Endorsed by the Executive Board of The Society for Artistic Research
Through cultural-historical shifts of "spatiality" throughout the history of knowledge, the concept of space is subject to fundamental change, which both reflects the respective framework conditions in itself and leads the philosophical undertaking of an empirically-free categorisation ad absurdum: At the beginning of philosophising stands the metaphysical question of the beginning or the “ground” of all things (Greek: arche), to which space as a conception of origin provides an answer; at the end we find the insight into the ('an-archic') structure of space that cannot be justified by thought alone and an insight into its emergence from political, economic, historical and above all social contexts.
Today, we are witnessing an unprecedented awareness of space, be it in philosophy, art, geography, and other such as academic discourses. However, after ages of discussion about time and its descriptions, why space, and why today?
Since organising, redistributing, promoting, annexing, and defending territories are basic exercises of political as well as economical and military decisions, to enthrone space as the new all-round theory means no less than to refer to the most traditional power dynamics we can imagine.This may be no surprise in given the strong effects of de-territorialisation as one main feature of the world’s status quo.
This group wants to intersect different artistic research practices and discourses as heterogeneous but complementary articulations of space, that address, operate on and contribute in different ways and capacities, to the transformation of the contemporary environment and its challenges: the social, the infrastructural, the technological, the sensory, the virtual, the built and the unbuilt.
Therefore the group consists of media theorists, composers, artists, performers, linguists, and architects to enable an interdisciplinary delineation of the field but also to strengthen a multidisciplinary research on the social impact of space(s) in our society in order to define certain strategies dealing with the multi-layered meanings of space in the mediatised every day and the arts. The group wants to investigate these contexts within artistic research practices and provide a framework for contextualisation and reflection on these practices.
The group is currently planning a joint book publication with keynote texts on spatial practices from the fields of media theory, linguistics, music, architecture and performance
SINCE 2020: 16 GATHERINGS
Every meeting was dedicated to a subject from our current practices within the group.
ACADEMIC SEMINAR 01: Auditive and Visual Perception of Space in Virtual Environments, Department of Media Theory, Technical University Berlin
ACADEMIC SEMINAR 02: Auditive and Visual Perception of Space in Virtual Environments, Department of Architecture, HCU Hamburg
LECTURE on The situation of space in contemporary media art environments, new media seminar, Aalto University Helsinki
12th International Conference in Artistic Research, Vienna
JAR 2021: Beyond the Visual – a research curriculum for explorations in spatiotemporal environments
Exhibition of an artistic research project with vacant buildings at Errant Sound Berlin – curated by Janine Eisenächer – supported by SIG – archived on the RC.
13th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research, Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany (in person)
CAN WE AGREE ON WHAT SPACE IS?
Concepts, definitions and interpretations of space and of spatiality are essentially how we construct the world and by extent how we create means to intervene into that world, with our day-to-day practices.
Space thus accumulates plural constructs, poetic artifices that we collectively produce and reproduce through time, within our cultures, our sciences, our arts. Through the dimension of time, these are the spaces that serve as vehicles for adaptation and transformation, from the scale of the individual to that of collective societies and of the environment at large.
Now, after a year of lockdowns and Corona reflections, the awareness of space seems to have affected all kinds of systems, including academic discourses and art, to subordinate their targets under a new paradigm within a wide range of empirical, deductive, discursive, historical, scientific and intuitive methods.
However, even basic spatial descriptions, terms like "close," "closed," "narrow," "high," "low," "far," or "open" have drastically changed their meanings due to daily experiences with mediated campuses and online-conferences, online exhibitions and concerts as streamed events, and computer camera views of private homes.
Thus, it is still unclear what this means for cultural practice in terms of perception, composition, aesthetics, engineering and culture.
SPATIAL MODELS
- How are we dealing with different models interdisciplinarily?
- In how far can we compare these models, how can we share our ideas and backgrounds and how can we dare to formulate more informed and advanced models in the future?
OBJECTIVES
- Understanding spatial models as fundamental narratives of the status quo of our societies
- Utilizing spatiality as a parameter in cultural production (e.g. composition, performance, sciences, journalism)
- Understanding the Arts as polyvalent representations of space(s)
- Developing personal research approaches with and of spaces.
Over 70 individuals working as architects, experience designers, lecturers and researchers, media artists and media technologists (VR/AR/XR), media theorists, visual artists, performers, musicians, sound artists, and composers, are presented in this network archive.