my concept of ‘poetic forensics’ with attunement as a method that is “palpable and sensory, yet imaginary and uncontained” (Stewart 2011) it admits the nonhuman—trees, rocks, streams, animals—suggesting new relations beyond the human as possible witnesses (Williams 2018). This presents an invitation to think differently about articulations of public truth. The question ‘Who else is witness?' emerges while exploring material intrinsically elusive to testimony on what and who has been disappeared by oppressive geopolitics. Human-rights issues are implicit given the project’s focus on historical erasure and state violence at “the threshold of detectability” (Weizman 2017). It also attends to my family’s experiences as we faced the “political disappearance” of my father Iván Daza, in 1960s Cold War-era Venezuela. The project grapples with validity through methods and lively approaches that decolonize both knowledge (Tuhiwai Smith 1999) and nature (Demos 2016) presenting posthuman challenges to a privileged human onto-epistemological position (Viveiros de Castro 2015).
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  Melliferopolis – collaborating with uncontrollable, flying, stinging insects (2019) author(s): Christina Stadlbauer published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
  This exposition explores encounters between humans and insects, in the framework of a long term project around honeybees in urban contexts called Melliferopolis. The interventions proposed by Melliferopolis create shared spaces of encounters for Bees and Humans. The choice to work with these insects in an urban and participatory setting creates situations that are surprising, unpredictable or challenge concepts of "safety". The exposition aims to develop an understanding for risks that arise when collaborating with non human animals, explores reactions to situations that are not entirely controllable and elaborates on notions of safety, hazard and unpredictability within practice based artistic research. As the territory to investigate these questions we look at interventions, performances and installations produced in public spaces in the city of Helsinki in the framework of Melliferopolis since 2012.
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