±

LANGUAGE-BASED ARTISTIC RESEARCH

SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP

@ SAR FORUM

TILBURG, 11 APRIL 2024

0930 - 1330

This half-day event hosted by the SAR Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research (co-founded by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin) takes place within the frame of the SAR FORUM, in Tilburg, Netherlands. More about the overall SAR FORUM programme HERE.

Language-based Artistic Research is a new term for an emergent field of artistic research, describing approaches to artistic research that specifically work-with language. The Special Interest Group (SIG) for Language-based Artistic Research was inaugurated in 2019 within the frame of the Research Pavilion #3, Venice, and now comprises an international network of over 500 artistic researchers. This SIG explores how artistic research is undertaken in and through different language-based practices. The intent is not to define or fix what language-based artistic research is but rather to reflect how it is practised in its diversity. This session during the SAR FORUM will introduce the activities of this SIG, providing invitation to the wider community of artistic researchers to become involved. This SIG session during the SAR FORUM will include activations of PRACTICE SHARINGS and presentations from THEMATIC NODES through a combination of live/in-person and pre-recorded contributions.

>

ON DEMAND - PRE-RECORDED PRACTICE SHARINGS

________________________________________________________________

Barb Macek | The Poetical Anamnesis

The Poetical Anamnesis / PA is a technique to investigate the existential dimension of autoimmune diseases. It conceptualizes the autoimmune body as a modified and therefore poetic body. The symptoms of the disease are read as signs of an organism transforming into a poetical means of world modification. 

The application of the PA results in a lyrical series: With every new poem the patient is created as a transient poetical formation; new information emerges and becomes comprehensible, and the result is a gain of meaning on the aesthetic as well as on the medical and the personal side.

The crow is the agent poétique or third agent within the PA. It is a mythical messenger with the ability to wander between the worlds. In a hospital environment it is conspicuously misplaced – challenging the clinical environment, inviting a change of perspectives, inviting transgressions.

________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

Annie Morrad| Jump Co Samples

The research and art work is situated in ‘Intuitive Interspecies Communication’. The practice-led research is then positioned in visual and sound artwork centred around Canada and Greylag Geese, Mallard Ducks and Pigeons. This creates outcomes exploring how dialogue between non-humans and humans forms language. Transformed into visual artwork, some with sound or live improvised saxophone. Consequently, resulting in co-production and co-authorship with non-human animalspecies. This is not through a pre-decided intention, or music score which suggests a hierarchical position. In contrast, it is one that enables agency in all participants as subjects and not objects. This presentation reveals how the produced outcome was created with non-human species’ interaction, field recordings, live improvised saxophone playing and digital electron interfaces. The produced language is then transferred into a language formed through art practice. These encounters enable co-productions between non-human avians and myself, exhibited in galleries and discussed in conferences and symposiums.

LINK TO ANNIE MORRAD'S PRACTICE SHARING PAGE HERE.

________________________________________________________________

Sara Gómez | GESTURE-SIGNS

A word that is inscribed in the choreography is spatialised through its letters; also through the gesture of writing, and speaking. The actions stage the word because they bring into account its objectual character. The word that enters into a relationship with actions or objects during the performance, becomes a gesture-sign: sign because every word, action or object has meaning that can be interpreted; gesture because signs and actions come together in an unexpected relation. The gesture that unites action and sign does not seem to carry meaning but modifies the meaning; it is the "or" of the sentence I will go to the right or to the left; where "or" seems to have no meaning but determines the meaning. Gestures that unite two different elements give the choreography a poetic function, because they produce utterances that are not descriptive but figurative; utterances that oscillate between an idea becoming a form and that form being formed. In the gesture-sign, the gesture crosses the sign, interrupting its definition and opening its union toward one new figuration.

LINK TO BARB MACEK'S PRACTICE SHARING PAGE HERE.

________________________________________________________________

Rob Flint| how we knew

My practice explores how different senses - specifically vision and hearing - combine in our experience, and how in language these senses are unified in the relationship between voices, words, and their physical context. During a ‘practice sharing’ within the frame of Convocation II (Vienna, October 2023), I was fortunate to have a ‘choir’ of human volunteers to play with the ritual use of language, and I have been developing an electronic group to assemble in their absence. This is that choir, reflecting musically on the experience. I’m interested in how the patterns of emphasis and texture differ between the human and electronic versions, and exploring the tension between these ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ affective modes.

LINK TO MICHAEL CROFT'S PRACTICE SHARING PAGE HERE.

LINK TO ROB FLINT'S PRACTICE SHARING PAGE HERE

Choreographic utterance 01. Notes for a Performative Lecture, Sara Gómez. Fragment recorded during Convocation II, at Zentrum Fokus Forschung. University of Applied Arts Vienna, October 2023 (This work is part of GESTURE-SIGNS on Practice Sharing II).

LINK TO SARA GÓMEZ’S PRACTICE SHARING PAGE HERE.

________________________________________________________________

LINK TO VANESSA GRAF's PRACTICE SHARING PAGE HERE.

________________________________________________________________

Michael Croft | Speech Spoken

The video presentation refers to a work called Speech Spoken, which is notified on Practice Sharing II, Language-based Artistic Research. Speech Spoken involves two monologues that are transcribed as text to preserve their speech-based idiosyncrasies, interposed alternately line by line, and are divided into several short disjoined but still-readable sections. This presentation introduces the experiential and theoretical nature of the work in the form of edited performative video recording, interspersed voices, and text, including some AI voice, in a physical gap of presentation of a new work-in-progress. As the viewer simultaneously listens to the presentation, they may notice some speech disfluency and scrambling of two layers of voice, which mimics the circumstances of the referenced work. The AI voice reads one section of the interposed text from the work in terms that mechanistically re-integrate its fragmentation through the voice’s inability to simulate speech disfluency, enunciation and lack of sense.  

