The Research Catalogue (RC) is a non-commercial, collaboration and publishing platform for artistic research provided by the Society for Artistic Research. The RC is free to use for artists and researchers. It serves also as a backbone for teaching purposes, student assessment, peer review workflows and research funding administration. It strives to be an open space for experimentation and exchange.

recent activities <>

INTIMACY AND DIGITAL SPACE: thoughts and tryout (2025) Reventp
In this research, I interrogate my practice as a performance photographer and explore how the digital space can be used as a tool to reflect on the unspeakable gazes and the notion of intimacy in an age where everyone can be seen and shown. The nature of the technologies used are as telling as we let them be but also pervasive in how they allow us to look into each other.
open exposition
Reticules (2025) Hanns Holger Rutz
A new filigrane sound object (or series of objects) in the making, w.i.p.
open exposition
The Body I Post (2025) Omkar Yadwad
The Body I Post examines how social media, algorithmic systems, and digital surveillance reshape contemporary understandings and performances of the body. Against the backdrop of theoretical frames leading from Foucault to N. Katherine Hayles, the project at hand scrutinizes the dynamics of shifting gazes, erosion of privacy, and the emergence of the posthuman subject. The work identifies the means by which identities are extracted, categorized, and refashioned through platform infrastructures and biased datasets, by investigating case studies such as Face to Facebook, Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections, and Trevor Paglen’s ImageNet Roulette. The research combines social experiments, visual references, and personal reflection to explore how bodies are curated for visibility, disciplined by metrics, and archived in ever-expanding digital memory systems. It questions the tension between material embodiment and its algorithmically mediated double and the ways in which humans have become simultaneously users, subjects, and raw data. The Body I Post is about what it means for us to exist as hybrids of flesh and code in an era where self-presentation has become continuous, performative, and inseparable from technological systems.
open exposition

recent publications <>

A Metaphorical Methodology: Embracing Complexity in Doctoral Artistic Research (2025) Kevin Skelton
This exposition invites you to reflect on the various things you do in your doctoral artistic research and to consider how these activities might form an interconnected system — a methodology. In a guided tour of words, images, and visits to my garden, I reconsider several research models I encountered as a PhD student investigating transdisciplinary performing practices. However, my primary aim is to carve out a pathway — from model to metaphor — one that offers a viable means of seeing your doctoral project existing within a terrain of complexity rather than utter chaos. Throughout the exposition I employ metaphors inspired not only by my artistic work, but also by my garden in Abruzzo, where I lived throughout my PhD studies. To fully discover Abruzzo, it is necessary to slow down — even allow yourself to get bored — before inevitably being revitalized and inspired by its natural beauty and ever-welcoming ambiance. I hope you will embrace this exposition’s journey. Permit yourself to be a rural-Italian wanderer, enjoy the breaks, and take extra ones so you can also enjoy an espresso or glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. Download Accessible PDF
open exposition
Bodies in Transition (2025) Anja Plonka, Rasmus Nordholt-Frieling, Marko Stefanovic, Laura Brechmann
The research project BODIES IN TRANSITION (2023-2024) searches for sensitive and collaborative bodies of the future by interlacing voices and materials from the Wadden Sea into a cosmology of plants, animals, bacteria, humans and planets. In the context of global crises, which appear as symptoms of a patriarchal and hierarchical self-understanding of human existence, three performers travel to the island of Sylt (Germany) to relearn ‘being’ in this more-than-human-world. Performative research is undertaken in the protection zone 1, the Morsum cliff and the mudflats near Munkmarsch. These dynamic ecosystems, with their tidal rhythms dictated by the moon and sun and their diverse life forms, ranging from Japanese berry seaweed to Pacific oysters, make the world’s processualism perceptible and remind us that our lives are intertwined with dynamic ecosystems. The performers immerse themselves in a fluid space of video, sound, natural materials, and performance, rethinking and questioning the diverse relationships between the organisms of the Wadden Sea and their own state as living beings. The leading question of this research is what we can learn from this dynamic interplay, to transform our existence with planet Gaia and all its organisms into a sensitive and resilient future. Download Accessible PDF
open exposition
Post-Interpretive Criticism and the Seven Liberal Arts: How Ancient Disciplines Produced a Contemporary Method (2025) Dorian Vale
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)
open exposition

sar announcements <>

Subscribe to SARA