Convener: Society for Artistic Research (SAR)
Hosts: University of the Arts, The Hague & Leiden University
Venues: Royal Academy of Art & Royal Conservatoire
How do both writing and practice operate as ways to convey new knowledge, understanding and experiences by which we (re)organize our lives?
08.30 - 09.30
09.30 - 10.00
10.00 - 10.45
10.45 - 11.15
11.15 - 12.45
12.45 - 13.45
13.45 - 14.15
14.15 - 15.00
15.00 - 15.30
15.30 - 16.15
16.15 - 17.00
17.00 - 18.30
18.30 - 20.00
20.30
WRITING: Motto, Program, Registration, Venues & Directions, Accommodation, Organisation, Archive, FAQ.
Contact
Matthea de Muynck — Royal Conservatoire
conference2016@societyforartisticresearch.org
Conference committee
Chair: Henk Borgdorff — The Hague/Leiden, The Netherlands
Marcel Cobussen — Leiden, The Netherlands
Alexander Damianisch — Vienna, Austria
Johan Haarberg — Bergen, Norway
Anya Lewin — Plymouth, UK
Frans de Ruiter — Leiden, The Netherlands
Janneke Wesseling — The Hague/Leiden, The Netherlands
Conference support team
Conference manager: Matthea de Muynck
— Royal Conservatoire , The Hague
Lotte Betting & Judith Westerveld
— Royal Academy of Art
, The Hague
Gabriel Paiuk & Patricia Wisse
— Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden
Moreover, writing is not just practice, but itself creative work, a constructive process that enables the emergence of the new and the unforeseen. What is the role of writing in artistic research and what type of voices may emerge?
Furthermore, while writing can be seen as a form of practice, the same is true for the inverse: in the context of artistic research, practice is a form of writing; a non-propositional form of writing, to be sure, but in artistic research material practices and products not only embody knowledge and understanding, but as agents in a methodological sense, are also the vehicles by which that knowledge and understanding is produced and conveyed. Here practice is making a case, a claim; a discursive practice that comprises (paradoxically?) non-discursive, i.e. non-propositional material.
Redell Olsen
In order to read the biography of Redell Olsen, please refer to the Keynote n°2, A Column of Air: Flickers/Writing/Painting.
Royal Conservatoire
Juliana van Stolberglaan 1
2595 CA The Hague
Royal Academy of Art
Prinsessegracht 4
2514 AN The Hague
Salomé Voegelin
Salomé Voegelin is an artist and writer engaged in listening as a socio-political practice of sound. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (Continuum, NY, 2010) and Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2014. Other recent writings include ‘During the Night Crops will Still Grow (unless the payers sleep)’, with David Mollin, in Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (Intellect, 2015), and a chapter in the The Multisensory Museum (Alta Mira Press, 2014).
Voegelin’s work on listening and writing brings the philosophy of sound to a participatory engagement: her blog www.soundwords.tumblr.com is the template for a participatory public listening and writing, and while her collaborative performances and radio broadcasts on Resonance FM, ora: voyages into listening and writing, (with Daniela Cascella) encourage a shared hearing and listening between sound and text (www.ora2013.wordpress.com), the monthly events Points of Listening, co-convened with Mark Peter Wright, engage in collective and solitary listening across London (www.pointsoflistening.wordpress.com).
Voegelin works collaboratively with David Mollin in a practice that focuses on text and sound and establishes through written and spoken word conversations and reconfigurations of relationships and realities. Voegelin and Mollin’s collaborative installations, performances and compositions have been presented for example at Magazine 4, Bregenz Kunstverein in Austria, 2008, Artisphere, Washington DC, US in 2014, as part of Liquid Architecture Festival 2014, at Lydgalleriet in Bergen, Norway, 2014, and most recently at the Kunstraum Riehen, Basel, Switzerland, 2015. Voegelin is an Associate Professor in Sound Arts at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes
Mia is Professor and Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Amsterdam. Until 2014 she worked as Professor of Iconology at the University of Ulster, Belfast. From 2007 to 2011 she was Head of the Research Graduate School there, leading particularly the PhD with Practice programme. She studied at the Universities of Heidelberg, London and Cologne, where she gained her PhD in 2000. The research was funded with a James Joyce Foundation Scholarship in Zurich and continued through an Irish Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship at UCD. She was Visiting Scholar at the University of Cologne in 2012. Her research focuses on word and image studies, particularly the visual legacies of writers (Joyce, Beckett, Sebald), also considering performance, the historiography of art and curation (particularly literary art exhibitions and experimental institutionalism). Rooted in Joseph Beuys studies, she has an interest in sculpture, performance, social practices, post-War art histories and artistic research.
