The listed are all ongoing projects per 25.02.2016, funded by Norwegian Artistic Research Programme. For a full list of finished projects as well as dates of each funding, see www.artistic-research.no.

Procect titles A - O

Move to Project titles P - Z

Amphibious Triologies

Professor Amanda Steggell

Oslo National Academy of the Arts, The Academy of Dance

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

Cross-adaptive audio processing as musical intervention

Professor Øyvind Brandtsegg

NTNU, Department of Music

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

Blind Spot - Staring Down the Void

Professor Karen Kipphoff

Østfold University College, Norwegian Theatre Academy

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

Divisions - The Charismatic Self and Hybrid Divisions of Labour

Professor Florian Schneider

NTNU, Trondheim Academy of Fine Art

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

Electronic Textures

Professor David Rych

NTNU, Trondheim Academy of Fine Art

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

Music without Borders

Professor Bjørn Ole Rasch

University of Agder, Faculty of Fine Art, Institute of Music

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

Music with the Real

Professor Henrik Hellstenius

Norwegian Academy of Music

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

New Performances – New Tools: Knowledge & Skills for the Post-dramatic Theatre

Professor Tore Vagn Lid

Oslo National Academy of Art, The Academy of Theatre

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

Order in Chaos

Associate Professor Niels Pagh Andersen

Lillehammer University College, The Norwegian Film School

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

BLIND SPOT investigates a sensory phenomenon at the gravitational center of all material knowledge. The project researches the implications of the “blind spot” to artists in the visual and performing arts concerned with the implications of perception in human experience and society.

 

The term “blind spot” stems from medical research into the optics of the eye. “The natural blind spot is due to lack of receptors where the optic nerve and blood vessels leave the eye. Blindness is absence of seeing. It may be experienced as blackness, or very differently it may be nothing. The sudden blindness of switching off the light is blackness (and black is a colour); nothingness is lack of visual sensation, as for the world behind one’s head.” Prof. Richard Gregory and Prof. Patrick Cavanagh (2011), Scholarpedia, 6(10):9618. The term is also used in photography, describing the nodal point of a camera. Beyond its’ technical significance the blind spot is of course a metaphor for a multitude of juxtapositions, between the visible and invisible, the static and fluid, the known and unknown. Blind spot is that which is uncannily present, and at the center, but remains unseen and undescribed. The project works from the artistic potential of the blind spot and its fuzzy surroundings.

 

The research unfolds between 2016 – 2019 in working groups, residencies and seminars. Blind spot as a topic is activated through performing arts processes, leading to three main productions: one performative production for stage to be toured nationally and internationally; a second research production will result in an exhibition to be presented nationally and internationally; and thirdly, a publication, reflecting upon the artistic and academic process of the research project. The publication also constitutes a collection,a sourcebook of the most diverse artistic material on the subject. The artistic research and production will be accompanied by investigations into the topic through the academic eye of scholarship in contemporary and media archaeology, history, sociology, technology, literature and philosophy.

 

The research is led by Prof. Karen Kipphoff of Norwegian Theater Academy at the University College Østfold in Fredrikstad and partner institutions in Berlin and Bucharest, also including students and research fellows as well as commissioned artists and scholars.

“Where no art history exists, critical journals and other related platforms are crucial to molding its discourse and involve all the intellectual processes that such an undertaking implies.” This first sentence of the mission statement of “NKAJournal of Contemporary African Art”, which was co-founded in 1994 by Okwui Enwezor, the artistic director of Documenta 11, crystallises the main concern of many magazines launched at various times and different places within the African continent or the African diaspora.

The format of magazines is not so much understood as a business model but rather as a periodical and often temporary intervention against a hegemonic voice. These were often set up under precarious circumstances as a collaborative artistic form of organizing discourse, critique and self‐expression, but also as a format which renders possible the necessary task of creating a new language to talk about art, life and politics. Magazines can tell a story about given moments in history and they communicate an immediacy of what was at stake just because of the fact of their existence, and they can also mirror a crisis through their duration and the challenge of reinventing themselves.

Electronic Textures revisits of twentieth-century modernism by reading through vanguard Pan-African, transcultural and international magazines. These magazines focus on non-western arts -music, cinema, art, photography, literature, poetry, architecture ‐ but also engage in political processes such as freedom and independence movements, and self‐organisation, realizing the potentiality of subjectivity in colonial and postcolonial structures. The research and exploration of the magazines will equally take up the challenge of developing new narratives in art history. The format of these historical magazines will be questioned as well as its actual relevance and potential.

The research project is divided into four stages:

  • Locating the archives of the different journals; first selection of the journals of interest
  • Comparing the selected magazines and curating a selection; organization of a workshop in Trondheim with international curators, editors and artists in order to develop narrative and aesthetic strategies for the artist e-book
  • Production of three artist e-books and a website
  • Conference to present the research and the artist e-books

 

AMPHIBIOUS TRILOGIES is a research through an extended choreography. The main aim is to artistically explore and monitor littoral spaces (between land and sea) via an extending choreography of related literal, limbic and liminal conditions, environments and articulations. Three subjects are set in motion; choreography, design fiction and sociology of the sea. They will be probed interconnectedly within three thematics/works; ‘island’, ‘pond’ and ‘passage’. Physical and remotely-sensed sea journeys, island hopping and pond wallowing are examples of research activities. These activities will ’embody’ and lead to a series of creative works.

