People

Adelheid Mers

Respectful, Detailed, Ethical Engagements: Facilitating Micro-Practices for a New Gentleness

Abstract

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

Dr. Adnan Hadzi is currently working as resident researcher at the University of Malta. Currently Adnan is a participant researcher in the Erasmus XR strategic partnership research collaboration with the Immersive Lab University of Malta project.
Adnan’s documentary film work tracks artist pranksters The Yes Men and net provocatours Bitnik Collective. Bitnik’s practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms, formulating fundamental questions concerning contemporary issues.

Photo: Adelheid Mers

Alexander Damianisch

Bio

The Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG) in Language-based Artistic Research was founded and is co-organised by Emma Cocker (UK), Alexander Damianisch (AT), Cordula Daus (DE/AT), and Lena Séraphin (FI). This Special Interest Group was inaugurated in the context of the Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019, within the frame of Convocation, a three-day gathering of expanded language-based practices. Since 2019, this SAR SIG has – through a variety of different formats and forms – connected over 300 artistic researchers interested in language-based practices.

Amy Salsgiver

Knowing the Sound of the Park Through Running: Sonic Adventures in Istanbul’s Macka Park

Abstract

This ongoing research project looks at the evolving soundscape of Macka Park in Istanbul throughout the pandemic from my perspective as a runner. Through recording, transcription, and composition, shifting meanings of public/social sound within the park were observed and interpreted. This project deals with the experience of sound during a period of personal and societal mending; social and sonic blending is addressed in the compositional outcome; it shows how attending to our own novel experiences of the mundane can be a valuable source of knowledge. Unlike a sound walk, where sounds are investigated and explored with some freedom, my 'sound runs' captured a sonic snapshot of a particular moment in time. Initially I listened for evidence of ecological and social sounds and their patterns, connections, and meanings within the park; I was also collecting source material for music composition. What I uncovered were transformative meanings of sound in social space during the pandemic, and a meaningful way to make social sound with others while in isolation. By making weekly recordings I built up a wealth of knowledge both in the audio data and in my own observations, and explored ways of representing this material in composition. Ultimately I found that by utilizing acousmatic-listening and embracing improvisation, I was able to create a musically and socially meaningful reconstruction of the park. The creation of this work, created with the MIAM Improvisation Ensemble, was also valuable as a digital social space as we strove to find ways of making music together while being apart. This talk looks at the methodology followed in the project, from recording to transcribing and attempts to compose with the source material, culminating with a recorded performance by the MIAM Improvisation Ensemble.

Date:

01.07.2022, 11:40

Bio

Amy Salsgiver is an Istanbul-based percussionist, composer, and educator. She is an active performer in classical and contemporary music, performing with Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra, Hezarfen Ensemble, sa.ne.na percussion group, and as a free-improviser. Amy is a lecturer at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Music at Istanbul Technical University (MIAM). She holds degrees from Manhattan School of Music, Royal College of Music London, and ITU MIAM. Currently she is working towards a PhD in music composition, researching the nexus of notation and improvisation and its trans-cultural applications.

Photo: Nazli Demirel

Andy Weir

Pazugoo, Demonic Personification of Nuclear Waste

Abstract

Weir presents the Pazugoo art project (ongoing from 2016 to today), a constellation of 3d-printed figures proposed as demonic personification of nuclear waste. The figures are collectively modified in workshops from museum artefact digital object scans, printed and buried at sites around the planet as material and mythic connector of sites of toxicity. Copies are collected and exhibited in museums and exhibitions as an archive or ‘index’ of the buried figures. The work emerges from research into deep geological repositories for long-term storage of nuclear waste, and the project of ‘marking’ sites for future generations. Through work on collaborations and residencies, Weir presents a challenge to proposed fixed site monuments by focusing on the material agency of the radioactive waste itself. Drawing on the drifting contagious materiality (Hecht) and mythologies (Negarestani) of Uranium dust, Pazugoo is both digital object and embodied material in nuclear waste landscapes. Through the method of burying multiple objects, referenced in exhibitions, the work aims to make perceivable connections that normally remain hidden. – waste storage sites in the Global North with abandoned Uranium mines forming part of the waste production cycle, for example. The figures draw on myths of demonic flight as navigational passage between realms (De Loughrey), proposing a speculative flight to ends of deep time and back to cognition in present. From this work, distributed digitally and rooted in Earth, sampling deep time materiality as ‘geo-fiction’, Weir makes more general claims, proposing this navigation between sensual experience and more-than-human scales of deep time as possibility for art knowledge within the Anthropocene.

Date:

03.07.2022, 10:20

Bio

Dr. Andy Weir is an artist and writer based in London. His work explores politics, agencies and subjectivities within deep time, focusing in particular on nuclear toxicity. Recent work has been exhibited in Perpetual Uncertainty, Malmo Art Museum; Splitting the Atom, Vilnius Art Centre, published in Realism Materialism Art and Journal for Curatorial Studies. He completed his PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London and is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Arts University Bournemouth, UK.

Photo: Andy Weir

Anna Recsens

What’s Behind that Silence?

Abstract

The city is built by stories and memories that belong to the collective imagination. Some have become silenced spaces (places forgotten, censored or erased from official narratives, requiring a collective process in order to reactivate them). Considering Silence as a space of resistance, or even of rights, WHAT’S BEHIND THAT SILENCE? presents a research project based upon knowledge transfer about art, sound and public space; an opportunity to imagine other realities using elements of memory, in which sound, in surprising ways, generates a new image of locations which are both well-known and, at the same time, hidden. This research project, developed in two cities, the Krottegem district in Roeselare and the Sant Andreu district in Barcelona (between 2019-2021) through hybrid (on-site and remote) art residencies, aimed for a critical reflection upon cultural identity in relation to community and silenced spaces, offering the possibility of creating fictional landscapes in order to experience new cities within the cartographic territories that we understand as real and existing. It also included VOICES, a visual and sound archive collecting interviews, sound art pieces, and experimental narratives with the objective of gathering a variety of views from the artists and other participants in the research, as well as fictions on issues related to silenced urban public spaces. This process opened pathways by which to explore those hybrid methodologies of artistic practice-based research and of digital dissemination of results which have proved effective in connecting locations, personal experiences, and artistic projects within the context of the recent pandemic, and its social distancing and travelling restrictions.

