Being a foreigner is daunting work, exacting because it does not proceed from an external observer position, but is done from within, diffracting own comforts and biases through those of others, often in a rapid back-and-forth. In 1988, I emigrated from Germany to the US to undertake this kind of work, as a 'practice of attending to being', a lived onto-epistemology. What has emerged during this 30-year endeavor is arts-based, diagrammatic, performative, and facilitative work that centers epistemic diversity. Not the proverbial 'melting pot' is ever the outcome, not a blend of particles, but rather a series of patterns by which, as Karen Barad states 'differences that make a difference' appear, part of 'respectful, detailed, ethical engagements.” Calling my work the 'Performative Diagrammatics Laboratory', I find myself diffractively reading ethico-aesthetic methodologies through political ontologies: legal scholarship in Critical Race Theory (Bell '88, Crenshaw '89), US and Latin American work in Cultural Policy Studies (Yudice '01), Performance Studies in radical methodology (Conquergood 01), Art Research and Aesthetics (Mersch on the zetetic, '15, Clavo on epistemodiversity '16, '21), work on emergent strategy and facilitation (Brown '17,'21) and indigenous pedagogy and research methodology (Simpson'17, '21). In working through the above, I particularly draw on Guattari's future-directed 'metamodeling'. In 'The Three Ecologies' Guattari asked to “organize new micropolitical and microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetic and new analytic practices” ('89). I am proposing to present my recent project, 'Micro-practices for a New Gentleness', facilitating a focused, diffractive conversation on a participant-selected topic, through a 60 minute workshop format, using a set of 18 prepared, largely participant-administrated prompts, performatively supported by associated 3-d printed figurines, followed by feedback.

Date:

02.07.2022, 10:00

Bio

Adelheid Mers is an artist and educator who works through Performative Diagrammatics, presenting work nationally and internationally in residency, conference and exhibition settings. Educated at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the University of Chicago, she is professor and chair of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mers currently co-leads the PSi working group, Performance & Pedagogy, co-edited an issue of CSPA Quarterly, and published essays with the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, and Global Performance Studies.

Photo: Adelheid Mers

Adnan Hadzi

Interdisciplinary Research in European Extended Reality Labs

Abstract

This paper analyses the use of Immersive Experiences (IX) within artistic research, as an interdisciplinary environment between artistic, practice based research, visual pedagogies, social and cognitive sciences. This paper discusses IX in the context of social shared spaces. It presents the European Extended Reality Labs (EXRL) interdisciplinary research project. The paper discusses how EXRL combines and integrates three research strands that are part of a major, sustained artistic or scientific focus of the partnering European academic institutions. In those labs researchers, artists, film-makers investigate and create different kinds of IX. EXRL provides the opportunity to situate artistic research in the context of scientific. Addressing the needs of the three target groups the paper will discuss: 1) The original development of the EXRL as being oriented towards practice-based research in Media Arts: Interdisciplinary Immersive Experiences within Media Arts. Through a multi-year development process with the VNLAB at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, Filmschool Lodz, the research group has acquired considerable expertise in IX Interactive Media, with a particular focus on surround sound (ambisonics/multichannel surround sound diffusion) and interactivity. 2) The second scenario and field of expertise is established through collaborative work with the Department of Cognitive Science, University of Malta, on Interdisciplinary Immersive Experiences within Cognitive Sciences. For the researchers, the key element is that the subjective experience can be challenged using new technologies and IX media that induce perceptual bodily illusions. 3) The third scenario is the application of techniques, tools, and processes of EXRL in Interdisciplinary Immersive Experiences within Social Sciences, such as Heritage Dissemination activities and finally an outlook on envisaged IX productions within migration studies.

Date:

02.07.2022, 14:50

Bio

Date:

02.07.2022, 10:50

with:

Ramon Parramon

Irati Irulegi

Annette Arlander

Attending to Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees

Abstract

Attending, mending or blending? This workshop takes as its starting point the artistic research project Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees in order to focus attention on trees in the immediate vicinity of the conference venue. Besides trying to mend our broken relationship to other beings that we share this world with and constantly blend with in transcorporeal exchanges, this exercise in attention to trees with trees can be used as a creative tool to assist concentration and focus as well as a sense of embodied connection with the environment. - Please, prepare to spend some time outdoors. The project is in its title referring to the photographic work of Thomas Pakenham, who in turn plays with the title of a book by Gurdjeff. The fields of critical plant studies and environmental post-humanities as well as the philosophical study of plant thinking and the scientific debates regarding plant intelligence seem like obvious contact points, although these fields are not necessarily welcoming this kind of practical artistic exploration. Meanwhile, developed in the border zone between performance art, environmental art and digital video or media art, the project is in some sense lacking a proper home base to contend with and to expand. Why is the human body there to attract attention from the trees? Where is the exploration of new technology and biological processes? What is the critical focus, the analytic disclosure, the intellectual paradox pointed at? On a deeper level this presentation therefore asks, prompted by the call: What artistic tradition, field or discipline should this practice actually connect to, what artistic forerunners should it reference? And what consequences would those choices have on the further development of the project? See https://meetingswithtrees.com

Date:

02.07.2022, 14:30

Bio

Annette Arlander, DA, is an artist, researcher and a pedagogue, one of the pioneers of Finnish performance art and a trailblazer of artistic research. Former professor in performance, art and theory at Stockholm University of the Arts and PI of the research project How to Do Things with Performance at University of the Arts Helsinki. At present she is visiting researcher at Academy of Fine Arts there, with the project Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees. Her artwork moves between the traditions of performance art, video art and environmental art.

Photo: Annette Arlander

Arijit Bhattacharyya

Bio

Arijit Bhattacharyya (1994, India) is an artist, activist and independent curator currently living and working in Weimar, Germany. His practice revolves around contentious narratives of resistance through social engagements, design interventions and lecture-performances. His artistic discourse is deeply rooted in the dissecting trajectories of socio-political history and its implications in cultural practices. He holds a Masters in Fine Arts from the Bauhaus Universität Weimar and also a Masters in Visual Art from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.

Photo: Arijit Bhattacharyya

Barbara Macek

Blending Worlds with Mending Words: How to Transform the Autoimmune Body Into Poetry

Abstract

Many autoimmune diseases are rare by definition, meaning that they are marginalised and placed at the periphery – of medical and pharmacological research, but also of public interest. Furthermore, the pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases is still unclear which is one root of the dark and threatening image commonly drawn of the autoimmune body, as a body who "treats itself as foreign" or "as an enemy". This is shown in the frequent use of civil-war-metaphors in regard to the topic, with understandably demoralising effects on persons concerned. The aim of the presented project is to throw the spotlight on autoimmune diseases at the margins of medicine and society, and to develop new ways of meaning creation for the processes behind – with the intention to provide a supportive imagery (verbally and pictorially) for persons coping with a life crisis labeled "autoimmune disease". The basis of the project are patient interviews that were conducted at the rheumatological department of the General Hospital Vienna as part of a transdisciplinary project on developing new, artistic forms of anamnesis. The "Progressive Universalpoesie" (progressive universal poetry), a theory of German romanticism, formulated by the poet Novalis and the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, constitutes the theoretical framework of the research. Its main thesis conceptualises the autoimmune body as a modified and therefore poetic body. The symptoms of an autoimmune disease are understood as articulations of these changes that can be read as signs of a starting transformation of the body into a poetical means of world creation. The research methods draw on DADA art techniques, f. e. by employing chance as a co-experimenter. The outcome is a series of poems that reconstruct the autoimmune body as a transient poetical formation. New information emerges, leading to a gain of meaning on all levels – the individual, the cultural, the artistic and the medical level.

Date:

02.07.2022, 15:20

Bio

Barbara Macek is an author and artistic researcher. She studied psychology and Art & Science in Vienna. In 2018 she received the "Award of Excellence" of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science for her academic achievement. In 2019 the Society for Artistic Research awarded her with the “Prize for Excellent RC Exposition” for her pain study. In the same year her book "Lykanthropus erythematosus" on autoimmune diseases was published. Currently she is a fellow (DOC) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and investigates autoimmunity as a PhD-candidate at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Photo: Barbara Macek

Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew

Keynote 'Loss and the Possibility of Imagining a Different 'We' '

Abstract

This keynote presentation extends the conversation on loss and mourning as a resilient power of the social to confront ongoing economic and socio-political challenges. Uncertainties generated through the ongoing economic and socio-political tensions urge the necessity to think of a different ‘we’, or “wes”. Such a move requires adapting new languages, knowledge, and relationships that do not necessarily follow the mainstream language of politics. What could be the role of artistic research in responding to such global obligations? What layers of responsibility, response-ability, and responsiveness are required from artist-researchers in the process? How can ‘we’ (remains as a question) maintain respectful relations between humans, non-humans, and nature to share desires? By activating such questions, this keynote presentation emphasizes the power of the ‘social’ through the ongoing socio-political and environmental challenges. By further exploring the notion and practices of loss, mourning, and radical empathy, the keynote presentation will explore productive ways of thinking, understanding, and engagement with the conceptions of life, community, and knowledge.

Date:

02.07.2022, 18:00

Bio

Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew is a visual artist and an Assistant Professor at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, Addis Ababa University. He has served as a Director of the Fine Arts and Design School for almost four years between 2012—2016. Berhanu organized and facilitated multiple local, continental and international collaborations, through which multiple educational, artistic, and research projects were realized. As an art teacher, Berhanu believes in the co-production of knowledge through the form of engaged pedagogy. Through his academic and institutional engagements, he has worked with multiple international institutions like; Wits School of the Arts, Berlin Art Academy, Institute for Spatial Experiments, Utrecht School of the Arts, Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts, Lucerne School of Art and Design and Zurich University. His artistic practices mainly focus on the subject of Dispossession. He is currently working on an ongoing research project that experiments with the notions and practice of Care and Mourning—as aesthetic, pedagogical, and political elements—in precarious socio-political conditions. His creative production process mainly follows research/process-based engagements outside studio environments. Berhanu has participated in many international art festivals, exhibitions, and conferences. Currently, Berhanu is a Ph.D. In-practice candidate at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

Bibiana Bragagnolo

Aos Olhos da Areia: Order and Disorder as the Main Force of Artistic Creation

Abstract

The artistic project Aos olhos da areia makes reference to a Gutiérrez’s aphorism: “The sand moves itself in an apparently disordered way. But this state does not proceed from the sand itself but from a rational proposition. In fact, order and disorder are the same in the eyes of the sand” (2020, p. 26). The idea of this project is to investigate order and disorder, through the concept of declassification, in canonic works from the pianistic repertoire, trying to enlarge the territorial limits of the selected works, amplifying the interferences and the role of the performer. The project has already 4 experiments derived from the piano piece La neige danse by Claude Debussy. As the concept of declassification is applied each new version ends up to be a little bit more distant to the initial stimulus from the piece’s score. In this presentation we will focus on two of these artistic objects. The first one, Aos olhos da areia 1.3, presents a musical performance where Debussy’s piece is disorganized from its articulation with improvisation and the dialogue with memories from other pieces, generating a new configuration of musical objects that are played by a piano and trombone duo. The second artistic object shown in this research, Aos olhos da areia 1.4, presents that first recording (1.3) after the interference of other artists from dance, visual arts and audiovisual, amplifying even more the idea of “order” and “disorder”. These artistic results exemplify the application of some declassificatory tools that end up to foment the questioning of the hierarchies between work versus improvisation, composer versus performer and, as a consequence, of the concepts of authorship, fidelity and style. In these experiments, the performer puts him/herself as a creative and critical agent, historically and socially situated, capable to propose and defend artistic practices beyond the Eurocentric ones.

