Research Catalogue

Artistic research is a comparatively recent development. Outside institutional definitions little work has been carried out to situate the phenomenon in a wider history of art as well as knowledge. This speculative article describes the present moment of artistic research as result of two developments: (1) a shift from notions of knowledge to notions of research, and (2), a shift from major to minor forms of making. At the same time, in line with understandings of contemporary art and as contemporary art, artistic research is not understood as historical project that unifies art and science; rather, artistic research is pitched as providing a transdisciplinary ground in which different disciplines and knowledges can enrich each other. On a historical scale, this development is seen as driven by the increased speed and complexity of our current world for which conventional knowledges offers only partial insights arriving often too late for decision-making. Building on Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s concept of experimental systems and his notion of graphematic space, the paper suggests research to create sets of traces as proto-forms underdetermined in their aesthetic and epistemic status and, hence, beyond specific disciplinary contexts. Such space for research is understood as fundamentally artistic, also in opposition to notions of research as output-oriented types of investment. It is suggested that representation as epistemic form has been losing relevance, certainly for the arts and increasingly for the sciences. Artists are tasked to invent new, expositional forms of knowledge over and beyond representation to remain epistemically engaged in today’s fast and complex world.

Territórios Expansivos é o tema subjacente a um programa de atividades de investigação artística desenvolvido pela OSSO – Associação Cultural, e coordenado por Diogo Alvim e Matilde Meireles desde janeiro de 2020. O programa culmina nesta publicação, um pequeno projecto editorial que procura estabelecer relações entre diferentes perspectivas e modos de operação em investigação artística, bem como entre diferentes instituições. Nela participam quatro artistas que foram convidados para desenvolver ensaios à volta deste tema. A publicação foi acolhida em parceria editorial pela Cátedra UNESCO em Gestão das Artes e da Cultura, Cidades e Criatividade do Instituto Politécnico de Leiria. Expansive Territories is the theme underlying a program of artistic research activities developed by OSSO – Associação Cultural, and coordinated by Diogo Alvim and Matilde Meireles since January 2020. The program culminates in this publication, a small editorial project that seeks to establish relationships between different perspectives and modes of operation in artistic research, as well as between different institutions. Four artists were invited to develop essays around this theme. The publication was hosted as an editorial partnership by the UNESCO Chair in Arts and Culture Management, Cities and Creativity, Polytechnic Institute of Leiria.

The research project investigates the possibility of generating new auditory and visual forms based on the analysis and mathematical transformation of scientific data. In addition, the project studies whether and how these new forms are of scientific significance by asking the collaborating researchers to scientifically analyze the artistic outputs. By remaining true to the data while employing an artistic working method and, thus, by combining scientific and artistic values, the project contributes to the conceptual development of a space for research that is shared between art and science. This, however, implies that during the project both scientists and artists will be challenged to work in ways that are unfamiliar to them, either through confrontation with complex artistic interpretations of data or through exposure to very specific scientific working methods. On a meta-level, the project will report on the types of interactions that are deemed to be of value to either the artists, the scientists or both. At present, scientists use a variety of sonification and visualization procedures to analyse and communicate their findings. For artists, those representations are often of little artistic value since they are geared towards a transparent communication of the data creating little space for artistic interventions. Conversely, by foregrounding aesthetic effects, the expanding field of artistic data sonification and visualization runs the risk of producing art works that only superficially related back to the scientific research from which the data originated. While giving the arts an important role in the communication of scientific activity, the artistic exploration of scientific data may thus add very little to the research itself. Given the ever-increasing amount and importance of data representations, it is of particular importance that artists become engaged with their fabrication and to identify how in spite of their very different constitution aesthetic and epistemic research aims may support each other. Three case studies from different scientific fields provide data to be transposed by the artists into artistic outputs, which are in turn analysed by the scientists. The artists have an established practice in music composition and visual art, respectively, and have been collaborating very productively for the last 3 years. Given the transdisciplinary nature of the artistic collaboration it is possible to investigate issues of intermediality not only between art and science but also from within the arts. The process of creation and analysis is continuously exposed on the Research Catalogue online platform while a number of performances/exhibitions make the outputs tangible to the scientists and the general public.

