Research Catalogue

When preparing for the dead, may we peep into the future? In the broader geography of the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean, we cook our coffee in the briki or cezve. Every region has its own variation, some heat up the water before adding the powder, some add spices, some make it thick, others thinner. And every person has their own variation as well. Coffee is something as personal as communal. Apart from the daily morning and evening consumption, we also share two uses of the coffee that are central of interest here: the coffee cup reading and the tradition of coffee drinking in funerals and memorials. Imagination and memory, future and past, the association with grief; and the unique timelines traced in each cup. I think that it has been with me for years, the memory of my grandmothers, my mother’s morning ritual of cooking a light Greek coffee in a big cup. The familiarity of the Kafenio. And most importantly, community dynamics; sharing others, participating. Here I aspired to create a meeting space with people, artists or not, with whom I have met over the years and share the subtle fascination about this type of coffee and its rituals. Acknowledging the blood, oppression and displacement behind and around the product. The Cafe Imperial.

Although it is virtually impossible to formalize what ‘best practice’ on the Research Catalogue might be, it harbours by now numerous examples of expositions that ‘work.’ In this session, I want to introduce a small set of diverse expositions from JAR as a way to highlight successful choices people have taken. With a short explanation of expositionality and virtual witnessing, I aim to support an understanding of the effect that those examples have as a way of describing how media-rich articulations can productively engage with both academic and artistic expectations.

short bio and cv

This essay explores Nomadic Aesthetics as a post-disciplinary ethical philosophy grounded in movement, displacement, and moral geography. Through the lens of travelling installations, Dorian Vale interrogates how contemporary art carries not only material form but migratory conscience. Installations by artists such as Francis Alÿs, Mona Hatoum, Chiharu Shiota, and Khalil Rabah are examined not as static works, but as mobile testimonies—witnesses to border regimes, global inequality, and spiritual unbelonging. The essay argues that when art moves, it inherits moral weight: the crate becomes a coffin, the gallery a customs post, and the viewer a pilgrim. Nomadic aesthetics reframes mobility not as logistics, but as liturgy. It positions the travelling installation as a modern secular relic—bearing not truth as monument, but truth as residue. This is a theology of movement: truth that survives only by circulation. Title: Nomadic Aesthetics — Travelling Installations as Moral Geography Keywords: Post-Interpretive Criticism, Nomadic Aesthetics, Installation Art, Moral Geography, Migrant Artworks, Travelling Exhibitions, Globalization, Francis Alÿs, Mona Hatoum, Ai Weiwei, Chiharu Shiota, Khalil Rabah, Ethics of Movement, Conscience in Contemporary Art, Aesthetic Displacement, Witnessing, Museum Critique, Portable Truth, Moral Cartography License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Publication Year: 2025 Movement / Framework: Post-Interpretive Criticism (The Museum of One) DOI (Placeholder until generated): [To be automatically assigned by Zenodo] Journal / Series: The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (ISSN 2819-7232) Volume: III Publisher: Museum of One (Registered with Library and Archives Canada) Persistent Identifiers: ORCID: 0009-0004-7737-5094 ISNI: 0000000537155247 Wikidata: Q136308879 (Museum of One)

This exposition is part of the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, performance, production, and technology. This interview features Caroline Shaw, American composer, violinist, singer, and producer, whose work moves fluidly between concert music, studio production, and film scoring. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Partita for 8 Voices, Shaw combines historical sensibility with experimental curiosity, creating sound worlds that merge the human voice, instrumental gesture, and digital texture into a single expressive continuum. In the conversation, Shaw reflects on the interconnectedness of composing, producing, and performing; on the role of technology as both a creative and tactile medium; and on the shifting perception of time, form, and space in contemporary music. She also discusses the relationship between notation and sound, the dialogue between acoustic and digital realms, and the value of presence, collaboration, and shared listening as vital counterpoints to digital mediation. Shaw’s reflections reveal a vision of music as a living organism, at once human, technological, and emotional, where composition, sound design, and performance converge into an embodied act of imagination and connection.

Desire Machine is an artistic research project that examines collaborative creation through the conceptual framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblage and desiring machines. Developed as part of the Atlas of Smooth Spaces research initiative, the project explores how movement, sound, and algorithmic systems can function as heterogeneous components within a non-hierarchical and non-representational assemblage. Real-time body data, generative soundscapes, and responsive lighting are integrated via a recursive feedback structure, allowing for emergent behaviours and dynamic modulation across media. Rather than focusing on disciplinary integration, Desire Machine proposes a co-functional space defined by distributed agency, where artistic production unfolds through competencies and material relations. The project offers a methodological proposition for rethinking compositional practice as a site of continuous negotiation, transformation, and becoming.