Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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).

DRAWinU

DRAWinU — Drawing Across University Borders.

status	active
portal	i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
admins	Fabrício Fava, Paulo Luís Almeida
members	Paulo Luís Almeida, RC i2ADS, Marina Vale Guedes, David Lopes

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PÁR-A-GEM

PÁR-A-GEM — The importance of Time in times of Time compression within contemporary artistic practices

status	active
portal	i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
admins	Fabrício Fava, Paulo Luís Almeida
members	RC i2ADS

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OPDrawing

OPDrawing — The Observation of Perception, considered through Drawing

status	active
portal	i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
admins	Fabrício Fava, Paulo Luís Almeida
members	Mike Croft

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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. But this “intersection of art and technology” is often bandied about in somewhat unclear terms about what it may mean and what its results can be. Art and technology don’t so much intersect as they almost overlap, at least in the sense that we cannot even fathom art without technology. To be realised, art demands a medium and hence, technology. Art cannot be without technology; art is unthinkable without technology. We can frequently witness two types of dynamics in art and technology collaborations. The first is when art works as a function of technology, towards technology, becoming somewhat goal-driven in its aim. This is where we can find commissions with motivations squarely grounded in technology and science. The second is where we find technology and science providing resources to art, such as new materials, tools, methods, etc., that artists use in their work. Occasionally, these can even be developed at the artists’ demand, but they can also result from independent research subsequently put at the artists’ disposal. Neither of these constitute modes of collaboration in which both parties are led to outputs resulting in effective contributions to both fields and where real synergies are developed or where the arrow points both ways. Is this type of synergy possible? Can art and technology cooperate? What can art bring to technology, engineering, and science? Can it produce effective contributions to these fields? i2ADS’s participation in the 2SMART project was steered towards two closely related, albeit quite different, goals. One of these was focused on communication design and communicating science by exploring data visualisation and other media design techniques for the sciences. The communication processes of scientific and engineering teams — those in the 2SMART project, but also in a broader sample of the Portuguese science and technology ecosystem — were studied with the goal of understanding their most frequent needs and of devising design patterns that could be used as tools for researchers to deal with design decisions when designers may not be available. This led to direct contributions to scientists’ and engineers’ design literacy and indirect contributions to a broader scientific literacy. Furthermore, this effort also allowed us to map other needs and opened avenues for future research within i2ADS and the Faculty of Fine Arts. Another goal was focused on art. However, rather than promoting collaborations with science and technology, it aimed to foster creation in a context of science, technologies, and engineering, bringing artists to the laboratories for creative residences for extended periods of time. André Rangel in NANO4MED lab, Carolina Grilo Santos in the Processes Products and Energy group, and Catarina Braga in the Environmental Sciences and Technologies group, all labs of LEPABE, developed processes of artistic research in the labs, exploring and discovering its spaces, the people that work in them, and the technologies, materials and processes they work with. At the start of each of these residences, the artists didn’t have constraints beyond a maximum duration for the residence and the expectation of showcasing the outcomes of their work in an individual show at the Library of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. The residences resulted in very diverse works — in media, concepts, approaches, and in the focus developed by each artist during the residence — leading to the different ways that the works resonate with the contexts where they were developed. However, we may also discover convergent traits in the works, perhaps because of their shared history or the forces that shaped them. With this cycle of residences, we tried to bring the epistemological processes of art to sciences and engineering, to look at STEM processes through the perspective of art, something which may lead to the development of new critical perspectives and to a reframing and reorganisation process that can only be developed through art. In this final show, which also marks the project’s conclusion, the three works are brought together and confronted in the Gallery of the Museum of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, provoking further dialogue between the works and the technologies that brought them to be.

status	active
portal	i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
admins	Fabrício Fava
members	Ana Duarte

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  [in]visible_illustrating the absence (2024) author(s): Margarida Dias, Catarina Casais published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
  On February 19th 2024 took place the 2nd seminar, "Illustrating the absence" of the project "[in]visible - [in]visibility of identities in Portuguese 1st-grade elementary textbooks of Social & Environmental Studies after 1974", at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (Portugal). For the reflection, illustration and critical analysis of the illustration works, there was the participation of the Master's in Illustration, Edition and Print students with the illustrator Júlio Dolbeth and the [in]visible team. Cristina Ferreira and Margarida Dias took the photos, and the session was recorded with audio.
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  [in]visible_seeing the invisible (2024) author(s): Margarida Dias, Maria Lurdes Gomes published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
  On March 14th 2023 took place the 1st seminar, "Seeing the invisible" of the project "[in]visible - [in]visibility of identities in Portuguese 1st-grade elementary textbooks of Social & Environmental Studies after 1974", at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (Portugal). For the reflection and critical analysis of the illustration works, there was the participation of the illustrators Júlio Dolbeth, Rui Vitorino Santos, Samuel Moura, the guests Catarina Casais, Daniela Fraga Gomes, Inês Capelo, Joana Carneiro, and in addition to the team, the external consultant Fernando Hernández-Hernández (U. Barcelona). Cristina Ferreira and Fabrício Fava took photographs. Through practical and creative proposals, the seminar aimed to think and problematize the illustration in 1st-grade elementary Social & Environmental Studies textbooks published in Portugal in the last 2 decades.
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  [in]visible_thinking about identities in textbooks (2024) author(s): Catarina Casais, Margarida Dias published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
  The communication and workshop “Thinking about (in)visible Identities in Textbooks” of the [in]visible project [2022.05056.PTDC] took place on November 17, 2023 at the School of Communication and Arts of Eduardo Mondlane University (ECA/UEM), in Maputo (Mozambique), organised by margarida dias. The workshop, part of the 8ei_ea - INTERNATIONAL MEETING on ARTS EDUCATION (https://eiea.fba.up.pt/2023/), was attended by approximately 50 people from Mozambique, Brazil, and Portugal, and was supported by José Carlos de Paiva, Paulo Nogueira, and David Neves. After the presentation, seven working groups were formed. Six groups analysed Portuguese textbooks for Social & Environmental Studies, and one group analysed a Mozambican textbook for Portuguese-Mathematics. All the textbooks were for the 1st year and were being used in schools during the 2023/2024 school year. First, each group analysed one textbook, and then they shared their analyses and comments with all the participants.
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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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