i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
About this portal
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
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
Recent Activities
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Intimate to and transcendent of transient time qua the seen and drawn in the present: an email to a painter/academic and his reaction
(2023)
author(s): Mike Croft, derek pigrum
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
The idea of the exposition was triggered by an email exchange between artists Mike Croft and Derek Pigrum on 30th November 2022. The two artists have for more than a year been maintaining an email correspondence on matters of mutual interest concerning their visual practice and theoretical explorations. On this occasion Croft had read something by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan on the automaton, the latter of which he knew to be of great interest to Pigrum, the email to Pigrum of which opens the exposition. The resulting email response from Pigrum has as its point of focus a visit he had made the day before to the KHM (Kunsthistorisches Museum) in his home city, Vienna, where what he terms ‘the automation of contingency that generates repetition’ was as usual in operation. The references Pigrum made in the email to his own artistic work and existing works of art and cultural and historical artefacts suggested his text might be divided and illustrated, the resulting format of which is the present exposition. Several additional responses to the email exchange’s content ensued, termed interventions in the exposition, leading to a closing email exchange dated 11th December 2022. A third email exchange between 13th and 14th December has resulted in a Postscript section. Croft’s contribution pivots, he suggests, around Lacan’s coined term ab-sense, very approximately interpreted to mean absence of meaning between patterns or continuum – in the linguistic context signifiers –that are nonetheless not reducible to mere nonsense. The running through, as it were, of contingency in Pigrum’s practice – which he points out is not his only interest and prompts a need to show the broader picture, as it were, a pivotal influence for him being Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne – may be considered informed by sense more so than meaning. The exposition is an example of how an ongoing correspondence can be an important aspect of each artist’s practice.
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The communication intent in 'matéria disponível’ (‘available matter')
(2022)
author(s): rosinda casais
connected to: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This article is based on the personal work 'matéria disponível’ (2020) by Rosinda Casais and proposes to analyse the importance of communication-driven art in its different stages. This work emerged from the objective to explore the outdoor space as a space to communicate, during the period of the first lock-down (social distancing) due to CoVID-19, from march to june 2020. Crossing this period, she and her 5 years old daughter used the debris that remained in the courtyard of the building, where both live, and started communicating through objects with the neighbours.
From the intention to interact with the other, this artwork fulfils itself, broadens and questions the communicative nature of the objects and the artistic practice as well.
Concepts, along with the capacity of the objects to change the atmosphere of a place and the common/individual memories, were developed during this work towards a sense of communication from/to it and is discussed here.
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Responsibility towards the Void
(2022)
author(s): Mike Croft
connected to: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
The question of responsibility is explored through drawing, specifically relating to a so-termed void space that ranges over a builder's yard and its immediate environment. The research is formatted as dated journal entries to show its chronological development, with the proviso that later stages may eclipse earlier stages, depending on their relevance. This looping, as it were, mimics the fact that the void space is best defined by the occasional circling of swifts, an observation that becomes a metaphor for how to try to articulate the space pictorially. Responsibility is referenced through theories of each of Levinas, Lacan and Foucault in relation to the Other, the latter of which is taken as the theoretical equivalent of void, but no less concerning responsibility. The author has drawn the site in such terms as locate the void in both the space that the site defines and a gap in the drawing process. This artistic effort is analogous demonstration of responsibility to that which is suggested by the theory. Responsibility is considered from the perspective of the personal and individual, automatically present in artistic commitment, in this case finding some explanation in theoretical thinking of the abstract notion of Other. The formatting of the process of attending to this theme and motif as research leads to a situation where drawing, as such, is but the predominantly visual tool alongside art writing, academic research, and graphic layout that provides live links to video clips and two explanatory texts.
