VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research

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VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
Visit VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research:
visjournal.nu
VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research is a digital journal presenting artistic research, emphasising the importance of reflection that is interwoven with artistic practice, thereby generating new knowledge. VIS is an open-access publication and uses the Research Catalogue publishing platform for its submission and peer-reviewing processes, as well as for its final publication. It has adopted an approach to peer-reviewing in which, rather than the process being blind, a dialogue is established between author(s) and peer-reviewer.
VIS holds an open call for every issue. Up to seven expositions are selected by the Editorial Committee for further peer-review. Submissions in the Scandinavian languages are actively encouraged, but VIS is also open to contributions in English. Following the appearance of its inaugural Issue 0 in spring 2018, VIS has produced two issues in every subsequent year.
The journal is the result of a cooperation between Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH) and the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills).
The Steering Committee for VIS
Ellen J Røed
, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor, Stockholm University of the Arts
Paula Crabtree, Vice-Chancellor, Stockholm University of the Arts
Michael Duch, Appointed by The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills)
Ann Kroon, Active Director of the Research Office, Stockholm University of the Arts
Inger Stray Lien, Chairman, The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills)
Geir Ivar Strøm, Policy director, The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (part of Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills)
Editorial Committee for VIS
Serge von Arx, Artistic Director Scenography Ostfold University College
Magnus Bärtås, Vice-Rector of Research, University of Arts, Crafts and Design
Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen, Artist
Anna Lindal, Violinist and professor
Trond Lossius, Professor and Ph.D. leader, The Norwegian Film School and Professor II at The Grieg Academy, Department of Music, University of Bergen
Eliot Mmantidi Moleba, Research fellow at The Oslo National Academy of the Arts, KHiO
Cecilia Roos, Vice Rector of Research, Stockholm University of the Arts
Contact:
visjournal@uniarts.se
contact person(s):
Heidi Möller 
url:
http://www.visjournal.nu
Recent Issues
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7. VIS Issue 7
VIS Issue 7 was published 14 March 2022. The issue features five expositions within the theme “Metamorphoses – Tales of the Ever-Changing”. Editor: Anna Lindal.
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6. VIS Issue 6
VIS Issue 6 was published 19 October 2021. The issue features five expositions within the theme “Contagion”. Editor: Anna Lindal.
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5. VIS Issue 5
VIS Issue 5 was published 15 March 2021. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “One more time, let's do it again!”. Editor: Trond Lossius.
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4. VIS Issue 4
VIS Issue 4 was published 14 October 2020. The issue features seven expositions within the theme “Affecting material and technique”. Editor: Trond Lossius.
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3. VIS Issue 3
VIS Issue 3 was published 1 March 2020. The issue features eight expositions within the theme “History Now”. Editor: Magnus Bärtås.
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2. VIS Issue 2
VIS Issue 2 was published 23 September 2019. The Issue features five expositions within the theme ”Estrangement”. Editor: Magnus Bärtås.
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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
Recent Activities
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Territorial Art, Design & Architecture
(2022)
author(s): Sergio Montero Bravo
connected to: Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design
published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This collaborative and cross-sectoral project addresses places, environments and spaces beyond mere functional urban endeavors. The project explores possibilities that become visible when public space is viewed from perspectives beyond the urban norm. The aim is to restore lost rural relations and to search for ways to leave the anthropocentric narrative. In the past, densification of cities has been considered synonymous with sustainable development, creativity and innovation. However, a one-sided urban focus leads to disarmament of rural habitats, and dissociation from human interdependence with non-human nature. Today, adaptation to global warming is dependent on the survival of the rural. Therefore, this artistic research project is primarily informed by activities in rural environments together with species and ecologies other than human and urban. The goal is to investigate how art, design and architectural interventions can foster oppositional narratives to anthropocentricity. What I present in this exposition are my most recent collaborations and a journey of professional metamorphosis to reach this goal. The result is a series of ongoing projects and processes that demonstrate how I explore places of communality, togetherness and mutual beneficial interdependency between species.
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Fragments in Time
(2022)
author(s): Tobias Leibetseder, Thomas Grill, almut schilling, Till Bovermann
published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The processual sculpture "Fragments" is in permanent development and consists of artefacts of the "Rottings Sounds" project of artistic research*. Waste, things collected, things stored and things put aside, texts, pictures, data, sounds etc. are the basis of the shape-changing work. It is located at the Auditorium of Rotting Sounds. For this exposition, media representations of physical fragments have been arranged, then subjected to multiple stages of erosion processes specific to digital data. Object or exhibition, museum or archive, collection or documentation are moments of intrinsic research and decomposition, accompanying the process and resting in the distant but immediate eye of the virtual observer.