Her publications include the books Post-War Germany and ‘Objective Chance’: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean (Steidl 2008, 2011), James Joyce als Inspirationsquelle für Joseph Beuys (Olms 2001), and Joyce in Art (Lilliput 2004). This book accompanied her international exhibition on the theme, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin. She has curated for: Goethe Institut, Dublin; Tolstoy Estate, Russia; MoA, Seoul National University, Korea; Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast; LCGA, Limerick; CCI, Paris; Maagdenhuis, UvA/VanAbbemuseum, Eindhoven.
Leader: Barnaby Drabble
Barnaby Drabble is a writer, teacher and curator based in Girona, Catalonia & Zurich, Switzerland.
A graduate of Goldsmiths College, London, he worked on freelance curatorial projects (1998-2008) and as curator of contemporary art at the National Maritime Museum, London (2000-2004), where he initiated its program of temporary projects in relation to collections and exhibitions. He co-conceived and coordinated the research and archiving project Curating Degree Zero (2003-2008) with Dorothee Richter, which explored critical and experimental approaches to exhibition making at the beginning of the millennium. He formed one half of the artistic/curatorial duo Drabble+Sachs (2001-2006) with Hinrich Sachs. Their work focused on issues of public-space, inter-disciplinarity, urbanism, intellectual property & civil disobedience. He has co-edited two influential publications on curatorial issues, and as a critic, author and researcher, he regularly contributes to art magazines, journals and publications. Currently he is managing editor of the Journal for Artistic Research (since 2010) and a member of its editorial board.
He holds a doctor of philosophy (PhD) in visual culture (Edinburgh College of Art, 2010). His ongoing research involves a focus on the public’s role in the exhibition, sentimental approaches to museology (with Federica Martini) and artistic responses to questions of sustainability, ecology and climate change. In 2005 he co-founded the Postgraduate Program in Curating at the Zurich University of the Arts. Since 2009 he has been a faculty member of the MAPS program (Master of Arts in Public Spheres) at the École Cantonale d’Art du Valais, in Sierre, where he teaches curatorial theory and exhibition history.
Leader: Julian Klein
composer and theatre director, Julian Klein is director of the Institute for Artistic Research Berlin, and teaches directing at University of Arts Berlin. He studied composition, music theory, mathematics and physics and worked during his studies as directing assistant, stage composer and theatre director. He became founding member and artistic director of the interdisciplinary performance art group "a rose is". From 2003 he was member of the Young Academy at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina. The focus of his research includes neuroaesthetics, artistic experience, emotionology, sonification and human taxomania. Currently he is visiting researcher at Concordia University Montréal and research fellow at Free University Berlin. Julian Klein is member of the Editorial Board of the Journal for Artistic Research.
Alva Noë
Alva Noë is a writer and a philosopher living in Berkeley and New York. He works on the nature of mind and human experience. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004); Out of Our Heads (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); and Varieties of Presence (Harvard University Press, 2012). The central idea of these books is that consciousness is not something that happens inside us, or to us. It is something we do. Alva's new book on art and human nature, Strange Tools, was released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on September 22, 2015.
Alva received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1995 and is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. He previously was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has been philosopher-in-residence with The Forsythe Company and has also collaborated with dance artists Deborah Hay, Nicole Peisl, Jess Curtis, Claire Cunningham, Katye Coe, and Charlie Morrissey. Alva is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a former fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a weekly contributor to National Public Radio's science blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture.
Alva Noë will also lead the Workshop 4A: Art, Philisophy, Writing and Speech.
Redell Olsen
Redell Olsen is a poet and text-based artist.
