25

JAR25 represents JAR’s silver anniversary in terms of issues. With our inaugural issue 0 in 2011, it also closes JAR’s first ten years of publishing artistic research. We have the sense that during this time, media rich academic publications have become more acceptable and that the role of text can be much more openly negotiated, leading to flat media hierarchies.

Read full editorial and browse issue

Aubiome: A Collaborative Method for the Production of Interactive Electronic Music

Joel Diegert and Adrian Artacho

Using a ‘performer-centric’ working method, artistic researchers Joel Diegert and Adrián Artacho investigate the potential of integrating the saxophone with real-time electronics. The musical work, 'aubiome', is used as a case study to demonstrate their collaborative co-creative approach. The six-stage, iterative working process that emerged during the aubiome project is broken down and described in detail.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

A∴418: Um Contributo para a Pesquisa Artística em Música

Vasco Alves

The A∴418 is a method for the systematization of the interpretative musical conception, oriented to the study of musical interpretation. Through the application of two analysis techniques, the researcher demonstrates the expressive idealization and the respective technical configurations of the sound narrative that he builds, as an interpreter, from the original musical text of the composer. At the end, a final score is produced in which both the composer and interpreter’s details appear.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Cleaning in progress: the line between art and life

Ulvi Haagensen

This exposition combines image, text, and video to provide an overview of my artistic research, which focuses on the embodied experience of art-making in relation to the everyday. Equipped with the notions of a line and a circle, I explore the connections and overlaps between art and life through a multi-disciplinary art practice that combines installation, sculpture, drawing, performance, and video, and merges this with everyday experiences, mainly cleaning, one of the more mundane aspects of everyday life. In this work, I am accompanied by three imaginary friends, who are also artists.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Future Earth Scream Now - The Solresol Birdsong Translator

Jim Lloyd

In this exposition, we describe a ‘speculative fabulation’ on communication with birds. A device was built that ‘listens’ to birdsong and translates this into human speech utilising the obscure musical language Solresol (François Sudre, 1866). Birdsong is analysed and converted into musical notes (one octave in the scale of C Major: do-re-me-fa-sol-la-ti). These seven notes are grouped to form four-note ‘words’ that are looked-up in the Solresol-English dictionary. Each note also has a rainbow colour assigned to it.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

I lost time and space. Where am I? – Erzählen von chronischen Schmerzen

Tabea Rothfuchs

What happens to a person’s inner and outer world when no medical procedure is able to (further) decipher the origin of an ongoing perceived pain? When pain becomes an independent clinical picture called 'chronic pain'? In a series of dialogues with pain patients and specialists, I investigate in this study – as an artist as well as someone who remembers an episode of chronic pain – how chronic pain influences and changes lives and what space it takes in the lives of people affected and those providing treatment.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

The Atemporal Event

Helga Schmid and Kevin Walker

The COVID pandemic has prompted many people to reconsider their previous living and working rhythms and to consider alternatives. We believe that the global enslavement to the standardised time of clocks and calendars has had a negative impact on us individually, socially, and environmentally. We aim, therefore, to change perceptions of time by helping people step outside societal time, treating time instead as a malleable material that can be stretched and moulded.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Vox Spatium

Sofía Balbontín

This exposition recognizes the "Vox Spatium" through the comparative study of acoustic spaces and their reaction to an impulse response (IR). The artistic research arises from two creative instances: a residency at the Experimental Base for Sound Art TSONAMI Valparaíso, Chile (2019) and the field studies of the project Resonant Spaces (Balbontín-Klenner, 2019-2020) in Belgium, Scotland and Spain.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

24

Here at JAR we are somewhat obsessed with the importance of articulation. Rather than asking what art is and what knowledge is, we are concerned with the processes through which ‘art’ and ‘knowledge’ become qualified. Although it might well be true that discourse has been developing in large historical cycles, we are acutely aware that those cycles have never properly represented what has been happening on the ground – neither in terms of art history, nor criticism, nor epistemology.

Read full editorial and browse issue

Beyond the Visual - A research curriculum for explorations in spatiotemporal environments

Constantinos Miltiadis and Gerriet K. Sharma

Virtual reality and spatial audio technologies bring about a new paradigm in the fields of architecture and music. Works developed in these media produce experiences beyond what is perceivable in the physical world, extending therefore our capacities to design/compose as well as our sensibilities for spatial and temporal perception. By operating in the spatiotemporal domain, these new media, question our disciplinary understandings of space and time as well as their aesthetics, requiring an altogether new post-disciplinary conception of design/composition and experience.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Encore

Mika Elo

The exposition presents two installations—Mitä uutta kivistä?/Anything new about stones? (2017) and LAB-O(U)RATORY (2019)—and enfolds them in a series of repetitive gestures that stage their methodical entanglement. Both of the installations explore and articulate the research potential of expanded writing. At stake is the ecology of attention in a setting that thematises the co-existence of different modes of articulation, interlinked spatial and temporal arrangements as well as their associative mechanisms.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Ephemer(e)ality Capture: Glitching The Cloud through Photogrammetry