 

The sea is what connects and separates, what brings life and death, what represents trauma and hope. This is becoming painfully obvious today. Boats and immigrants to Europe. Climate change and the melting of the arctic oceans. Through this project we will test the limits of contemporary choreography and the power of contingency, in art based perceptions and projections of the future that address the significance of given and new knowledge of the sea.

 

The main research questions we will address are:

1) How might the thematic concepts ‘island’, ‘pond’ and ‘passage’ become manifest,

materialized, practiced and interconnected in littoral landscapes/zones?

2) What kinds of affiliations and tensions can be found within choreography, design fiction and sociology?

3) How might methodological approaches be developed between these affiliations and

tensions? How may these contribute to an understanding and phasing of an extended

choreography?

4) How might an extending choreography make accessible the shifts between land and sea to audiences?

 

Over a three year period a programme of fieldwork, seminars, presentations, workshops and ad hoc events will open up a reflexive space, culminating in the launch of three booklets linked during a performative event on the Oslo fjord presenting three works Island – Pond – Passage.

 

The project is led by Amanda Steggell, Professor of Choreography, Oslo National Academy of the Arts in collaboration with Andrew Morrison, Director of the Centre for for Design Research, Oslo School of Architecture and Design and Han-Jørgen Wallin Weihe, Professor of Social Work, Lillehammer University College.

The Artistic Research Project Music with the Real departs from a current critical debate on music, aesthetics and digitalization*, and aims to develop compositional and performance-related practices through cross-media works integrating audio-visual samples. A group of five composers and one performer will create a body of works interrelated by a focus on the same artistic discourse: a common practice fundamentally critical to recycling conventional sound practices from the New Music canon, attempting new and unexpected dialogues with our familiar surroundings by employing elements from concrete and digital surroundings.

 

We have gathered a research group to present lectures, participate in symposiums and to provide artistic contributions to the project. This group includes:

• Henrik Hellstenius (professor of composition at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo)

• Clemens Gadenstätter (composer, professor of music theory, analysis and composition at the University of Graz and guest professor in composition at Musikhochschule Dresden)

• Carola Bauckholt (composer, Cologne)

• Johannes Kreidler (from Berlin, composer, writer and lecturer at Musikhochschule Hannover)

• Dr. Matthew Shlomowitz (from London, composer, Lecturer of Composition and Music Technology at Southampton University)

• Håkon Stene (performer and researcher, Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo)

 

Furthermore, a group of associated members will be connected to the project through seminars, lectures and performances.

 

The project will result in five new, larger works by the composers involved, created in cooperation with performer Håkon Stene. These will range from solo works incorporating larger electronic environments, to chamber groups and ensemble/soloist settings. A seminar series with theoretical text production will accompany the artistic portfolio.

 

Historical and current contexts

The inclusion of concrete material from outside the arts into the arts is a roughly 100-year old practice, occurring first in the visual field. In concert music, one can trace the incorporation of outside-musical sound objects, “composed samples” and ”referential” material – allusions and metaphors – to scattered examples from renaissance polyphony’s intertwining of popular tunes, Biber’s Battaglias, dramatic effects in operas (thunder, gunshots etc.), Beethoven’s Wellington’s Sieg and Symphony nr. 6, the Romantic Program Music movement (Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique, Listz’s Die Hunnenschlacht etc.), in Ravel and Debussy’s audio depictions, in Mahler’s composed samples of Viennese waltz music and other direct quotations in Symphony nr.9, in Webern’s semiological “aura”, through the complex superimposing musics of Charles Ives’s Country Band March, Berio’s Sinfonia and B.A. Zimmermann’s collages to name but a few. All of these are examples of instrumentally composed samples alluding either to worldly phenomena or to other instruments, like in the case of Biber, a string instrument prepared with paper between strings and struck col legno to imitate the military drum on the battlefield. It was first with the emergence of recorded sound and electronic apparatus like the radio that sound from the outside world could be reproduced in a realistic fashion inside concert halls. The significant turn arose when recording techniques became accessible for composers like Pierre Schaffer and John Cage in the 1940s. Throughout musical modernisms, sound, in all its shapes, was liberated from its traditional, instrumental roots, conceptualized and explored as musical material in a variety of ways.

The integration of samples in art music has expanded greatly in the last years. Besides employing samples as a fundamental part of their music, composers such as Bernhard Lang, Carola Bauckholt, Matthew Shlomowitz, Johannes Kreidler, Simon Steen-Andersen, Joanna Bailey, Stefan Prins and others represent a tendency among composers to eschew the material defined and handed down by New Music’s canon, and to reflect current popular culture, cheap mass-produced consumer technology and typically “low status” materials. Whereas the unfiltered montages comprising found materials offered by the Schaefferian Musique Concréte wished to abstract the connoting potential of its sound objects, these composers wish the exact opposite: A material that is derived from the real world, that is conceptualized as art and communicated back into the world in the attempt to have its audience re-reflect perceptions of the familiar.