Film Poems (Les Figues, 2014) collects the texts for her films and performances from 2007–2012. Her previous books include: Punk Faun: a bar rock pastel (Subpress, 2012), Secure Portable Space (Reality Street, 2004), Book of the Fur (rem press 2000), and, in collaboration with book artist Susan Johanknecht, Here Are My Instructions (Gefn, 2004). From 2006 until 2010 she was the editor of How2, the international online journal for Modernist and contemporary writing by women. In 2013-14 she was the Judith E. Wilson visiting fellow in poetry at the University of Cambridge. She is the Reader in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Redell Olsen will also lead the Workshop 1: Poetics of Critical Writing
Michael Schwab
Dr. Michael Schwab is a London-based artist and artistic researcher who investigates postconceptual uses of technology in a variety of media including photography, drawing, print-making, and installation art. He is research fellow at the Zurich University of the Arts, the Orpheus Institute, Ghent and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He is co-initiator and inaugural Editor-in-Chief of JAR, Journal for Artistic Research, senior researcher in the ERC funded research project ‘MusicExperiment21’ and joint project leader of ‘Transpositions: Artistic Data Exploration’ funded by the Austrian Science Fund.
Leader: Alva Noë
In order to read the biography of Alva Noë, please refer to the Keynote n°1, Art and Philosophy: Taking Aim at the Invention of Writing.
Leader: Giaco Schiesser
Giaco Schiesser is a philosopher, theorist and publisher. He is a professor for the theory of cultures and of media, head of the Department of Art & Media at Zurich University of the Arts, ZHdK, and founder of its Media Arts programme (1997).
With respect to artistic research: he is vice-president of the executive board of the Society for Artistic Research (SAR), head of the dossier Research at ZHdK and permanent visiting professor for scientific and for artistic Ph.D. at University of Arts and Design Linz, Austria. Within this framework he runs a PhD group for art research at ZHdK. As well he has served as an expert for different accreditation agencies and has been a reviewer of artistic research projects for a series of national institutions and journals for several years. Recent publication: „What is at stake – Qu’est ce que l’enjeu? Paradoxes – Problematics – Perspectives in Artistic Research Today“ in: Arts, Research, Innovation and Society, eds. Gerald Bast, Elias G. Carayannis [= ARIS, Vol. 1] New York: Springer 2015.
Giaco Schiesser’s work and publications focus on the theories of cultures, media, and subjects/singularities | epistemology | aesthetics, art research | democracy, public spheres, every day culture.
Moderator: Daniela Cascella
In order to read the biography of Daniela Cascella, please refer to the Workshop n°2, Writing and Sound Art.
Moderator: Kate Briggs
Kate Briggs is a writer and translator whose work engages with reading, writing, literary history, literary theory, translation and the forms of literary criticism. She is the author Exercise in Pathetic Criticism (2011), co-editor of The Nabokov Paper (2013), both published by information as material, and translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture notes: The Preparation of the Novel (2011), and How to Live Together (2013), both published by Columbia University Press. She runs a literary translation and creative writing workshop at the American University of Paris and is a core tutor (writing) on the MFA program at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. An excerpt from her book-in-progress on the practice of translation recently appeared in The White Review (n° 15).
Alexander Damianisch
Alexander Damianisch is director of the Focus Research Centre and head of the department Support Art and Research at the University for Applied Arts Vienna. He is re-elected member of the executive board of the Society for Artistic Research and member of the executive board of the AIL – the Angewandte Innovation Laboratory. He is delegate to the Austrian Science Fund and vice president of ARTist, a society supporting postgraduates.