Tom Milnes

Ephemer(e)ality Capture: Glitch Practices in Photogrammetry details artistic practice using cloud-based photogrammetry that actively invokes glitches through disturbance of the imaging algorithm by utilising optical phenomena. Reflective, transparent, specular and patterned/repetitive objects were used to confuse the imaging algorithm to produce spikes, holes and glitches in the mesh and textures of the 3D objects produced. The research tests the limits of photogrammetry in an effort toward new image-making methods.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Investigating the impact of Electroacoustic Music in Greek Culture, through a portfolio of Electroacoustic Music works which explore religious and mythological aspects of Greece

Epameinondas P. Fasianos

My research investigated the viability of various electroacoustic music compositional approaches, which were used in a series of works that explored specific relationships between real-world and abstracted sound materials, through the strategic use of pitched, melodic, and non-pitched materials (as well as specific characteristics and behaviours of those materials) as integral elements in the composition. All of the compositions were linked to Greece in various ways, either directly or symbolically.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Raising the Voice: Sculptural and Spoken Narratives from the Flat Sheet

Hannah Clarkson

This exposition explores ideas of narrative and storytelling through sculptures and texts raised from a flat sheet, a kind of visual and spoken poetry which is both particular and multiple. In this paper, the key area of investigation will be the relationship between sculptural and spoken narratives in my practice. This is engaged with in four main areas:

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

23

Expositions of practice as research can be very precarious objects to create and handle. There are no readymade templates or tools – everything is in a process of negotiation, without ever really settling. In fact, the force field of shifting relations seems to work towards suspending any settlement, as if this highly specific non-place was the only site from which to make sense of it all.

Read full editorial and browse issue

Absurd Sounds

Yann Coppier

Absurd (derived from surdus, or deaf, in Latin): that which cannot be heard or is contradictory to reason.This artistic research project questions the ways we work with sound, using a methodology derived from the absurd as a tool for innovation. The scientific roots of sound as a physical phenomenon are rarely disputed, whether by sound artists, sound designers, sound technicians, or even composers.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Body Hegemonies 2017: An Experimental Transfer

Monica Clare van der Haagen-Wulff, Michael Lazar, Fabian Chyle

Body Hegemonies is an artistic project aimed at exploring and making transparent some of the themes of epistemic violence and hegemonic orders resulting from the legacy of colonialism and slavery, as the hidden flip-side of modernity and enlightenment. Our aim was to examine the Eurocentric logic of dehumanization and processes of exclusion from the perspective of bodies and their embeddedness within these hegemonic structures. The goal was to use artistic methods as tools to research topics commonly examined within an academic framework.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Composing Technique, Performing Technique

Scott McLaughlin, Zubin Kanga, Mira Benjamin

Technique as the entanglement of composition and performance as an epistemic object (Knorr Cetina) emergent from contingent materiality. Two pieces by Scott McLaughlin—respectively for Zubin Kanga (piano) and Mira Benjamin (violin)—are discussed as case studies of strategies for entwining the specific embodied techniques of instrumental performance with the material agency (Pickering) of the instrument as a 'material indeterminacy' in which knowledge inheres through practice (Spatz).

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Registers of Disinhibition: Transferred Autonomy and Generative Systems in Artistic Research

Matthias Sildnik

This exposition is a presentation of an artistic method that incorporates generative technologies in artistic intervention. The autonomy of the generative system is analysed not as an isolated capability of a technical object but as a specific configuration between the autonomous operations of the system’s creator, the system itself, and the individuals related to the system. The notion of transferred autonomy is proposed to emphasise this interrelated nature of an entity’s autonomy. In this way, a generative system is positioned in a broader socio-economic and cultural context.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

∂ Topological Landscapes

András Blazsek

∂ Topological Landscapes (2015–ongoing) is a multisensory environment that comprises three projects, all based on research into the controversial healing instruments designed by Southern California inventor Royal Raymond Rife (Nebraska, 1888–California, 1971). Rife’s early twentieth-century scientific work involved light microscopy, frequency theory, and the concept of pleomorphism, which he applied to study formal differentiation in viral cells. One of Rife’s aims was to develop methods and mechanisms that would allow him to use frequencies to kill viruses.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

22

Why have we not been talking more about ‘artistic research’ in relation to the MA (or the MFA) and, in particular, engagements with practices of research that are meaningful and rich but not sufficiently captured by standard definitions of the term? Why is ‘artistic research’ often conflated with the question of doctoral education in the artistic field disconnecting the vast majority of artists in education from the question of knowledge?