Abstract

Sound is a physical force that connects everything it its omnidirectional path. The term psychoacoustics names a set of relationships between sound, space, and perception focusing on the formal physics of hearing, as sound interacts with an environment. It entails the study of sonic phenomena as it meets, interacts with, and is transformed by encounters with objects, structures and other bodies across time and space. Camille Norment coined the term cultural psychoacoustics as a dynamic aesthetic and conceptual framework to contextualilze her investigation of socio-cultural phenomena through the sonic. Here, the sonic is not only sound heard, but sound felt, and even imagined. Similarly probing the encounters, interactions, and transformations of bodies and experiences, cultural psychoacoustics augments the notions of time and space to include conceptual dimensions such as historical time and global zeitgeist. Human and non-human bodies are activated through the resonance of narrative discourses that emerge between the present and a multiplicity of concurrent histories. Camille Norment’s artwork manifests through forms including architectonic sound installation, intelligent sound systems,sculpture, drawing, recording releases, and live performance. These artworks are all united by a preoccupation with form and space to challenge perception, the physical body of the viewer, and socio-cultural narratives. Uncanny, electronically sensorial, metaphysical, kinetic, tactile, and generative systems touch, extend, and connect human and non-human bodies across time and space. Engaging experiences are created from the relationship between the sonic object/space and the body of the visitor as a physical and psychological participant in artworks that are both cognitive and somatic. Norment’s performance works place a particular focus on the agency of improvisation, ethics, and democracy in attempts to level conventional vertical hierarchies of composer, conductor, musician, and audience to more horizontal waveform dynamics in which the roles are blurred, shared, and require attentive participation. In-keeping with her other body of works, the performance compositions include an engagement with dynamics as enabled by hybrid improvisational compositions, the tactile force of low frequency bass sound felt through the body of the audience, and the blurring of performative roles through solo, collaborative, and choral works. The resonant frequency of the performance venue – its natural “voice” – is engaged as a dynamic collaborator through generative feedback – a sound most typically censored. Alongside her iconic glass armonica, the “uncontrollable” voice of feedback is used as staple in Norment’s performance instrumentation, and the natural mix of analog and electronic voices, human and generative systems narrate feedback loops of experience through musical sonic languages.

Date:

01.07.2022, 18:30

Bio

Working with, and through sound in forms including installation, performance, and composition, Camille Norment utilizes the notion of cultural psychoacoustics as both an aesthetic and conceptual framework. She defines this term as the investigation of socio-cultural phenomena through sound and music - particularly instances of sonic and social dissonance. The work is occupied with the coexistence of sonic perceptual experience as socio-cultural coded semiotic frameworks, and the speculative re-listening of sound objects to forge emancipatory spaces. Current investigations continue the exploration of feedback in relation to revolution, evolution, power structures, and ‘posthuman’ systems. Amongst her extensive international exhibition, permanent public artworks, and performance credits, Norment’s commissioned solo project for the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea opens March 2022. She represented Norway in the 56th Venice Biennial (2015) and has also presented at the Kuchi-Muziris Biennial, MOMA, SFMOMA, the New York Armory, and Ultima Contempory Music Festival.

Caroline Gatt

Prelude to a Method: Interdisciplinary Experiments Around (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics

Abstract

In this practical workshop, we invite participants from any field to experience interventions currently being developed for use with musical ensembles in a 4-year interdisciplinary project entitled ‘(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics’. In that project, we – an artistic researcher in music, an anthropologist, and a philosopher -- plan to research the improvisatory foundations of ethical behavior and processes across a range of human activity. The heart of the project is a series of ‘Lab’ sessions with live musical ensembles; these offer case studies for examining and experimenting with key ethical phenomena such as agency, habituation, and value-formation. Participants will work with us through a collage of performative exercises and simple scores inspired by artists and scholars such as Augusto Boal, Lawrence and Anna Halprin, Ben Spatz, and Pauline Oliveros. These are meant to bring specific ethical issues to the surface through practice. The session will be documented with video. We will then watch the documentation together and discuss how the work responds to questions such as: - (How) do interventions that increase the visibility of practical ethics affect participants’ aesthetic values, and vice versa? - (How) is the experience of being a self amongst others altered in the act of collaborative improvisation? - What aspects of listening – to both the human and other-than-human – in improvisational practice are conducive to (individual and collective) ethical goals? The workshop will help us weave together our working-processes-in-progress into a method for the musical Lab sessions (Mend); offer participants a condensed (pre)view of a topic of wide interdisciplinary scope (Blend); and show Artistic Research’s unique pragmatic potential for ethical inquiry (Attend).

Date:

03.07.2022, 10:00

with:

Christopher A. Williams

Joshua Bergamin

Bio

Caroline Gatt is Senior Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, University of Graz and Co-Investigator on the project ‘(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics’ funded by the Austrian Science Fund. Gatt is an anthropologist and performer focusing on ontological politics, laboratory theater and song, co-design, and collaborative processes. Her recent publications include ‘From an Ethics of Estrangement to an Anthropology in Life’, an illuminated video essay in *The Journal of Embodied Research* (2021), 'Breathing Beyond Embodiment: Exploring Emergence, Griving, and Song in Laboratory Theatre' (*Body and Society* 2020), 'An Ethnography of Global Environmentalism: Becoming Friends of the Earth' (2018) and the forthcoming special section of *American* *Anthropologist* 'Knowing by Singing: Ontological Politics, Logocentrism, and the Other-Than-Human'.

Casper Schipper

Research Catalogue: A User Introduction to the Versatile and Most Used Online Platform for Artistic Research

Abstract

Introduction and Moderation | Johan A. Haarberg Research Catalogue: A User Introduction to the Versatile and Most Used Online Platform for Artistic Research Presenters: Casper Schipper, Luc Döbereiner and Tero Heikkinen, RC Admin Officers; Moderator: Johan A Haarberg, SAR Executive Officer The Research Catalogue (RC) functions as a platform for the dissemination of peer-reviewed content and publications, for student’s presentation of work and the assessment of such work – as well as of self-published research outcomes. The Research Catalogue is provided by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR). RC enables students, artists and researchers to deviate from the standard format of academic presentations, journal articles and/or research repositories: Because images and sounds are not subordinate to, but fundamentally on a par with the text; Because of the opportunity provided to break out of the linear narrative structure; Because it facilities the option for a continuous (and collaborative) research activity from notation/documenting research processes and initial outcomes to fully elaborated publications. The RC offers an online platform in which sound, images, video and text can be combined in an integrated format for presentation, and in which the visual disposition and the focus on different media formats can be decided by the author herself/himself. Use of the RC is free of charge for all individual researchers. In this session, the RC Team will offer a basic introduction to the use of this platform and demonstrate some of its potential for documenting research processes and outcomes, including the different RC exposition editors and how to use your personal media repository, which will be created when you register as a full user at the RC.

Date:

02.07.2022, 16:10

with:

Luc Döbereiner

Tero Heikkinen

Christina Lammer

Blautöne: Shades of Blue

Abstract

Overexposed 16 mm film inspired the idea to conduct research on vulnerability and care by means of handmade film. Drawing on sensory ethnographic material that has been collected in the surgical operating theater in order to analyze the gestures of surgeons, operations on the human body shall be compared with those on the skin of film. Probing in-depth. For this cyanotype, a contact printing process with the negative exposed in direct contact with the sensitive emulsion, is used with the intention to interact with the body of film. Sunlight, water and a couple of non-toxic chemicals are the basic ingredients of this low-tech photographic process. The ways of how digital images (negatives) are combined with analog processing throw light on entirely different practices of how human and non-human bodies can be treated with care. Invasiveness is among the questions which shall be discussed with the blue prints at hand.

Date:

02.07.2022, 14:50

Bio

Christina Lammer is a research sociologist, filmmaker and lecturer based in Vienna. Her work combines sensory ethnography with video, performance and body art in hospitals and clinics to focus on embodied emotion and sensory interaction between patients and physicians during the course of medical treatment. Her most recent books: Performing Surgery (2018), Moving Faces (2015), Anatomy Lessons (2013), edited together with Artur Zmijewski, and Empathography (2012, all Löcker Verlag, Vienna). Lammer holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Vienna.

www.corporealities.org

Photo: Christina Lammer

Christine Reeh-Peters

Fabulation for Future - How to Create an International Committee to Save the Earth through Speculative Fabulation

Abstract

We are living in a time of multiple crises confronting the beginning consequences of the Anthropocene. The climate change in convergence with the new corona virus has been provoking controversial debates about the future on earth. The sudden visibility of a far-reaching interrelatedness between biosphere, ecosphere, and technosphere has not only led to a change in collective consciousness about our ontological condition and interdependence, but also to a concrete shift of our physical lives into the digital. To find out how we can meet these current ethical and ecological challenges with artistic-philosophical means Christine Reeh-Peters and Fee Altmann have conceived Fabulation for Future, an artistic research initiative starting in September 2021 with a kick-off international Summer School at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF. This 9-days online event has been the reflection ground to develop projects for an online exhibition to open in May 2022. The projects artistic research process designs a collective critical rethinking of the human condition aiming for artistic ways to create post-anthropocentric worldviews for a sustainable future on earth, where human and non-human species coexist. Reimagining such a future through artistic research methods can only happen by involving diverse perspectives and agencies. The sustainable goal of Fabulation for Future is thus to build a worldwide sympoietic network of thinkers, artists and filmmakers. This network is conceived as collectively acting in form of a fictive International Committee to Save the Earth through Speculative Fabulation while preparing discourses, artistic actions, fabulative concepts, speculative narratives and videos to be digitally presented. Christine and Fee will introduce the visual framing as well as underlying philosophical concepts to set up the committee and stage a “Speech to the fictive International Committee to Save the Earth through Speculative Fabulation.” www.fabulationforfuture.net

Date:

03.07.2022, 11:40

with:

Fee Altmann

Bio

Christine Reeh-Peters is Junior Professor for Theory and Practice of Artistic Research in Digital Media at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, member of the Institute of Artistic Research. Diploma in Film direction at the Lisbon Film School ESTC. M.A. and PhD in Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Lisbon. Head of several international conferences for philosophy and film. Co-editor of two anthologies on film and philosophy at CSP (2017) and Brill Publishing (2021); Author of "Being and Film" (2021). Film director of 10 artistic documentaries (www.crim-productions.com).

Photo: Christine Reeh-Peters & Fee Altmann

Christopher A. Williams

Prelude to a Method: Interdisciplinary Experiments Around (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics

Abstract

Date:

03.07.2022, 10:00

with:

Caroline Gatt

Joshua Bergamin

Bio

Christopher A. Williams (1981, San Diego) makes and researches (mostly) experimental music. From 2021-2025 he will lead the research project "(Musical) Improvisation and Ethics" (Austrian Science Fund ZK 93) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. As a composer and contrabassist, Williams' work runs the gamut from chamber music, improvisation, and radio art to collaborations with dancers, sound artists, and visual artists. His artistic research takes the forms of both conventional academic publications and practice-based multimedia projects.

Photo: Karin Lernbeiss

Claire Waffel

Sensing the Border: Between Water and Land

Abstract

Phenomena such as rising sea levels can feel like distant concerns, yet they are an increasingly palpable reality as climate change unfolds across the planet and connects seemingly unrelated places. The lecture performance ‘Sensing the Border: Between Water and Land’ assists in conceptualising and embodying big bodies of water and how they connect phenomena over space and time, and across species boundaries by focusing in on their structures of containment. The lecture performance draws attention to an inconspicuous water containment infrastructure in a small village on the Stettin Lagoon. The sheet pile wall in Mönkebude protects its inhabitants against floods, an increasing concern with incremental sea level rise. As an often-overlooked object in the landscape, the wall helps articulate and record current as well as anticipated water movements of the body it is meant to contain. Zooming in on this structure in close-up and macro photographic images, the wall’s materiality and structure become a platform to investigate and observe the different life forms that assemble on and around it and that are, in some cases, hindered or even sustained by the wall. Moisture and weather conditions affect it unevenly, revealing lively, diverse, wide-ranging and often unnoticed multispecies assemblages. Weaving together varying scale views of the wall and what these in turn reveal, the lecture attempts to unite different types of knowledge in telling the story of this infrastructure and place. As the narration unfolds both in text and image, the wall transmutes into a vibrant object and agent, telling both the story of the containment and transgressive movements and mutations of bodies of water.