LINK TO MARYAM RAMEZANKHANI'S PRACTICE SHARING PAGE HERE.

PRACTICE SHARING ACTIVATIONS

________________________________________________________________

Below are a number of pre-recorded PRACTICE SHARING activations. [Click the video-stills below to play video - double click to open video full screen].

>

PART I (LIVE/IN-PERSON)

________________________________________________________________

Ruth Anderwald/Miriana Faieta/ Rob Flint/Bogdan Florea/ Ileana Gherghina/Cristiana de Marchi/Kai Ziegner | Voice/s Voicing

Whom or what do we give a voice? An essential part of our epistemological and methodological practices, voicing uses the instrument that living and non-living beings possess and links the materiality of the voice to its signifying aspects. Voices steer us, guide us, motivate or hinder us – be it the voice of an animal or fellow human, the inner voice as we get in our head, the artificial voice of a navigation system or digital assistant, the pleasurable murmur of wind and water; it can be the imagined voice, or an actor, filling a character with life, or a commentator interpreting events… Allure or warning, we coordinate the voices we encounter and orient accordingly. Moving away from screaming and leaning in to hear a whisper, we respond with somatic space positioning, different levels of appreciation, alertness, openness, and ensuing sense-making processes. How can we think about voice and language without resorting to a sound/sense hiatus? How is the voice related to its body, and how to explore the voice that has many bodies or the voice that has no body at all? The voicing of art and research has become a crucial point of reference and a daily practice.

Amaryllisation © Mariella Greil & Simona Koch

PRACTICE SHARING LIVE ACTIVATION

________________________________________________________________

Antrianna Moutoula | Nonstop Languaging

Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind wonders whether thinking and other invisible and soundless mental activities are meant to appear or whether they can never find an adequate home in the world. Gertrude Stein sees streams of consciousness as a linguistic tool which can transform reality. Lyn Hejinian, states that one is always thinking about reality, as reality is all there is. Influenced by those ideas, in my artistic research, I position the appearance of thinking and specifically the stream of thought, as a crucial element in the production of autotheory.

In 2020, I developed the performance practice of nonstop languaging. I perform autotheory by merging a process of articulating autobiography (carrying the self in language) with methods of forming and digesting theory. The result is an overload of words, citations, experiences, lyrics, and memories, all seeking their own linearity. I believe that insisting on unedited, manifestly subjective modes of working with language, many of which are associated with feminine writing and have been previously deemed nonsense, insignificant and inadequate for academic knowledge production, can contribute to the reshaping of the logic of artistic academic spaces.

IMAGE: Detail from citations are bricks, performed during Springboard Art Fair, Utrecht, 2023. Antrianna Moutoula.

LINK TO ANTRIANNA MOUTOULA'S PRACTICE SHARING PAGE HERE.

THEMATIC NODES

________________________________________________________________

Mariella Greil & Werner Moebius | Onomatopoetic Sound(e)scape – Slides and Slips between Sound and Speech

Onomatopoetic Sound(e)scape explores the interrelation of frequencies and investigates the acoustic phenomenon of slipping between abstract sound and concrete language. This dynamic audio-experience explores the double-meaning of the German noun Laut as the 'smallest acoustic-articulatory element’ in language and the adjective laut, as widely audible, strong in tone. Departing from Latin phænomenon, "that which appears, is brought to light, shows”, we focus on micro-phenomenological recounts of flourishing and weathering. These processes were at the methodical core of the Amaryllisation project, as we experiment with thresholding sound perceptions and emergent meanings. The laying bare of meaning making delves into the rich realm of onomatopoeia, the formation of words that imitate sounds and vice versa. The project aims to create a soundscape performing the subtle nuances and expressive potential of onomatopoetic elements. Lingering at the cusp of this research void is the main objective of our project. The fluid transitions between sound and speech blur boundaries, create subtle submergences of soundwords. Onomatopoetic Sound(e)scape not only celebrates the inherent musicality within language but also encourages to reflect on the connection between sound, expression, and communication. This project is a multisensory exploration, unearthing the expressive potential embedded in the onomatopoetic fabric of language.

________________________________________________________________

© The Art of Being Governed, Anderwald + Grond 2019

Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker, documentation of a live activation of a Dorsal Reading Practice, from the project Dorsal Practices.

LINK TO EMMA COCKER'S PRACTICE SHARING PAGE HERE.

________________________________________________________________

Katrina Brown & Emma Cocker| Dorsal Practices

Dorsal Practices is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orientate to self, others, and world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? Since January 2021, Brown and Cocker have engaged in a live enquiry of practice-based artistic research involving the three-fold interrelation of various movement, conversation and reading practices. In this improvisatory performance reading, they reactivate conversational transcripts from their collaboration through an experimental reading practice, in the very moment of voicing creating a ‘new’ and contingent unfolding of dorsal sense-making, where fresh insights and understanding happens through the unexpected conjunctions and (re)combinations.

PRACTICE SHARING ACTIVATIONS

 ________________________________________________________________

LINK TO KATRINA BROWN'S PRACTICE SHARING PAGE HERE

Katrina Brown| Light Hesitates 

Hesitancy, dubiousness, this way-that way, dither as a shimmer, a split-second suspension, a sway, a blurry orientation. Hesitancy as a vibrant glitch and a space of possibility which allows us to turn, tremor, let the world in and be amidst it all. In light hesitates, I am exploring how words open philosophical poetic edges that rub against each other, overlap and spark new entry points into movement, how a constellation of words or a diagram can operate as a choreographic device or force field within which to work.  Words resonate from, inhabit, intrigue, persist and fold back into the body. In the SIG in Tilburg I want to performatively re-activate one such diagram through movement and projected image-text-voice – as a way of sharing.

