VARIA, the fourth issue of HUB — Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society is a compilation of insightful views on different subjects that drive us through expositions where the true interests and concerns and research of those who enjoy sharing their points of view to build an understanding of the meanings of contemporary art on a global level are presented. This edition presents a constellation of voices, gestures, and research paths that intersect across diverse geographies, temporalities, and concerns.
Each exposition in VARIA is self-contained, yet they collectively resonate, creating a field of echoes where artistic research manifests as a sensitive, embodied, and speculative form of inquiry. VARIA represents an encounter with matter, memory, machines, language, and the world as it exists and as it could be.
This Spring 2025 issue assembles work shaped through a collaborative process involving authors, reviewers, and editors. It highlights the potential of the Reseаrch Catalogue as a platform for both reflectiоn and exhibition, where thinking, creating, and sеnsing are explored and embraced in unison.
Within these pages, you'll encounter gestures of care and friction, ranging from kinetic sculptures that mimic the human body to photographs that capture the essence of Hanoi. You'll also find speculative utopias shaped by aerial imagery and AI, as well as curatorial acts of witnessing postcolonial memory. Sound, code, image, and word intertwine, not as separate tools, but as co-authors in the unfolding of meaning.
What unites these diverse contributions is not uniformity, but a shared eagerness to ask questions in unconventional ways and to blur the lines between artist and researcher, body and machine, past and future, inside and outside. Common concerns аnd threads emerge, such as:
- Artistic research as a living method where knowledge emerges through making, reflecting, and experimenting.
- Entanglements between humans and non-humans, revealing porous boundaries and posthuman kinships.
- Speculative gestures that imagine otherwise — offering alternative futures, reconfiguring memory, or troubling the present.
- Language as both code and spell, shaping how we speak with machines, with images, with each other.
- Multiplicity of roles, where artists become curators, performers, thinkers, and vice versa.
- Contextual and situated knowledge, rooted in specific places like Sápmi, Lithuania, Iceland, or Vietnam — yet reaching far beyond.
These expositions don’t seek to resolve or conclude. Instead, they open up to readers and users. They trace delicate routes through trauma, intimacy, co-creation, and transformation. The themes arise like mycelium: rhizomatic and interlaced, speaking of folds and crossings, of reparative desires, of worlds overlapping. In VARIA, everything finds a space to resonate between fragments and flows, anticipating other durations.
Assembling Hanoi: Metamorphosis of Photographic Images (Lorena Bañares): Taking a photograph as fluid machine it evolves from the compounds based on the notion of dualism separating subject/object, human/non-human, and the outside/inside of the frame to the fold’s reference that entangles Hanoi and its unique blend of cultures and timeless charm exudes as an aura of going back in time.
Contemporary Artworks Speak: The Traumatic Transgenerational Memory (Marija Griniuk) - A curatorial process that considers colonialism through visual narratives, with heavy layers of history in the Baltic, built into artworks where the author is also implicated as an artist.
Disembodied prosthetics (Thorolf Thuestad): How kinetic sculptures allow that an artistic experience can be influenced by mimetic recognition of human motion patterns in non-representative kinetic figures, and examines how these characteristics can modulate the performingexperience of such figures.
Glimpsing Speculative Utopias: Envisioning Futures (Amna Qureshi): Here, alternative visions for resilient futures are based on a multidisciplinary approach by integrating aerial photography of Iceland’s landscapesas a speculative narrative. Through a unique aspect of the research (the use of artificial intelligence), a transformative dialogue and deep reflection on the politics of the present, while imagining possibilities for the world to come can be catalyzed.
Language in AI Art: Encoding, Folding and Transforming (Garrett Lynch IRL): By examining the potential for communication and interaction between humans and machines, facing four artistic works, the central subject is the role of language in AI as an integral part of the artistic process rather than just a tool, maintaining that AI is a form of network that enables emergence.
At the edges of this Issue, what lingers is the sensibility of the image, the tenderness of incomplete narratives, and the shared wish to mend something (however small) in the world. Let this be an invitation to be present and read slowly, with openness and attention. To follow the threads that call us to and let them guide us to the unexpected.