 

Impulse and Intention

Our motivation for the project is twofold: There is a growing consensus among musicologists, composers and musicians in the field of New Music that the “Klangrecherche” of the past six decades has revealed a growing fatigue in the last ten to twenty years, partly due to a singular focus on musical material operating within a pitch, rhythm and timbre paradigm only. In comparison to other art genres, art music has been clinging to means and methods of creation and communication lacking the openness and manifold of, say, visual arts or modern theatre. It has been claimed that this has led to an aesthetic isolation of art music. In an art form so focused on material, the fatigue has been obvious for many, especially since the last major material inventions of instrumental music now dates back to spectral music of the 1980s and Helmut Lachenman’s musique concréte instrumentale of the 1970s, both of which have been stylistically widely copied.

Secondly, we desire to respond to a recent and ongoing critical discourse about the aesthetic and artistic consequences of the Digital Revolution in music and multimedia art based on the aforementioned assumption of fatigue and need for re-orientation in New Music. We wish to explore these observations through artistic research, furthermore influence that discourse through artistic work exploring extended, transmedial practices based in music. There is at present a renewed interest in the art music field to deal with reality – that is, not least in the many new forms it presents and integrates itself in modern lives through new technology. The merging of virtual and physical identities, often referred to as “cross-realities”, stimulates many, especially younger artists – many of whom label themselves digital natives – to integrate into music elements derived from such contexts.

Our project group aims to gather and present such practices that are shifting focus away from pure abstract sound design, towards engaging dialogue with familiar surroundings including referential – even prosaic – elements from popular and everyday culture.

 

*H.Lehmann, J.Kreidler, Mahnkopf: Music, Aesthethics, Digitalization – a Controversy: Wolke Verlag 2010; H. Lehmann – The Digital Revolution in Music – a music philosophy: Schott 2013; J.Kreidler – Music with Music: Wolke Verlag 2012; Various publications in MusikTexte, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Musik & Ästhetik, Positionen).

We human beings have since the dawn of time tried to find order in chaos. We are doing it by telling stories witch makes logic and teach us the difference between right and wrong, evil and good. In the world of cinema we have created a way of telling stories, with a set of rules for a narrative structure, which we are basing our films upon.

 

The question for me is, how does those rules affect the stories we are telling and how does the stories effects us human beings in the way we are looking at ourselves? That is the main theme in my artistic reserach project Order in Chaos.

 

The film editor is a storyteller in living images and s/he has a knowledge about dramaturgical rules and how these cinematic tools influence the audience experience. My research will analyse my former works as an editor in order to investigate the limitations of the classic dramaturgy. Through the editing of the film “The Look of Silence” I will investigate the possibilities of expanding that dramaturgy and character-building to open up new layers of understanding and experience for the audience.

 

For more than 30 years I have as a film editor worked with the classic narrative method which is build on identification with a sympathetic main character.

 

This method was tested 3 years ago while I was editing Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing”, where the main character was a mass murderer whose ambition was to justify his past actions by re-enacting the murders into film scenes. “The Act of Killing” follows the process of the re-enactments and the discussions which takes place during the filming. “The Act of Killing” is a documentary film about self-presentation and storytelling.

 

While editing the film we could not use the classic narrative method and had to invent a new language and set of narrative rules. Joshua Oppenheimer’s new film “The Look of Silence” deals with the same historical event, but this time seen from the victims’ point of view. The editing of “The Look of Silence” is the first part of my artistic development project is now finished. The second part is to analyse and draw conclusions in an E-book.

The project explores cross-adaptive processing as a drastic intervention in the modes of communicating between performing musicians. Digital audio analysis and processing techniques are used to enable features of one sound to inform the professing of another. This allows the actions of one performer to directly inflict changes on the other performer’s sound, and doing so only be means of the acoustic signal produces by normal musical expression on the instrument. The goal of the project is development of a new performance practice, documented in audio and video by a series of studio recordings and concerts.

 

There ia a strong focus on performance and new modes of expression within the academic environment of Music Tehnology at NTNU. There is active research and exploration of new musical forms enabled by custom made instruments. The development of instruments tailored to explore new modes of preformance fertilize the musical exploration, and the insights gained from practical use informs development of new instruments. A dedicated ensemple (T-EMP, Trondheim Electroacoustic Music Performance) has been established to deepen the knowledge. The ensemble was key to the research project “Communication and interplay in an electronically based ensemble” under the Project Programme. The project resulted in several artistic productions and has crystallized some clear areas of focus for furter exploration and research. It also brought technological innovation within instrument development, where convolution and granular techniques have been put to new usage.

 

We now seek a more spesific intervention in the interplay between two acoustic instrumental performers by means of cross-adaptive processing. In our context, cross-adaptive processing means that the sounds made by one performer directly influence the sonic character of the other and vice versa. For example to let the balance between noise and tone in a saxaphone sound directly affect the size and amount of artificial reverberation for a singer. In our previous research, live processing was approached as an instrumental and performative technique, involving the electronic/computer performer directly in the realtime dialogue with an acoustic instrumentalist. In the current project, the electronic/computer artist’s role will be more focused in designing a situation and an environment for the two acoustic instrumental performers, where the rules and modes of communication between the two have been radically transformed.

The starting point for the project is a set of recordings by Norwegian folk-musicians of Norwegian folk-songs in the “stev og slåtte” (stave and tune) tradition of Setesdal in Agder. These studio-produced video and audio recordings will be passed on to performers from other parts of the world for them to respond to. Their musical responses will form the basis for a digitally interactive process using the latest music technology: portable studio / laptop, Dropbox and Skype. Participants will also meet in person to continue their work in joint seminars and workshops at the various partner institutions.