>

PART II (LIVE/IN-PERSON)

Writing on the Market Square in Vaasa, Finland (Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Vidha Saumya and Lena Séraphin) during the Sharing Text post doc research project at Åbo Akademi University and Pro Artibus Foundation artist residency. Photo Christoffer Björklund, 2022.

LINK TO RESEARCH EXPOSITION (PUBLISHED IN VIS: NORDIC JOURNAL OF ARTISTIC RESEARCH) HERE.

________________________________________________________________

Niina Turtola & Tapio Vapaasalo |Blinkbonny Avenue and Everyday Life

This artistic research is thematically interested in the practice of everyday life and in issues of the liberated book and page layout, book design and dialogue between text and image. The urgency of this node of the ‘liberated page’ explores shared interests and dialogues that are documented into discussions, emails, notebooks, exchanges of thinking and memories since 2010. The purpose of this research is to collect these thematic interests into a visual form of a research project. This means that the conventions of book, text design and layout are used as a platform for depicting artistic research in an open manner. Historically, the printed book is seen a closed and final as communication medium. It is unreachable, yet obvious, part of everyday life. Now the printed sheets are pages for a dialogue to take place and depictions of an ongoing trajectory and artistic research process. Thematically the object of research is multimodal. It is the printed page, images, and texts in it that is being created in a dialogical manner, but also linked to the everyday lives where these collected materials derive from.

THEMATIC NODES

________________________________________________________________

Alex Arteaga & Emma Cocker| thinking aesthetic thinking

This thematic node proposes to inquire into one specific variety of thinking: "aesthetic thinking". Based on previous investigations, this enquiry starts with the hypothesis that aesthetic thinking is enabled through an intensification of sensorimotor and emotional skills and a temporary neutralisation of will-based, target-oriented and logical-constructive actions. Furthermore, we believe that aesthetic thinking unfolds within emerging networks of non-hierarchically distributed agencies and does not produce or consolidate but rather destabilises meaning.

We intend to investigate how language-based artistic research practices may on the one hand trigger, sustain and nurture aesthetic thinking and, on the other hand, enable intuitive evidences of this variety of sense-making to appear. On this basis, we envisage to research as well the relationships between aesthetic thinking and discursive-propositional thinking, a hegemonic modality of meaning-making in the medium of language. We propose to carry on this research on the methodological basis of "ecologies of research practices in action": the mobilisation of connected, intertwined and hybridised practices in the medium of language. The collective activation of practices of reading, transcribing, translating, voicing, writing, distributing, printing, projecting, showing and sharing language in the form of "ecologies" is meant here to realise—meaning simultaneously fulfil and achieve insights—aesthetic thinking.

________________________________________________________________

Andrea Coyotzi Borja & Lena Séraphin * | transitory writing in no one's land

The 2-year research project transitory writing in no one’s land is an inquiry structured as corporeal gatherings or workshops interweaving multi-lingual, performative and embodied writing as a collective writerly method for testing new practices of situated writing and approaches to language. The practice of writing as a multi-lingual and collective activity offers the potential for participants to become aware of one’s cultural disposition. The aim is to examine how collective writing as method and activated co-authorship might create conditions for inter-subjective relations and the emergence of inclusive in-between spaces or no one’s lands. The artistic research project transitory writing in no one’s land is situated within an interdisciplinary field formed by contemporary art and its practices, literature and literary practices as well as corresponding critical theory. This collective research and its methodology allows for transformation, for transitory writing as a delineation of the self. For further information please visit: https://writinginpublic.space

transitory writing in no one’s land is a collaboration between Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin, Paula Urbano.

transitory writing in no one’s land is supported by Kone Foundation.

________________________________________________________________

Erika Tsimbrovsky, Mirte Hoogendoorn, Mariana Renthel, Cecilie Fang Jensen, and Antrianna Moutoula | Asemic Writing and Reading

We are a group of researchers interested in thinking together about the 'asemic' writing process, the materiality of language, extended writing techniques, and intermedial bodily presence in writing with a focus on its corporeal dimension. Some members of our group have developed particular relationships with the notion of asemic, and others have just begun to develop this relationality, which provokes generative conversations about how the concept of ‘asemic’ relates to our practices and why. This contemplation concerns the genealogy of the term and questions why the concept is relevant to our research inquiries today. One of the main inquiries in our sessions was the ambiguous nature of meaning-making in art and artistic research. In art research, we seek alternatives that might come with the ‘asemic’ and ‘eco-asemic’ materiality of language and awaken art/dance’s potential to meaningfully collaborate with surroundings. These explorations of language other than linguistic and grammatical aspects help to reimagine and redefine major concepts of living and ways of knowing. This artistic research enables art/dance potential to challenge existing conventions and institutional structures and create space for “unspoken texts” and “unheard voices”.

PRACTICE SHARING ACTIVATION

________________________________________________________________

Hanns Holger Rutz | Concatenative Sonic Spatialisation

A sound practice tentatively called “concatenative sonic spatialisation” uses text corpora segmented beforehand or during a piece’s performance to allow the formation of new connections among fragments. Connections can be defined linguistically or sonically, often using similarity relationships. This practice is spatial since observers are presented with ongoing explorations of the corpus in different directions, recognising an incremental definition of sonic volume and recurring elements. The example presented is from Writing (suspend) (2023), which uses Petri-dishes as sounding bodies in a circular arrangement. Its corpus is a public ethnographic archive of endangered languages, spoken by a small and declining group of people. For the installation, twenty-four narrative recordings across the world were chosen, which are continuously injected by the algorithm based on sonic similarity, creating a meandering mix of voices that, while their semantic level is unlikely to be deciphered by the audience, reveal something fundamental about all human languages.

Entangled in digital media / Photography: Copyright: Niina TURTOLA. 

Hanns Holger Rutz, Concatenative Sonic Spatialisation.