*"Rotting Sounds – Embracing the temporal deterioration of digital audio" is a cooperation of the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. It is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) as project AR445-G24.
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Ta Form
(2022)
author(s): Klara Waara
published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This research, developed in Amsterdam during the repeated courses of lockdown between 2020 and 2022, examines the powers and limitations of fantasy. Processing the mental and ideological undercurrents in Europe, the text describes a trajectory where the visual artist appropriates the role of a poet to explore the possibilities for change and movement in isolation. As thinking, reading and writing alters the protagonist, the appropriating artist becomes appropriated by language. The gradual blending with the observed subjects raises questions about the distinction between the internal and external.
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We Would Strike!: Beyond Representation in a Post-Industrial Town.
(2022)
author(s): Arturo Delgado Pereira
published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
On 30 July 1984, 11 mercury miners locked down in the mines of Almadén (Ciudad Real, southern Spain) to protest against their precarious economic and social conditions. 650 metres deep inside the oldest and most productive mercury mines in world history, the miners endured the dark and contaminated galleries for 11 days and nights until their claims were addressed. As an emigrated local filmmaker, I come back to post-industrial Almadén in 2019 to make a documentary film about the mining strike. The premise is to find young locals willing to live inside the now-closed mines for 11 whole days in homage to the older miners and to recreate the experience of 1984, 35 years later. Apart from engaging our collective mining past, performing the form and duration of a previous workers strike, Encierro proposes the underground as a living and symbolic space to foster a series of conversations, encounters, and social and political propositions to reimagine Almadén, which rose from a mine shaft more than 2000 years ago, as ‘something else besides’ a mining town.
This exposition explores the potential of documentary film fieldwork to take on a different relationship to normal life that the same or similar events would have as ‘untransformed reality’ – a strike versus the reenactment of a strike – and its potential for activism and social transformation. I will also explore the use of the conditional tense in documentary; a speculative and hypothetical approach to reality sensitive to the ‘potentially’ real, the ‘possible’, and the ‘what if’ as modes of documentation. What happens when the forms of ‘documentary’ and ‘reenactment’ are exceeded, and act upon the world rather than only represent it?
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The Sonified Textiles within the Text(il)ura Performance: Cross-cultural Tangible Interfaces as Phenomenological Artifacts
(2022)
author(s): Paola Torres Núñez del Prado
published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This research is working with Sonified Textile Controllers. They can be described as textile sensor-based tangible interfaces. Some of them are part of a disruptive sound performance – an experimental sound art concert that has been presented in various cities in Europe and the Americas called "Text(il)ura"[1]. The three fiber-based controllers presented as part of this performance, The Shipibo Conibo-Style Textile, The Hanap Pacha Quipu, and the Unkuña of Noise, all reference the cultures of Paola Torres Nunez del Prado’s country of origin, Perú. These textile artifacts are works of art as well as devices that fall within the scope of smart textiles and that of human-computer interaction, as they allow the user to experiment with alternative ways of approaching the execution of sound art or electronic music. Referring to both aesthetically and symbolically distinct forms of expression from diverse human communities, these cross-cultural devices are characteristically hybrid and ever-changing: history, myth, craft and technology, gender, transhumanism, sound, visuals and tactility – everything is intertwined in an amalgamation of human knowledges and experiences aiming for a type of universality that does not impose one thought system over the other. The design of the interfaces proposes a different approach to tactile manipulation of electronic sound instruments, where it is common to find controllers made of metal or plastic, and where the aural and tactile sensitivity with which they are first made, transforms the performance itself. The Sonified Textiles aim to redefine musical interfaces, both conceptually and design-wise within the e-textile realm. The research uses a phenomenological framework to go beyond the mind-body dualism and to reconnect with the natural world.
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Smitte som skapelsesmaskin
(2021)
author(s): Liv Kristin Holmberg
published in: VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The exposition ”Smitte som skapelsemaskin” (Contagion as a creation machine) is based on the artistic project ”Kroppsliturgiske eksperimenter” that explores the boundaries emerging when performing arts and human bodies enter the sacred space of a church. To what extent does the church as a social and architectural environment, shape human conceptions of bodies? What might the history of theology and of the Christian church tell humans about our relationship to our own bodies? The pandemic has put the above questions in a new light: It made the skin a potential carrier of life-threatening infections. At the same time, we suffered the lack of mutual human touch and of physical presence. Caught between the fear of being infected by touch and a hunger for being touched, the project ”Kroppsliturgiske eksperimenter” appears both challenging and attractive. Crisis has produced a desire for new forms of touch, in art and in human life. This contribution to VIS was created in collaboration and dialogue with performer Hanna Barfod, priest, professional singer and research fellow Mathias Gillebo, film photographer and editor Mats Christian Rude Halvorsen and priest Arne Jor.