 

The project is based on the following two-part problem as presented:

 

How do performers from other cultures respond to traditional Norwegian music from Setesdal, and how do Norwegian artists / performers respond to these responses?

In further developing the musical material, what are the implications of the different instruments of world music? What tonal and rhythmical challenges and opportunities do they offer when developing a new sound?

The final results of the project will be made publicly available on CD and DVD, and in the form of video installations that presents a selection of the musical responses submitted during the working process. The video installations will also form an opportunity for live responses from various musicians. The artist Jeremy Welsh will take charge of developing these video installations. Other presentational formats will include public concerts, seminars and studio sessions.

 

One major resource for this project is the international network built up by Annbjørg Lien and Professor Bjørn Ole Rasch, which was documented recently in Khoom Loy (2012), an album nominated for a Norwegian Grammy Spellemann prize in 2012.

 

For several years the Faculty of Fine Arts has been collaborating with the Peace Corps on an exchange programme for students and teachers, which has been the basis for a network of musicians from countries including Nepal, Palestine, Cambodia and Thailand. Several of these contributed to Khoom Loy, and have also met and toured with other celebrated Norwegian folk musicians.

 

Research fellow and assistant professor Ingolv Haaland also has several years’ experience of working with musical projects in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

 

The Faculty of Fine Arts will set up a special research fellowship in conjunction with the project, with specialisation in rhythmic music performance. This PhD position will help to strengthen the project’s artistic performance dimension while also enhancing academic reflection on the project’s themes.

 

The main contributing partners in the project are the University of Gothenburg (UiG) and Telemark University College (HiT).

 

As a result of its long-standing BA programme in world music, the Academy of Music and Drama (UiG) has well-established networks in the Middle East, thanks in part to its collaboration on a ten-year project in Palestine run by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA). In addition to the forthcoming MA programme in world music at the Institute of Popular Music, University of Agder (UiA), we see many further areas of potential academic cooperation. The MA programme is a collaboration with the Institute of Folk Culture (HiT).

 

Over the past three years, the UiA has also had collaborations in China in conjunction with Concerts Norway (Rikskonsertene), with whom we are currently working on arrangements for closer professional contacts.

That which in the in the recent years has been denoted the “post-dramatic turn (in German: “die postdramatische Wende”) in the performative arts, undermine a number of truths that have been automatized and trained through education and practice for decennials. Along parameter by parameter arises a crisis of knowledge in the theatre, as the new (post dramatic) artistic goals and ambitions collide into established (dramatic) presuppositions and practices. The result is currently a fundamental – and often mutual – confusion that concerns the core of the understanding of the subject and its skills. If the “the post dramatic turn” changes the standards of what is considered high quality and relevant theatre, how will this impact on the concept of the subject and its professionalism? Put differently: When the very goal of the trade – of what should be produced – is displaced, what are the consequences for the craft and the craft person’s self-understanding?

 

By inviting collaboration with central educational institutions, individual artists, institutional theatres and free scenic ensembles, I wish on behalf of the Academy of Theatre/Oslo National Academy of the Arts to seek an answer to these questions through an artistic field work over a period of three years. The project has consistently an artistic and productive goal, in which scenic seminars, practical workshops and free standing shows/performances, demonstrations and larger productions are bound together, conveying in a common professional program.

 

Among the main partners in the project are: Transiteatret-Bergen (Norway), Institut für angewandte Theaterwissenschaft, Giessen (Germany), Transiteatret-Bergen, SISU-percussion ensamble, Det Norske Teatret, Dramatikkens Hus (Norway) and Neofelis Verlag (Berlin).

 

Website: http://etudes.khio.no

The project sets out to investigate self-images and self-conceptions of artists in a post-industrial society that is characterized by hybrid divisions of labour. The project consists of researching facts on the ground of creative industries, a series of conferences and workshops across Norway, culminating in the commission of five artworks by internationally renowned artists.

In the debate about creative industries, the artist appears as a role-model for a self-managed entrepreneurship that is supposed to undo the industrial division of labour that prevailed throughout modernity, and most importantly the division between manual and intellectual labour.

Rather than uncritically accepting these claims about creativity and knowledge production and thus accepting the position of the artist in a seemingly seamless way into a homogenous conceptual arrangement of creative industries, artistic practices follow different paths, and this project aims to examine this phenomenon.

This artistic research project sets out to explore, analyse and work with the shifts, changes and contradictions of the artist’s role in today’s society which may result from the assumption that art is no longer situated outside of production. Ultimately, it will test a daring hypothesis: The mythology of networked automatisation has estranged creativity from the process of creation. In order to generate value, the image becomes valuable in an alienated context — one other than its own.

Against that backdrop, a rather “charismatic” notion of the self of the artist might be condemned to a terrible task: It has to revaluate, remix and reconnect the image with a new concept of a self, which does not necessarily have to be the original creator. Rather than being an unearned gift, the charismatic self may appear as the just or unjust forfeits of new forms of ownership that are currently emerging out of the networked character of production.