LINK TO HANNS HOLGER RUTZ'S PRACTICE SHARING PAGE HERE.

IMAGE: Asemic drawing/writing session by Erika Tsimbrovsky

________________________________________________________________

>

ON DEMAND - PRE-RECORDED PRESENTATIONS

THEMATIC NODES

________________________________________________________________

Below are a number of pre-recorded THEMATIC NODES presentations [Click the video-stills (or audio files) below to play - double click to open video full screen].

______________________________________________________________

Delphine Chapuis Schmitz --- Emma Cocker --- Laressa Dickey --- Sabina Holzer --- Ines Marita Schärer --- Litó Walkey | withing

This is an emergent ‘thematic node’ for exploring the relation of languaging and bodying: How does languaging affect bodying? How does bodying affect languaging? How does movement inform wording? How does wording inform moving? How can we explore ways for languaging/bodying with, through and from sensing and somatic practices? How to find wording and worlding for the polyphonies of somatic experiences?

scores - notations - situations – conditions

Initiated through the mutual witnessing of shared resonances and affinities during Convocation II, we conceive this ‘node’ as an emergent framework for experimenting together, for sharing embodied practising, for testing possibilities for a bodily becoming of language/words. Since November 2023, our shared exploration unfolds through the rhythm of rotation, an evolving constellation of ‘pairings’ and ‘proposals’ based on a bi-monthly cycle. For each bi-monthly iteration, a pairing (two of us working together) devises a score/proposal/invitation/focus which we then all collectively test, enact, activate, reconnecting together after a period of practice for sharing materials / findings / discoveries / reflections from the shared research process.  

Being in doing.

Being in practice together.

Body/Language.

Between the two, activating the between.

Moving

between different modalities,

shifting from one to the other.

Tilting towards.

Along-siding.

AUDIO: The audio recording comprises two 'readings' activated directly during our oneline zoom sessions: Part 1: (26.02.2024) Collective reading of a 'Breath Poem' generated from engaging with a score set by DCS anf LW; Part 2: (15.01.2024) Collective reading of the originating score (note: we have left the sound as it was in the live recording).

________________________________________________________________

Anna Nygren, Barb Macek | SELF as OTHER, or: speaking aut*

We, Anna Nygren (AnnaN/annan) and Barb Macek (barb/brab), started the collaborative project speaking aut* – aut as in aut/istic and aut/oimmune – with the aim to explore the meaning of living as auts, writing about it in regard to everyday life, in regard to the medical discourses about autism and autoimmunity, and in regard to the view of the "others", the not-auts.

Beyond that, as writers we are also interested in the aut/hor-ror – as something that disturbs within or next to the aut and makes it scary, but at the same time triggers something else, and thereby invites to a rethinking of aut/hor(ror)ship.

In the context of language-based artistic research we seek to develop practices that allow for investigating the meaning of aut on different levels of our existence.

By exchanging our experiences we try to explore new wor(l)ds, experimenting with transgressing borders (self – other / human – nonhuman / something – nothing / …) not only on the level of language but also on the pictorial, tonal and kinaesthetic level, and we warmly invite others to take part in this exchange.

* Speaking out and at the same time speaking as auts, but also speaking in a language called "aut" …

________________________________________________________________

Beverley Carruthers -- Emma Bolland -- Jane Glennie -- Jane Partner -- Laura Rosser -- Nicolas Lambouris -- Paula Muhr -- Robert Good -- Sarah Blair -- Sharon Young -- Simon Tyrrell -- Tom Rodgers -- Wiebke Leister | The Expanded Librarian: An homage to Canetti - a series of characterisations.

With Elias Canetti's 'Earwitness' in mind, we collected eccentric portrayals of the different searchers and their searching processes currently involved in our Expanded Librarian project. Their characterisations are based on the explorations we have undertaken so far to find different approaches to the Text+Image conundrum: the Expanded Librarian as hunter or gatherer, as inventor or finder, as chaser or pursuer, explorer or investigator, enquirer or forager. Asking: What gestures do your Expanded Librarians adopt? What are they looking for? How does their searching operate? Who do they meet on the way? What does s/he make? How does s/he choose results? What kind of language is being used to speak of those findings? Which active verbs, descriptive identifiers or visual locators? You can read more about the ongoing project here, part of our exhibition at CRASSH, University of Cambridge in March 2024.

________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

Jen/Eleana Hofer and Allison Yasukawa | The Revolution Will Not Be Monolingual

Tra- means “across,” so how many forms of “across” can we come up with? ~ Cecilia Vicuña

Language justice is a framework and set of practices for equitable communication: practices that support each person’s capacity to communicate authentically in our language(s), and hence to participate fully in the contexts where we work, live, learn, think, create, and interact. Language’s many forms, formations, and modes serve as our material to undo the false frames of language dominance and monolingualism. We live inside translingual rhythms using their resonances and harmonics as generative strategies of political engagements, transformative pedagogies, and writings/artworks.

For us, languaging is a generative practice of sparking questions. How does language shape us? When might we shapeshift to embody all the forms of acrossness? Where are language barriers linked to material realities and imbalances of power and privilege in our classrooms, creative spaces, and the wider world? Where are language barriers nonexistent, the signal of a potential for radical unbarriering? How can we counteract oppressive systems of colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy by transiting across, through, and under language into justice, resistance, and liberation? How do we learn to listen, perceive, and communicate translingually to imagine other possible worlds?