Rebody (2010) by Gerhard Eckel, Michael Schwab and David Pirrò is a video and installation piece in which the captured motion of a dancer is transformed into a dynamic drawing that informs a musical composition. The piece explores the dance movements, the drawing algorithms and the musical structures in an attempt to create aesthetic resonances and convergences. The work investigates how structured creative processes can transpose rather than represent the dancer's movements. Rebody is based on motion-capture data collected from Bodyscapes (2009), an intermedial solo dance performance by Valentina Moar (choreography/dance), Gerhard Eckel and David Pirrò (composition).

I have been customising and developing a number of interrelated concepts over the years. This Provisional Glossary attempts an overview. Key terms to date: Exposition, Figure, Proto-object, Second-order Artefact

This text introduces and contextualises my use of 'figure' and 'second-order artefact' in order to explain the visual operations at play in much of my research. Following both Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard, it argues that notions of 'Gestalt' need to be complicated and that what we consider to be a 'body' needs to be challenged. With reference to Didi-Huberman and Ranciere, an alternative way is sought that can explain how a shape may think.

‘Nietzsche 5 : The Fragmentary’ is a collaborative research exposition, which presents a number of compositions by the young Friedrich Nietzsche (organised top to bottom) as well as various layers of reflection, interrogation, and speculation (organised left to right). It focuses on a moment of transformation around 1872 when Nietzsche moved from a serious interest in music composition to a career as a writer and philosopher. This period also coincides with the breakdown of Nietzsche’s friendship with Richard Wagner. The exposition suggests that Nietzsche’s own music as well as that of Wagner serves as a (negative) point of reference for the later Nietzsche, whose work, following Maurice Blanchot amongst others, can be characterised through the notion of the fragmentary, which places it also in relation to early Romanticism, in particular the writings of Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Friedrich Hölderlin. While Nietzsche’s more monumental compositions, such as his unfinished Mass (1860) and the symphonic poem Ermanarich (1861), may be more problematic, the exposition suggests that in some smaller pieces – in particular in So lach doch mal (1862) and Das ‘Fragment an sich’ (1871) – a sense of the fragmentary in Nietzsche may already be constructed. Beyond interpretations that focus more narrowly on Nietzsche’s work, this research exposition sets out to render the notion of the fragmentary productive for the wider context of artistic research. It does so with reference to Nietzsche’s notion of the untimely as a way to challenge both the dominant instrumentalisation of research and the notion of contemporaneity that seems central to present-day artistic practice. This not only provides perspectives into artistic epistemologies but also, more concretely, provides the methodology by which the research itself and its exposition have progressed. The overall mode is, thus, also that of the fragmentary, in which various media including text and image as well as audio and video recordings are distributed across a two-dimensional grid allowing multiple relationships and readings to emerge. The research exposition aims not only to discuss but ultimately also to employ the fragmentary so as to touch upon a specific artistic and intellectual motivation that we have come to identify with Nietzsche and which we suggest is also relevant today.

Although it is virtually impossible to formalize what ‘best practice’ on the Research Catalogue might be, it harbours by now numerous examples of expositions that ‘work.’ In this session, I want to introduce a small set of diverse expositions from JAR as a way to highlight successful choices people have taken. With a short explanation of expositionality and virtual witnessing, I aim to support an understanding of the effect that those examples have as a way of describing how media-rich articulations can productively engage with both academic and artistic expectations.

The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia introduces the pioneering concept of ‘expositions’ in the context of art and design research, where practice needs to be exposed as research to enter academic discourse. It brings together reflective and methodological approaches to exposition writing from a variety of artistic disciplines including fine art, music and design, which it links to questions of publication and the use of technology. The book proposes a novel relationship to knowledge, where the form in which this knowledge emerges and the mode in which it is communicated makes a difference to what is known.

A portfolio of diagrams and explanations that explain the conceptual and technical environments of the Journal for Artistic Research and the Research Catalogue.

In this collection, I plan and document events around the notion of exposition.