 

Radical Interpretation of Iconic Musical Works

Associate Professor Kjell Tore Innervik

Norwegian Academy of Music

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

Segunda Vez

Professor Dora García

Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Academy of Fine Art

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

SYNSMASKINEN: 7 fields of contemporary crisis

Professor Frans Jacobi

Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Dept of Fine Art

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

The reflective musician

Professor Håkon Austbø

Norwegian Academy of Music

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

Topographies of the Obsolete: Phase 2

Professor Anne Helen Mydland

Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Dept of Fine Artc

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

TRUE OR FALSE

Associate Professor Einar Egeland

Lillehammer University College, The Norwegian Film School

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

Wheels within wheels

Associate Professor Jostein Gundersen

University of Bergen, The Grieg Academy

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

Procect titles P - Z

Move to Project titles A - O

Pictogram-me

Professor Ashley Booth

Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Dept of Design

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

Porøs

Professor Neil Forrest

Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Art and Craft

Read project description here or in the scroll field on the right.

“Segunda Vez” is a film and analysis project using the figure of author, critic, artist and psychoanalyst Oscar Masotta (Buenos Aires 1930 – Barcelona 1979) as a trigger to speak about art, politics and psychoanalysis. Art refers to performance art, repetition (second time around) and event (to happen again). Politics refers to the complex position of the artist within an urgent political situation, calling for action. Psychoanalysis refers to a method, a form of transmission of knowledge that allows to give complex but efficient answers to complex problems involving language, body, and memory.

 

Oscar Masotta is a figure that functioned as a hub (as a theorist and a practitioner) for the most important developments of South American conceptualism, introduced Lacanian psychoanalysis in the Spanish-speaking world, and went into exile on the eve of the state terrorism in Argentina (1976-1981).

 

The film is episodic and consists of five chapters, developed and filmed in 2015-16. The first three chapters are the documentary filming of reconstructions (real reconstructions, real performances: they happen again) of the three happenings Oscar Masotta did in 1966: “El Helicóptero” (The helicopter), “Para inducir el espíritu de la imagen” (To induce the spirit of the image) and “El mensaje fantasma” (The phantom message). The last two chapters are filmed fiction shorts, one adapting Julio Cortázar’s short story “Segunda vez” – both a science fiction story and an accurate description of state murder – and “La Eterna”, a conspiration of readers to change reality, with the background of an ancient and seemingly infinite library.

 

When we speak of a film and analysis project we mean to say that the film is the motor that moves the analysis. The film “practice” organizes the discursive elements of the project. The necessity to understand and re-construct the context for these five chapters to happen again (second time around) and be filmed, leads the pace for the discursive elements of the project. These discursive elements are:

 

1. Archival research (mainly done at the Torcuato Di Tella archive in Buenos Aires and Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano in Barcelona)

 

2. Interviews (with people who participated in the first occurrence of the events and with researchers of those events, many of them with several publications on the work of Oscar Masotta)

 

3. And publication (both LIVE, in the form of a symposium, and printed virtually and analogically, with the creation of a web, and the ambition to periodically publish cahiers to document the research as it happens, as well as a final publication of the results and conclusions)

The project “wheels within wheels” will research the potential for new forms of expression through interactions between performers of early music and contemporary composers. Musicians within the field of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) have frequently commissioned new works for their historically inspired instruments. Composers have frequently studied music of the past for new ideas to composition methods. We seek new ways of interaction between these seemingly far ends of the musical spectrum, by introducing a new kind of interaction between repertoire, performers, and composers.

 

The project has three main sources of interaction: 1. Polyphonic repertoire of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, 2. performers ́ interpretation of that repertoire, including strategies for improvising diminutions (ornaments) and structures, 3. composers ́ abstractions and manipulations of traits of both the repertoire and the performers ́ interpretations of and improvisations with it.

 

The performers ́ playing techniques, interpretations of and improvisations in and around the repertoire will work as sources of inspiration for the composers. Based on these expressions, and their own readings of the repertoire, they will develop new strategies for composition, for improvisation and electro-acoustical interactions. This in turn will offer the performers inspiration for new ways of improvising and relating to the different parameters of the performance, which in turn will feed the composers with new inspiration, etc. This constant interaction between performers, composers and a shared material shall lead to

 

New musical works

New strategies for improvising structures and diminutions, with historical styles as starting point but not necessarily ending point

New musical expression

The project seeks to contribute to critical discourse around methods and goals of HIP, around the capacity of early music to stimulate new ways of expression and spatial and temporal organisation, and around the constructed dichotomy between “historical music” and “new music”.

 

The project includes the Grieg Academy´s research groups for HIP and for composition, and collaborates with leading composers and performers at the Grieg Academy and other research institutions and freelance musicians nationally and internationally.

The research presented in this paper will largely be based on footage from a feature film which is to be shot and cut in 2015, and premiéred in 2016. The film will be edited by project manager Einar Egeland, and directed by Erik Poppe. The 5-6 months editing of the film will take place prior to the actual project, and will establish the basis for further research. The finished film, and the complete audiovisual raw-material, will be available for research purposes without limitations, including experiments carried out in lab-controlled environment.

 

The research project consists basically of two major parts, which will be tightly connected:

 

The editing of the actual feature film

Testing of the result under controlled conditions.