He was inaugural manager for the Programme for Artistic Research at the Austrian Science Fund. He studied literature and history at the Universities of Vienna and Paris (Sorbonne), concluding his studies with a doctoral degree. Additionally, he holds a Master of Advanced Studies in Arts Management (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna). He worked in the field of arts management and non-profit PR, including curatorial work at the Memorial Site New Synagogue – Centrum Judaicum Berlin, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart. His interest is focused on the development of an open landscape of research. Coming from the humanities, literature and the broad field of the arts (Arts/Cultural Management) he has developed a special focus for the area of Artistic Research. He actively started to take into account the necessity for setting up adequate contexts, institutionally and in respect of funding options. In his understanding content creates frames; to achieve this caring, empowerment, support and documentation is needed. In his publications, he describes what he aims for with the tools of his work and institutional affiliations, the Support for Artistic Research (Künstlerische Forschung – Ein Handbuch, Zürich 2015, 249-253) and the development of Heterotopoetics (Arts, Research, Innovation and Society, Arts, Research, New York 2015, 223-227). Recently, he co-curated an exhibition project in Hong Kong Contemporary Code – Artistic Research (School of Creative Media/ City University of Hong Kong, 2015).
It is possible to register as a conference participant from 22 February 2016. Registration closes as soon as the maximum number of participants has been reached, or on 15 April 2016 at the latest.
Please note that there is only a limited number of 150 places available!
The fees for the conference are:
— Non-members of SAR: €140
— SAR members: €80
(including individual and institutional members, membership must have been paid at the time of registration!)
— Students: €35
(excluding PhD students with a paid position)
The fee includes:
— Participation in all plenary sessions
— Participation in one of the workshop strands*
— Lunch on 28 and 29 April
— A reception and buffet on 28 April
The fee does NOT include:
— Banking costs (depending on the payment method)
— Travel and accommodation costs
The Hague offers many types of accommodation, from hotels to hostels and from B&B’s to AirBnB. For instance, Hampshire Hotel Babylon and Hotel NH Den Haag are conveniently located at walking distance from the train station as well as from the conference venues and offer good value for money.
For a more comprehensive list of accommodation options in The Hague, please visit Booking.com,
bedandbreakfast.nl or airbnb.nl.
We recommend that you make your reservation as soon as possible, as The Hague is a popular convention and tourist location. Also, Wednesday April 27, 2016 is a Dutch national holiday (King’s Day).
Leader: Daniela Cascella
Daniela Cascella is a London-based Italian writer. Her research is focused on sound and literature across a range of publications and projects, driven by a longstanding interest in the relationship between listening, reading, writing, translating, recording, and in the contingent conversations, questions, frictions, kinships that these fields generate, host or complicate.
She is the author of two books in English, F.M.R.L. Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound (Zer0 Books 2015) and En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing. An Archival Fiction (Zero Books, 2012). Daniela initiated and curates the LYD Writing Research Residencies at Lydgalleriet in Bergen, for which she has invited visual artist Dominique Hurth and writer Natasha Soobramanien to develop a series of projects in 2016/17. In December 2015 she curated, with Rhea Dall and Martin Glaz Serup, WhereWereWe: on Intimacy, Writing, Body, a five-day international festival of readings and performances, for Project Art Writing Aarhus.
She is Assistant Professor in Writing in the MA Fine Art, Bergen Academy of Art and Design, and Associate Lecturer in Sound Arts at LCC/University of the Arts London. Her texts have appeared in art, music and literary publications such as The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gorse, 3:AM Magazine, The Wire, Frieze, Music&Literature, The Journal of Sonic Studies, Reductive Journal.
Daniela Cascella will also moderate together
with Kate Briggs the Forum: Writing and the Art School
Friday 29th of April 2016, Royal Conservatoire
I am a PhD student. Can I register as a student?
Yes, but only if you don’t have a paid position within a research institution.
When can I register for the conference as a SAR member?
You can register as an SAR member if you hold an individual SAR membership, or when your home-institution holds an institutional SAR membership. Please note that the membership payment has to have been completed! The SAR individual membership fee is €50 per year. To become a member, please register via this form: http://www.societyforartisticresearch.org/membership/membership-form/
Are there any scholarships available?
No.
Can I register for more than 1 workshop strand?
No. The sessions within each workshop strand are designed to form a sequence, and it is important that the discussions develop during the various meetings. In the registration form, you can indicate your first and second choice workshop strands.
