Research Catalogue

Exhibition essay & reproductions of posters to accompany the exhibition "Orange Work" at Nullið Gallery during DesignMarch 2024, Iceland's design week.

This is the schedule for the master research symposium.

Design, 1995-96, 2023. Design, 1996-97. Photography, 2010, 2011. Essay, 2015. Collage Text, 2022. The exposition serves as commentary and guide on the place of art, in a gradually environmentally and technologically challenged world. I designed this exposition as a 'teaser' on how architects, who work mainly conceptually, might conduct research from different art and media sources, as well as their own broader artistic work. In this art and design context, I further make a commentary on outgrown conceptions of the foreign, in terms of the so-called "exotic', and the non-foreign,within the political context of contemporary globalisation. Thus, I raise open questions on the impact of architecture and design on global politics. The re-design proposal, inspired by De Stijl, illustrates the modernist historical view that art appears to be regressive, rather than progressive: as soon as a movement or a school becomes established, reaching its culmination, it starts declining. Finally, I have included a graduate school architectural design project in the archaeological site of Eleusis accompanied by new commentary. With essay about experimental film making in the British avant-garde, published in "Architecture and Culture" journal, 2015, which is about the environmental challenges of the urban environment. The reference to the TV show "Alone", a competitive prize show of sole or two-person players, is a reminder that humans can live in the natural environment developing survival tactics already applied by their ancestors. I included those references to make hints at the relationships between film, television and contemporary architecture as an artistic medium, in the old-fashioned tradition of architecture belonging to the fine arts. About how to navigate this exposition: Scroll from top to bottom, then from bottom to top, then scroll to the top right, then scroll to the bottom right. For Luke, who I haven't met; with respect and care.

This research project explores how theatre can contribute to democratic engagement. The starting point was artistic probes investigating aspects of democracy: participation, deliberation and inclusion. The probes resulted in three productions presented at theatre institutions in Sweden. In Skapa Demokrati (Creating Democracy), participation was promoted by encouraging the audience members to create a democracy together. The performance thus allowed participants to experience a democratic process by actively engaging in the making of a constitution. In Öva Demokrati (Practicing Democracy), deliberation was in focus. The performance allowed the audience to deliberate on suggestions for strengthening Swedish democracy. Through methods inspired by political science, the audience was invited to speak and listen to arguments for the different proposals. In the performance, they were also presented with a variety of ways of voting to illustrate how different electoral systems can encourage engagement and give minorities a chance to be heard. In Monument, different strategies were used to promote inclusion. The project started with the idea that monuments say something about society. The monuments were used as vehicles to include voices from the residents of Helsingborg. The artwork presented these different experiences through a multi-perspective script. Other outreach activities also helped enable inclusion. Narrative analysis for theatre was used to reflect on these probes, allowing for a deeper understanding of how performances were conceptualised and structured, and how they made meaning for the audience. Lastly, the performance Ibsendekonstruktion II: Brand was written and staged to reflect on how the research has changed the artistic practice. The research has resulted in strategies for inclusion and a novel theatre format, the conversational theatre, which encourages participation and deliberation. These outcomes provide the theatre with methods to be in dialogue with society.

Psychoanalysis is always targeted in theory with armchair theorizing. A very distorted sense of the phenomena from the armchair introspection and speculation and almost-limited theorizing in behavioral psychologies and even in psychoanalysis invests itself in human experiential stances instead of objective observation. To construct a theory based upon these phenomena, however, there’s too much data. What psychoanalysts do is to demonstrate to the people, through self-experiments, how simple it is to misunderstand what is actually in their consciousness and in their first-person data. What’s remarkable about consciousness is that it is not continuous. There are countless voids in the information of consciousness, some of which work in the psychoanalytic experience of diagnosing symptoms in first- person data, the beliefs about the experiences to which individuals have exclusive access. Its discontinuity, the voids and the holes are limited to these beliefs. For the fact that language works discursively, humans may renounce their privileged access to these experiences and shift their focus from what they believe to what actually is the case. In the end, there will be a scientific narrative in which the conscious self will not be a character. A living body, a living brain, and everything else is all that exists. The first-person narrative would be extracted from that third-person account. The conscious self never exists in any other sense. Thinking that it would exist is the illusion.

“Havana Syndrome” has so far been shrouded in a controversial secret as a medical condition and reluctantly made available in the scientific discourses. In spite of the reluctance, global availability of technologies to conduct the violations reported by the US diplomats was never a hidden agenda for conspiracies. US and various NGO accounts illustrate the deployments of these high-tech tools in warfare and beyond, targeting both diplomats and civilians.