IMAGE: Geheimschrift / secret writing, Barb Macek, 2022

LINK TO SELF AS OTHER: SPEAKING AUT* RESEARH EXPOSITION HERE

>

ON DEMAND - PRE-RECORDED PRESENTATIONS

________________________________________________________________

Orlando Vieira Francisco and Rita Rainho |  Saídas de Emergência

"Saídas de emergência" (Emergency Exits in English) is an initiative within the scope of artistic research focusing on the Visual and Performing Arts. The programs proposed by the collective aim to bring a visible overview of the practices applied by the established models of economics and ecology to define a discursive dimension between the arts and the climate crisis. We look at artistic methods identifying the high tension between movements seeking social justice and economic initiatives for ecological resolution with high extractive and territorial impact.

"Saídas de Emergência" began in 2023, planning regular frequency (with two editions per year). We already realized the first three editions with +15 members in different non-institutional places. In each edition, we seek transdisciplinary approaches to a specific object or project, exploring different perspectives from each member to broaden collective understanding.

To ensure that each session highlights the experimental component of the work shared, we are also encouraged to ensure that these sessions are safe spaces for divergent and conflicting critiques.

THEMATIC NODES

________________________________________________________________

Below are a number of pre-recorded THEMATIC NODES presentations [Click the video-stills (or audio files) below to play - double click to open video full screen].

________________________________________________________________

Annette Arlander | Looking for a Penpal Pine

My pine friend in Fredhäll, Stockholm, and me, Annette Arlander, form an embryo of a node. We are looking for a penpal, a pine tree with a human friend, to engage in dialogue with through letters. Usually, I write letters to pines sitting in or on or next to them. Now we are looking forward to engaging with pine trees at a distance, which is the usual way when writing letters. And to create a dialogue between pines through letters.

The purpose of this node is to experiment with letter-writing to, with, in the vicinity of and between trees, with human assistance. Thereby we want to consider how to approach entities and living beings with a completely different way of being and communicating that nevertheless share many life processes and perceptual capacities with humans. Is the traditional form of letter writing bringing us further apart or perhaps closer in the moment? How much can we understand and how much do we need to imagine?

We would love to engage with several pine-trees with human friends or assistants, if there are many out there? The language of the letters would preferably be English. And the letters could be sent via email rather than in paper envelopes, even if they would first be written by hand. If interested, please contact annette.arlander@uniarts.fi

________________________________________________________________

Valia Papastamou and Elpida Karaba | Affectful distabilising apparatuses. In search of technoaesthetic nodalities

The proposed contribution presents technoaesthetic practices working on diverse methodologies and affiliations between research-based art, feminist theory and expanded critical pedagogies. The sharing of material takes the form of an online script, incorporating improvised parts of previous discussions that took place in our research. Through this, we present some parts of the processes of producing theory and practice in the Centre of New Media and Feminist Public Practices,which now appears as a spectral institution, and how certain technoaesthetic practices lead to the production of language-based artistic-research. More specifically we focus on a double case study: the mapping/cartography and the language-based work Undoing the Glossary (a future sample), of the artist-researcher V. Papastamou. We discuss how this double practice brings forth the importance of articulating affectful visibility through archiving the gaps and silences in history and destabilizing the existing language towards the construction of new words and new empowering queer-feminist languages. The mapping/archive and the soundscape that Papastamou creates as a double artistic-research apparatus, act as narratives of feminist vocal enunciations and hybrid collective storytelling using various artistic methods, references and strategies. They act as apparatuses, as creative oppositional potencies for political post-digital affect and sensibility, underlying the role of feminist art as an active agent in the appearance of the dyselected and those erased from (his)story, a mutation force against the imperatives of cognitive and technological capitalism.

________________________________________________________________

Anna Nygren &  Elisabeth Hjorth | LOVE SONG FOR (UN)ROMANTIC FAMILIES

A work in progress about a work in progress

Extracts from a conversation:

“When I write, it's like tickling the language. I think about this other thing that language and words are. How I never feel alone when we spend time together. I think about the total pleasure of messing with language, of just being in it. And how this enjoyment is never disconnected from the violence that words also are. To allow oneself the pleasure of the malignant. I think about the autistic sensitivity to sensory impressions, how it can be used as masochism. I think about how to take care of evil. Writing is in the middle of a tenderness and a fight. Take care without taking the edge off.”

________________________________________________________________

>

CONTRIBUTORS TO SIG SESSION

[in alphabetical order]

Annette Arlander, DA, is an artist, researcher and a pedagogue, visiting researcher at Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, former professor in performance art and theory and professor in artistic research there as well as at Stockholm University of the Arts. Her research interests include artistic research, performance-as-research and the environment. Her artwork moves between the traditions of performance art, video art and environmental art. See https://annettearlander.com

Alex Arteaga is an artist researcher who combines and hybridizes aesthetic, phenomenological and enactivist research practices through an inquiry into embodiments, environments and aesthetic cognition. He studied music and architecture in Barcelona and Berlin and received a PhD in philosophy at the Humboldt University Berlin. He lectures in different universities and art centers and develops long-term artistic research projects such as Architecture of Embodiment, Contingent Agencies or the Sense of Common Self.

Ruth Anderwald is an Austrian artist-researcher who focuses on dizziness as a state of uncertainty, unpredictability, and instability, as well as creating momentum for resistance and/or new possibilities. She currently holds the professorship of artistic research at the Ph.D. in Art programme at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, together with Leonhard Grond, her long-time collaborator. http://on-dizziness.com

Sarah Blair pursues visual-verbal patterns, parallels, exchanges, and hybrids. She teaches at the Royal College of Art in London.

Emma Bolland is an artist, writer, and lecturer who lives in the north of England.

Katrina Brown is a UK-based choreographer with an interdisciplinary hybrid practice across movement, drawing, writing, still-and-moving image, presents live scored situations and artist-pages (material and digital). She is currently working with artist-writer Emma Cocker (Dorsal Practices) and with artist Frankie Williams (On Field Crossing) on a series of audio-voice works for radio. Light hesitates is a solo research project investigating notions of ‘hesitancy’. She is Senior Lecturer Choreography at Falmouth University Cornwall.

