Research Catalogue

Exhibition catalogue of 'Decolonial Love' (with full archive of the artworks and commentaries) Artists: Afulodidim Nikefolosi & Brice Catherin Brulhart Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland, 22 May - 23 July 2025.

WAP/Walking As Practice Program takes place where the forest meets the sea in the Northern Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden. It is a program for self-identifying walking artists. Exploring and sharing strategies for proximity through artistic expressions in the field of walking practices, creating a transformative, dynamic space for art that engages with life and nature. This involves critical and poetic explorations influenced by the immediate surroundings. We participate in each other’s walkshops or interventions, and we also host Share Sessions to familiarize ourselves with each other’s practices. Additionally, we introduce the Research Catalogue for final dissemination, where each artist create their individual exposition.

Conceived and co-organised by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin, this Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG) provides contexts for coming together via the exchange of language-based research. The intent is to support developments in the field of expanded language-based practices by inviting attention, time and space for enabling understanding of/and via these practices anew.

JSS Book reviews

This dataset accompanies A Quantitative Analysis of Critical Posture in Art Writing, 1980–2025 and provides a structured corpus of twenty influential critical texts spanning four decades of art discourse. The dataset operationalizes Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC) by applying a system of diagnostic indices designed to measure linguistic posture rather than interpretive content. Rather than evaluating what artworks mean, the dataset examines how critical language behaves in proximity to aesthetic encounter. Each text is coded according to a set of phenomenologically grounded indices—including Rhetorical Density (RD), Interpretive Load Index (ILI), Viewer Displacement Ratio (VDR), Ethical Proximity Score (EPS), Institutional Alignment Indicator (IAI), and newly introduced supplemental indices—capturing patterns of extraction, restraint, viewer positioning, closure, and institutional mediation. The dataset spans critical writing from 1980 to 2025, covering academic art history, museum wall texts, catalog essays, journal criticism, and experimental critical prose. All texts are analyzed using transparent, repeatable coding protocols, enabling comparative analysis across historical periods, institutional contexts, and stylistic regimes. The resulting quantitative profiles reveal structural shifts in art criticism, including the rise of interpretation-heavy language, increasing institutional alignment, and the erosion or preservation of phenomenological restraint. This dataset is intended for researchers in aesthetics, art history, museology, discourse analysis, and digital humanities. It supports replication, extension, and methodological critique of Post-Interpretive Criticism, while also serving as a proof-of-concept for formalized phenomenological analysis—demonstrating how phenomenological insights can be rendered measurable without reducing artworks or encounters to data objects. By treating criticism itself as the object of analysis, the dataset contributes a novel methodological resource for studying the ethics, structure, and historical evolution of art discourse. Post-Interpretive Criticism, Stillmark Theory, Message-Transfer Theory, MTT, Misplacement, Displacement, Aesthetic Displacement Theory, Theory of Misplacement, Absential Aesthetics, Witness Aesthetics, Hauntmark Theory, Spiritual Criticism, Presence-Based Criticism, Custodianship of Art, Art as Ontology, Aesthetic Recursion Theory, Aesthetic Recursion, Viewer as Evidence Theory, Restraint in front of art, Moral proximity, Interpretive silence, Erasure as ethics, Temporal scarcity, Silence as method, Ontology of beauty, Aesthetic mercy, Language as violence, Art encounter ethics, Epistemology of witness, Philosophy of Art, Aesthetics, Art Theory, Contemporary Aesthetics, Comparative Aesthetics, Phenomenology and Art, Ethics in Art Criticism, Interpretation and Meaning, Criticism and Reception Theory, Epistemology of Art, Visual Culture Studies, Dorian Vale, Founder of Post-Interpretive Criticism, Post-Aesthetic Critic, Independent Philosopher of Art, Museum of One, Art Writer and Theorist, Aesthetic Philosopher, Custodian of Witness Aesthetics, Spiritual Aesthetics Movement, The Doctrine of Post-Interpretive Criticism, The Custodian’s Oath, The Canon of Witnesses, Art as Truth, Art as Presence, The Viewer as Evidence, Interpretation vs. Witnessing, Language as Custody, Erasure as Afterlife, Museum of One Manifesto, Alternative art criticism, New art criticism movement, Ethical art theory, Criticism beyond interpretation, Slow looking philosophy, Quiet philosophy of art, Radical art restraint, Witness over interpretation, Interpretive Restraint, The Journal of Post-Interpretive criticism, The Journal of Post-Interpretive criticism ISSN 2819-7232), The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (Q136530009), Epoché Fidelity Index (EFI) (Q138018710), Phenomenological Phase Alignment Score (PPAS) (Q138018807), Residue Engagement Restraint Ratio (RERR) (Q138018901), Quasi-Subject Agency Recognition Index (QSARI) (Q138018929), Dialectical Circulation Index (DCI) (Q138018950)

This paper extends Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC) by introducing a second layer of diagnostic indices designed to evaluate the phenomenological fidelity of art criticism. While the original PIC framework measured ethical posture and linguistic force through indices such as Rhetorical Density, Interpretive Load, Viewer Displacement, Ethical Proximity, and Institutional Alignment, the present extension formalizes how phenomenological operations themselves are preserved or violated in critical language. Five additional indices are proposed: Epoché Fidelity Index, Phenomenological Phase Alignment Score, Residue Engagement Restraint Ratio, Quasi-Subject Agency Recognition Index, and Dialectical Circulation Index. Together, these metrics assess whether criticism maintains bracketing, respects the distinction between work and aesthetic object, preserves the viewer’s constitutive role, sustains the open dialectic of aesthetic experience, and avoids unrestrained claims over experiential residue. The framework does not evaluate artworks or interpretive correctness, but measures linguistic behavior in relation to phenomenological structure. By stratifying ethical posture and phenomenological fidelity into distinct diagnostic layers, the paper advances a formal, repeatable methodology for analyzing art criticism while remaining non-prescriptive and non-extractive. The result is a mathematically constrained phenomenological toolset capable of diagnosing when critical language honors or violates the conditions of aesthetic encounter. This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and Art as Truth: A Treatise (Q136329071), Aesthetic Recursion Theory (Q136339843), The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (Q136530009), Canon of Witnesses (Q136565881),Interpretive Load Index (ILI) (Q137709526), Viewer Displacement Ratio (VDR) (Q137709583) , Ethical Proximity Score (EPS) (Q137709600) , Institutional Alignment Indicator (IAI) (Q137709608), Post-Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Q137711946)