The film is titled “The King’s choice”, and takes place during the German invasion of Norway in April 1940. Norways king Haakon, and his son prince Olav, are in the middle of the drama unfolding. Together with the Government and Storting, they are forced to make choices which can have immense consequences both personally and for the country. The film tells the story of a king in a small country on the outskirts of Europe, who says no to settle an agreement put forward by the German representative. The answer is not obvious, there are other options. The film will describe these chaotic days, and at the center of the turmoil, a lonely king with huge decisions to make.

 

Film editor Einar Egeland and director Erik Poppe have previously worked together on two feature films, ‘”Hawaii Oslo” (2004), and “Troubled Water/De Usynlige” (2008). The film attached to this research project will offer another chance of going even further in our collaborative aim to push ourselves professionally when a film is to be shaped into a whole. An editors job is (among others), to create emotional truthfulness in the characters, come to life by their actions and reactions. This is valid in any film, regardless of story and style. In previous films we have tried to pinpoint the line where emotions are felt true to the audience, but not to cross this line. Such a balance is demanding, and wrong judgements along the way may destroy the expression of the film, and the perception of it. Our collaboration to find the thin line which divides what is perceived as a true expression from a false one, will continue in this film, and will also create a basis for the research project. During the editing, notes and reflections on the work being done will be made as a reference. The films progress will be available in various stages and in different versions for later use.

 

We know that fictional representations of emotions trigger human bodily responses. The film editing room can equal a laboratory where artistic expressions of human emotions are put under the magnifying glass. When the audiovisual is assembled in a specific order, the editor has an aim to predict the cognitive, emotional and bodily responses from an audience. The study will look for more substantial confirmation to what extent the decisions being made in the editing process, hit the target – or not.

 

The finished feature film will be a reference on its own. 3 major experiments will be performed to gather more knowledge about the correlation between artistic choices being made – and how it is actually perceived. While looking for the invisible line separating what we accept as true and what we reject as false, we will try to define it more precisely. We will test the limits of comprehension, and the ability to constitute meaning out of the fragmented and deconstructed, and search for what may distinguish a true emotion from a false, both in neurophysiological terms, and regarding artistic audiovisual expressions. The experiments will be carried out with material edited into sequences of various complexity and length, and subsequently exposed to subjects by means of a cognitive neuroscientific approach.

In Pictogram-me we explore how the visual language can play an important role in creating dialogue, and how we can develop visual tools to collect personal life stories.

 

In what ways can an investigation of experiences with, and attitudes to, pictograms contribute to increased reflection on life’s complexity? This is the key question in Pictogram-me. The desired outcome of the project is to highlight the experiences of those who have a difficult daily life, a challenged existence. The project aims to promote empathy for those who are “unlucky” or “Challenged” to us the general public.

 

The pictogram was originally designed as non-verbal language, and visual representation of facts and statistics made the information universally accessible – even to illiterate societies or reading impaired persons. A fundamental question in this research is whether pictograms can offer new knowledge about peoples lives and their conditions.

 

The Challenged

We can all feel underprivileged and have a difficult day. It can apply for shorter or longer periods and it may affect us as an individual or as part of a group facing challenges in life and society. In Pictogram-me we work with some of us who have a difficult daily life. By asking the “Challenged” to share with us (visualize) and tell us about their lives, we collect personal stories and experiences and transform them into a series of pictograms.

 

Students in courses and workshops collect data for visualization. The data comes from many groups, and representatives, for the “Challenged” and, of course, their support organizations, if they have one.

 

We use the “Challenged” as a generic term for individuals or groups of individuals who, for shorter or longer periods of time, have faced debilitating challenges. There can be many different types of challenges – related to being unemployed, in poverty, a victim of crime, incarcerated, a prostitute, an immigrant, a drug addict, elderly, a sexual deviant, or having lifestyle diseases and complaints, physical or sensory disabilities or mentally challenged.

 

Methods

The project is based upon methods derived from participatory action research and inclusive design processes. It includes courses and workshops involving students at various educational institutions in design. We are developing and testing tools for visual dialogues, and for collecting material that will form the basis for the development of ideas and sketches of pictograms.

 

The professional questions

• How can pictograms express abstractions, variations in intensity, and nuances to definitions or philosophical concepts?

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How may simple visual symbols promote empathy?

• How can the picto-grammatical language be enhanced with words and terms?

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Which methods can be applied or developed to approach persons in distress and access their narratives?

• How can interactivity produce new visual combinations with unexpected messages and unique experiences?

 

The collection of data from disadvantaged groups requires high ethical end emphatic standards during the research process and also with regards to the use of pictograms.

Porøs is an installation of cisterns and circulatory elements as an irregular topography of ceramic vessels and porous-looking media – some hold water, others distribute water, others filter and block, irrigate, and still others evaporate water. The installation is both an archeological and climatic event. The ceramic masses will range from the eccentric geometries of the large cisterns to the fragile and cloud-like crusts of the engineered porous clay – each variety of ceramic designed to mediate water in specific ways. Water will be a narrative commodity, moving mostly by passive design and from one state to another – liquid to gas. Evaporation becomes part of the ceramic entity that investigates the potential to preheat and precool the ambient air.

 

The project structures our built spaces as living, evolving as organism – a landscape that lives and breathes with technological assistance. Dynamic interaction between temporal and permanent materials enable the biomimetic processes. Porøs sets out a sustainable environmental practice in the arts and craft media within the spaces of contemporary architecture.