Registrations
Opening
Keynote by Alva Noë
Coffe break
Five parallel workshops strands
Lunch at Foyer
Transfer to Royal Academy of Art
Keynote by Redell Olsen
Coffe break
Keynote by Salomé Voegelin
Keynote by Michael Schwab
Reception & Celebration JAR 10
Buffet
Possibility for drinks at Café Schlemmer
Photo and video galleries:
Conference Video Gallery
Conference Photo Gallery (part I, part II)
SAR Reception Photo Gallery
09.00 - 10.00
10.00 - 10.45
10.45 - 11.15
11.15 - 12.45
12.45 - 13.45
13.45 - 14.15
14.15 - 15.15
15.15 - 15.45
15.45 - 17.15
17.15 - 18.00
18.00
Contributors
— Hanna Hallgren
— Susanna Helke
— Katja Hilevaara
The relationship between artistic practice and writing in the context of research is a challenging and much debated topic, both in and outside the framework of art degree programmes. Often the relationship is felt to be one of friction, opposition or paradox. Writing gives an explicit verbal account of the implicit knowledge and understanding embodied in artistic practices and products while at the same time art may escape or go beyond what can be expressed by words and resist (academic) conventions of accountability. A 'written element’ is almost always asked for in the context of higher arts education, as well as by funding agencies, so the artist-researcher in that context often feels cornered, and has to meet opposing demands at the same time.
However, in the debate on art practice and writing the fact that writing itself is a practice is often bypassed. Giving a linguistic expression to one’s research is work that demands as much dedication and commitment as creative work does.
This year’s SAR conference will address writing in relation to artistic research from these perspectives: writing as practice and practice as writing. How do both writing and practice operate as ways to convey new knowledge, understanding and experiences by which we (re)organize our lives?
In workshops, demonstrations, performances, discussions, open sessions and on-the-spot encounters we will contribute to the ongoing development of the relationship between practice and writing in the context of artistic research.
Poetics of Critical Writing
How does the form and style of writing interconnect with meaning? What is the practice of critical writing? In the field of Artistic Research can writing be more than an expository tool for artworks? In these workshops we will investigate these questions with particular emphasis on form and content in critical writing, the plurality of language including the visual and aural and how we can create the architecture of written space.
Writing about the Sound of Unicorns
28 April 2016, 15.30 till 16.15 — Royal Academy of Art
In Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke famously discusses why there were no unicorns. His reason for denying the unicorn’s existence is not that such a beast, its fossilised imprint or its bones, could not be found, but that even if such a find was to match all the traits of the mystical animal we know as unicorn it could not be a unicorn, since the name “unicorn” is already given to that beast with the one horn we know from fables and fairy tales.
Kripke’s contemplations on the unicorn offers a useful starting point to discuss the inaudible as an impossible sound, which is not literally the sound of the unicorn, but the notion of the sound of the unicorn is what might engender its imagination: there are in the woods no sonic bones or fossils of this mythical beast, but there are other, present sounds, which we do not hear and yet they impact on how we understand the trees. The inaudible as a sound not heard, and as a concept for what is considered impossible, makes us aware that there are things, which for physiological, aesthetic, ideological or political reasons we cannot or do not want to hear. These are sounds that fall out of what we consider possible and in their impossibility they can reassess how we name the actual and challenge the rationale of its description. In this presentation I want to tail Kripke’s unicorn into the woods to listen for its sound and propose that writing is not about describing what I might find but is about creating portals, points of access to experience what we cannot yet hear.
Artists’ (Academic) Writings in Academic, Artistic
and Societal Force Fields
29 April 2016, 10.00 till 10.45 — Royal Conservatoire
This keynote will have to acknowledge the uncomfortable and often unloved nature of the written elements in (mostly visual) artists’ PhDs, the fact that they are – by and large – not read, yet appear necessary for employment.
I will, however, also be able to point to the possibilities that arise and the places that such writing – in all its forms – may occupy in the constellation of academic disciplines, art/creative practices and social/political life. This involves, of course, complicating the notion of writing or (academic) text in relation to art practice, as well as the nature of the nearest academic neighbours: art history/theory, word and image studies and curatorial discourses.
Examples will come from university projects by artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Ahmet Öğüt, as well as from conceptual writing practice (information as material), in order to explore the dynamics of de-skilling and re-skilling, as well as institutional critique and new or experimental institutionalism in relation to artists’ writings. Artists deliberately place themselves in (other) disciplinary or societal contexts (John Latham and Barbara Steveni’s APG and much work thereafter) and/or attempt to avoid the market and institutions (dark matter etc.) – with varying success.