Date:

02.07.2022, 10:20

Bio

Claire Waffel is a visual artist working across photography, video and installation. Currently she is a doctoral student at Bauhaus-University in Weimar and an ELES Research Fellow. Her research focuses on spatial practice as a way of addressing and engaging communities affected by sea level rise. Through compiling different methodologies into a visual language, the research aims to reveal the profound relationships between communities, architecture, politics and climate change. This is a first iteration of a longer collaboration with the curator and cultural researcher Caroline Ektander.

Photo: Claire Waffel

Cordula Daus

Bio

Danny Butt

Artistic Research in the Asia Pacific: Renewing Exchange

Abstract

Working in South East Asia and Indonesia, the trajectories of artistic research are hard to discern. European policy definitions of research such as in the Frascati manual do not have the same weight in non-OECD countries, and traditions of non-University research are less clear, and so the formats and genres of research are more commonly bureaucratically received in the context of development than debated for their relevance to local practices of knowledge. In this presentation, we discuss the histories that led to the Asia Pacific Artistic Research Network, which held its inaugural meeting in Yogyakarta in 2019. Reflecting on institutional dynamics and diverse community perspectives in the region, we consider how the network as a practice-led enquiry itself can attend to emergent local creative practices of scholarship, inside and outside the academy.

Date:

01.07.2022, 16:00

with:

Kurniawan Adi Saputro

Bio

Dr. Danny Butt is Associate Director (Research) at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, where he is also Graduate Research Convenor for Design and Social Practice.

Photo: Danny Butt

Dean Hughes

Artist Pedagogy Research Group

Abstract

Introduction and Moderation | Jaana Erkkilä-Hill, Michaela Glanz What are the qualities that artists bring to teaching, and what can we learn by looking across the boundaries that separate fields of artistic education? In introducing the aims of the Artists Pedagogy research group this session will expand on these questions and connect them to the wider interested of the group. The group sets out to bring together researchers focused on artists’ pedagogies, in its broadest understanding, to encompass music, dance, theatre, performance and art making. It welcomes research focused on different learning environments including academies, universities, and alternative art schools. It asks what it means for artists to teach artists; how different forms of art are taught; how they might be taught; why they are taught in those ways; and how can artistic research help us to develop new understandings of artists pedagogies?

Date:

01.07.2022, 14:30

with:

Magnus Quaife

Bio

Dean Hughes is an artist and academic leader. His work been included in important survey exhibitions such as Hayward Galleries 5 yearly British Art Show, the Saatchi Galleries Newspeak: British Art Now, and EAST international. Solo exhibitions include Laure Genillard Gallery, London, Gian Carla Zanutti, Milan, Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco, Dick Smith Gallery, London, Cairn, Pittenweem. Formerly Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at MMU and Head of the School of Art at Edinburgh College of Art. He is Professor of Fine Art and Deputy Faculty Pro Vice Chancellor for Arts, Design and Social Sciences at Northumbria University. He was educated at Chelsea College of Art and Design.

Dorie Millerson

Thinking/Sinking Into the Folds of Craft and the Digital Turn

Abstract

A sense of both the precariousness and promise of craft practice gained momentum during the pandemic. Digital reliance, a convenience before the crisis, became a necessity during enforced social isolation. Our current artistic research project, Thinking Through Craft and the Digital Turn, explores the synergies between craft and digital methodologies within Canadian post-secondary educational institutions. We are seeking to understand both the current and historical narratives that tell the story of craft's relationship with and to digital tools, processes and networks. Can interdisciplinarity honour specific histories and hard-won knowledge as it melds, in particular craft and digitality? To that end, we have created an extended reality visualization of historical and personal stories we have gathered from students and educators. We seek to convey the complexity of the relationship between craft and digitality as expressed through the data we have gathered. Layered LIDAR (light detection and ranging) measurements of locations in Canada and swaths of digital textiles are used to envision a landscape that envelops the viewer and allows a connection and alternate understanding of the gathered narratives. There has long been philosophical attention paid to the necessary complicity of materiality and imagining, however, rather than citing canonical references we look to the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude as a guiding light in this metaverse encounter. Their practice of using textile to transform landscape has helped us to envision ways of wrapping but also creating elaborate folds where previously little-known histories wait to be discovered. The perceptual experience of encountering stories, facts and objects through immersion encourages alternative hierarchies of knowledge acquisition. We seek to exceed the bounds of convention by communicating affect and sensation along with data, as we blend craft, artistic research, and digital space.

Date:

Introduction and Moderation | Jaana Erkkilä-Hill, Michaela Glanz How is language-based artistic research? How to enable connections and affinities between researchers? How to establish shared frames of reference? Since 2019, this Language-based Artistic Research Special Interest Group has evolved through various activities including Practice Sharing (2020), a gathering of over 70 online examples of language-based practices from diverse fields such as visual arts, performance, film, theatre, music, choreography and literature; and Affinities and Urgencies (2021/22), two online events that comprised sessions facilitated by different groups or individuals identifying constellations of interest and focus within this expanding field of research practice. This live and in-person session during the SAR conference continues along these lines moving towards a more distributed organisation of the Special Interest Group. We will share recent activities, introduce ‘thematic nodes’ and engage with a wider community of artistic researchers, including a second call for ‘Practice Sharing’. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/835089/835129

Date:

01.07.2022, 14:30

with:

Alexander Damianisch

Cordula Daus

Lena Séraphin

Tender Dialogues: Suspending Artistic Research Writing as Meaning-Making

Abstract

This proposition critically assesses artistic research writing as meaning-making and suggests suspension of end results in favour of collaborative thought processes. The Tender Dialogues workshop is inspired by the writings of Georges Perec and his book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris that acknowledges overlooked phenomena in a Parisian square in 1974. The aim is to further develop Perec’s writing experiment by collectively making a non-conclusive inventory of public space, rather than referencing the book. The workshop devices observational writing on civic space. It consists of conversations, readings and writings that challenge language as representation. A procedural approach disentangles writing from singular perspectives and suspends writing from meaning making by an epistemic inquiry that advances open-minded dialogue. The writing bridges the corporeal and cerebral and arrives at circumventing isolated objects and thus lacks control of semantic appearances. In this 180min workshop, we will together test writing in public space beginning with a prompt outlining the role of a sole writer by noting singular words about phenomena in our field of vision. From there we continue to write as a group, a collective that decides on a spatial score for the writers on site, and the observational writing is tested on behalf of bodily perception and sensation. The third prompt continues to be based on bodily awareness, but the writers now move and write simultaneously in a pattern that is collectively decided on. This third writing prompt rejects naming and nouns and is inspired by quantum theory. Each of the three writing sessions is merged with readings and discussions about the experiences of writing and the diverse textual qualities buoyed by a procedural approach. The prompts demonstrate how writing has capacities for forming affinities, how writing can be a collective attempt and therefore attend to reflective collaboration.

Date:

02.07.2022, 10:00

with:

Lena Séraphin

Bio

Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University. Emma was a co-researcher on the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014–2017). She is co-founder of the Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group on Language-based Artistic Research. Emma is currently co-editing a Special Issue of Phenomenology & Practice on ‘Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research’. Her writing is published in On Not Knowing: How Artists Think; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, and The Yes of the No.

Emma Cocker

Language-Based Artistic Research Group

Abstract

Date:

01.07.2022, 14:30

with:

Alexander Damianisch

Cordula Daus

Lena Séraphin

Tender Dialogues: Suspending Artistic Research Writing as Meaning-Making

Abstract

Date:

Gerriet K. Sharma

Spatial Aesthetics and Artificial Environments

Abstract

Introduction and Moderation | Jaana Erkkilä-Hill, Michaela Glanz In this Special Interest Group we want to intersect different practices and discourses as heterogeneous but complementary articulations of ‘space’, that address, operate on and contribute, in different ways and capacities, to the transformation of the contemporary environment and its challenges: the social, the infrastructural, the technological, the sensory, the virtual, the built and the unbuilt. The SIG’s objectives are: - Understanding spatial models as fundamental narratives of the status quo of our societies - Utilizing spatiality as a parameter in cultural production (e.g. composition, performance, sciences, journalism) - Understanding the Arts as polyvalent representations of space(s) - Developing personal research approaches in and with spaces. We will give an introduction to the SIG and its objectives, followed by examples of members' work or collaborations within the SIG and an open invitation to and discussion of future subjects and activities, collaborations and practical SIG structures. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1108448/1108449

Date:

01.07.2022, 13:00

with:

Martin Thiering

Bio

Dr. art. Gerriet K. Sharma is a composer, sound artist and artistic researcher in spatial practices. Edgard Varèse guest professor at Elektronisches Studio TU Berlin 17/18. Publications in international journals and books on spatial practices and sound - “Aural Sculpturality. Spatio-temporal Phenomena within Auditive Media Techniques” published by ZKM in 2019. His binaural spatial sound model (ssm) firniss redux was published by mille plateaux in 2020 and is part of the lumbung radio project at documenta 15. Initiator of the Special Interest Group “Spatial Aesthetics and Artificial Environments” and co-founder of the “Lab for Spatial Aesthetics in Sound” (spaes) at Funkhaus Berlin in 2020.

Guy Livingston

**ONLINE** Imposing/Inviting: Gestural Indications for Silence in Beethoven’s Last Piano Sonata

Abstract

This presentation will examine silence in classical music, specifically using Beethoven’s last piano sonata as an example. This may suggest new ideas about gestural and performative silence. The context is exclusively concert halls, and live performances. This topic specifically relates to the 'attending to' or 'attending with' thematics of the 13th conference. Silence is (since Covid) an acknowledged tool for societal and artistic reflection. But also poorly understood. My research on the visual embodiments of silence attempts to confront long-term assumptions about musical silence, whether in Beethoven or contemporary sound art. Much like Cage’s 4”33’, Beethoven’s last sonata is a masterwork, a black box, a classic, sometimes a cliché. Unlike Cage’s piece, it’s not at all about silence or noise; it’s a daring work about rhythm, variation, texture, and power — certainly in my personal experience as a performer. I studied this sonata with the Russian pianist Alexander Edelman, who himself had studied it with Heinrich Neuhaus, and have performed it many times. I focus on the two dramatic silences which occur during the opening fanfare, setting the stage for the remaining half-hour of non-silence. These silences have the character of ritual, and are symbiotic with the rituals of a large and attentive audience. The performers whose gestures I analyze are virtuosi, soloists, trying to be different, but also anchored in the classical tradition, with its rules and expectations. A critical re-evaluation of these traditions might start with the simplest building block of an eighth-note rest. Looking-at (and I use the gerund advisedly) rather than listening-through the silences in these interpretations is intriguing, and could suggest that the markers for silence are more important in these interpretations than the silences themselves, offering a potentially disruptive function to the classical tradition that has fostered them.

Date:

02.07.2022, 10:20

Bio

Guy Livingston is a pianist and audio-artist with a strong interest in twentieth-century avant-gardes. He studied architecture and music at Yale University, and piano at the New England Conservatory. Subsequently Livingston lived in Paris where he co-founded the Paris New Music Review. As a pianist he has commissioned over 200 new works, and performed around the globe. His radio documentaries have been broadcast on ABC, Lyric fm, ConcertZender and National Public Radio. Currently he is pursuing his PhD at the University of Leiden on the topic of ‘markers for musical silence’.

