Research Catalogue

A worklog exemplifying my practice of making situated interventions through narrative storyworlds and animated worldbuilding. My art often brings some conditions attached that aim at transforming the mindset and routines of the environments I enter, as a way to ”world” them. Constructing alternative inner story worlds has always been the basic mode for me to perceive the world, process the world, and to find ways to act in the world. worldbuilding as an artform also serves my interest in systems and “the whole”. an interest that brings about the desire for sustainability, for things to be fair, balanced, for “the whole” to sustain and thrive. My artworks often materialize as a response to something in my environment, a response that carefully takes form within the fictive storyworld. Examples of responses are a proposal to update the permanent exhibition on mining at Tekniska Museet, staging a shutdown of the university or introducing climate budgeting into film courses. This method of careful responses aligns with the concept of “worlding”, a term from material feminist thought about making “cuts” in the world, enacting interventions that produce the world I inhabit. “Worlding” is acknowledging the relations, how I am entangled in the world, while acting. Being embedded in a “storyworld” gives me the critical distance that enables me to respond more creatively, ”as if” things could be a whole lot different. Due to my interests in the full range of things, from material to structural to epistemological and ontological, I prefer to make interactions on all levels simultaneously in order to trace their effects, how they are connected, how they interact and affect one another. In order to reach initiated understanding into all parts of “the wholes” *I often engage in transdiciplinary collaborations with researchers from many different disciplines.

Growing Likeness, a study in biological authored portraiture and bioart experiment in the aesthetics and value of bio-facial construction, challenging the sustainability of growing human-like structures in a deep-rooted vision. A mapping of intelligence systems disguised as human, this research strikes a visual analogy to the science and the system matrix of crop roots. The aesthetics and symbolic resemblance to the human head is a creative and philosophical query, provoking the viewer to challenge their perception, if in fact any, likeness to human identity. How is the biological intervention of the plant seedlings aiding the construct and metaphorical meaning of being human? Simple experiments with seeds, are in fact, a means to expand knowledge of leading science and technology research whilst communicating this knowledge through art. https://www.ecu.edu.au/schools/arts-and-humanities/ecu-galleries/past-exhibitions/related-content/exhibitions/2024/growing-likeness

In our exploration of the spatiality of language and, specifically, the activation of the site where writing "makes" rather than takes place, we propose a multilayered experience of the book as an object, as well as a geometrical, topological, and especially performative space, which we understand as an "ecology of the book". Extending this practice beyond the book's margins, yet simultaneously embedding it within the material and technical affordances of the book’s medial articulations, we evoke a "new" ecology—one unfolding alongside the interaction-landscape and its actual and invented inhabitants, as well as the techniques of its production. Texts, drawings, figures, figurations, methods, and both human and non-human authors weave together the heterogeneous texture of the book’s "new" ecology. In our monographs, "Fauna. Language Arts and the New Order of Imaginary Animals" (2018), "Flora. Language Arts in the Age of Information" (2020), and "Fiction Fiction. Language Arts and the Practice of Spatial Storytelling" (2023, De Gruyter/Edition Angewandte), we explore and map the territory of language arts. This approach manifests, on the one hand, through the transgression of traditional scientific methodologies and a shift in models—from thinking-of-the-other toward thinking-with-the-other, and on the other hand, through the agency of our eponymous characters, Fauna and Flora, who not only title our books but also act as conceptual operators—figures that navigate, perform, and activate the very spaces our texts explore. Applying Michel Serres' methodology of thinking by inventing personae, these characters move within and percolate through the margins of text (written, figural) and space (concrete, fictional), reconfiguring the notion of authorship and placing literary texts and digital drawings within the frame(less) collective of more-than-human and more-than-organic actants.

What if failure is not collapse but recalibration? This research reconsiders seismic activity as a speculative site of vibratory instability, adjustment, and relational tension, rather than disaster. Drawing on seismic data from the most significant Romanian earthquakes between 1977 and 2023, the project translates magnitudes into an immersive sound installation that renders the inaudible perceptible through algorithmic processing and low-frequency vibration. The resulting sonic environment invites discomfort and disorientation as productive states, reframing failure as a mode through which we may interpret stability itself differently. The work draws from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Jung’s archetypal theory, Bohm’s field theory, Deleuze’s pataphysics, Priest’s aesthetics of failure, and Eshun’s sonic fiction to position seismic resonance as a speculative and unstable threshold between sensing and knowing. Rather than presuming to represent the Earth’s voice, the installation critically engages with the ethical implications of translating geophysical data into sound, acknowledging the gaps, distortions, and interpretive acts involved. Instead of breakdown, failure becomes a condition of listening – one that resists mastery and opens a dialogue between human and more-than-human temporalities through sonic practice.

This exposition explores the paradox of rendering visible a research that seeks to remain unseen. It examines concealment, obfuscation, and selective disclosure as strategies of resistance and protection, questioning the ethics and politics of visibility in academic and artistic inquiry. Absence, silence, and ambiguity are explored as ways of invoking presence, challenging dominant paradigms of transparency and access, and proposing alternative modes of engaging with hidden or fugitive research. Central to this inquiry is the operatic prompter, an unseen presence that feeds lines to the performer, ensuring continuity while remaining hidden. The prompter’s role complicates the link between knowledge and articulation, shaping the performance without claiming authorship. Like other fugitive voices in history, the prompter embodies a marginal agency, whispering from the wings.

Gestaltology Encoded is an experimental research article in the form of an exposition, centered around the development of an artificial organism, Arcana, coming to life through the artistic research project Gestaltology (2020–2023). The project aims to explore AI and robotics in a way that challenges Cartesian dualism, by investigating the interplay between mind, body, and environment. By engaging a transdisciplinary team, the project delves into evolutionary biology, AI, and robotics, creating an artificial organism that evolves through symbiosis with its environment. Arcana’s artistic process, rooted in these conditions, emerges through its ability to create visual outputs that transcend human-centric perspectives. This research proposes a posthuman approach to AI development, emphasizing an ecocentric and performative perspective that reshapes the relationship between technology, art, and ecology. The article reflects on the project's iterative nature, where failure is viewed as an inevitable and creative catalyst, guiding the project toward unforeseen futures.