Read full editorial and browse issue

31 Days Old - Performance, Family and Ethics

Sarah Black and Andy Frizell

In this exposition, Dr Sarah Black-Frizell and Andy Frizell, discuss the performance installation 31 Days Old (2016). This involved a full-scale installation performance in Sarah and Andy’s family home, in collaboration with Sarah (43) her mother (age 66), her auntie (age 54) and her daughter (age 3). This project highlights domestic photography as a strategic trigger for personal and family narratives and memory work. The work consists of film, live performance and original music and soundscapes.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Exploring and Prototyping the Aesthetics of Felt Time

Elsa Kosmack Vaara and Cheryl Akner Koler

The intention of this research is to investigate how interaction designers may explore felt time through the culinary practice of sourdough baking. In this exposition we share how the physical experience and manipulation/shaping of time in sourdough baking provides an experience of fulfillment and satisfaction. We show our insights on how interaction designers, and possibly many other communities of practice and discourse, may learn from this.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Impulsive Incantations - Voicing Migraine

Mariske Broeckmeyer

When migraine arrives, not only the body suffers. The voice too is impacted by a condition that introduces itself with such great force. As a migraine-suffering singer I notice these changes and become fascinated by the aesthetics of a failing voice in a failing body. This exposition reflects upon the relevancy of Migraine Music as an aesthetic phenomenon and by focusing on the specific area of the vocal and the sonant, I project the issue into a broader context of language, speech and communication. First, I find the migraineur’s voice to be missing as it is silenced by society.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Methods of Indirection: a trialogue between Patrizia Bach, Howard Eiland, and Luis Berríos-Negrón about Walter Benjamin and translating The Arcades Project

Luis Berríos-Negrón, Patrizia Bach, Howard Eiland

Walter Benjamin deemed his Arcades Project [Das Passagen-Werk (Mit Bindestrich und Werk mit Capital W)] “the theatre of all my struggles and all my ideas.” As a vast accumulation of materials, it had become for him a literary laboratory for testing social, critical, and spatial ideas. The co-authors here present an exposition where they look to reactivate that ‘theatre’ to search, test, and draw from each other alternative recursions for their respective practices.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Soft Robotics and Posthuman Entities

Mads Bering Christiansen, Jonas Jørgensen, Anne-Sofie Emilie Belling, Laura Beloff

Through collaborative media arts practice we explore texture morphing soft robotics as an artistic medium of expression. We present an installation, Homo Viridis, that features a soft robotic interface developed to mediate signals between a vascular plant and a human body. The exposition paper discusses how Homo Viridis stages a situation of hybridity where individual, more-than-human subjectivities are mentally and physically intertwined.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

21

Ten years ago, when we started JAR, the journal was conceived to change how artistic research presented itself. This has meant, first of all, to show alternatives to the distinction between practice and theory that dominated the discourse at the time. While there were other, albeit few, journals and publishing channels around, there was something ‘theoretical’ about them, most importantly with regard to their form, which seemed to have allowed for only limited engagement with media, other than text.

Read full editorial and browse issue

Breathing into the Ecological Trauma: The Case of Gruinard Island

Christoph Solstreif-Pirker

With the performative investigation of Gruinard Island, Scotland, an exemplary non-site of anthropocenic extinction, this research exposition aims for alternative ways of encountering space in the midst of the present ecological crisis. The research exposition suggests an inclusive way of breathing, thinking, and living that merges “with experience, art, ethics, technology, mysticism, science, etc.” (François Laruelle: Principles of Non-Philosophy).

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Everything That Shines Sees: Flash Light, Photography and the Acheiropoietic

Dominique Somers

This exposition takes a close look at the concepts of self-origination and mediation for a better understanding of the photographic image engendered by a flash of light and its natural radiation. Starting from my own artistic experiments with fulguric and cosmic rays, performed in cooperation with a lightning simulation lab in Oxfordshire (UK) and with the nuclear research centre CERN in Geneva (Switzerland), it puts forward a speculative approach that looks beyond static and traditional assumptions about what it entails to 'be photographic'.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Interrogating the notion of 'frock consciousness' through the practice of dressing and responding to dressed bodies

Jennifer Anyan

Within my practice as an artist that draws upon my professional experience as a fashion stylist, I have undertaken a broad range of practice-based projects in the last thirteen years that deal with the identity and dress. This exposition seeks to use Virginia Woolf’s notion of frock consciousness as a framework to demonstrate how each of the projects has contributed to a body of research that has enabled me to make a contribution to knowledge in terms of how the practice of dressing ourselves impacts upon one’s consciousness and experience of being in the world.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Walking the Newsroom: Towards a Sensory Experience of Journalism

Sander Hölsgens, Saskia de Wildt, Tamara Witschge

We invite you to join us on a walk through the newsroom of a regional newspaper, Dagblad van het Noorden. We trace how the journalists perceive, articulate, engage, embrace, challenge, are receptive to, and give form to the ‘atmospheres’ of their workspace. The concept of atmospheres is central in how we have looked at the newsroom. On this walk, we explore the spatial, socio-cultural, rhythmic, tonal, and somatic characteristics of the recently redesigned newsroom, using video, sound, text, and drawing.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION

Walking with Soldiers: How I learned to stop worrying and love the cadets

Susanna Hast

“Walking with Soldiers” examines an auto-ethnographic moment of marching across the city of Helsinki with first-year cadets of the Finnish National Defence University. In a reparative reading, the walk dismantles boundaries of bodies, critiques, and affects. Through a walking methodology and autoethnography, the present exposition demonstrates how the author began orienteering within military structures through an affective investment. The exposition is a researcher’s journey across subjectivities and difference in a female civilian body.

[...]
keywords: OPEN EXPOSITION