Research Catalogue

In this section, the research defines the "Divergent Gaze" not as a subjective condition, but as a rigorous phenomenological method. It is the production of a divergent reality where fantasy becomes scientific certainty. The artist does not merely observe reality but interrogates its molecular and ontological stability.

This artistic research investigates what kind of music arises from multiple musical identities. The answer is the album III, a collaborative work with guitarist Juhani Silvola, supported by a research exposition that documents and reflects upon the creative process, and an extensive timeline showing it as it unfolded. The main argumentation within the work revolves around the importance of distinguishing between musical identities (plural) and personality (singular). The rationale behind this is to generate productive creative friction – to use the knowledge of multiplicity as a tool – to identify and push against boundaries and have knowledge from one identity inform, and expand, another. Identities are multiple, situational, and enacted through doings: (in my case) the drummer, the singer, the producer, the programmer, et al. They coexist, each with its own expectations, vocabulary, and criteria for success. Personality, by contrast, is shown as the continuous thread – the container in which all identities meet and negotiate, providing coherence without dissolving difference. The research unfolds across three phases: Startup, Deconstruction, and Assemblage. Methods include archival listening (revisiting accumulated recordings as material to draw from, either through self-gratification or analysis), physical and material constraints, custom software tools, and playing my instruments. In some cases, peripheral projects became ‘methodological sites’, allowing for focused and longer-term exploration and research. Spirit of Rain, Be Like Water, and a duo with Hans Martin Austestad, all function as experiments where methods combine and generate knowledge. A central concern is the role of machines in creative practice. Noting, but not necessarily drawing on, philosopher John Searle's (1980) Chinese Room Argument and the concept of procedural agency, this work follows a line of thought in which machines may exhibit tendencies, but not personality. What emerges from human-machine collaboration is shaped by this asymmetry. The exposition, built using HTML and hosted in the Research Catalogue framework, is not a linear argument entirely, but rather a pathway through sounds, texts, videos, and fragments – organized semi-chronologically and tagged by function. It demonstrates that answering a question about musical identity requires both artistic result and theoretically aligned reflection.

In the Mirror of Care Work researches skills within Nordic interactive performance practices. Using the mirror as a metaphor for visualisation and connection, artist Inga Gerner Nielsen brings into conversation the work of nurses and interactive performers. By inviting in the perspectives of care workers and looking into the history of their profession, Inga engages in discussions about the politics, mythologies and poetics of her own field. What do we see when we look in the mirror, and when that mirror is a nurse? Do we, as performers – like the nurses were once said to – abide by the feeling of a calling? Does this involve a kind of spiritual care for our audience? And what of the nurses’ working conditions should we perhaps try to adopt as (care giving) performers? The project visited Stockholm (MDT) in September 2023 and Helsinki in January 2024 in a two-day symposium to meet and exchange with local artists about the aspect of care work in their artistic practice . The project is based in a long-term collaboration with the nursing school at UCN Hjørring & Thisted in the north of Denmark. Together with teacher of the History of Nursing, Helle Kronborg Krogsgaard, Inga gerner Nielsen is developing ways of integrating interative performance excersices and visual art into the teaching of 1.st, 4th and 7th semester nursing students.

Post-Interpretive Criticism and the Seven Liberal Arts: How Ancient Disciplines Produced a Contemporary Method documents the emergence of Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC) as a methodological consequence of classical intellectual training rather than as a theoretical innovation or aesthetic preference. The essay argues that PIC arises when the seven liberal arts—grammar, logic (dialectic), rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—are rigorously internalized and applied without modification to contemporary art criticism. Rather than proposing a new interpretive framework, this study traces how long-standing disciplines of clear thinking expose structural failures within dominant modes of contemporary criticism, particularly the proliferation of unfalsifiable claims, category errors, rhetorical excess, and disproportionate commentary that displaces the artwork itself. Drawing on the trivium’s emphasis on distinction, validity, and proportionate articulation, alongside the quadrivium’s cultivation of ratio, harmony, distance, and order, the essay demonstrates how interpretive excess becomes visible not as an ideological disagreement but as a violation of established intellectual standards. The essay situates Post-Interpretive Criticism within a continuous lineage extending from classical antiquity through medieval university education, the scientific revolution, and non-Western traditions emphasizing proportion and restraint (including Islamic geometric practice and Japanese concepts of ma). It argues that PIC is replicable, falsifiable in procedural terms, and resistant to misuse because it depends on disciplined application of inherited methods rather than subjective taste or theoretical allegiance. By reframing Post-Interpretive Criticism as a diagnostic instrument rather than an advocacy position, the essay positions PIC as a restorative application of classical liberal arts to a contemporary domain that has largely abandoned them. The work contributes to debates in art criticism, aesthetics, philosophy of interpretation, and methodology by demonstrating that interpretive restraint, silence, and proportion are not evasions but outcomes of rigorous intellectual discipline. Post-Interpretive Criticism; Liberal Arts; Trivium; Quadrivium; Art Criticism; Aesthetics; Methodology; Classical Education; Proportion; Interpretation; Rhetorical Ethics; Dialectic; Grammar; Geometry; Critical Theory; Museum Studies; Philosophy of Art; Intellectual History 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)

This project develops strategies for performing contemporary music, strategies that are inspired by rhetoric performance practices, the creation of presence in performing, and how to use such practices to become a freer interpreter of contemporary music. The artistic research project is by nature a multi-faceted endeavour and has created an intriguing laboratory setting in which my contemporary music performance could be continually thought and reworked. The title Making Sense refers to my intention to create an embodied feeling of sense through my performances both for performer and listener, without a logocentric meaning 1) Initial research question: How can I perform contemporary classical music to communicate more directly with the listener, by working with presence as a performer, and using prosody (the melody and rhythm of the language) as an inspiration for performance? My main research aims have been: * to explore different methods for reaching an intensified presence in performing. * to describe the process of learning and performing a musical work – both physically and mentally thus using and documenting a reflective practitioner approach to musical experience. * to create new understandings about practice with particular attention to contemporary music.

This exposition investigates how visual meaning emerges at the threshold between abstraction and representation through a painting process based on “blocking”—the placement of large tonal regions before any detailed painting occurs. Each painting begins with coarse structural square blocks that are then repeatedly fractured or clarified. Rather than illustrating a subject, the method becomes a perceptual experiment: recognition arises as the work shifts between coherence and ambiguity. Alongside the paintings, a set of computationally blocked images and time-based sequences are produced using Colab. These digital transformations mirror the studio process by moving between coarse simplification and increasing visual differentiation. Taken together, the analogue and digital works offer a parallel investigation of how minimal structure can trigger figural recognition, and how ambiguity can be deliberately sustained. The exposition positions “blocking” as both a practical method and a conceptual tool for understanding tipping points between seeing and not-seeing in contemporary painting.