In all this, the question arises: what kinds of social construction do – and can – artists’ (academic) texts pursue or perform today? Where might this writing’s strength and value lie?
Writing Art in Digital Space
The workshop strand focuses on the question of how digital space, that opened up most notably by the Internet and mobile technologies, supports and conditions the ‘writing’ of art as research.
Understanding writing as a technology on the one hand and a creative practice on the other, the workshop considers, by way of examples and accounts from participants, how artists across the disciplines relate to text as tool, mode and material in their research. More specifically the workshop will discuss the impact of digital technologies on textual/artistic formats for knowledge production and exchange. Recognizing that the digital space now predominantly frames our reading and writing experiences the group will address questions of originality, authorship, collaboration and versioning that the digital space raises.
For artistic research to converse credibly in the academic field, convention commonly demands ‘written elements’ to aid an understanding of material, performative and other non-alphabetic knowledge claims. In the process the danger arises of the artistic experience itself taking a back seat to its textual ‘supplement’. The workshop asks whether, and in what ways, the digital space can offer ways out of this bind, and provide a complex, multifarious, liminal site for ‘writing art’.
The strand is convened and facilitated by two members of the editorial board of the Journal for Artistic Research, conceived as a platform for the re-negotiation of the relationship between art and academia, which offers its contributors a dynamic online canvas where text can be woven together with image, audio and video.
Art and Philosophy:
Taking Aim at the Invention of Writing
28 April 2016, 10.00 till 10.45 — Royal Conservatoire
What is art? Why does it matter to us? What does it tell us about ourselves? Normally, we look to works of art in order to answer these fundamental questions. But what if the object themselves are not what matter? Philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë argues that our obsession with works of art has gotten in the way of understanding how art works on us. For Noë art isn’t a phenomenon in need of an explanation but a mode of research, a method of investigation what makes us humen – a strange tool. Art isn’t just something to look at or listen to – it is a challenge, a dare to try to make sense of what it is all about. Art aims not for satisfaction but for confrontation, intervention, and subversion. We cannot reduce art to some natural aesthetic sense or trigger; recent efforts to frame questions of art in terms of neurobiology and evolutionary theory alone are deemed to fail. By engaging with art, we are able to study ourselves in profoundly novel ways. In fact, art and philosophy have much in common. Reframing the conversation around artists and their craft, Noë provides a daring and stimulating intervention in contemporary thought.
A Column of Air: Flickers/Writing/Painting
28 April 2016, 14.15 till 15.00 — Royal Academy of Art
In 1967 Art and Language designated a column of air ‘art.’ The place of writing as and in place of painting seemed assured. When you begin to look away from seeing and reading the dematerialised art work, there emerges a new possibility, a poetics of flickers. In 2016 this column of written air flickers with art forms very different from the art critical language associated with conceptual art. What does this flickering reveal? Poetics and the visual arts flicker with glimpses of this not not-conceptual-art, and not not-writing-as art. My performance/lecture will explore how writing might engage with a flickering ekphrastic turn to landscape painting and its spin-offs. Timothy Morton questions whether ‘Nature’ was ever really there as more than a flickering ghost. I will nevertheless resist the double bind associated with simplistic definitions of ekphrasis, undoing the binary logic of writing as a half-glimpsed phantom of another 'proper' subject. The possibility of the filmic will be registered across the boundaries between the documentary, the poetic, and the visual-as-writing. Tracing this exploration through existing works and images, this lecture/performance hopes to enact a writing of paintings for paintings and an aesthetics of art that flickers in writing.
Exposition Writing: Radical Epistemology
28 April 2016, 16.15 till 17.00 — Royal Academy of Art
Expositionality is one of the key concepts of the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR). The term suggests that in the context of artistic research, practice may not only be seen as producing outcomes but also as the creation and communication of its own epistemologies. Thus, what ‘knowledge’ might mean in a specific project can become part of the aesthetico-epistemic labor of research.