Hakeem Adam

**CANCELED** In Response to the Archive - Researching Post Colonial Identity through Digital Media

Abstract

**CANCELED** The African finds themself in a peculiar state of metamorphosis in the post-colony, where the general idea of who you are and why you matter is still defined externally and reinforced through instruments of power. In an attempt to understand how this identity metamorphosis occurs and functions, I engage in research into archival material relating to Ghanaian Identity, manifesting as Ghana Airways is an artistic project examining the construction of Post-Colonial identity and instance of hypernationalism in Ghana. How do we design appropriate or applicable methods for researching postcolonial identities through archival material, and base them on specific instances of sensibilities, rather than constricting them to existing academic or ethnographic models? Using sound as medium, I engage in a narration of one possible dimension of Ghanaian identity through a sculptural assemblage. The work, which involves various transpositions of the archive into sound, offers insight into the malleability of material (physical or ephemeral) via digital media. This presentation reveals the techniques and insight involved in interfacing the archive in narrative driven work.

Date:

03.07.2022, 10:50

Bio

Hakeem Adam is a Ghanaian digital artist and freelance arts and culture writer exploring the power of narrative. He is the founder and creative director of DANDANO, a Pan-African cultural platform for African film and music criticism and documentation. Hakeem has exhibited internationally at the CHALE WOTE Street Art Festival in Accra, Ghana ; Many Studios in Glasgow, Scotland ; Okay Space in New York, USA (2018); SPACE10 in Copenhagen, Denmark (2019); Abandon Normal Device (2021); and York Mediale (2021). He is currently pursuing a MA in Digital Media from the University of the Arts, Bremen.

Photo: Hakeem Adam

Henk Borgdorff

Ten Years with the Journal for Artistic Research: Impact and Challenges

Abstract

Introductions by Henk Borgdorff, Michael Schwab and members of the JAR Editorial Board JAR is looking back on ten years of activity with 25 issues and just under 150 published expositions. Based on the development of the Research Catalogue (RC) as a unique versatile online platform for presenting artistic research outcomes, JAR pioneered the novel format of expositions. The journal has developed rigorous policies and peer-review processes making it the first online, peer-reviewed journal within this field that engages with artistic articulations. JAR is published by the Society for Artistic research (SAR) initiated by Florian Dombois (SAR’s first President), Henk Borgdorff (Member of the JAR Editorial Board 2011-2015 and SAR’s fourth President) and Michael Schwab (JAR Editor in Chief from the start onwards). Over these last ten years, JAR has been driven by an increasingly international editorial board seeking to support artists in finding their own articulations as researchers, in terms of media use, format as well as languages leading to a set of new challenges for the next decade. During this session, Henk Borgdorff will present his view on JAR and the impact it has had on the field of artistic research and beyond. Michael Schwab and other members of the current editorial board will introduce their current work and some of the challenges they see for the journal in the future.

Date:

02.07.2022, 14:30

with:

Michael Schwab

Bio

Henk Borgdorff is emeritus professor of Research in the Arts and former Academic Director of the Academy of Creative and Performing Art, Leiden University, and until December 2020 professor (‘lector’) at the Royal Conservatoire, University of the Arts, The Hague. He was professor in Art Theory and Research at the Amsterdam School of the Arts (until 2010), and visiting professor in Aesthetics at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at the University of Gothenburg (until 2013). Borgdorff served as editor of the Journal for Artistic Research (until 2015), and as president of the Society for Artistic Research (2015-2019). His has published widely on the theoretical and political rationale of research in the arts. A selection is published as The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia (Leiden University Press 2012). See his profile page on the Research Catalogue: www.researchcatalogue.net.

Irati Irulegi

What’s Behind that Silence?

Abstract

Date:

02.07.2022, 10:50

with:

Ramon Parramon

Anna Recsens

Ivan C. H. Liu

Complexity, Environment, and Future Aesthetics

Abstract

We are interested in the emergence of the complex relation between nature, humanity and technology through a series of new media art works. In this presentation, we present three experimental works with a variety of new media including kinetics, sound synthesis, fluid, interactive technology and living plants to reveal these hidden messages. The first work, The Rice-Pile Model, is based on the physics model Sand/Rice-Pile Model for studying complex critical phenomena such as avalanches. We translate the miniature motion of sliding pills into loud trembling sounds on-the-fly with the help of motion capture and granular sound synthesis. The kinetic sound installation oscillates the senses of the viewers between the microscopic and the macroscopic world. While the audience are captivated in the “live experiment” in front of them, it is a reminder that miniature changes can trigger a drastic event at a much larger system scale like many issues the humanity faces today. The second work Chthulucene proposes and looks for a foundation of future aesthetics based on the notion of “second nature” that incorporates industrial byproducts/waste as the part of the natural world. The creative process involves feed living plants with metal-polluted water of various concentrations to look for the appearance that co-live with the pollution. The third work Nirvana creates an experiential conflict for the viewers, evoking introspection. In Buddhism, “Nirvana” is an ultimate state in which Buddhists aim to achieve through a life-long practice. If we take the Buddhism practice as a metaphor for the continuous pursue of more advance technology and better living, then what will the Nirvana be like for us? The waterfall installation constructed with recycled waste reminds the viewer of natural landscapes, and yet the visual image and colors suggest something completely opposite.

Date:

02.07.2022, 11:40

Bio

Ivan is an artist and a researcher. He has a strong background in science, trained as a physicist at the Max-Planck Institute (Germany) and Imperial College London (UK). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Applied Arts at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, and heads the Future Narratives Lab. His current works experiment new forms of narrative to address future and contemporary issues that arise as human civilization advances.

Photo: Ivan Liu

Işıl Eğrikavuk

Garden: A Living Research Space on Inclusive Ecology and Care Work in Academia

Abstract

In their article titled "The future of ecology is collaborative, inclusive and deconstructs biases", researchers Ramirez, K.S., Berhe, A.A., Burt, J. et al. argue that “the field of ecology continues to struggle with great imbalances. Women and people of colour remain chronically underrepresented in ecology faculty positions, and within academia they are less likely to receive awards and funding, be cited, give plenaries, or serve on editorial boards” (Ramirez, Berhe, Burt, et al., 2018). I argue that this is the case also in many art universities in Europe. My research project, which I recently started as a research group with students at the UdK aims to create a space within the media and communication faculty of UdK, where I currently work at. The garden is a framework which introduces the idea of inclusive ecology, a concept that foresees that there are entire dimensions of ecology that are not represented. We ask: how can we create an inclusive research space that mends the the gender-biased, patriarchal, colonial and mono cultural representations of care? How can the Garden embrace and foster such forms of care and inclusivity to design a different future? Garden will literally be a space which blends different genres and disciplines: a green architectural space where students can experiment on ideas of inclusive ecology, an research space, in which we will hold a year around lecture series on the topics mentioned above, and a space for artistic expression. The garden is both a physical and a metaphorical space for re-thinking our positions and interconnectedness to each-other, to less visible living beings and to the world by critically raising the questions above and practicing them.

Date:

03.07.2022, 10:50

Bio

Işıl Eğrikavuk (PhD) is an artist and academic, whose research specializes in performance, dialogue-based art and artistic research. She has an MFA from School of The Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD from Istanbul Bilgi University. She works as a faculty member at Berlin University of Arts (UdK) since 2017. She has exhibited and performed at various international exhibitions including Chicago Architecture Biennial,Chicago; Die Buehne, Berlin; Block Universe, London; Lenbachhaus Museum, Munich; Salt Galata&Ulus, 11th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah; Egeran Gallery, Istanbul; 11th Istanbul Biennial.

Photo: Işıl Eğrikavuk

The time spent online during the pandemic has turned the attention not only to the possibilities of digitalization, but also the incomputable aspects of face-to-face communication or the experience of different places, atmospheres, bodily sensations. In our presentation we do not want to confront the immediate, “natural” or “real” world with technology and virtual reality, but rather explore the intersections between the physical and virtual worlds focusing on the “seams” of (seamless) human-computer interaction (Eva Hornecker, Shane Denson). Facing a new digital imagery, as presented e.g. in James Bridle's “New Aesthetic”, combining Kelly Goeller's “pixel” sculptures, military camouflage technology or parametric design, we propose to turn to the profound changes in perception itself: the transgression the iconic image in the sense of a 2-D representation towards “spacial” images which include different perspectives, layers and movements and are produced not only by operations connected to the (model of a) camera, but by scanning (in German: tasten), detecting, sensing. As in the case of “The New Aesthetic” our argumentation relies on the images or visual experiments of Yuval Levi, architect and visual researcher, but – in contrast to Bridle – also on the theoretical work of Katerina Krtilova, media theorist and philosopher, developed in the 1-dimensional medium of writing (Vilém Flusser) – and constant feed-back loops between both approaches. Continuing a dialogue which has started in the context of our contribution to the “Open Secret” online project of the KW Berlin entitled “Peripheral Vision”, we want to explore the different dimensions and perspectives offering a visual method, based in digital photography, and a terminological framework, based in media theory, proposing an “aesthetics of intersections”, performed in between images, spaces and writing.

Date:

02.07.2022, 15:20

with:

Yuval Levi

Bio

2021/2022, Dr. Katerina Krtilova is visiting professor at the Department for Media Studies at the University of Bonn. From 2018 she has been a researcher at the Zurich University of the Arts and coordinator of the PhD program “Epistemologies of Aesthetic Practices” (ETH, ZHdK, UZH). She has studied Media Studies and Philosophy in Prague and Regensburg and in 2017 defended her PhD on Vilém Flusser`s media philosophy (“Gesten des Denkens”) at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Photo: Yuval Levi

Kathleen Morris

Thinking/Sinking Into the Folds of Craft and the Digital Turn

Abstract

Date:

02.07.2022, 16:10

with:

Lynne Heller

Tricia Crivellaro Grenier

Dorie Millerson

Kiraṇ Kumār

Epistolary Ancestries

Date:

01.07.2022, 14:30

with:

Emma Cocker

Alexander Damianisch

Cordula Daus

Tender Dialogues: Suspending Artistic Research Writing as Meaning-Making

Abstract

Date:

02.07.2022, 10:00

with:

Emma Cocker

Bio

Lena Séraphin is a post doc researcher at the Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies, Åbo Akademi University. Her research Sharing Text studies collective writing in public space and publishing as a research practice. She holds an MA from Goldsmiths’ and a doctorate awarded the Aalto University Dissertation Award in 2018. Her dissertation The Don Quixote Complex and Investigations into Fictionality is based on witnessing an artist as an assembly of roles and exploring the double as a fictional device. She is co-founder of the SAR Special Interest Group on Language-based Artistic Research.

Lena Séraphin

Language-Based Artistic Research Group

Abstract

Date:

01.07.2022, 14:30

with:

Emma Cocker

Alexander Damianisch

Cordula Daus

Tender Dialogues: Suspending Artistic Research Writing as Meaning-Making

Abstract

Date:

02.07.2022, 10:00

with:

Emma Cocker

Bio

Leonhard Grond

Bio

Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond have worked collectively as a duo and in teams with others since 1999. Since October 2021, they have held the professorship for the PhD in Art Program at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Within their co-creative and process-oriented practice, they develop practice-led and theory-led artistic research, with a particular focus on the topic of dizziness (FWF-PEEK AR 224, FWF PEEK AR 598). With philosopher Karoline Feyertag, they co-edited the reader Dizziness—A Resource (2019, Sternberg Press). Their projects have been shown internationally, e.g., Centre Pompidou Paris, ÉCAL Lausanne, Himalayas Art Museum Shanghai, Kunsthaus Graz, mumok, Vienna, Tate Modern, London, Ujazdowski Castle CCA Warsaw, wien modern Festival, Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Photo: Anderwald + Grond

Luca C. Soudant

Trans*formative Thinking Through Sound: Artistic Research in Gender and Sound Beyond the Human

Abstract

This presentation verbally reflects on an ongoing artistic research practice that deals with sound, gender, power, spatiality and human-nonhuman entanglement. Sparked by a sound design for a less crunchy ‘lady-friendly’ crisp, the presented research inquires the relationship between gender and sound at human-nonhuman encounter through making and thinking. Drawing on queer theory, sound studies, and posthumanism, it aims to transcend essentialist, vision-focused and anthropocentric conceptualizations of gender and, as an insight gained from working with low-frequency sound waves, it reflects on sound as material-philosophically demonstrating human-nonhuman entanglement. The latter, as this presentation proposes, may encourage us to horizontalise hierarchies between the human and nonhuman. Finally, this presentation situates sonic thinking as a mode of trans*formative thinking: a process-oriented philosophy that aims to embrace the messy, queer ways of human-nonhuman entanglement, which characterises a vibrant space from which further artistic research can develop.

