Research Catalogue

This exposition documents my explorations of pondering with pine trees. Tämä ekspositio dokumentoi yritykseni miettiä mäntyjen kanssa. Den här ekspositionen dokumenterar mina försök att fundera med furor.

The group acts as an open and inclusive formation for artist-researchers who share an interest and practice in working with sound. The group is committed to the indispensable action of encouraging and supporting personas of all diversity to participate and join in the collective exploration in and through sound, sensing and amplifying the heard, unheard as well as the overheard. As a collective the group welcomes contributors who are willing and eager to share their idea and practices, think collectively and are interested in shaping a emancipatory sonic futurism.

This study examines the relationship between the narratives in audio-visual artwork and the temporality of historical preservation within sociocultural contexts of destruction and re-construction, and rusting, through the concept of Sankofa. The series of photographic artworks titled “Patches of Time” delves into the socio-cultural fabric of memory, historical sites, forest, and the contemporary reconstruction of the past. Together with the written content, I show various forms of media such as photos, sound files and videos that reveal different aspects of the audio-visual practice. The photos and sound compositions are discussed here as ways of doing and making, exposing the experiences that hold aesthetic qualities and a sense of the sublime. The materiality of the photos and soundscapes mirrors an archaeological process, where remnants of the past are not only recovered but also recontextualized within contemporary sociocultural frameworks. Specifically, I investigate the integration of destruction and re-construction which aligns with Walter Benjamin’s notion that reproduction destabilizes traditional narratives, offering opportunities for reimagining history, and reshapes the aura of cultural artifacts. The destruction and re-construction of these photos impacts the narrative gestures of going back and starting anew (Sankofa). The study aims to observe the interconnectedness of art, memory and the mind as historical sites and explore the potential for re-imaging the nature of audio-photographic art.

Abstract This Research Catalogue exposition with audio-visual examples documents ongoing research into artistic interactions helping to ascertain and streamline prosocial and empathic behavior in groups with divergent backgrounds and modes of thinking and how these skills can benefit the artistic endeavors positively. Promoting intersociality and an empathic approach to collective music making amongst individuals who represent different schools of musical thoughts and styles or expertise, as well as bringing to the table divergent cultural backgrounds and individual characteristics is the aim of Ensemble Improvisation Experimentell (E i E), founded and lead by me at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna (MUK) since February 2021. In a world of pandemics, climate crisis and war it may seem idealistic, even fanciful, to search for moments of ‘shared empathy’ or creative symbiosis amongst musicians in professional exchanges and its influence on artistic experience and outcome, without immediately searching for ways of dimming the fire of destruction through war and climate crisis that our global society faces. However, finding micro-solutions through artistic endeavors and promoting a more sustainable future for the arts themselves in general, and specifically for the genre of contemporary music, is a valuable goal and tool for infiltrating humanism with sustainable thinking and acting patterns. Extensive video and audio documentation of practice sessions and performances, as well as exemplary images are attached to this exposition.

The project is a semi-graphic notification of the artist/author’s initiatives to stretch fiction – so-termed analogous to the stretcher component of an umbrella – in his language-based and visual practice. The referenced time-frame is from 2014 through 2025. The contention is that if one considers oneself as subject within one’s work, amidst whatever the work's more objective concerns, then it is a fairly obvious next step to third-person oneself – in the sense that a writer such as Fernando Pessoa invented heteronyms. While in visual practice such a prospect is, arguably, more difficult to articulate, a fictional element instilled in art- or other academic writing already has certain precedents in more experimental writing in the latter fields. If, as in the artist/author’s case, such writing is an adjunct to one’s visual practice, then a fictional characterisation of oneself as another can comment on and variously inhabit one’s visual work. Unlike how characters often populate fiction, however, the artist/author’s strategy is to only partly develop them, hence having them oscillate as, themselves, a question of relevance.

This project explores the cultural disappearance of Czech railway station pubs—once vibrant, affordable communal spaces where different layers of society met. As gentrification and modernization erase these places, the project treats them as social relics: through photography, objects, gestures, and staged re-enactments, it asks what is lost when shared public rituals fade. The research approaches the railway pub as a vanishing cultural microcosm. The aim is not only to document, but to interrogate the meaning of these spaces for both national identity and personal memory.