Understanding artistic research through such ‘radical epistemology’ has two chief implications: (1) the relationship between artistic research and contemporary art can be redefined; in effect, it is through notions of ‘expositionality’ that artistic research can not only become contemporary, but also enter a productive tension with contemporaneity itself. (2) it challenges the major forms on which our contemporary episteme are build, both in art as well as in science; it may be that, in particular, an interest in the situatedness and locality of knowledge drives the development of artistic research.
My keynote presentation will argue for expositionality as form of writing. It will explain this with reference to previous issues of JAR as well as JAR’s submission policy and peer-review process. In a more speculative and programmatic part, I will try to sketch what is at stake when one is ‘writing up’ one’s research: the staging of a very particular relationship to knowledge, which has the power to challenge and destabilize exiting, dominant epistemological narratives.
Art, Philosophy, Writing and Speech
What happens when we do not see art and writing as opposites, but as practices that both generate and destabilize meaning, like the work of philosophy? This workshop strand investigates and discusses what emerges when art and writing are combined or mixed up. And when philosophy is seen as a form of practice-based research that has written and non-written characteristics. Written statements and works of art are both propositions: they propose us something, and here the discursiveness of languages meets the symbolic function of art. Those propositions have different registers, different voices; different ways of speaking, writing, reading, performing. The propositions of art, philosophy, writing and speech are generative, experimental, creative and communicative and in the context of research also aim to ‘write’ what is silent.
Do we loose anything when we move from practice to writing?
Contributors
— Andreia Alves de Oliveira
— Alex Arteaga
— Jude Browning
— Lona Gaikis
Art, Philosophy, Writing and Speech
Writing is often equated with the discursive. But what about the cursive, the spacial, the temporal, and the audible aspects of writing? Writing and speech, like art works, are performative. In the context of artistic research hybrid forms like graphic design, illustration, script writing, voice-overs, drawing vignettes and the artist’s book testify that the opposition between art practice and writing cannot be maintained. But in what dialect, tongue, idiom or language do we voice our understanding and experience? Is collaboration between different voices and registers key here? What does publishing mean in this context? And how does the tacit knowledge of the body and our subjective experiences translate to more explicit modes of discourse and dialogue?
Contributors
— Stephanie Black
— Julie Harboe & Group
— Steve Dutton
— Kate Liston
— Karen Lohrmann
— Tatjana Macic
Writing and the Art School
29 April 2016, 14.15 till 15.15 — Royal Conservatoire
In the form of a semi-scripted conversation that will later open up to a collective discussion, Kate Briggs and Daniela Cascella will reflect upon the relatively new role of the writing tutor in the art school. Where has she come from, how long has she been around for and how long will she stay? What exactly does she do? How are her questions, challenges and concerns different from those of her colleagues? What is she asking of her students? What are they asking of her? What about the relation between the critical and the creative? How to think about rigor? What about writing in a second language, or writing in a language as strangers? What about the related practices of reading, note-taking, listening, looking, editing, translating, art-making, living? How are tutor and student working together to arrive at an understanding of what writing is, or could be, in the context of an arts practice, in relation to one, and/or in relation to writing produced elsewhere? To literature, for instance, or to art criticism? To existing canons and expectations of language? Who will read this writing? Who could, who should?
Writing Funding Applications
29 April 2016, 09.00 till 10.00 — Royal Conservatoire
If it comes to resources, the written word is important. Funding institutions ask for proposals and proposals are reviewed, reports are exchanged. Of course there is a demand for funding institutions to “handle with care”, adapt their tools to the needs of the respective community, but also, researchers themselves need to sensitively respect guidelines and requirements.
The challenges of the written word differ according to the context for which it is needed. Sometimes ambiguity is of quality; sometimes it is a danger for the envisaged. Often in the context of Artistic Research openness or ambiguity is seen as a mandatory element for the development of projects, and sometimes this is also prolonged into the field of the writing of a funding application. Within this session we will address this and similar questions.