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Fast- and Stop- frame, and Real- time: video's comment on matters of observation of perception considered through drawing
(2022)
author(s): Mike Croft, Safa Tharib
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
The exposition is a presentation of work in progress, also involving reflective commentary, by two collaborators in a research project titled 'The Observation of Perception: considered through drawing', hosted by i2ADS Research Unit of the Fine Art Faculty of Porto University. The collaborators, a digital visual artist and an analogue-focused fine artist, are respectively involved in the research through visual story-telling and video, and drawing and its audio-visual recording. In the present circumstances, each of the works is considered through its video element specifically in relation to several manifestations of time. In the digital visual artist's case, time is formatted through and as fast-frame and stop-frame, and in the fine artist's case, real-time and a psychoanalytical inflection on real, often appearing in the literature capitalised as Real. The first author, who provides the written reflection, is the fine artist, while substantial visual work, a published paper, and some critical intervention is provided by the digital visual artist as a second author. The first author takes as a directive, aspects of the second author's paper, and reflectively critiques both his and his research collaborator's time-based work in their video manifestations. Theoretical references are to the digital visual artist collaborator Safa Tharib, the philosopher Henri Bergson and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The exposition ends with a question that emerges from the commentary, as to the applicability of the indexical signifier to consideration of digital as well as analogue practice.
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Diagramming Perception
(2022)
author(s): Mike Croft
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
This artistic research is a contribution to a larger research project titled ‘The Observation of Perception, considered through drawing’, hosted by i2ADS. The research begins with the hypothesis that perception can be diagrammed, in this case through and as a form of drawing that indicates how perception is for this investigator conceived and works in action. One of the two visual motifs of the work is also a meta-motif, in that as an action-camera placed over the eyes, it is the means by which the investigator records himself at work on the second main motif, which is his image as viewed in a circular hand-held mirror. The investigator approaches the initiative as a question of diagramming the self-same initiative, accepting whatever are its developed implications as the aesthetic of the work. Peirce's division of the diagram into elements of firstness and secondness, with the elusive recognition of diagram as an abstract entity before any communicative purpose, keys into a working practice that in any case veers towards the diagrammatic. The investigator's tendency to audio-visually record his working process has led him to a position where the logistics of the purpose paradoxically reveal the subjectivity – if not absurdity – of the self-same process. In this case, little by little, a contingent factor of a wart takes centre-stage as blind spot; at-once a torn hole within the drawing's material surface, the action camera as an illusory obstruction, and a factor that oscillates with and as the circular self-portrait. The presentation takes the viewer/reader through the process, largely perceptual, that is diagrammed on and as the artifactual outcome, the drawing.
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SAR 2021 presentation - Paulo Luis Almeida & Flávia Costa
(2022)
author(s): Jonas Howden Sjøvaag, flavia costa, Paulo Luís Almeida
connected to: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
published in: SAR Conference
An Ecology of Care provides a philosophical basis for developing practical and aesthetic ways to requalify and improve the experience of being-in-the-city. This experience involves the relationship with spatial boundaries that inform gestures in the urban environment, such as fences and walls or social and political limits; it also implies our being sensitive to temporal boundaries that tacitly shape our perception of the city, such as disposable architectures, working rhythms and natural cycles.
In this video paper, we focus on a common performance-drawing project, carried out in two different cities: Helsinki and Porto. Through several actions, we pretend to challenge the dichotomy between human gestures and natural cycles and address the complexity of the relationships between spatial boundaries and the idiorhythm of walking in the city. Our project begins with the premise that the observation of gestures allows us to understand the way we exist in the world. Also, the re-enactment of those gestures in art practice allows us to understand, in an embodied way, the existential and social changes we are currently undertaking.
In “Follow me”, a drawing performed on the fence surrounding the construction of the new KuvA (Helsinki), we problematise drawing as an act of care and relation, built upon idiorhythmic, embodied and communal gestures in a shared space. In “Insula Perdita” we re-enact the death of palm trees in the city of Porto and the inevitable natural cycles and changes that moulds the perception of the city as a frame and ecosystem.
Both practices explore approaches to the Ecology of Care as a frame for artistic research, through the geographical concept of Throwntogetherness: to perform/draw as a responsive relationship between human and non-human (objects, plants, animals) to emphasize the interdependence between non-human and everyday life gestures in building the value of communality.