Date:

03.07.2022, 11:40

Bio

Luca Soudant (Maastricht, 1993) is a theorist, writer, artistic researcher, teacher and DJ (ADIË) based in Maastricht, The Netherlands. Their research is situated at the intersection of gender studies, posthumanist feminism and sound studies. They graduated from the research master Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and the practice-led master Critical Studies at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Currently, they teach Critical Studies at Maastricht Institute of Arts and Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, encouraging students to incorporate critical theory in their art and/or design practice.

Photo: Luca Soudant

Luc Döbereiner

Research Catalogue: A User Introduction to the Versatile and Most Used Online Platform for Artistic Research

Abstract

Date:

Marina Grzinic

Convivial Epistemologies

Abstract

Publishing Policies of the Journals on the Research Catalogue – JAR, JSS, RUUKKU, VIS and HUB Presented by members from each of the editorial boards Moderator: Johan A Haarberg, SAR The Research Catalogue (RC) provides the online platform for four peer-reviewed journals focusing on artistic research: JAR – https://www.jar-online.net/ JSS – Journal of Sonic Studies - https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portals?portal=13 RUUKKU – http://ruukku-journal.fi/en VIS – https://www.visjournal.nu/ HUB – Instituto de Investigação em Arte, Design e Sociedade is planning to soon launch a new journal on their RC portal partner platform. Members from the editorial boards on these five journals will present their publishing policies during this session. This should include topics such as selection and peer review procedures, format expectations (if any), editorial support before publication etc. There will also be opportunities to ask questions or raise other issues in relation to these policies.

Date:

03.07.2022, 10:00

Michael Schwab

Ten Years with the Journal for Artistic Research: Impact and Challenges

Abstract

Date:

02.07.2022, 14:30

with:

Henk Borgdorff

Bio

Michael Schwab (b. 1966) is a London-based artist and artistic researcher. With a degree in philosophy and a PhD in photography, Schwab has developed the notion of ‘exposition’ that links artistic freedom with academic criticality in support of what has been called the 'practice turn in contemporary theory'. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR).

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/?person=10953

Molly Joyce

Virtuosity of the Self

Abstract

Virtuosity of the Self will present how the disabled performer develops virtuosity unique to oneself, and how this process can serve disabled and nondisabled performers alike. The disabled body offers generative pathways to new movement and understanding regarding virtuosity. Additionally, virtuosity is conventionally understood as a fast, impressive embodiment grounded in ability rather than disability. Through incorporating literature from embodiment, psychology of the self, and disability studies (Kasnitz, 2020 and Honisch, 2018), a new and exciting potential in cultivating virtuosity unique to oneself will be revealed, utilizing examples from disabled dancers Marc Brew and Kayla Hamilton. Both dancers offer unique perspectives to approaching and executing virtuosity from disability, specifically Brew with physical acquirement of disability and Hamilton with vision impairment and questioning ocular importances. This will convey how virtuosity unique to oneself, that beyond comparison and in a lane of its own, is critical in moving virtuosity towards more inclusive and exciting potentials. The presentation responds to the “Blend” theme as it engages disabled dancers with my musical practice, specifically fostering reflective collaboration. The qualitative inquiry embraces “Verstehen” (primarily cognitive understanding of another) through my shared experience of disability with the case study dancers. This mutual empathy allows for an active, involved role to generate deeper insight through the research, and ultimately the interdisciplinary blending result from knowledge transfer. The presentation also contributes to the “Attend” theme in recalibrating historical hierarchies for virtuosic forms, as well as bringing attention to fragile and complex influences of disabled artists within contemporary frameworks. The content is part of an artistic research project in the Dr. Artium program between Graz and Zurich Universities of the Arts.

Date:

30.06.2022, 21:20

Bio

Molly Joyce was recently deemed one of the “most versatile, prolific and intriguing composers working under the vast new-music dome” by The Washington Post. Her music has additionally been described as “serene power” (New York Times) and written to “superb effect” (The Wire). Her work is concerned with disability as a creative source and she is a graduate of Juilliard, Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Yale, and holds an Advanced Certificate in Disability Studies from CUNY. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Dr. Artium program between Graz and Zurich Universities of the Arts.

Photo: Marc Brew (dancer); Kayla Hamilton (dancer)

Márcio André Silva Steuernagel

Bio

Márcio Steuernagel is a Brazilian composer, conductor, and artistic researcher – currently Artistic Doctoral Candidate at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, researching imperfection in music as a compositional and performative dimension. Steuernagel is Master in Music by the Federal University of Paraná, main conductor of the Federal University of Paraná Philharmonic Orchestra; Professor at the School of Music and Fine Arts of the State University of Paraná, conductor of the Ensemble Móbile, and a founding member of the Ensemble entreCompositores. He lives in Vienna.

Photo: Maria Frodl

Nick Laessing

Hydrogen Kitchen Workshop

Abstract

This workshop will take place on Saturday and Sunday from 10 - 13h.

Date:

with:

Irati Irulegi

Anna Recsens

Bio

Ramon Parramon. Artist, and cultural researcher. PhD in Fine Arts. Teach at the Universitat de Barcelona. He founded and leads Idensitat (1999 -). As director of this art project, he took part in different European cooperation projects: Who Cares? (2020-2022), Sounds of Our Cities (2019-2021), Participatory Art for Invisible Communities (2016-2018), ARTIZEN - European Initiative for Art and Citizens (2015-2016), and ECLECTIS (2013-2015).
Irati Irulegui, Curator and Idensitat coordinator Ana Recasens, Artist and Idensitat researcher

Photo: Ramon Parramon

Rebecca Collins

Parametres for Understanding Uncertainty (P4UU)

Abstract
Parameters for Understanding Uncertainty (P4UU) investigates how methodologies used in creative practice meet those in the physical sciences. The aim is to find innovative approaches to better communicate research processes involving invisible matter. P4UU combines research into existing art/science collaborations with a sonic inflection (e.g., Ars Electronica residencies at CERN, Geneva) with field research at laboratories where physical science experiments use sound technology for dark matter detection (e.g., the Canfranc Underground Laboratory and the Laboratory of Acoustics for the Detection of Astroparticles), to find unconventional research engagement strategies. Situated accounts of the aforementioned laboratories, a disused underground railway tunnel or below sea level, can provide new angles on often impenetrable methods of particle physicists. Field work in the form of site visits, interviews, autoethnographic writing and workshops inform the investigation. Creative-critical accounts and autoethnographic writing engage with what audio theorist Jonathan Sterne highlights as ‘the (cultural, political, environmental, aesthetic …) stakes of knowledge production’ (2012, 3-4 ellipsis in original) within sound studies research. A central tenet of P4UU is to think through how sound operates in the depths of its presentation, rather than as surface representation. P4UU builds on eco-feminist Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘situated knowledges’ (1988, 581 italics in original) by privileging reflexive engagement to attune to the acts of scientific experiments as experience using creative practice to make accounts of these activities. For the Mend Blend Attend SAR 2022 Conference Collins will share initial findings from the P4UU investigation as a means to consider how artistic research opens up possibilities for creative researchers within scientific industries. P4UU is funded by a Royal Society Edinburgh Saltire Early Career Fellowship award January 2022-2023.

Date:
02.07.2022, 10:50

Bio
Rebecca Collins is an award-winning artist and researcher. She works at the intersection between contemporary performance and sound studies. Her practice, grounded in specific sites or communities, investigates the relationships between social, political, and cultural phenomena. She is interested in how critical, fictional and performative interventions might cultivate attention towards our contemporary condition indicating potential levers for change. Rebecca is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Edinburgh College of Art where she is also Director of Research for the School of Art.

Photo: Rebecca Collins

Roelof van Wyk

Queer Picturing - a Performative Lecture: How to Develop an Arts Research Methodology by Queer Auto-Ethnographic Methods, Exploring the Affect of Shame During the Apartheid Years, 66-89.

Abstract
I was born in 1969. Born criminal, not yet a criminal, but born homosexual. My existence would be declared illegal, a sin and a disease with the Amendment of the Immorality Act of 1969 which also governed Apartheid’s inter-racial relations. The Atlas of Shame: Desire, Disgust and Difference is an artistic meditation on the Violence of Images. It is a lens on how images affect Queer Being; banal images, selling everyday products, selling heteronormative relations, selling whiteness, selling an aspirational world of hegemonic power and authority. This is a Visuality of Violence. Let me take you on a novel journey developing Criticality as a Methodology through Queer Storytelling, Poetic Inquiry and Critical Collage. Let me show you the Creative Muses of Artistic Knowing- Chance, Intuition, Serendipity, Synchronicity and Glitch–which can critically excavate the archive to unearth knowledge. Let me reconstruct the world queerly, not in pink but becoming, always flowing, of uncertainty as a productive way of being in the world. Let me demonstrate a systematic, consistent, critical, resilient and rigorous ‘way of working’ born in the black box of the artist’s studio. Let me invite thinkers, tinkers and technicians to advance a collective future of mending together—open-ended, unfinished and fragmented yet related and relatable, transmutable, transitional and transferable Artistic Knowledge. Let me be your Cartographer in the Atlas of Shame: Desire, Disgust and Difference. How can an Interdisciplinary Arts Research Practice illuminate the affective apparatus of the Apartheid regime on everyday life? How can an Arts Research Methodology mobilise memory with Auto-Ethnographic reflection, renewal and resilience? How can an Arts Practice become an Arts Research Practice irt the Frascati Manual–novel, creative, uncertain, systematic, reproducible–and satisfy the research objectives?

Date:
03.07.2022, 11:40

Bio
Van Wyk is a queer artist, researcher, architect and curator with an Architecture undergrad (B. Arch, cum laude). He has exhibited independently (2003-2021), as well as in the V&A Museum (London, 2011) and the Tate Modern (London, 2012) while completing a Masters in Visual Cultures (Cum Laude, 2013) at Goldsmiths University (London). In 2015 he programmed and produced the artist-led Johannesburg pavilion during the 56th Venice Biennale in Italy. In addition, he has guided various architecture and creative placemaking projects. He is completing a PhD by Creative Work at WITS in Johannesburg.

