i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
About this portal
i2ADS — Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
i2ADS is an R&D Unit based at the Faculty of Fine Arts of University of Porto, Portugal (FBAUP).
Its mission is to promote research in the fields of Fine Arts, Design, Drawing and Performing Arts, with an emphasis on the practical and educational impact of artistic research in society. The main goals are the creation of a shared research culture between artistic areas to inform and enhance its practice and the promotion of debates regarding the social, cultural and technological frames of art and design.
i2ADS’ organization comprises Research Programs and Art-Based Labs on Arts Education, Critique and Society; Interculturality and Society; Artistic Production, Processes and Technological Studies; Artistic Practice, Politics and Social Engagement; Computation, Hybrid Practices and Culture; and Drawing Across Disciplines. The Unit supports two Doctoral Programs (Fine Arts and Art Education) at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto.
Its team is composed of researchers from the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Architecture (University of Porto) and the School of Music and Performing Arts (Polytechnic of Porto), PhD FCT grants and collaborating researchers from several Universities.
i2ADS is an Institutional and Portal member of the Society of Artistic Research (SAR) and the European Educational Research Association (EERA).
contact person(s):
Paulo Luís Almeida ,
Fabrício Fava url:
https://i2ads.up.pt/en
Groups
DRAWinU
DRAWinU — Drawing Across University Borders.
PÁR-A-GEM
PÁR-A-GEM — The importance of Time in times of Time compression within contemporary artistic practices
OPDrawing
OPDrawing — The Observation of Perception, considered through Drawing
2SMART
The intersection of art and science, or art and engineering, or art and technology, is a common trope since the 1960s when collectives such as “E.A.T.” were formed to explore and promote collaborations with the then-new technologies.
Recent Activities
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Ancestry – before DNA test – considered through drawing
(2024)
author(s): Mike Croft
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
The exposition is deliberately incomplete not only because, arguably, this is the nature of research, but due to the author's working with a sense of in-the-meantime, while waiting for the results of a DNA Ancestry test. The research is therefore a preemptive response to a genetics and identity project to be explored through drawing, hosted by i3S, Institute of Investigation and Innovation in Health, University of Porto, Portugal. The exposition presents a degree of drift from a starting-point of family photos processed through drawing by a fictional artist, to a more conceptual idea of microbiological cells of which their content is increasingly fragmented text. As the drawing process develops, the use of coffee-staining is a key medium, its geographical origin conferring roughly with that of the human species. Such drift of content between creative writing, visualisation, and academic writing, is possible on the basis that the author does not as yet have a clear idea of what the DNA Ancestry findings will disclose or how they will look. An after-the-test exposition will follow the present exposition – which is interesting in terms of how such future knowledge will be in the wake of, and responsive to, a stage of indetermination.
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Ancestry – after DNA test – considered through Drawing
(2024)
author(s): Mike Croft
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
To the extent that this research is artistic, it involves the mediums of drawing, drawing towards painting, academic research, academic writing, fiction, and occasional use of video. If artistic research could be an entity with the opacity, so to speak, of such mediums, then it would not be necessary to mention its constituents. However, this is worth stating at the outset because in the author's view the Research Catalogue does have its own mediumistic basis: take the research off the platform and its form and concept alters. The topic of the research is a response to the author's genetic ancestral DNA test provided by i3S (Institute of Investigation and innovation in Health, Porto University). The author is one among a group of participants conducting individual research on the theme of 'Call for Drawing – Genetics and Identity'. This author's activity follows an exposition called 'Ancestry – before DNA test – considered through Drawing', published on the Research Catalogue. The activity concerns the charting of progress of thinking, doing and making up to and including two main pieces of visual-material work, with the expectation that the research will continue to develop.
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Distanciation and other: implications of distance in an ancestry DNA project
(2023)
author(s): Mike Croft
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
The exposition focuses on the question of ‘distanciation’ that at-once both distances and furthers one’s understanding of the self through being drawn into a work of text – here taken in a broader sense to include also the visual-material – and geographical and temporal distance. The latter interpretation of distance relates to the artistic research project that contextualises the article, which is in response to a call for drawings on the question of genetics and identity, hosted by i3S (Institute of Investigation and Innovation in Health, Porto University). As part of this author’s response, and as an example that may, through its reading, cause some expansion of one’s notion of self, the novel ‘The Inheritors’ by William Golding is discussed. From the point of view of genetic ancestry, Golding’s novel involves incongruous recognition between a family of Neanderthals and a larger group of Homo sapiens, and a more psychological use of the term ‘other’ for foreignness and one’s negotiation of such initial reaction by oneself. The conjoined question of distanciation and other is considered through reference to a large drawing of the author in progress as part of the ancestry project at the time of writing, and through theoretical reference to the work of Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Lacan and Bracha Ettinger that helps elaborate on distanciation, the psychically interpreted other, and a maternal matrixial idea of pre- and post-natal I and non-I of the self in contiguous relationship not only with psychoanalytical theory, but also with global ancestral mitochondrial DNA.
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by division and differentiation
(2023)
author(s): Carolina Grilo Santos
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
“by division and differentiation” is a speculative fiction or a document on the daily life as an outsider. Presented as video art, this project is the result of a residency program crossing scientific and artistic research that reveals imaging reflections, detected gestures, and alienated thoughts.
An inner monologue sets the tone for travels among accounts, wanders, and memories, invoking the divergences and parallelisms between reality and imagination. There are twisty borders in the millimeters of tension of what is visible to the naked eye and what can only be seen through the machine, between what can be touched without danger and what’s endangered — in science and art. Surrounded by volumes of data that are phenomena for others, dances of precise injections and light beams, we have lost count of the time we have been here.
This work is a result of project 2SMART, engineered Smart materials for Smart citizens, with reference NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000054, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
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HMV_II
(2023)
author(s): Catarina Braga
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
Fragments of an investigation carried out at the end of the 21st century get intermixed with the invisibility of the object of study — indoor air.
From a speculative practice between the scientific process, the artistic process and the affective, political, social and cultural process that we create with the things of the world, the appearance of a new body is proposed. It is inside a fictionalised laboratory that we get to see this collective, symbiotic and ancestral organism; a multispecies entity that transcends the borders between terrestrial bodies (mineral, human, vegetal, animal, technological) and time and space.
The exhibition and work being presented here is the result of the artist's residency with the LEPABE laboratory team of Environmental Sciences and Technologies (FEUP), which investigates and measures indoor air quality, studying its impact on human health.
This work is a result of project 2SMART, engineered Smart materials for Smart citizens, with reference NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000054, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
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(Des)Aceleração
(2023)
author(s): André Rangel
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
(Des)Aceleração is a relational system between coherent light, bioactive molecules, velocity, glass, photoluminescence, volume, surface, algorithm and programming, in continuous variation. It is the outcome of a residency in which a dynamic intermedia system was created, articulating knowledge from a spectrum of activities and configuring conditions for a spatial, optical and chromatic experience.
The computer-controlled movement of the light beam, combined with the idiosyncrasies of the glasses, their heterogeneity, and that of the riboflavin, produces indeterminable phenomena of projection, reflection, refraction, and dispersion of light. In this system, coherent light ceases to be coherent. The laser beam is not used as a stylus but produces a visual experience that results from the coincidence of the predicted and determined with the unforeseen and indeterminate, of order with chaos.
This work is a result of project 2SMART, engineered Smart materials for Smart citizens, with reference NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000054, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).