Research Catalogue

"New ideas might be conceived and developed more rapidly in disciplines that are more abstract. The inductive methods of experimental innovators in painting makes their enterprise resemble the more empirical disciplines considered by psychologists, while the deductive approach of the conceptual innovators makes theirs resemble the more abstract disciplines." David W. Galenson, "The Life Cycles of Modern Artists", NBER Working Paper Series, 2003. Artists and architects have been at times captivated by visionary ideological viewpoints, which they used as inspiration and to make suggestions for applications with their artworks and designs. My use of the diagram and the image aims to convey the simple message that art strives for evolution; meaning to strengthen the mind, to research capabilities, to communicate a disinterested, though not necessarily apolitical, view of social changes, to overcome banality and offer an alternative way of looking at the world. For many artists, this motivation has traditionally often gone hand in hand with political goals and motivations. The decline of the commercial art market in the 1980s gave rise to artists working mainly, but not solely, with ephemeral installations, including the ubiquitous video art, performance, and the broader range of conceptual art. Painting remained as an established fine art practice, with a renewed interest to conceptualism. The portrait is of the artist, myself, at a young age, dated 1993, when I was a student at the NTUA. Betty Nigianni is my name known as (aka), which I also used as my artistic pseudonym.

2024-2025 Manuel Rodriguez

Exploring the affordances of Larping in virtual reality.

The project began as a commitment to 30/30, an initiative offered by Artquest, where subscribing artists were required to upload a new artwork to a 30/30 dedicated platform on a daily basis though the month of February and into March, 2025. The response formatted as this exposition is variations of text, image, and video animation, archived as still-image iterations mostly sized at 21 x 29.5cm and hyperlinked videos of up to two-minutes’ running time. The works’ content wavers between anecdotal and academic/theoretical. (Artquest issued non-obligatory collective prompts at the start of each day, which is in this case sometimes either used.) Any texts from each iteration have been copied to a companion page and corrected, rephrased or explained. The iterations play with oscillation between text and image, where the look of text under these circumstances becomes more noticeable while retaining much of its readability. Theoretical reading during the project had been Isabelle Stengers's book on the philosopher A. N. Whitehead, which is variously referenced in the iterations. At the same time, the author’s recent interest in a question of adaptability of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's Logical Square to the question of the artistic research process is referenced. Given that the theories of these two authors do not in any obvious sense relate, their conflation in a sense holds their function in the iterations open to question, analogous to how one reflects on interests in and through one's visual practice. While the 30/30 structure required daily decision-making and action, any one iteration tended to be of consequence to the next, which afforded continuity of duration to the project.

Cognitive Architecture est un détour cognitif-psychanalytique autour des théories, hypothèses et des revendications cognitives d’économie mondiale, des idéologies, et des leurs conventions ou réfutations. Bien qu’il soit davantage rencontré dans les sciences humaines, la mode de structuration des événements, des happenings, est également un concept significatif dans les sciences cognitives. Les sciences cognitives conçoivent les fictions des realite faire des données du sens commun et postulats qui décident des problèmes dans leur conditionnement même. Sans doute apparaît-il d’emblée que les cadres dans lesquels les sciences humaines classent les phénomènes en sensations, perceptions, images, croyances, fonctions et travaillés logiques, jugements, etc., sont empruntés comme tels au travail de siècles de philosophie. Loin d’avoir été forgés pour une conception objective de la réalité humaine, ces cadres ne sont que les produits de la destruction abstraite où se tracent les vicissitudes d’un effort spécifique, qui pousse l’homme à chercher la confiance, la vérité, la conscience de soi et l’univers. Une confiance qui est transcendante dans sa position, et qui le reste donc dans la forme, même lorsque le philosophe en nie l'existence. Les tendances à une confiance absolue dans les explications naturalistes des phénomènes culturellement conditionnés exigent une un encadrer l'appropriation cognitive des concepts scientifiques d’économie mondiale. Dans les chapitres consécutives, ce livre critiques d'appropriations des concepts darwinienne dans les discours libérale détourne le darwinisme scientifique dans l’idée de s’appropriation moins avec ou aux technologies avancées que de les adapter aux valeurs idéologiques libérales croissantes qui elles- mêmes sont devenues plus autoritaires dans leurs règles non écrites d’entrepreneuriat, d’auto-évaluation et de développement individuel, particulièrement l’esprit humaine.

Turkish Female director Tomris Giritlioğlu was one of the first in Turkish cinema to touch upon the long-forgotten and pathological consequences of the Turkification efforts in Turkey since forever. In Salkım Hanımın Taneleri / Mrs. Salkım's Diamonds, she (re)creates the recent and pessimistic past of the one-party Turkey of 1943 Wealth Tax, trying to overthrow the official discourse of the chaotic institutionalization and nationalization times in Turkey. In Güz Sancısı / Pains of Autumn (2009), she formed a part of the identity carnival of 6-7 September 1955 Events/Pogrom. In these two films, Tomris Giritlioğlu offers a series of interesting contexts to examine the Turkish government’s national stance and the identity formation in two decades from the 1943 Wealth Tax and to the 6-7 September 1955 Events/Pogrom.