Photo: Roelof van Wyk

Rolf Hughes

Keynote 'Metabolising the Dead: The Politics of Energy'

Abstract
Rachel Armstrong & Rolf Hughes Department of Architecture | Faculty of Architecture, Campus Sint-Lucas, Ghent/Brussels, KU Leuven, Belgium The idea that life flows is an old concept, but what flows, and how it does so, remains the subject for conjecture. Heraclitus attributed the flow of life to an exchange for fire for all things (Barnes, 1982, p100), while William Bryant Logan attributed the miracle of the burning bush to the concept of metabolism, which enables life to burn without being consumed by its flame (Logan, 2007, p2). Two and a half millennia after Heraclitus, we continue to debate what makes the world lively—invariably returning to the concept of some kind of energy. The industrial era has brought increasing access to new, concentrated sources of energy—from mining coal to burning wood, gas and crude oil. The West fully exploits power. Capitalism’s appetite to consume energy sources beyond what nature provides in a sustainable cycle, not only bestows a deluded sense of omnipotence, but fuels a tendency to innovate by directing energy at each problem. As a result, the rate at which we are consuming natural resources has spiralled—at present, we are using the resources of 1.8 Earths to sustain our current population and we will reach 3 Earths by the year 2050 (The World Counts, 2022). Critiqued through a brief survey of pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial paradigms of production, the epistemic implications of different Western economies—craft, industry, information—are explored via the writings of Romantic authors Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who observed our growing dependency on power as fire and electricity, as well as its relationship to “life”, through pertinent, cautionary tales of human overreach where humankind wishes to be seen as gods of this world, rather than affable neighbours. Presently understood through the concept of networks, ecosystems and quantum biology, the flow of life mysteriously sustains our unique terrestrial materiality through myriad types of bio-electro-physico-chemical exchanges. Critical to the ongoing exchange of electrons are the regenerative landscapes of soil forged by minerals, organic matter, living organisms, gas, and water, and host to countless oxidation-reduction (redox) reactions that involve a transfer of electrons between two different types of chemistry. These potent chemistries are essential for the webs of ongoing metabolic transformation on our planet, and were likely critical for biogenesis providing the complex chemical “spark” of life. They also provide channels between the living and the dead. Comparing the unfettered exploitation of energy sources that typifies the Anthropocene, with the generous energy distribution through redox reactions in natural systems, this lecture proposes that a co-constitutive and collaborative relationship with our fertile earths may be possible by regarding the vital energy of “life” as a continual flow of electrons. By directing this flow through the natural electron “currency” systems in bodies, which loosely form our metabolism, we may be able to forge a new relationship with the living realm that is fundamentally regenerative—by using and producing electrons without exceeding the “carrying capacity” of their native ecosystems. Drawing on the regenerative potency of the world’s soils, this lecture asks why and how we might stitch the webs of life back together. Bringing unlike ideas and bodies into proximity, we tell a story of life and soils by threading historical insights into questions of life using science and story-telling to follow the flow of electrons—from animating life force, to cellular transactions and the electrical power systems that fuel heavy industry—as a way to explore the regenerative capacity of soils. The lecture asks what happens when we damage the capacity of soil to return spent matter back into the webs of life? Can we limit ourselves to using only the kinds of quantities of energy that are present in living bodies to conduct our activities of daily living? How might we speak to the dead? Weaving a tapestry of concepts, narratives, images and sound, Armstrong and Hughes propose re-relating to agentised soil bodies as beings, creatures, or even a part of “us”—asking whether this might change how we treat our precious earths and catalyse ways of living that re-invigorate (rather than deplete) the fundamental liveliness of the world. Moving from anthropocentric perspectives to perspectives that de-centre human language, this presentation itself is an artistic research stitching experiment that seeks to discover new spaces for relating to our soils, reconsidering our relationship with them, acknowledging their restorative potential, and, not least, their capacity to queer distinctions between the living and the dead. References: Barnes, Jonathan. 1982. The Presocratic Philosophers. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, vol. 1, ch. 4. Logan, William Bryant. 2007. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. The World Counts. 2022. Number of planet Earths we need. [online]. Available at: https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/state-of-the-planet/overuse-of-resources-on-earth/story. [Accessed 24 April 2022]

Date:
03.07.2022, 14:30

with:

Rachel Armstrong

Bio
Rolf Hughes is Professor of the Epistemology of Design-Driven Research in the Department of Architecture at KU Leuven, Member of Emergence of Bio-age Working Group, Chatham House, London, and Director of Artistic Research for the Experimental Architecture Group which develops pioneering transdisciplinary research, design prototypes and immersive experiences for the emerging ecological era. His research and teaching explore the contribution of artistic research methods to developing narratives and epistemologies with a focus on “unspeakable dialogues” between human and nonhuman agencies. A writer across creative and critical genres, he has devised interdisciplinary performances and installations at venues such as the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the University of the Underground (Amsterdam), the Northern Stage and the Victoria Tunnel (Newcastle), the Max Planck Institute (Florence), and globally, online, via Digital Futures.

Through an Architectural Design Office titled The Wicked Home, (a reference to the irreducibly complex character of our domestic living spaces) at KU Leuven, and the elective course Haunted House: The Hidden Life of Buildings Hughes interrogates the implications of our relationship with lively matter, and our role within a (re)enlivened world. Investigating ‘living along with’ the base building blocks of ‘more than human’ communities, changes our present and future relationship to the home and associated principles of neighbourliness.

Ruth Anderwald

Dizziness, Anxiety, and Climate Action. Reflecting the Possibilities of Artistic Research from the Viewpoint of the Compossible Space

Abstract
This contribution explores the reaction to the climate crisis from the concept of dizziness, framing the climate crisis as the greatest instants of dizziness and anxiety today. Climate anxiety threatens to stifle and petrify emerging action. Drawing from Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety as the reflection of freedom for possibility and action is the outset of this artistic research reflection. Thinking dizziness with Kierkegaard allows us to understand states of dizziness and anxiety as providing the possibility of possibilities, creating a compossible space. Based on the concept of the compossible space and augmenting this concept by involving the fields of somaesthetics and somatic practices, such as Feldenkrais, this contribution traces dizziness, anxiety, uncertainty, and unpredictability as the core of an intra-active growing together, based on the premise that animate beings and inanimate elements permeate and co-constitute each other.

Date:
02.07.2022, 16:10

Bio
Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond have worked collectively as a duo and in teams with others since 1999. Since October 2021, they have held the professorship for the PhD in Art Program at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Within their co-creative and process-oriented practice, they develop practice-led and theory-led artistic research, with a particular focus on the topic of dizziness (FWF-PEEK AR 224, FWF PEEK AR 598). With philosopher Karoline Feyertag, they co-edited the reader Dizziness—A Resource (2019, Sternberg Press). Their projects have been shown internationally, e.g., Centre Pompidou Paris, ÉCAL Lausanne, Himalayas Art Museum Shanghai, Kunsthaus Graz, mumok, Vienna, Tate Modern, London, Ujazdowski Castle CCA Warsaw, wien modern Festival, Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Photo: Anderwald + Grond

Sally Elizabeth Dean

The Somatic Costume Dressing Room - Mending and Attending Through Touch

Abstract
This lecture/performance is an invitation into Sally's current artistic research project, 'The Somatic Costume Dressing Room' - with video and live examples. What if costume (to include everyday clothing) is designed live, in the moment, on bodies, in order to care for, attend and respond to the psycho-physical needs of individual wearers? How can costume mend through its touch - supporting the need for rest, grief, reconnection to the heart or a strained back? Instead of costume being a visual effect to serve a theme/character within a performance or a product to sell, could it be a haptic-focused process - advocating embodiment, consciousness and well-being? How can designing and wearing Somatic Costumes be radical acts of kindness? Welcome to the Somatic Costume Dressing Room, an online or live meeting place, a one-to-one session, with Sally guiding wearers through tactile encounters using simple materials (balloons, bin bags, tape, tights, bed sheets, lentils), to co-create costumes/movement. Designing is an act of repair, as well as a reflective, collaborative performance of making, wearing, (un)dressing and moving. Mending begins with choreographing attention to the internal, tacit, tactile experiences of the wearer - a somatic approach. Wearers are guided into ´Aware-Wearing´- bringing attention to the effects of costumes´ touch on bodies, often starting with eyes closed. This artistic research aims to challenge ocular-centrism in modern culture, rebalancing the sensorial hierarchy by re-prioritising touch, with the hope that costume and design processes may gain new material and sensorial value beyond the visual or semiotic. It also proposes ´wearing´, a meeting between bodies and materials, as a bridge to knowing and knowledge - through sensorial and embodied experience.

Date:
02.07.2022, 15:40

Bio
Sally E. Dean (NO/UK/USA) is a PhD Research Fellow at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her artistic research investigates designing/choreographing attention through the touch of Somatic Costumes. Sally leads (2011-2021) the collaborative SMCP Project, co-designing Somatic Costumes that generate psychophysical awareness in wearers and immersive sensorial performances. Recent publication in ‘Performance Costume - New Perspectives’ (2020), exhibited at A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow (2019), and performance at 14th Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (2019).

Photo: Jana Koelmel

Samuel Barros

Aos Olhos da Areia: Order and Disorder as the Main Force of Artistic Creation

Abstract
The artistic project Aos olhos da areia makes reference to a Gutiérrez’s aphorism: “The sand moves itself in an apparently disordered way. But this state does not proceed from the sand itself but from a rational proposition. In fact, order and disorder are the same in the eyes of the sand” (2020, p. 26). The idea of this project is to investigate order and disorder, through the concept of declassification, in canonic works from the pianistic repertoire, trying to enlarge the territorial limits of the selected works, amplifying the interferences and the role of the performer. The project has already 4 experiments derived from the piano piece La neige danse by Claude Debussy. As the concept of declassification is applied each new version ends up to be a little bit more distant to the initial stimulus from the piece’s score. In this presentation we will focus on two of these artistic objects. The first one, Aos olhos da areia 1.3, presents a musical performance where Debussy’s piece is disorganized from its articulation with improvisation and the dialogue with memories from other pieces, generating a new configuration of musical objects that are played by a piano and trombone duo. The second artistic object shown in this research, Aos olhos da areia 1.4, presents that first recording (1.3) after the interference of other artists from dance, visual arts and audiovisual, amplifying even more the idea of “order” and “disorder”. These artistic results exemplify the application of some declassificatory tools that end up to foment the questioning of the hierarchies between work versus improvisation, composer versus performer and, as a consequence, of the concepts of authorship, fidelity and style. In these experiments, the performer puts him/herself as a creative and critical agent, historically and socially situated, capable to propose and defend artistic practices beyond the Eurocentric ones.

Date:
30.06.2022, 19:40

with:
Bibiana Bragagnolo Emyle Daltro

Sophie Uitz

Convivial Epistemologies

Abstract
The last decade has witnessed a metamorphosis of collaborative development of a new deﬁnition and practice of conviviality as a positive and afﬁrmative act of agency for change. However, the global capitalist world and its processes of racialization and neocolonialism systematically oppose the possibility of conviviality. Moreover, the pandemic has reinforced this structural inequality while creating another barrier to conviviality. In May 2021, we launched the FWF-PEEK project, "Conviviality as Potentiality: from Amnesia and Pandemic towards a Convivial Epistemology" (AR679), hosted by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. After an initial theoretical investigation on conviviality, we put the theoretical analysis of concepts into practice. With various marginalized communities, LGBT*QIA+, minorities, BIPOC, Black people, refugees, migrants, activists, and grassroots organizations, we have engaged in encounters and intimate interactions to explore and codevelop (artistic) practices that have the potential to intervene in these disruptive dynamics. We start from the assumption that art-based research can act as a "tool for conviviality" to negotiate the uncertainties and obstacles of "living together in real-time" by engaging with practices, vocabularies, and artistic and knowledge-based methods. Through these encounters, working within and negotiating the structural and material constraints of coming together in proximity, we have engaged in the process of co-creating convivial epistemologies. We decided to record the statements, the different thoughts interacting, the sounds surrounding the encounters, the silences, the temporality in the air, took the podcast format, and began developing an experimental ﬁctional docu-research on the potential of plural languages and experiences for building future communities of resistance under and against neoliberal global capitalism, structural racism, and racialization.

Date:
30.06.2022, 22:00

with:
Marina Grzinic Jovita Pristovsek

Suelen Calonga

Another Name for /ˈɑːkʌɪv/ When it is Related to Us

Abstract
The questioning unfolds from my previous artistic research called "Why do the Archives archive?" (Bauhaus-Universität, 2020), focused on the understanding of mythical motivations for the European accumulation fetish and the consequences of colonial extractivism in the construction of national collections, which reflects today in a very deep discussion about destitution and restitution of cultural property. The closing of this first cycle culminated in a series of performances and videos in which I dealt with the notion of path as archive and the notion of baggage as archive, and my last work "I am the archive" made me see that there is a lot in me that is inaccessible to the outside. More than a year later, this question still bothers me. I realized now that not only the reason for the existence of Archives but also the very meaning of this word (and others that it evokes: museum, collection, inventory, anthology, library, records, repository, repertory, catalog, file, document) relates to a set of data or objects described, accumulated, systematized and kept in a place to be accessed. At some point we came to understand this as "knowledge production" but, in practice, this doesn't even make sense. Knowledge is not something to be inscribed in a "neutral" place, not even in the arts, or in literature, even less in the sciences. How did we come to the point of being the Archive our main source of apprehension of the world, and no longer the world itself? Where lies the perception today? What is that which happens in individual and collective memories; that which happens in the silence and in the invisible between the bodies (including non-human ones), and which cannot be shown, described, transcribed, translated, but is still transmitted? What is it that trees, stones, people perceive and know from what happens around them, and that is possible to transmit even though it is impossible to describe, register, and, above all, name? It is certainly not an Archive.