Beverley Carruthers is an artist, working with text, sound, photography and film. She teaches photography at the University of the Arts London.

Delphine Chapuis Schmitz (F/CH) works as an artist-researcher, as an artist-writer, as a writer-teacher, as a teacher-translator. Her field of research revolves around embedded and embodied practices of making sense, the po(ï)ethical potentials of language-s, and the exploration of meaningful relationalities in sensory entanglements. The development of a relational and performative practice of writing is at the core of her situated practice, which involves collaborative constellations of various kinds and making-thinking from a transversal perspective.

Emma Cocker’s research attends to the embodied dimension of artistic process through a nexus of experimental, performative and collaborative language-based approaches (including reading and conversation). Her writing is published in Reading/Feeling, 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Writing Choreography: Textilities of and Beyond Dance, 2023, and the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and forthcoming How Do You Do?, 2024. She is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University, UK.

Andrea Coyotzi Borja (México) lives and works in Finland. Her artistic practice focuses on everyday life encounters, observations, and daily occurrences with ordinary objects and situations. These find a form in different mediums such as video, sound, installation, writing and drawing. In addition, Coyotzi Borja is actively engaged in the research of the phenomenon of the infraordinary. Recently published her doctoral dissertation In the middle of things: On researching the infraordinary.

Michael Croft: fine artist and artistic researcher interested in such fields as drawing, language, perception, psychoanalytic theory and philosophy; artistic practice has developed from traditional methods to an approach that is research-based and traverses mediums, media, and text; uses academic and artistic research publishing and platforms to present his work.Currently involved in a collaborative project, ‘The Observation of Perception, considered through drawing’, hosted by i2ADS research Institute in Art, Design and Society, Porto University.

Cordula Daus (D/A) is a writer-artist who works across performance,  literary fiction and a general study of feelings. Her artist books and lecture performances have been presented internationally. Currently, Cordula is leading the artistic research Outer Woman at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (co-researchers: Sebastian Bark, [M] Dudeck and Charlotta Ruth, FWF: V 797). In collaboration with Charlotta Ruth she initiated the ongoing art project Questionology. Her novel SEHR is forthcoming.

Laressa Dickey is a dance artist and writer based in Stockholm whose recent projects explore the politics of care, the effects of state violence on the human body, and space junk. Her work spans disciplines and modalities. She has published books of poetry, as well as collaborative texts, including a series of feminist essays commissioned for Bergen Assembly. Her artistic research has been supported by the Kone Foundation. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (US) and an MFA in Choreography (SE).

Cecilie Fang is an anti-disciplinary artist from China and Denmark. She researches power structures through and with language. An auto-ethnographic research that moves between writing and materially making. She is interested in how language has a physicality, as it exists in relation to the body. How language is an ecosystem. How language is a medium of revealing power. And where that leaves the speaking, listening, reading, and writing body.

Rob Flint is an artist who explores the relationship between different forms of sensory experience, and how these can complement and confound one another, especially through actions of the voice. His work appears in different contexts of experimental sound and music and art, in galleries and performance venues. He has participated in some previous activities of the Language-based Artistic Research (Special Interest) Group including Convocation I, Convocation II, and Practice Sharing I and II.

Miriana Faieta is an Italian singer and artist-researcher. Her research investigates the relationship between voice and language in improvisation. After a Bachelor’s degree in Languages and a Master’s degree in Jazz singing, she is now Subject-Matter Expert of Music semiology at Conservatoire “L. D’Annunzio” of Pescara. Alongside her stage career, she started her own path as a researcher conducting vocal labs and collective improvisations aimed at understanding what type of meaning is evoked during collective singing.

Dr Bogdan Florea is an actor/independent researcher, co-founder of Nu Nu Theatre, which supports professional actors who work in a second language English. Bogdan has published in academic journals and presented papers at conferences in UK, Europe, USA. 

Ileana Gherghina is an actor/director/performance artist, Nu Nu Theatre co-founder and curator of Live Art and Performance Group (UK). Ileana's most recent commissions have been for University of Bristol and festivals in Japan, Serbia, Norway, Romania, Germany, Armenia.

Jane Glennie is an artist, filmmaker and typographer who creates through multiplicity.

Robert Good is an artist based in Cambridge UK who works with text to critique the systems and structures of both analogue and digital landscapes.

Sara Gómez. Artist researcher and choreographer. Doctor in Philosophy (Autonomous University of Barcelona). Professor at the Master in Dance Research (CENIDID, Mexico). In 2023, she was part of Practice Sharing II, and Convocation II (University of Applied Arts Vienna), both initiatives of the Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. In 2022, resident artist of INprescindibles #49, at La Poderosa, Barcelona; of Research Academy at Zurich Academy of the Arts; of Processes in Dialogue, La Mecedora, Mexico.

Mariella Greil works in the field of artistic research, is a dancer, a Senior Artist at the Angewandte Performance Laboratory and an Elise-Richter-PEEK Fellow (FWF) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She focuses on contemporary performance, especially its ramifications into the choreographic and the ethical. Together with Emma Cocker and Nikolaus Gansterer she co-edited Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2017), published the monograph Being in Contact – Encountering a Bare Body (2021) and recently the anthology Bare Bodies – Thresholding Life with de Gruyter.

Vanessa Graf is a writer and researcher at the Critical Media Lab Basel, where she is working on her PhD project Head in the Cloud, examining the material-semiotic construction of digital infrastructures (mainly: data centers) in the Alps. In her research, she is interested in the intersection of technology with natureculture, in particular as mediated by language: narratives, metaphors, sociotechnical imaginaries. More about her academic and literary work can be found here: http://vanessagraf.at

Elisabeth Hjorth is a writer and professor in Literary Composition at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. Her literary and academic practice focuses on female autobiography, language/power, neurodiversity and autistic poetics. She holds a PhD in Ethics from Uppsala University. 2021- 2023 she was the project leader for the interdisciplinary research project ”Autistic Writing: Reclaiming Reloading Another Mother Tongue”, financed by the Swedish Research Council. Her latest book is Mutant (Glänta, 2021).