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.

Date:

30.06.2022, 19:40

with:

Emyle Daltro Samuel Barros

Bio

Bibiana Bragagnolo is an artist, pianist, teacher and researcher for the Music Graduate Program and for the Contemporary Culture Studies Post-Graduation Program at the Federal University of Mato Grosso, Brazil. PhD in Musicology and Master in Musical Performance, she coordinates two research projects: Artistic Research in Brazil: gaps, perspectives and possibilities and Experimentation and Performance: declassifying the musical work. She coordinates the research group Observatory and Artistic Research Laboratory: performance, creation and contemporary culture in Latin America.

Photo: Bibiana Bragagnolo

Brigid McLeer

Take These Too...May Our Hands Work Serve You as Memorials

Abstract

This presentation will reflect on a recent project titled 'Collateral', made for the British Textile Biennial 2021 (1st - 30th Oct 2021). https://britishtextilebiennial.co.uk/programme/brigid-mcleer-collateral/ ‘Collateral’ consists of a large hand-embroidered whitework panel inspired by the iconography and scale of a machine-made lacework panel commemorating the Battle of Britain. The work was installed at Queen Street Mill in Lancashire, the place where industrialisation of textile production began in the 18thc, and accompanied by a video piece made in collaboration with folk duo Lunatraktors. 'Collateral' is a work of critical memorialisation, that uses a collective process of production and the rituals of public memorialisation to critique the inequities and 'forgettings' of global capitalism. It was made with the participation and collaboration of over 120 different people. As an artistic research project ‘Collateral’ continues my ongoing enquiry into the capacity of images from the past, reconfigured, to ‘act’ politically and socially on the present. In this way, the research uses memory, grieving and civic, public memorialisation as a means of collective reckoning and a call for justice, or what Karen Barad describes as ‘re-membering the future’. In the context of this SAR conference, this presentation will discuss the ways in which Collateral ‘mends’ and ‘blends’ our complex relationship to one another at this global scale, through literal and local stitching: a ‘suturing’ of subjectivities, time and place. In addition, it will look at how imagery from photojournalism and artefacts of national remembering can be ‘re-wrought’ to attend to those who continue to be forgotten in the rapacious flow of consumer capitalism.

Date:

03.07.2022, 11:50

Bio

Dr. Brigid Mc Leer is an Irish artist and researcher based in London. She is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Her research is concerned with relations between art, writing, politics and memory. Recent projects include, 'Collateral' installation for British Textile Biennial 2021, performance lecture/play ‘The Triumph of Crowds’, Downtown Art, New York 2017, and her essay ‘Returning in the House of Democracy’ for ‘The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice’ edited by Dr. Emily Orley and Katja Hilevaara (Routledge 2018).

Photo: Philippe Handford

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

Connecting Resonances: A Decolonial Intervention into Artistic Research in/through Sound and Listening

Abstract

Within the Arts and Humanities in the West, artistic research and sound studies have established themselves as vibrant and productive academic fields resulting in a profusion of scholarly writings and artistic expositions around a wider range of practices. Notwithstanding a rapidly growing body of work, much of the attention has been invested in artistic research and sound studies within an American and/or European context. Artistic research in/through sound in the Global South has largely remained underexplored, although the multitude of regions in the Eastern and Southern parts of the globe sharing a fraught colonial history contribute significantly to global output in artistic and cultural production with unique aesthetic approaches in sound and listening. The paper emerges from an ongoing postdoctoral project that facilitates an embodied understanding of the unique auditory cultures and artistic perspectives of the underexplored southern part of the globe by an artistic research approach departing from the speaker’s own practice with sound and exploratory listening. Such new knowledge fundamentally shifts Eurocentrism in sound studies and in the field of artistic research with a decolonial approach. The paper re-examines a fundamental issue in the studies of modernity and globalization concerned with media and cultural encounters, artistic and technological transmissions between Global North and South as a two-way process of historical exchanges and postcolonial confluence. The project draws from the body of work of practitioners active in the Global South, whose presence has often been neglected in the Eurocentric field of sound studies and artistic research.

Date:

01.07.2022, 15:20

Bio

Dr. Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is an artist, media practitioner, researcher, and writer. Incorporating diverse media, creative technologies, and research, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance addressing contemporary issues. He is the author of three books, The Nomadic Listener (2020), The Auditory Setting (2021), and Between the Headphones (2021). Chattopadhyay holds a Ph.D. in Artistic Research and Sound Studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, and an MA in New Media from the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University.

Photo: Helena Roig

Camille Jania Norment

Keynote 'Unfolding'

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.

Adelheid Mers

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Adnan Hadzi

Abstract

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Alexander Damianisch

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Amy Salsgiver

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Andy Weir

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Anna Recsens

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Annette Arlander

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Arijit Bhattacharyya

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Barbara Macek

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Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew

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Bibiana Bragagnolo

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Brigid McLeer

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Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

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Camille Jania Norment

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Caroline Gatt

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Casper Schipper

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Christina Lammer

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Bio

Christine Reeh-Peters

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Bio

Christopher A. Williams

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Bio

Claire Waffel

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Bio

Cordula Daus

Bio

Danny Butt

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Bio

Dean Hughes

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Bio

Dorie Millerson