Research Catalogue

In A place Like This sets out to investigate and expand the issues and critical discourses within Sandborg and Higgins' current collaborative research practice. The central focus for the research is concerned with how art, in this instance photographic and painted image making and text, can be used as an agent or catalyst of understanding and critical reflection. The research methodology is constructed through photography, painting, drawing and text. This utilises the form of an artist publication as a point of critically engaged dissemination: a place for the tension between conflicting ideas and investigation to be explored through discussion. The research question is focused on how the production of the image and the act of making images can communicate or describe moments of erasure or remembering in terms of historical and personal narratives with direct reference to moments of violence and place. This is seen not in terms of a nostalgic remembrance of the past; instead as one that is rife with complicated layers and dynamics where recognition is denied the ability to locate a physical representation. Embedded in this is an exploration of particular questions concerning the ethics of representation: the depiction of ourselves and other? In this sense it brings into question an examination of the act of remembering as a thing in itself, through the production of the image and text, contexts of knowledge and cultural discourses explored through the form of an artists publication.

Desenho e Perfomatividade (Conjunto de Workshops realizados)

[Hyper]drawing is a research project. Hyperdrawing is an opportunity for [fine art] drawing practice. This Research Catalogue exposition documents ongoing research into Hyperdrawing: Hyperdrawing is an ambiguous practice. Hyperdrawing adopts a position, a perspective or viewpoint, that a lack of definition should be embraced and that ambiguity presents an opportunity. Hyperdrawing has the capacity to enable and sustain drawing practices.

Thesis of the Royal Art Academy, The Hague, 2024 BA Fine Arts In the landscape of modern society, alienation is a common denominator to the experience of individuals. Whether this is due to society’s perpetual acceleration, or the experience of life through the ever-present lens of consumerism, alienation is an unmissable part of the contemporary human experience. This extends to the art world, where the chasm separating an ever-booming global market for the arts, and institutions struggling to get their pre-covid-19 visitor numbers highlight the disparities in the experience of art today. These disparities will ultimately transpire in the experience of the viewer. But how, and why can art be a catalyst for alienation in late-contemporary society? This Graduation Research Paper is an attempt at exploring the relationship between the artwork, the audience, and the artist, so as to attempt and provide a comprehensive notion of the ways in which relationships form around artworks, notably through communication theory. This GRP will also explore examples of elements of influence in the formation of communicative structures between the art and the audience. Notably, this paper will discuss the myth of the artist, and its influence as an authority in the experience of art, as well as the influence of spatial context on the reception of art. The paper will conclude that the artist possesses limited agency in the reception of their artworks, and that in order to provide an honest experience to a contemporary audience, the artist must seek to understand and deconstruct the codes which surround the audience's consumption of art.

This paper investigates the development of the production of High Fidelity (Hi-Fi), audios and the emergence of an accompanying audiophile culture in late state socialist Poland of the 1970s. My case study offers a discussion on the re-negotiating of the cultural values of a specifically marketed technology that was used as a status symbol in affluent market economy countries. In state-socialist Poland, a host of social actors appropriated Hi-Fi audios technologies and audiophile culture to be part of a nationwide project of technological and social modernization. I investigate how in this specific historical setting the mass-scale development and the production of Hi-Fi audios emerged, and how this was embedded into the government policy of building “consumer socialism.” This development also corresponded with a state-sponsored program of technological modernization, in which the electronics industry was identified as a flagship sector that received substantial government investment. I also discuss the emergence of a local audiophile culture, which was redefined by intermediary actors, from being a Western elitist “consumption microculture” into an accessible form of cultural uplift for working-class youth.

Envision a mobile application focusing on music discovery via operationalized and interrelated metadata. Imagine that this application builds on a certain record collection developed under the auspices of a public service institution. Then visualize the application as a vehicle for telling forgotten and neglected histories of recorded music, and you have DR DJ. This article reads the digital music archive of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) through the media archaeological notion of imaginary media by discussing a proposal for music discovery that never came to be. This proposal is a discarded idea for a mobile application called DR DJ, which the article assesses through Siegfried Zielinski’s concept of variantology. The article provides an analysis of DR’s actual digital music archive by viewing the unfulfilled potentials and desires of DR DJ as imaginary media co-constituting the realized technologies of DR’s music communication. The article evolves a speculative scenario where an actualized DR DJ potentiates experiences of concurrent lines in the history of recorded music, while also highlighting structural limitations and a reaffirmation of Western modalities.