Jen/Eleana Hofer is a poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, facilitator, and urban cyclist who co-founded the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena Aire (2010-2020). They live on unceded Tongva land in Los Angeles, where they teach writing and translation, work as Sins Invalid’s Language Justice Coordinator, and do language justice advocacy and organizing. They have received support from many entities, including CantoMundo, the Academy of American Poets, the City of Los Angeles, the NEA, and PEN American Center. Jen/Eleana publishes with numerous small independent presses and in various DIY/DIT incarnations. A few of their ultratranslations and writings about translation can be accessed on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog and in the "trans positions" series at Jacket2, and in documentation of the Ultrasympathetic Ultratranslation Symposium at BAK in the Netherlands. Excerpts from a recent project, unremembering are at Map Magazine. More information: https://www.channeltransmitrepeat.com.

Sabina Holzer is a body-based artist working in the field of expanded choreography and creates performances, dances, & text(ures) in collaborative ways with artists such as Alix Eynaudi, Jack Hauser, Katrin Hornek, Elisabeth Schäfer, Jeroen Peters a.o. She explores languages embedded in bodies and in the geo-historically located and informed memories & futures. Her investigations unfold in transdisciplinary performances and interventions in public spaces, galleries, museums & theaters, (such as: Hidden Museum, dOCUMETA (13), ImPulsTanz, Tanzquartier Wien  a.o.).  She publishes in various medias.

Anouk Hoogendoorn is an artistic researcher, who is currently doing a PhD at Zurich University of the Arts, CH and Teesside University, UK. Anouk has a practice that always has an important collaborative and experimental orientation to it. The (spoken) texts, textile works, sketches, movements, and sounds that come out of this practice are moments of processes rather than presentations fixed once and for all.

Elpida Karaba is Associate Professor, Department of Culture, New Media and Industries, University of Thessaly, Greece (https://cult.uth.gr/staff/karaba-elpida/). Her work and publications focus on art history and theory, feminist theory, performance, activist art, new media and research based art practices, public art, curating and critical pedagogies. She is the Director of the Center for New Media and Feminist Public Practices (CNMFPP) (www.centrefeministmedia.arch.uth) and founder of Temporary Academy of Arts (https://temporaryacademy.org/).

Nicolas Lambouris is a visual artist whose work focuses on issues of collective memory, cultural identity, and the politics of representation.

Wiebke Leister is an artist and researcher, who teaches performative photography and artistic research at the Royal College of Art in London.

Barb Macek studied psychology and Art & Science; in 2023 she finished her doctoral studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. As a writer and artistic researcher she applies poetry-based practices in bio-philosophical contexts to investigate autoimmune diseases. Prices: Award of Excellence of the Austrian Ministry of Science 2018, Annual Prize of the Society for Artistic Research 2019. Monography: Lykanthropus erythematosus, 2019. Her current research project aims at developing a new theory of autoimmunity.

Cristiana de Marchi is a visual artist and writer who lives and works in Dubai. She holds a Master’s Degree with first class honours in Archaeology from the University of Torino (Italy), and is currently a PhD candidate in the Artistic Research Programme at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Cristiana primarily works with video and textiles to explore issues related to identity, displacement, and belonging, investigated through the lens of the unequal relation between justice and legality.

Ines Marita Schärer (CH) works across poetry, performance, installation, sound art and experimental music. She is concerned with the precarities and vulnerabilities of diverse human and more-than-human beings within predominant power structures and explores voice and words as a means of establishing relationality and re-imagining their conditions and environments. Her practice is informed by the given context, permeable for various forms of knowledge, nourished and driven by thinkers, co-thinkers, collaborators and allies.

Annie Morrad an internationally exhibited artist, musician and lecturer. A Senior Lecturer in BA and MA Photo University of Lincoln, UK. I work with conceptual ideas on animal and interspecies communication and am opposed to speciesism with hierarchical concepts. My art practice incorporates: music; installation; photography; performance; video and sound. I also play live improvised tenor saxophone. My PhD explored dialogue between artist’s practices. https://amorrad.myportfolio.com/

Werner Moebius works with sounds, beats and files in the context of audio culture, sonic and intermedia art in between conceptualisms, contemporary composition, electroacoustic improvisation, electronica and pop. His work ranges from minimalistic soundscapes to weird instrumental poppy tunes or audiovisual concepts in collaborations with artists of differing media.wernermoebius.net

Antrianna Moutoula (GR) lives and works in Amsterdam. Primarily language-based, her artistic work spans performance, film, radio, and writing. Driven by the desire to articulate the continuous present, her current research focuses on nonstop languaging, an autotheoretical performance practice in which she traces her thoughts through language simultaneously in spoken and written form. By engaging with this practice in different contexts she aims to rework the confinements of knowledge production within artistic academic discourse. antriannamoutoula.com

Paula Muhr is a Berlin-based visual artist and an interdisciplinary researcher with a PhD in Art History and Visual Studies from the Humboldt University Berlin.

Anna Nygren is a writer, playwright, literary scholar and translator, based in Gothenburg, Sweden. They are autistic and queer, with a research interest in textual/textile desires, horses and misplacements. Among their literary works “Allt jag äger och har” (it-lit, 2022) and “Nathalie” (Dockhaveri Förlag, 2023) are the most recent. Anna works as a teacher in literary composition at Gothenburg University and is a PhD student in literature at Åbo Akademi.

Jane Partner is a poet, artist and researcher based in Cambridge UK, where she also teaches English literature and art history.

