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? How does ‘artistic research’ matter to artists leaving the MA without embarking on a PhD?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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'.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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20

The ongoing climate emergency and the coronavirus pandemic have both impacted on the role and function of JAR, and the Research Catalogue in particular, on which the journal is based.

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***CLICK FOR MORE INFORMATION*** reading as performance / reading as composition

Paul Norman

At the end of ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ (1969), Sol LeWitt states: “these sentences comment on art but are not art.” In the same work he also remarks, “If words are used and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature, numbers are not mathematics,” thus creating a paradigm. Is writing or talking about artistic ideas art or not?

… Let’s say for now that it could be.

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A Porous Consciousness in and as Artistic Practice: Re-engaging with classical Indian philosophy and aesthetics as a living tradition

Srisrividhiya Kalyanasundaram

Artistic creativity is critically and painstakingly intertwined with ecological creativity in Indian aesthetics. The underlying principles of form, grammar and structure are carefully considered applications and expansions of ecological principles. But what lies at the heart of a consciousness that can enact, embody and expand this creativity principle? I argue that the consciousness principle is 'porosity', an ability to transcend self to enter a state of being where life can move through as a seamless exchange of energy in consecrated time and space.

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Composition as Commentary: Voice and Poetry in Electroacoustic Music

Edmund Hunt

What is the role of a spoken or sung text in an electroacoustic composition? Does it represent anachronism, assigning the role of communication to the voice and thereby depriving more abstract electroacoustic material of its rhetorical force? Does the disembodied, electroacoustic voice distance the audience from the communicative power of the words that are heard?

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Exploring the Efficiency of Artistic Practices within the Context of their Interaction

Andrew Miller

This exposition presents the artistic research project ‘Exploring the Efficiency of Artistic Practices within the Context of their Interaction’, which examines the ways in which artistic practices interact with one another. It understands practices as the organised media and structures through which a researcher is able to initiate and continue the process of environmental constitution, the embodied process through which the world emerges as meaningful for and with us. The project is situated within the context of a phenomenological approach to consciousness and sense-making.

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The Missing Page: Place as Palimpsest and ‘Foil’

Jeremy Bubb

In this exposition, I analyse the making of The Missing Page, a short film I shot in 2016 (and completed much later, in 2018) in response to the disappearance of my mother, Dorothy, from her home for over twelve hours; she was later diagnosed with dementia. This exposition reflects on the key stages of the project: establishes the aims of the film and its inspirations; the nature of the exploratory research, which took place on location at my parent’s home; and the conclusions I drew.

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19

Assessing new knowledges that emerge from expositions of practice as research puts a particular kind of responsibility on peer-reviewers (as well as editors, and ultimately also readers) that goes beyond a simple application of expertise. While a reviewer’s expertise may tell us which elements of a submission are already dealt with in a particular field, the other, arguably more interesting and innovative parts of a submission are more complex to assess, since they are by definition departures from the very field a reviewer is an expert in.

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Digitally Produced Jewellery: Tactile Qualities of a Digital Touch

Sofia Hallik and Darja Popolitova
The importance of tactile contact between the artist and their jewellery has increased over the last decade. More and more artists now implement digital technologies into their work process. This raises questions about the notion of tactility, something that is usually associated as something tangible or given to touch.
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Memory as a Method for Filmmaking

Emilio Angel Reyes Bassail
This research develops a method for filmmaking that uses autobiographical memory as a guiding principle for the production of images. The proposed method comes as the result of a double gesture in which I wanted to a) acquire a subjective understanding of memory that came from artistic practice; and b) materialize the process of memory through film.
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Study of/as Commoning

Anette Baldauf, Vladimir Miller, Annette Krauss, Mara Verlic, Moira Hille, Hong-Kai Wang, Mihret Kebede Alwabie, Julia Wieger, Tesfaye Beri Bekele, Stefan Gruber
’Study of/as Commoning’ is one of the outcomes of a research project realized by a group of artists, architects and social theorists at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2014–16). In times of ongoing environmental crisis, violent land grabbing and the aggressive financialisation of space, time and subjectivities, combined with global migration flows, the research group explored the debates on the commons and the different practices of commoning as potentially providing new entry points for a radical repudiation of neoliberalism.
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18

Insofar as artistic research takes place within rich fabrics of practice, it is always also embedded in a multiplicity of languages – both verbal and non-verbal ones. Requiring submissions in English is – in some aspects – like asking for text as the only mode in which to report on an artistic research project: fixed formats that restrict options of articulation.

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50 Billion Micrograms. In the Search of the Aftermath of an Event

Christine Hansen
This exposition provides an example of how art can offer an alternative way of understanding the past through my work “50 Billion Micrograms”. The project explored a forgotten media event from 1979, in which a gigantic meteorite supposedly landed in a remote lake on the west coast of Norway. The exposition attempts to demonstrate how ambiguity was a fuel the project.
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Passages of Light: Analogue and Digital Moving Image Installation.

Alexander Nevill
Within a rapidly changing media landscape, light remains an intrinsic and potentially expressive aspect of moving imagery, regardless of the shape, form and resolution that specific capture and display devices might take. The practice of light in moving imagery is typically considered through an arrangement of sources, filters and modifiers that sculpt the aesthetic appearance of a two-dimensional frame and is often studied in relation to mainstream Hollywood films.
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What can a process do? A passage from ritual to rituality

Usoa Fullaondo
In this exposition I try to build new relationships between different creative processes arising from nature, life, and art. This is done by setting up visual, textual, and affective analogies through superimpositions of layers of images, sound, and text based on the book Un Atletismo Afectivo (An Affective Athleticism) (publication on paper, 116 pp, 2016) and the audiovisual work Trenza (Braid) (HD video, 55', 2017).
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