The Research Catalogue (RC) is a non-commercial, collaboration and publishing platform for artistic research provided by the Society for Artistic Research. The RC is free to use for artists and researchers. It serves also as a backbone for teaching purposes, student assessment, peer review workflows and research funding administration. It strives to be an open space for experimentation and exchange.

recent activities <>

La violenza della creazione (2026) Xichen Qian
This research explores creation as a form of violence that operates through interruption, erasure, and bodily pressure rather than through visible conflict or aggression. Through a conference-performance, writing is treated as an unstable action: it begins, stops, fails, and is physically destroyed without revealing its content. The work focuses on moments where creation resists completion, and where decisions to stop, delete, or abandon become central gestures. By placing the performer behind the audience and withholding textual legibility, the research shifts attention from meaning to process, from narrative to tension. Creation is approached not as expression or inspiration, but as a concrete and irreversible experience that acts upon the body and its limits.
open exposition
Drumming spaces – Approaches to long-aesthetic drumming (2026) Markus Evert Snellman
This artistic research explores drumming as a practice in which cyclical motion, subtle variation, and gradual transformation converge into an ongoing rhythmic flow, inviting musical experience to shift from progression toward immersion within what is ongoing. The study asks how a drummer can create and cultivate such long-aesthetic rhythmic continuity within open-ended improvisational contexts, both practically and conceptually. The research draws on Finnish folk music’s pitkä estetiikka (long aesthetic), minimalist music, flow theory, and improvisation literature, and adopts an artistic research methodology in which drumming practice constitutes the primary site of inquiry. Insights are synthesised from personal practice, group rehearsals, performances, and audiovisual documentation produced between 2024 and 2025 in duo and trio improvisational settings, analysed through reflective practice and retrospective video analysis. The findings identify strategies for sustaining rhythmic continuity grounded in bodily and technical ease, held in balance with the uncertainties of improvisation. Central elements include deeply embodied ostinati, dynamic and timbral sensitivity, mindful approaches to change, and a principle of sustainability in musical ideas. In group improvisation, a slower pace of interaction, a non-reactive performance stance, and an open, undemanding listening orientation supported ongoing engagement and a spatial quality of the music. The research suggests that sustained, uneventful musicking may foster flow-like states and contribute to a broader slowing down of attention and pace, highlighting the potential of slow, continuous improvisation as a meaningful artistic and pedagogical practice.
open exposition
Inistitute for Relocation of Biodiversity (2026) Christallina Rox
In 2017, Christina started to work under the name "Institute for Relocation of Biodiversity" that serves as platform for artistic interventions and hosts her explorations around human nature divide. Under this umbrella, she creates a series of videos that simulate, suggest and create utopian and dystopian realities connected with the contemporary discourse around the anthropocene, climate change and the current biodiversity crisis.
open exposition

recent publications <>

Shared Resonance – A Participatory Electro-Acoustic Ritual (2026) Kaixiang Zhang
This exposition presents a practice-based research project that reimagines electronic music performance through the participatory and ritualistic ethos of Capoeira. Initially motivated by a critique of audience passivity in contemporary electronic performance, the project shifted from “translating” Capoeira into an electronic context toward constructing ritual-based frameworks that foster shared authorship, presence, and collective agency. The research unfolded through iterative processes of design, testing, and reflection. Early on, ritual was established as a conceptual foundation, situating the work within debates on participation, spectacle, and cultural belonging. Subsequent phases explored instrument-making as both technical and symbolic practice, producing DIY electroacoustic objects (Lua and Mar) that embody accessibility, agency, and transparency. Attention then turned to orchestrating the ritual performance itself, experimenting with spatial, temporal, and sensory structures that redistribute power and unsettle the artist–audience divide. The process culminated in a public performance integrating instruments, structure, and reflection, while raising new questions around documentation, belonging, and the fragility of agency. From these iterations emerged the framework of ritual as multi-dimensional architecture: a compositional and perceptual field where time, space, materials, and social dynamics interweave to sustain collective creativity. The exposition combines documentation of instruments and performances with reflective writing, offering both a record of process and a proposition for future development.
open exposition
Home page JSS (2026) Journal of Sonic Studies
Home page of the Journal of Sonic Studies
open exposition
A Museum of Breath: Designing Spaces for Attention, Not Spectacle (2026) Dorian Vale
A Museum of Breath: Designing Spaces for Attention, Not Spectacle proposes an alternative architectural and curatorial ethic for contemporary museums in an era increasingly governed by speed, spectacle, and attention economies. Departing from the dominant model of the museum as a site of circulation, visual consumption, and algorithmic visibility, the essay advances the concept of the Museum of Breath—an institution designed not to display objects efficiently, but to protect and cultivate human attention as an ethical resource. Drawing on architectural phenomenology, aesthetic philosophy, and sacred spatial traditions, the essay argues that attention is not merely perceptual but moral: to attend fully is to suspend ego, resist extraction, and honor presence. Museums, once spaces of reverence and contemplation, have gradually adopted architectures optimized for movement, accumulation, and self-documentation. This shift, the essay contends, is not accidental but infrastructural, embedded in circulation patterns, lighting regimes, material choices, and curatorial metrics that privilege velocity over duration. The Museum of Breath is proposed as a counter-model. Its design principles emphasize subtraction, stillness, and respiratory rhythm. Architecture is treated as a living system—one that expands and contracts, modulates light and air, and guides the visitor’s pace through compression and release. Influenced by the work of architects such as Tadao Ando, Peter Zumthor, and Louis Kahn, as well as artists including Agnes Martin, Marina Abramović, and Eija-Liisa Ahtila, the essay situates breathing as both a physiological and aesthetic organizing principle. Curation within this framework becomes an ethics of restraint. The curator is reimagined as a custodian of attention rather than a manager of content, responsible for creating conditions of duration, silence, and perceptual humility. The essay further critiques the market logic that renders spectacle measurable and stillness invisible, proposing alternative evaluative values grounded in slowness, absence, and unrecordable experience. Rather than offering a finalized architectural blueprint, A Museum of Breath presents a speculative yet rigorous proposal for rethinking museum design, curatorial practice, and institutional purpose. It invites architects, curators, and theorists to reconsider the museum not as a theatre of objects, but as a sanctuary for presence—one that restores the human pulse in spaces increasingly designed to exhaust it. 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) Dorian Vale is a chosen pseudonym, not to obscure identity, but to preserve clarity of voice and integrity of message. It creates distance between the writer and the work, allowing the philosophy to stand unclouded by biography. The name exists not to hide, but to honor the seriousness of the task: to speak without spectacle, and to build without needing to be seen.
open exposition

sar announcements >

Subscribe to SARA