 

The metaphor of water and landscape are unmistakably powerful, especially relevant in Norway. Our intention is for Porøs to become part of an elaborated network of cooperation, education and technological achievement in the field of architectural ceramics. The ‘research/design/build’ nature of this project demonstrates both professional interaction and an artistic prototype. In the future, the project would spin off as a stream of pedagogical practice and study.

 

In my own work as ceramics artist, I have developed an idea of synthetic landscape fragments that colonize built spaces. My prototypes are layered assemblies that float and roam in space as a detached and nomadic entity in the space of architecture, hence a kind of nomadic colony. The idea is to form a sculptural substrate that suggests a growth apparatus for post-modern space.

 

From a technological perspective, we emphasize the biomemtic thrust and embrace ecological systems in nature as a model for hybrid art/architecture structures. We consider the development of an ecological model for built spaces as the enlightenment of this generation. Researching a system that builds the idea of a synthetic climate can be based on natural systems, media and phenomena and Porøs will contribute a decidedly artistic viewpoint to sustainable schemes. The project requires us to engineer ceramic to produce unique environment phenomena that other media cannot. Porosity as a motive for design is not new. Basic earthenware (a.k.a. terra cotta) cookware persists to this day – the open pore ceramic structure allows for rapid heat gain and loss without cracking the pottery. Ceramic porosity is also exploited as a evaporative cooling system to keep water cool. Simple earthenware clays’ open pore structure that allows water to move from the inner reservoir to the outer skin and evaporate, achieving a cooling effect.

 

If ceramics is to return as a creative presence in built spaces, it will exist as an abstract idiom that defines new purposes. This project suggests a conceptual footing for a free discourse between ceramics and the radically different ‘built spaces’ of this era. The project begins with a belief that materiality, image and function can transform our environmental. Material eccentricity, morphologies and instability will be virtues. If crafted ornament began as symbolic prosthetic, it must now evolve into a prosthetic for living.

 

Porøs will require a collaborative practice for which there is growing curiosity but little precedent: the craft media specialist in an artistic, design and engineering relationship with contemporary architects. Our intention is for Porøs to become part of an elaborated network of cooperation, education and technological achievement in our respective fields of ceramics and architecture.

Today’s performer is fundamentally different from his counterpart a century ago. Particularly after the recording business emerged, the demands for technical perfection have, to an increasing degree, been a constraint upon the performer’s free exercising of his or her creative impulse. In our opinion, this leads to an expectation of ‘error-free’ conformity that suits the role of classical music in today’s society, where it is seen more and more as elitist, set in its ways and out of touch.

 

The situation doesn’t need to be like this, however. The classical heritage is as challenging and exciting as ever. Many musicians look under the well-known surface, searching for the deeper forces of the works they perform. The ‘Reflective Musician’ project is about the different types of knowledge that are necessary to access these forces. These may be conscious or intuitive, but we are convinced that some kind of deep insight into the driving forces behind the music is necessary to ensure that the interpretation casts off conformity and emerges as personal and genuine.

 

One may say that not everyone needs this knowledge. Some artists seem to possess the talent to get to the essence anyway. This may be right, but the question is then whether they are genuinely making do without knowledge or simply using the kind of intuitive knowledge talked about above. They may be ‘knowing without knowing that they know’ – a little like when Stravinsky said about Boulez’ analysis of Le Sacre: “Very interesting! I never thought of it!”

When we speak about music written in our own time, things are a bit different. Apart from the fact that it still takes courage to defy the stereotypes of mainstream repertoire and engage in contemporary works (although, fortunately, this is becoming more common among younger performers), the contact between the performer and the living composer is necessarily different from that with a long-deceased one. Although here the objective would also be to penetrate to the core of the work, the danger of conformity is not such an issue, since the material itself is new and unknown. The role of the performer here may also be quite different from the classical, re-creative one.

 

Whilst allowing for these differences, in both cases the process of interpretation will ideally be a sort of co-creation, as it were, with the composer, in which the performer ‘composes’ the work anew from inside the act of performance, striving to create something that is simultaneously unique and as faithful as possible to the composer’s original conception.

 

The next question to answer, is:

What kinds of performing knowledge will lead to a specific, unique interpretation?

We will look for the answer mainly by investigating analytical methods that reveal the constituting forces of the creative process, not just looking at the surface. One approach is Schenkerian analysis, enhanced with Schönberg and Caplin’s formal function approach. We will also make use of the auditive-sonological approach (emergent forms) that takes as its point of departure the sounding work rather than the written one. The two different approaches will hopefully lead to fruitful confrontations and discussions. Also, the analytical thinking of Messiaen, that had such an impact on a whole generation of composers, will provide a range of useful tools when dealing with certain styles.

 

An important aspect of the work will be to spot the elements in the composer’s personality, psyche, etc. that the performer can identify with. This may be particularly difficult when it comes to composers who lived centuries ago. The performer’s task is to expand the area of common ground, without pretending to achieve a total merging of sensibility with that of the composer, for which he or she would have to ‘become’ the composer.

It is important that, whatever the period in which the work was written, one can ‘peel off’ the layers of standardisation of approach transmitted by so-called tradition. By doing this, the work may emerge as new in our time.