Date:
01.07.2022, 14:40

Bio
Suelen Calonga carries the familiar legacy of intellectual production of black men and embodied knowledge of indigenous and gypsy women. Visual artist, researcher and curator, she is MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies (Bauhaus University, 2020); Bachelor’s in social communication (PUC Minas, 2007), and specialist in Images and Media Cultures (UFMG, 2010). Coordinates the WAR (Worldwide African Route) initiative, creating, documenting, and sharing investigative processes of black people working for intellectual and spiritual emancipation.

Photo: Suelen Calonga

Szikago Pakrel

Future Archeology

Abstract
We propose our project FUTURE ARCHEOLOGY, a deterritorialized fabulative media collaboration which takes the form of a blended body of audiovisual artifacts. The time-based artifacts start from our own respective research questions, which are randomly multiplied with responses to the last fragments of each artifact in the logic of an exquisite corpse. The exquisite corpse was, as known, invented by the surrealists of the 1920’s, featuring André Breton, Jacques Prevert, Marcel Duhamel among others. It is similar to an old parlour game of writing, in which the first participant only leaves a hint about its “ending.” In our adaption, each of us, in every round, only reveal the last frame of the 2-minute short video, to which each artist, in the next turn, can attend. In this way the collaborative work obtains a rhizomatic, stitched together body-like structure exploring questions of the relationship between human and nature and current ethical and ecological challenges within this context. How can we attend to each other's work, in order to blend our perspectives, as to mend on the broken relation between human and environment? We arrange our work around specific provocations such as natural currents, affective shapes, ways of becoming. The work is strongly fabulative, and as an exhibition framework, we present our body of artifacts as found footage from the past, situated in an imagined future. For the conference, we will present a 20 min. pre-produced video of the artifacts that will be commented on by us as if we were an archeologist from an uncertain future.

Date:
01.07.2022, 13:00

Bio
Our name is Szi-Ka-Go-Pa-Kr-El and we are a corpse, a stitched- together, semi-machine archaeologist of the future who will present our exquisite findings. We are also an international, interdisciplinary, arts-based research group interested in collaborative media design. We are based in India, Iceland, Germany, Norway, the US, and Wales. We met during the artistic research masterclass Fabulation for Future organized by Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, where we became committee members of the international network Fabulation for Future. For SAR 2022 we present our joint project and add artifacts to what we call an ARCHEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE.

Szilvia Ruszev, Kausik Ghosh, Gonzalo H. Rodriguez, Paul R. Jones, Kristin Johnsen & Elisabeth Brun

Photo: Szi-Ka-Go-Pa-Kr-El

Søren Kjærgaard

Traversing Sonic Territories (TST)

Abstract
What happens when we borrow sounds from other musicians? How can such a transgression of seemingly personal territories contribute to an expanded understanding of our sonic identity and musical imagination? And could this b/lend of sonic identities perhaps point to a more ambiguous yet dynamic and vibrant state of the ‘subjects’ in intra-action? Taking off from these questions, TST intends to challenge our idea of ‘a personal sound’, which is a widespread conception within especially acoustic improvised music, consequently investigating how a radicalized sharing of these ‘personal sounds’ through contemporary sampling technology can contribute to an expansion of improvisational and imaginal horizons. Individual idiomatic approaches to one’s own instrument are thus provoked and questioned as we transgress the habitual boundaries for action possibilities and musical imagination. And yet, as we touch on these boundaries, we are quickly challenged by the liminalities of our own musical identity, including our physical disposition, instrumental in/ capacities, mimetic patterning, aesthetic preferences and other un/conscious biases. So how do we embark with ethical care while still throwing ourselves into the risks of sharing and playing across this complexity of borders in search of fruitful disorders? And how do we develop a critical and imaginal listening that enables us to hear through the cracks and breaches in order to see the potentials beyond. Concretely we work from a duo of saxophone and piano toward external collaborators from other musical contexts, where the sharing process involves different approaches to audio sampling and archiving, embedding and embodying, listening and playing on each other’s sonic material to a point where authorship, origin and instrumental conventionality is – b(l)ending also the practice into an electro-acoustic field, where digital code contributes to and disrupts the acoustic logics of the instruments.

Date:
01.07.2022, 16:40

with:
Torben Snekkestad

Bio
Søren Kjærgaard – Pianist
Associate Prof., RMC, Cph. SK’s work encompasses a variety of settings ranging from solo performance to ensemble formats. His work has led to various int’l performances and a discography of critically acclaimed albums.

Tamara Friebel

Listen2Intuition: Mathematics|Arts|Society

Abstract
We present aspects of an interdisciplinary project bridging mathematics and arts. We emphasise the role of intuition crucial both to mathematical research and artistic creation, in particular composition. Structures from on-going mathematical research were step by step appropriated by an artist/composer using visual art and design software and finally compositon principles. In this way, new music was composed using uniquely formed degrees of freedom and shades of constraints. This artistic crystallization process lead in return to conceptional ideas, which translated back into a mathematical research proposal; thus confirming a true eye-to-eye interdisciplinary process. Our presentation will span from the mathematical background over the design of 2D graphics and 3D objects to scores and performance samples. The content is shaped by our experience of two pop-up exhibitions engaging 150 visitors ranging from 4 to 80 years and all educational backgrounds and seducing them to stay on average almost one hour: shifting thought processes, rekindling interest in mathematics and/or new music, stimulation drawings, dance and research. Altogether BLEND in a very special and optimistic form.

Date:
30.06.2022, 19:00

with:
Klemens Fellner

Bio
Tamara Friebel is an artist educated in composition & electroacoustic composition at the University for Music and Dramatic Arts Vienna, Royal College of Music London, Huddersfield University and in architecture at the University for Applied Arts Vienna, RMIT Melbourne, with a background in sociology and theology from universities in Melbourne. She completed her PhD in composition ‘Generative Transcriptions, an opera of the self’ in 2013. Since 2014 she is Post-Doc within the 'unconventional research' Mathematics & Arts: Towards a balance between artistic intuition and mathematical complexity.

Photo: Tamara Friebel

Tero Heikkinen

Research Catalogue: A User Introduction to the Versatile and Most Used Online Platform for Artistic Research

Abstract
Introduction and Moderation | Johan A. Haarberg Research Catalogue: A User Introduction to the Versatile and Most Used Online Platform for Artistic Research Presenters: Casper Schipper, Luc Döbereiner and Tero Heikkinen, RC Admin Officers; Moderator: Johan A Haarberg, SAR Executive Officer The Research Catalogue (RC) functions as a platform for the dissemination of peer-reviewed content and publications, for student’s presentation of work and the assessment of such work – as well as of self-published research outcomes. The Research Catalogue is provided by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR). RC enables students, artists and researchers to deviate from the standard format of academic presentations, journal articles and/or research repositories: Because images and sounds are not subordinate to, but fundamentally on a par with the text; Because of the opportunity provided to break out of the linear narrative structure; Because it facilities the option for a continuous (and collaborative) research activity from notation/documenting research processes and initial outcomes to fully elaborated publications. The RC offers an online platform in which sound, images, video and text can be combined in an integrated format for presentation, and in which the visual disposition and the focus on different media formats can be decided by the author herself/himself. Use of the RC is free of charge for all individual researchers. In this session, the RC Team will offer a basic introduction to the use of this platform and demonstrate some of its potential for documenting research processes and outcomes, including the different RC exposition editors and how to use your personal media repository, which will be created when you register as a full user at the RC.

Date:
02.07.2022, 16:10

with:

Luc Döbereiner

Casper Schipper

Tero Nauha

Bio
Tero Nauha is a professor in Live Art and Performance Studies at Uniarts Helsinki, and a performance artist. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Academy of Finland funded postdoctoral research project, How To Do Things With Performance, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in 2017. In his practice he focuses on the interstices between intangible forms and material cultures; the complex narratives of financialization, social spheres, and the knowledge production in institutions.

Photo: Aapo Huhta

Thalia Raftopoulou

Transitionality, Listening and Time in Artistic Research

Abstract
Learning to accept loss and change as inevitability appears to be an extremely difficult task. Learning to create and produce knowledge from loss and turmoil, from the bleakness within the current conditions in, through and with artistic research has been under discussion and has brought fourth challenges in epistemological approaches in different fields of knowledge, but also challenges on its reciprocal relation with the everyday. Knowing how this knowledge can be applied, to “design” further and think with and fourth, will be discussed as a trait that possibly resides in matters of combining methods; experimentation, perseverance, field work in transition, sensing voices in orality and materiality within a slow process. Time and attentive listening will be thought of as main allies to field work and will be utilised as tools within practices and artistic research methodologies. Reflecting on intersections of specific articulations by Ursula K. Le Guin on continuity of process, by Jacques Rancière on transitionality, specific approaches on reflective methods in thought by John Dewey, the artist will unfold aspects of the urgency, relatability and the possibilities of response- ability of artistic research. This online talk stems from a specific chapter on artistic research the artist wrote during the research she conducted from 2011 to 2021, (PhD, Department of Theory and Art History, Athens School of Fine Arts) in Athens, Greece on “Sound and Listening in the Athenian apartment building”.

Date:
01.07.2022, 08:40

Bio
Thalia Raftopoulou is an artist and researcher working on the intersections of art and sonic cultural study. She works across mediums while paying attention to the affectivities within orality and matter, vibration and vocalisation. She conducted a research on listening in the Athens' apartment building PhD, Department of Theory and Art History, Athens School of Fine Arts (2011- 2021) and has been trained in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies, MFA, Bauhaus University- Weimar, and in visual arts in the Athens School of Fine Arts, Greece.

Photo: Thalia Raftopoulou

Thomas Hawranke

Fish Belong to the Ocean – Animal Activism through Video Games

Abstract
Both animals and digital protest are very present when it comes to the actual pandemic situation: On the one hand, animals are staged as the source of diseases. The image of exotic animals on a dirty wet market somewhere at the end of the word reproduces the tainted narrative of speciesism and racism. On the other hand, protesting in public space was/is problematic due to corona restrictions. As a result, many protests were relocated into the digital space; Hong Kong’s streets virtually occupied, a game’s Museums of Natural History transformed into a place for resistance. As a starting point for our lecture, we analyse three moments of digital animal rights activism: Protest through actions in video games, hijacking the triple-A-fame of industrial-produced video games and creating playable counternarratives to existing games. From here we will dive into different questions: What is activism in video games? How do forms of protest and activism change through computer games? And, how can the computer game be used to conduct animal advocacy, e.g. caretaking and empathy? Following these questions, while roaming through virtual worlds, we try to formulate a special form of digital protest that speaks on behalf of the animals through play, grief and empathy. Instead of being loud and angry in the face of planetary catastrophes, we seek silence and empathy as a form of radical caretaking.

Date:
01.07.2022, 08:00

with:
Pascal Marcel Dreier

Dreaming in the Witch House

Abstract
The lecture performance Dreaming in the Witch House centers around the narration The Dreams in the Witch House written in 1932 by American author H. P. Lovecraft. The lecture focuses on the theme of unstable research in which the architecture of Lovecraft’s witch house serves as a catalyst for different strategies to find the hidden and the unexpected. By combining the efforts of Lovecraft’s characters with different real-world places of power the lecture argues towards an idea of an esoteric form of artistic research. Within the lecture situation, Lovecraft’s text fragments are played back in audio. The pre-recorded female voice serves both as a narrator and as a dialogue partner. The audio is enhanced by a text read aloud. As a projection, the viewer sees fragmentary settings around a realtime3D witch’s house and found footage clips that refer to the content in associative form and expand it visually.

