Research Catalogue

Een artistiek onderzoek naar contact, verbinding en gemeenschappelijke grond.

The research project 'Lessons in the Shadows of Death' explores and exposes an almost lost tradition of public mourning - the Art of Lamentation. The project follows the structure of the 17th century musical genre 'Leçons de Ténèbres' – traditionally composed as vocal ‘lessons’ performed during Easter week contemplating the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and based on the Biblical Lamentations. The overall purpose is to create and promote an intra-active 'grief-entangled' music practice in relation to public mourning and wounds of loss. Previous artistic research on vocal mad scenes, lamentations and Nothingness (Laasonen Belgrano 2011) and performance philosophical explorations of apophenia and autopoesis (Price 2017) has since 2019 merged and developed into a growing archive investigating ‘ornamentation-as methodology’. The primary aim of this project is to transform the ornamented music and words of Michel Lambert’s nine Leçons de Tenebres from 1661 into nine video-essays. Together with an international network of artists and scholars we will bring the 17th century musical mourning to a contemporary Jerusalem – a city which lives as a symbol of any falling, wounded and embodied space-time. The project reconfigures the Art of Lamentation as a living practice for a wounded world in need of re-learning how to attend to existential consciousness and communal grief.The research project 'Lessons in the Shadows of Death' explores and exposes an almost lost tradition of public mourning - the Art of Lamentation. The project follows the structure of the 17th century musical genre 'Leçons de Ténèbres' – traditionally composed as vocal ‘lessons’ performed during Easter week contemplating the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC and based on the Biblical Lamentations. The overall purpose is to create and promote an intra-active 'grief-entangled' music practice in relation to public mourning and wounds of loss. Previous artistic research on vocal mad scenes, lamentations and Nothingness (Laasonen Belgrano 2011) and performance philosophical explorations of apophenia and autopoesis (Price 2017) has since 2019 merged and developed into a growing archive investigating ‘ornamentation-as methodology’. The primary aim of this project is to transform the ornamented music and words of Michel Lambert’s nine Leçons de Tenebres from 1661 into nine video-essays. Together with an international network of artists and scholars we will bring the 17th century musical mourning to a contemporary Jerusalem – a city which lives as a symbol of any falling, wounded and embodied space-time. The project reconfigures the Art of Lamentation as a living practice for a wounded world in need of re-learning how to attend to existential consciousness and communal grief.

Dorsal Practices is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orient to self, others, world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? A dorsal orientation foregrounds an active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support a more open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

Thesis of the Royal Art Academy, The Hague, 2024 BA Fine Arts In the landscape of modern society, alienation is a common denominator to the experience of individuals. Whether this is due to society’s perpetual acceleration, or the experience of life through the ever-present lens of consumerism, alienation is an unmissable part of the contemporary human experience. This extends to the art world, where the chasm separating an ever-booming global market for the arts, and institutions struggling to get their pre-covid-19 visitor numbers highlight the disparities in the experience of art today. These disparities will ultimately transpire in the experience of the viewer. But how, and why can art be a catalyst for alienation in late-contemporary society? This Graduation Research Paper is an attempt at exploring the relationship between the artwork, the audience, and the artist, so as to attempt and provide a comprehensive notion of the ways in which relationships form around artworks, notably through communication theory. This GRP will also explore examples of elements of influence in the formation of communicative structures between the art and the audience. Notably, this paper will discuss the myth of the artist, and its influence as an authority in the experience of art, as well as the influence of spatial context on the reception of art. The paper will conclude that the artist possesses limited agency in the reception of their artworks, and that in order to provide an honest experience to a contemporary audience, the artist must seek to understand and deconstruct the codes which surround the audience's consumption of art.

This paper investigates the development of the production of High Fidelity (Hi-Fi), audios and the emergence of an accompanying audiophile culture in late state socialist Poland of the 1970s. My case study offers a discussion on the re-negotiating of the cultural values of a specifically marketed technology that was used as a status symbol in affluent market economy countries. In state-socialist Poland, a host of social actors appropriated Hi-Fi audios technologies and audiophile culture to be part of a nationwide project of technological and social modernization. I investigate how in this specific historical setting the mass-scale development and the production of Hi-Fi audios emerged, and how this was embedded into the government policy of building “consumer socialism.” This development also corresponded with a state-sponsored program of technological modernization, in which the electronics industry was identified as a flagship sector that received substantial government investment. I also discuss the emergence of a local audiophile culture, which was redefined by intermediary actors, from being a Western elitist “consumption microculture” into an accessible form of cultural uplift for working-class youth.

Envision a mobile application focusing on music discovery via operationalized and interrelated metadata. Imagine that this application builds on a certain record collection developed under the auspices of a public service institution. Then visualize the application as a vehicle for telling forgotten and neglected histories of recorded music, and you have DR DJ. This article reads the digital music archive of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) through the media archaeological notion of imaginary media by discussing a proposal for music discovery that never came to be. This proposal is a discarded idea for a mobile application called DR DJ, which the article assesses through Siegfried Zielinski’s concept of variantology. The article provides an analysis of DR’s actual digital music archive by viewing the unfulfilled potentials and desires of DR DJ as imaginary media co-constituting the realized technologies of DR’s music communication. The article evolves a speculative scenario where an actualized DR DJ potentiates experiences of concurrent lines in the history of recorded music, while also highlighting structural limitations and a reaffirmation of Western modalities.