 

Traditional musicology has used analysis as a tool for greater understanding of the inner structure of musical works but has generally shied away from linking this explicitly to how performers might make choices as part of developing their interpretations of these works. In such a view, interpretation begins where science stops. Even more recent, performance-focused musicology tends to regard the performer as a subject for scientific observation, not as a co-investigator. Performing is, in our view, not some kind of undefinable, occult exercise, nor is it simply a set of behavioural patterns to be externally codified. Rather, it is an inherently creative activity based on its own systems of knowledge which, whether conscious or intuitive, ought to be capable of being articulated in words as well as in practical music making. If we manage to make the young musicians aware of this, we may be able to break down some of the barriers that currently inhibit them from finding their “own” voices, and hence make musical life so predictable.

 

The research group consists of:

 

Project leader Håkon Austbø, pianist, professor at UiS and NMH. Takes a coveted position in musical life through his work on composers like Messiaen and Skryabin. Was the winner of the international Messiaen competition in 1971.

Darla Crispin, pianist and researcher, now associate professor at NMH, previously research fellow at Orpheus Research Centre in Music [ORCiM}, Gent, and Head of Graduate School at Royal College of Music, London. Specialises in the music of the Second Viennese School (Schönberg, Berg, Webern).

Lasse Thoresen, composer, professor at NMH. His works, often inspired by folk music and ethnic traditions, are performed internationally and won several prizes, like Nordic Music prize (2010).

Njål Sparbo, Singer. Sparbo is one of the most active and versatile singers in Norway, with a repertoire that spans romances, opera, church music, early music and contemporary music.

Nils Henrik Asheim, Composer, Organist and Pianist. Asheim has written for both chamber ensembles and orchestra, but has also been working with improvisation and with recomposing of works. He is currently organist at Stavanger Concert Hall. He is educated from the Norwegian Academy of Music and the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam.

Olaf Eggestad, pianist and musicologist. Works on the staff of UiS and is postdoctoral researcher at NMH.

Ellen Ugelvik, pianist, fellow at NMH. Pursues an international career as a performer of contemporary music.

One year of mapping out and identifying new post‐industrial sites, new research questions, and to expand contextualization which will be raised and developed further through a series of think tanks, conferences and research groups.

 

Phase 1 of the project focused upon the artistic responses to the post‐industrial landscape of Stoke on Trent, the historic centre of ceramic manufacture in the UK. For phase 2 of the project we aim to juxtapose and mirror the experiences, methodologies and outcomes that evolved through phase 1 to other post-industrial regions in the UK, Norway, Denmark and Germany. Existing partner institutions will apply methodologies of working site specifically uncovered through the project, back to their national/local context, thus grounding the project in their own research environment and landscape. Interest from new partner institutions will also introduce and broaden the scope of this research to other regions such as Limoges in France and Dresden in Germany, who equally bear industrial histories adjacent to those in Stoke‐on‐Trent.

 

Phase 2 will develop the research strands which explore the landscape of post‐industry through raw material, the contemporary ruin and ruination, and the role of art and artists in a non-art space. These strands will constitute the basis of the research context in the different institutions, workshops, seminars and conferences. A discursive platform will evolve through two think tanks and

 

Brownsword/Mydland’s participation in constituting the research groups in the partner institutions.

Three iconic solo works for percussion will be re-composed specifically for at least four new medias and performing situations, including produced visuals (TV or YouTube), site specific art, context related performance and staged concert performance.

 

Along the three year project we want to challenge the almost “sacred” relation to the score classical musicians are trained to possess. We will focus on how the musical content of each of the mentioned works can be interpreted radically different according to the performance medium and still be in accordance with the works inherent raison d’etre (based on our specific knowledge of the composers and their music).

 

Each of our radical interpretations follow at least four presentation forms:

 

A classical concert performance performance on stage, but with a visually designed context. Here we will investigate how the merger of two art forms will influence a more classical interpretation of the score.

The piece is performed as a fixed media production, created from various visual footage made in the project. The advantage of this approach is to transcend the limitations a physical performance always has.

The piece is transformed into a portable version for open air, local communities and interventions in public spaces.

A site specific media installation involving various mixed- and new media presentation techniques related to White Cube contexts.

As the project develops over the three years, we will consider other and emerging options for presentations.

SYNSMASKINEN is a new artist-group and an inquiry into 7 fields of contemporary political crisis. The project will consist of 7 art projects, each exploring a certain aspect of contemporary crisis. Together these 7 visions will attempt to unfold a contemporary cosmology; a new political horizon.The project is in collaboration with partner art-institutions in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Ukraine and Germany.

 

SYNSMASKINEN is an artist-group in the sense that each production is produced in collaboration between a small group of participants. Each of the 7 projects will be made by new groups of artists and thinkers. In this sense SYNSMASKINEN will probe the concept of the research-group: What kind of insights does artistic thinking provide? How can collectivity adress the political issues of the 7 topics in a critical manner?

 

The name is taken from the danish and the norwegian translations of Paul Virilio’s seminal book on the techniques of perception, La Machine De Vision . The name SYNSMASKINEN contains the methodological program: SYN=vision / MASKIN=machine

 

SYNSMASKINEN is the third large-scale research-project at KHiB. Following Re-Place and Topographies of the Obsolete the project offers a continuation of and an addition to the new tradition of KU/artistic research at the core the Department of Art.

 

www.synsmaskinen.net/