Date:
02.07.2022, 16:10

Bio
Thomas Hawranke, PhD. is a media artist, researcher and lecturer at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in Cologne. He conducts deep hanging out in a variety of gaming communities, loves to watch animals in virtual worlds and uses practices of play as his primary research methodology. He is co-founder of Paidia Institute and member of the artist collective susigames.

Tobias Kühn

Bio
Tobias Kühn (born in Ohorn, Saxony, 1992) is interested in building connections via ecological practices, woodworking and the culinary arts. A creative network force in Weimar he has lived and worked in Germany, New Zealand (on the cultural island of Einsiedel where he focused on animal care and construction) and the Americas, while hiking through global landscapes, seeking cross-cultural and cross-species interactions. His artworks include a »Search for freedom or escape from reality« in which he hiked the Applachian trail, and building a wooden shelter (3-sided block house) on the Bauhaus University Campus. In 2013 he became a student body representative, organizing the legendary »SpaceKidHeadCup« as well as many other culinary and artistic performances. He was also instrumental in caring and feeding for the initial tidal waves of global refugees at the start of the Ukranian war, helping with the organizing groups of volunteers to (re)build and clean spaces, source/save ingredients (while receiving feminist critiques on collective action and methodologies of organization) and still managing to cook, clean and care for all who needed it and avoiding/cooling (most) interpersonal conflicts.

Torben Snekkestad

Traversing Sonic Territories (TST)

Abstract
What happens when we borrow sounds from other musicians? How can such a transgression of seemingly personal territories contribute to an expanded understanding of our sonic identity and musical imagination? And could this b/lend of sonic identities perhaps point to a more ambiguous yet dynamic and vibrant state of the ‘subjects’ in intra-action? Taking off from these questions, TST intends to challenge our idea of ‘a personal sound’, which is a widespread conception within especially acoustic improvised music, consequently investigating how a radicalized sharing of these ‘personal sounds’ through contemporary sampling technology can contribute to an expansion of improvisational and imaginal horizons. Individual idiomatic approaches to one’s own instrument are thus provoked and questioned as we transgress the habitual boundaries for action possibilities and musical imagination. And yet, as we touch on these boundaries, we are quickly challenged by the liminalities of our own musical identity, including our physical disposition, instrumental in/ capacities, mimetic patterning, aesthetic preferences and other un/conscious biases. So how do we embark with ethical care while still throwing ourselves into the risks of sharing and playing across this complexity of borders in search of fruitful disorders? And how do we develop a critical and imaginal listening that enables us to hear through the cracks and breaches in order to see the potentials beyond. Concretely we work from a duo of saxophone and piano toward external collaborators from other musical contexts, where the sharing process involves different approaches to audio sampling and archiving, embedding and embodying, listening and playing on each other’s sonic material to a point where authorship, origin and instrumental conventionality is – b(l)ending also the practice into an electro-acoustic field, where digital code contributes to and disrupts the acoustic logics of the instruments.

Date:
01.07.2022, 16:40

with:
Søren Kjærgaard

Bio
Torben Snekkestad – Saxophonist
Prof. of Contemporary Music Performance, NMH, Oslo. Holds a Ph.D. from NARP w. the project Poetics of a Multiphonic Landscape. TS’ music is forged from an intensive amalgamation of technical and interpretative elements. He has worked with a vast number of esteemed musicians.

Tricia Crivellaro Grenier

Thinking/Sinking Into the Folds of Craft and the Digital Turn

Abstract
A sense of both the precariousness and promise of craft practice gained momentum during the pandemic. Digital reliance, a convenience before the crisis, became a necessity during enforced social isolation. Our current artistic research project, Thinking Through Craft and the Digital Turn, explores the synergies between craft and digital methodologies within Canadian post-secondary educational institutions. We are seeking to understand both the current and historical narratives that tell the story of craft's relationship with and to digital tools, processes and networks. Can interdisciplinarity honour specific histories and hard-won knowledge as it melds, in particular craft and digitality? To that end, we have created an extended reality visualization of historical and personal stories we have gathered from students and educators. We seek to convey the complexity of the relationship between craft and digitality as expressed through the data we have gathered. Layered LIDAR (light detection and ranging) measurements of locations in Canada and swaths of digital textiles are used to envision a landscape that envelops the viewer and allows a connection and alternate understanding of the gathered narratives. There has long been philosophical attention paid to the necessary complicity of materiality and imagining, however, rather than citing canonical references we look to the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude as a guiding light in this metaverse encounter. Their practice of using textile to transform landscape has helped us to envision ways of wrapping but also creating elaborate folds where previously little-known histories wait to be discovered. The perceptual experience of encountering stories, facts and objects through immersion encourages alternative hierarchies of knowledge acquisition. We seek to exceed the bounds of convention by communicating affect and sensation along with data, as we blend craft, artistic research, and digital space.

Date:
02.07.2022, 16:10

with:

Lynne Heller

Dorie Millerson

Kathleen Morris

Tõnis Jürgens

Quantifiction of Sleep

Abstract
Sleep has become a battleground of ideologies. There’s the idea of sleep as a practice that can be optimized and applied to the service of being productive. This is countered by the notion of sleep as a form of resistance to capitalist subjection. A way to study this discursive field of tension, to make it “tangible”, is within the context of quantitative self-tracking or -surveillance, as made possible in recent years by the widespread popularity of smartphones, wearables and fitness devices. I call this tendency “quantifiction” – a meld of the quantified and fictive. Much work has been published in recent years within the field of digital humanities regarding, for example, machinic enslavement (Maurizio Lazzarato), cognitive capitalism (Yann Moulier Boutang), the privatization of stress (Mark Fisher), auto-exploitation (Byung-Chul Han), etc. In a sense, these theorists shed light upon the fiction of betterment via quantifying one’s habits into data. However, the concept of quantifiction also speaks to a sense of tacit paranoia, of implied conspiracy – to be read between the lines of these theoretical texts. Beyond the macro-level critical discourse of digital humanities, the quotidian experience of the end-user of wearables is perhaps something else entirely. This research project is positioned within a discursive field of tension, the dualism of productive sleep as opposed to sleep as resistance, and seeks to dabble with themes such as personhood, surveillance, anxiety, digital waste and the inadvertent emergence of meaning. While discursively stemming from e.g. philosophy, digital humanities and psychoanalysis, an additional goal here is to blend these fields with the methodology of artistic research, so as to create (algorithmically) unquantifiable output. I tend to deem this as “poetic theory”. As the realm of sleep is occupied by the creed of productivity, how does this affect the definition personhood and its relation to the unquantifiable?

Date:
01.07.2022, 07:20

Bio
Tõnis Jürgens (1989) is a cinema projectionist, writer and void enthusiast. He has a bachelor's degree in culture theory from Tallinn University and a master's in new media from the Estonian Academy of Arts. At this time Jürgens is a doctoral candidate of art and design at the Estonian Academy of Arts, where his artistic research concerns self-tracking, digital garbage, and sleep as a potential for resistance. Currently he resides in Prague, where he is writing articles and working on his first short artist film shot on 16mm.

Photo: The Wily Grasser(1923) by Sidney Sime

Ujjwal Utkarsh

Filming the Spirit of a Protest

Abstract
My PhD project 'The Revolution is Everyday' lies in the intersection of observational filmmaking and the act of protest. For me, the observational form is not geared towards objectivity but rather as a sensorial experiential approach with an intent to make the invisible, visible and sounding the inaudible. This is a continuous work of questioning how one looks, hears, exists in this world. Thereby the focus becomes the process of working on myself and the film(s) themselves a mere by-product of it. This inward looking approach is as Trinh T Minh-ha puts it in context of the non western traditions- specifically in Asian and African cultures, ‘one often learns to know world inwardly, so that the deeper we go into ourselves, the wider we go into society’. This for me is to create from a position of humility and to accept that ‘I don’t know’. It is also thereby not to tell or inform the audience, but rather an invitation. Such an invitation to the audience finds resonances in the Indian aesthetic concept of सहृदयता (Sahridayata, literally- ‘with heart’). Nirmala Mani Adhikary notes that ‘sahridayata...keeps the poet and the reader in the (same) universe and they become able to share the poem’. Some people will be able to connect to ‘the poetry’, others not so much. This is not dependent on their socio-economic situation or even their political position. Through this presentation, I would like to juxtapose this theoretical conceptual scaffolding with excerpts from the film that I am working on made with such an approach and intent. The film itself is an invitation to be with a 10 day anti caste protest rally in Gujarat(India) in 2016. By adding another layer of performative element of talking about the cinematic form or the approach, the intent would be to add another layer of what Minh-ha refers to as ‘Speaking Nearby’ - ‘a speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it’.

Date:
03.07.2022, 10:20

Bio
Ujjwal Utkarsh is a Phd-in-Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. He makes films and has been working towards developing a form that emerges out of the observational cinema tradition. With this approach, he has looked at various themes and, in his ongoing work he focuses on using the observational lens to look at protests in India.

Photo: Ujjwal Utkarsh

Vanessa Ramos-Ve- lasquez

Bio
Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez is media artist, interdisciplinary researcher, Ph.D. candidate at Bauhaus-University Weimar developing a project intersecting Cultural History & Theory, Media Theory, Environment & Society and Indigenous Studies.
Master of Arts/New Media, University of the Arts Berlin in collaboration with Humboldt University’s Department of Cultural History and Theory and the Cluster of Excellence Bild-Wissen-Gestaltung. Bachelor of Fine Arts/Expanded Media, University of Kansas, USA via IBEU/IIE/Fulbright scholarship.
Her unconventional artistic practices create a hybrid space between academic and artistic languages to explore forms of decolonization of knowledge. Although rooted in performance, she employs a variety of media to formulate meta-narratives. She explores structuralist image-making processes and their integration into performative installations and audiovisual experiences. Her latest works are operations of rescuing her own indigenous heritage.
She teaches Artistic Research for Filmmaking at Bauhaus University Weimar through its Bauhaus.Module interdisciplinary program and is the curator of Regarding Water, a pop-up group exhibit at Eigenheim Galerie Weimar.

Yuval Levi

Perspectives of Human-Computer-Vision: A Space Odyssey

Abstract
The time spent online during the pandemic has turned the attention not only to the possibilities of digitalization, but also the incomputable aspects of face-to-face communication or the experience of different places, atmospheres, bodily sensations. In our presentation we do not want to confront the immediate, “natural” or “real” world with technology and virtual reality, but rather explore the intersections between the physical and virtual worlds focusing on the “seams” of (seamless) human-computer interaction (Eva Hornecker, Shane Denson). Facing a new digital imagery, as presented e.g. in James Bridle's “New Aesthetic”, combining Kelly Goeller's “pixel” sculptures, military camouflage technology or parametric design, we propose to turn to the profound changes in perception itself: the transgression the iconic image in the sense of a 2-D representation towards “spacial” images which include different perspectives, layers and movements and are produced not only by operations connected to the (model of a) camera, but by scanning (in German: tasten), detecting, sensing. As in the case of “The New Aesthetic” our argumentation relies on the images or visual experiments of Yuval Levi, architect and visual researcher, but – in contrast to Bridle – also on the theoretical work of Katerina Krtilova, media theorist and philosopher, developed in the 1-dimensional medium of writing (Vilém Flusser) – and constant feed-back loops between both approaches. Continuing a dialogue which has started in the context of our contribution to the “Open Secret” online project of the KW Berlin entitled “Peripheral Vision”, we want to explore the different dimensions and perspectives offering a visual method, based in digital photography, and a terminological framework, based in media theory, proposing an “aesthetics of intersections”, performed in between images, spaces and writing.

Date:
02.07.2022, 15:20

with:

Katerina Krtilova