Proto-Objects is an ongoing, long-term research project by Michael Schwab retrofitted to a number of activities held before and after 2009. The project combines two distinct concerns: (1) the figuration of brain activity and (2) the conceptualisation of artistic, epistemic objects – that is, it combines a specific with a general research interest. The material basis for proto-objects consists of one hundred three-dimensional models, each of which represents an artistic analysis of Schwab’s brain activity while seeing a work from the history of art. While these models – or figures – may be scientifically developed to enhance our understanding of the workings of the brain, they may also be artistically developed and used for the production of new works of art. The notion of a proto-object indicates that both avenues may be suspended and that objects may be produced with unknown or at least underdeveloped representational status. This approach makes use of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s distinction between graphematic and representational spaces, where the former can broadly be understood as the space of research and the latter as the space of science or art. By deploying the notion of a proto-object, this research project suggests that research activity can continue for its own sake at the border of either science or art so that ‘knowledge’ in the guise of epistemic or aesthetic objects may be speculatively projected but never quite realised in those representational spaces.

Michael Schwab | Zurich University of the Arts, CH Day 1, 9 November, De Bijloke Bibliotheek, 14:00-14:30 For the installation Proto-Objects, Michael Schwab commissioned four independent collaborators to respond to his artistic analysis of his own brain activity. This was recorded as he was exposed to a succession of one hundred pictures, randomly chosen from the history of art (from 1420 to 1912). The initial EEG scan took place as part of the research project “Wissen im Selbstversuch/Knowledge through Self-Experimentation” (2009–10, PI: Yeboaa Ofosu, see http://www.hkb.bfh.ch/?id=2453) at the Hochschule der Künste Bern (CH) and was carried out by Dr. Thomas Koenig at the Universitätsklinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie Bern (CH). The raw EEG data was statistically analysed and geometrically transformed with the help of Padraig Coogan, Leon Williams (both Royal College of Art, London, UK), Michael Klein (Universität Heidelberg, D), and David Pirrò (Kunstuniversität Graz, AT). This work resulted in the construction of one hundred three-dimensional “proto-objects,” each corresponding to what is deemed significant in Schwab’s cognitive response to each particular picture. The name “proto-object” was first used by Schwab in a book chapter (Schwab 2012) that utilises Hans-Jörg Rheinberg’s research on “experimental systems” for possible epistemologies and methodologies of artistic research. Rheinberger makes a distinction between two spaces, the graphematic and the representational space (see Schwab 2013). Surprising events that lack explanation are produced in experimental settings and traced in the graphematic space as “epistemic things.” Epistemic things are gradually transposed into the representational space where they register as knowledge. According to Rheinberger (1997, 28) appropriating François Jacob, epistemic things announce future knowledge and, thus, drive history. However, in the context of techno-scientific experimental systems, and despite being rooted in the graphematic space, the future of an epistemic thing lies in the representational space—that is, research must feed into science. The installation Proto-Objects speculates that this economy is reversible, following a two-step procedure. The material installation transfers an actualised technical object back to an epistemically underdetermined space, a virtuality suggested by a multiplicity of images from different disciplinary backgrounds. In this installation, Einar Torfi Einarsson transforms Schwab’s proto-objects into scores to be interpreted and played by the cellist Séverine Ballon; the contemporary artist Florian Dombois uses the one hundred objects to develop a “language of things,” in which he writes poetry; the architect Miguel Figueira modifies Van Gogh’s Pont de Langlois (1888) on the basis of the proto-object corresponding to that painting; and Taslim Martin uses one proto-object as the template for a creamer and sugar set. Needless to say, there are no “real” proto-objects outside their presentation as manifold, “the real object is reflected in a mirror-image as in the virtual object which, from its side and simultaneously, envelops or reflects the real: there is ‘coalescence’ between the two . . . a double movement of liberation and capture” (Deleuze 1989, 68). Keeping what Deleuze says here in mind, the installation Proto-Objects may be seen to suggest alternative modes of signification within artistic experimental settings.

TRANSPOSITION NOT EXHIBITION A RESEARCH EVENT BY Gerhard Eckel, Michael Schwab, David Pirrò and Artemi-Maria Gioti Angewandte Innovation Laboratory, Franz Josefs Kai 3, Vienna Transpositions Lab May 14 – 16, 2016 10:00 – 17:00 daily with interventions by Paulo de Assis, Florian Dombois and Lucia D’Errico Symposium May 17, 2016 10:00 – 17:00 organised by Cecile Malaspina