Maryam Ramezankhani was born and is based in Tehran, Iran.As a calligrapher and a linguist what fascinates me the most is how concepts, thoughts and feelings represent themselves into language, literature and other forms of expressions.Persian calligraphy is intertwined with poetry and literature, and brings out various aspects of Persian culture into intricate forms and colors. Through my artistic activities, I try to construct and re-construct words and forms to talk about the contemporary existence, its problems and questions.

Mariana Renthel is an artist and researcher currently working in Medellin, Colombia as an Associate Professor on the drawing and printmaking area of the Visual Arts Program at the Universidad de Antioquia. She is currently doing  a PhD at the UNA in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her work interest revolves around materiality and (somehow)text, with an emphasis on process as source methodology and outcome, as well as the haptic sense of touch.

Rita Rainho is an Artist and integrated Researcher at i2ADS, where she leads the seed project "Cotton and Resistance from Cape Verde – cultivation of thought and artistic practices for a history of the present." She co-founded the Action and Research Collective at i2ADS, 2010. RR focuses on artistic research addressing art, politics, and environmental crises in Cabo Verde, Mozambique, and Brazil.

Tom Rodgers is an artist and designer based in York, UK, engaging with photography, graphic design, book design, and writing.

Laura Rosser is an artist and lecturer at Falmouth University working across print, analogue technologies and live events that consider the translation of rational thought as it traverses between online and offline spaces.

Hanns Holger Rutz is an artist and researcher in sound art and digital art, based in Austria. His works in installation, improvisation and music composition span more than two decades, having extended to other digital and non-digital media. He heads the FWF-funded artistic research project “Simultaneous Arrivals” (with Nayarí Castillo and Franziska Hederer) on novel forms of collaborative artistic processes. Rutz is Professor for Artistic Research at Gustav Mahler Private University for Music Klagenfurt, AT.

Valia Papastamou is an artist, associate researcher in the Centre of New Media & Feminist Public Practices and PhD Candidate at the School of Humanities & Social Sciences (University of Thessaly). Her PhD dissertation “Artistic-research performative practices in the contemporary transnational condition: Feminist transformative politics of knowledge” examines the performative relation between research and art. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include art theory, political and social philosophy, gender studies, postcolonial theory, contemporary critical theory.

Lena Séraphin is a writer-artist based in Helsinki. Her postdoctoral research Sharing Text at the Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies, Åbo Akademi University (2020-2023) was an exploration on collective writing in public space and site-specific publishing as a research practice. She holds an MA from Goldsmiths’ and a doctorate from Aalto University, and teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts, Helsinki.

A Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at the University of California Davis, Erika Tsimbrovsky is a choreographer/multidisciplinary artist and cofounder/artistic director of Avy K Productions (San Francisco). Her research highlights multimedia dance-installation, dance, visual art, and text interplay, and new relationships for the artist-performer-audience. Bodily explorations of new languages and modes of communication created by entities muted and unrecognized by society are the core of Tsimbrovsky’s artistic research-practice.

Niina Turtola uses both texts and images to challenge conventions of book, layout, and writing. Her work has been exhibited internationally in several countries such as Finland, Namibia, UK, Germany, and United States. She has defended her artistic research in 2021 on typographic estrangement where everyday words were made visible by pragmatic enstrangement projects of Turtola. Turtola works as a lecturer of contextual studies of design at the Edinburgh Napier University. Turtola is book designer, information designer, text designer and a contemporary, conceptual artist and writer.

Simon Tyrrell is a writer and artist exploring the customary language, gestures and artefacts people use to celebrate community and make sense of the relationships, time and space they share.

Visual artist, curator and educator Paula Urbano body of work focuses on identity and migratory issues.

Professor Emeritus Tapio Vapaasalo from Aalto University, Finland is a Finnish Graphic designer, educator and philosopher whose focus is on book design and the dramaturgy of the page and design theory and history. Recent accomplishments include Eminentia grant to collect lifetime experiences in communication, graphic design and education into a publication. Vapaasalo has acted internationally in numerous Jurys, won several awards, acted as a thesis supervisor and as a head of a design department, as a mentor for students, to mention a few meaningful participation in the field of arts, design and culture.

Orlando Vieira Francisco is a visual artist and Researcher at i2ADS and a member of the editorial board of HUB – Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society. He has been working on coordinating the transnational project "From the Top of the Mountains We Can See Invisible Monuments" and explores the production of social space between art and politics and practices of environmental and social activism.

Litó Walkey (GR/CAN) is a Berlin-based artist whose work operates collaboratively through writing and choreography. Her performance and publishing projects engage with how collective structures of (re-) writing and reading (-across) enable affective circulations that energize sense (and self) drifting. She performed and taught internationally with Chicago-based performance group Goat Island and held a long-standing teaching position at HZT (Inter-University Center for Dance) Berlin. She is currently a PhD researcher in Performance Practices at Gothenburg University.

Allison Yasukawa is an interdisciplinary maker, educator, and deep language nerd. She is invested in what communication scholar Joanne Gilbert calls "heckling the status quo.” Her work investigates asymmetries of power in language and interaction and examines crossings of various kinds, from the personal to the global. She is the Director of English for International Students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. allisonyasukawa.com & languagingart.design

Sharon Young is an artist and lecturer at Glasgow School of Art working on feminist strategies of subversion through multi-disciplinary approaches to image and text.

Kai Ziegner, PhD (born 1975 in Plauen, GDR) is a visual artist, author, researcher and lecturer from Berlin. Ziegner studied German literature, political sciences, journalism, photography and fine arts in Leipzig, Berlin and Zurich, holds a master´s degree awarded by Zurich University of the Arts and completed a research doctorate in fine arts with distinction at Linz University of Design. His research questions critical aspects of contemporary history and merge experimental writing and conceptual photography.