The broad spectrum of possible approaches in the field is intimidating; I will try to give an example of structuring ideas in writing funding applications that may help to focus and provide support in finding further solutions in additional contexts. Despite the jungle of possibilities and specific potential pitfalls for artistic researches (ambiguity vs. focus) in a continent of frameworks my position in this respect is that in the centre, there is a way to focus ideas, theory, methodology, tools and time. This session will show what such a way may look like, and will hopefully help the participants to navigate this rapidly growing continent of artistic research more easily and succesfully.
Full payment of the registration fee must be made at the time of registration. Payment can be made by credit card or iDEAL (for bank transfers within The Netherlands). A confirmation of your registration is automatically sent via email immediately upon receipt of your payment. Please SAVE YOUR RECEIPT and print it for your reference, information and reimbursement.
* Every participant can choose ONE workshop strand to follow during the conference. The sessions within each workshop strand are designed to form a sequence. It is important that the discussions develop during the various meetings. Therefore, participants cannot swap between strands during the conference. In the registration form, participants will see directly whether a place in the workshop strand of their choice is still available.
Cancellation Policy
If you cannot attend the conference, you can deregister via the link in your confirmation mail. Please do so, so that we can open up your place to someone else. We cannot offer any refunds of conference fees.
If the conference is sold out, you can apply to join the waiting list by sending an email to registration@societyforartisticresearch.org. Please clearly mention “Waiting list” in the subject line.
We will send a mail to people subscribed to the waiting list as soon as any places become available. Registration for these places will be on a first come first serve basis.
Hotel NH Den Haag
For the convenience of guests participating in this conference, a number of rooms have been reserved for the nights of 27-28 April and 28-29 April at Hotel NH Den Haag. These rooms and rates will be available until five weeks prior to arrival (i.e. March 24, 2016). After this date, the rooms and rates are subject to hotel availability.
The rooms that have been reserved at the Hotel NH
Den Haag are all double rooms à €123,00 per night
for two people or à €108,00 per night for single use
(including breakfast, excluding city tourist tax).
* If you wish to book an additional night, please contact Ms. Simone Bolleboom-Faber, Group & Conference organizer NH Hotel Group, at s.bolleboom@nh-hotels.com
or tel. +31 (0)70-3812339.
To book one of these reserved rooms, please use
the following link to the hotel booking form:
http://www.nh-hotels.com/events/en/event-detail/29833/koninklijk_conservatorium.html.
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Writing and Sound Art
This workshop strand will approach sound as medium and material in its relationship with words—as it is heard, unheard, written, collected, transmitted, imagined and looped. In each session we will explore possibilities and challenges for writing sound in and through (or against) a number of formats, methods and materials; reflect on writing as performance and writing as recording; consider the implications of writing sound as a continuum between art and music, presence and memory.
The workshop will also consider the triggers and connections that allow the changing archive of sunken aural memories to resurface in writing, through questions such as: What is the life of a sound beyond its actual sounding, of a word before or after it is uttered, beyond or after or even before and without our experience of it? What radiates from sounds and remains, or excites residues from the past? Do we need to footnote aural memories? Can we consider aural memory as a fictive apparatus?
Contributors
— Justin Bennett
— Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
— Helen Clarke
— Claudia Holanda
I am looking for accommodation in The Hague close to the venues. Can you give any recommendations?
The Royal Conservatoire made an agreement with NH Hotel Den Haag, which is very close to both of the conference venues. You can find more information about hotel recommendations on the conference website, under “Accomodation”.
If necessary, am I able to cancel my registration and be reimbursed?
If you cannot attend the conference, you can deregister via the link in your confirmation mail. Please do so, so that we can open up your place to someone else. We cannot offer any refunds of conference fees.
I can no longer register, is there a waiting list? When will those on the waiting list be informed if they are able to take part in the conference?
If the conference is sold out, you can apply to join the waiting list by sending an email to registration@societyforartisticresearch.org. Please clearly mention “Waiting list” in the subject line. We will send a mail to people subscribed to the waiting list as soon as any places become available. Registration for these places will be on a first come first serve basis.
Special Session: Writing Applications
Keynote by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes
Coffee break
Five parallel workshops strands
Lunch
Orchestra of the 18th century
Forum: Writing and the Art School
Coffee break
Five parallel workshops strands
Pleanary closing session
End of conference