Research Catalogue

The aim of this artistic research project is to create a VR documentary experience that narrates the story of a time witness from the second world war in Bodø, Norway. The project explores questions concerning visual storytelling and ethics in the encounter between the VR-audience, interviewed subjects and the audiovisual spatial design. Artistic and qualitative research methods have been employed to explore how different visual modes and contexts alter the experience of narrator and narrative in a media format characterized by its ability to place the viewer in a state of immersion, intimacy, and a sense of presence. Theoretically, this study is situated in an artistic landscape connected to media theory, journalism, ethics and visual communication. Concepts such as postmemory, media witness ethics, with the so-called risk of improper distance and considerations around the term distant others, are relevant for the reflection associated with the project.

As we move towards the first quarter of the third millennium, the impermanent and shifting influence of globalisation, economic division, migratory encounters, social media, historic narrative and tourism is having a major impact in our understanding of the making, belonging and occupying of place. It is widely documented that these conditions are contributing to a growing sense of displacement and alienation in what constitutes as place making, occupying, and belonging. CCFT is asking how interdisciplinary artistic research practices contribute and share new critical understandings to aid this evolving understanding of place making, belonging and occupying?

This paper examines the themes of human perception and participation within the contemporary paradigm and relates the hallmarks of the major paradigm shift which occurred in the mid-20th century from a structural view of the world to a systems view. In this context, the author’s creative practice is described, outlining a methodology for working with the communication networks and interpersonal feedback loops that help to define our relationships to each other and to media since that paradigm shift. This research is framed within a larger field of inquiry into the impact of contemporary New Media Art as we experience it. This thesis proposes generative/cybernetic/systems art as the most appropriate media to model the processes of cultural identity production and networked communication. It reviews brief definitions of the systems paradigm and some key principles of cybernetic theory, with emphasis on generative, indeterminate processes. These definitions provide context for a brief review of precedents for the use of these models in the arts, (especially in process art, experimental video, interactive art, algorithmic composition, and sound art) since the mid-20th century, in direct correlation to the paradigm shift into systems thinking. Research outcomes reported here describe a recent body of generative art performances that have evolved from this intermedial, research-based creative practice, and discuss its use of algorithms, electronic media, and performance to provide audiences with access to an intuitive model of the interpersonal in a networked world.

This article provides insight into the choreographic situation LUFTIG, where the idea of air as conveyor of tactile experience is passed on, reworked and performed by children and adults. It examines how shifting the focus from movement language to a distinct expressive idea affects the choreographic process, and looks at how involving young people as choreographers and choreographic material affects the aesthetic experience of the now for artists and audience. Drawing on Tygstrup's idea of transformative time (2018), Gumbrecht's concept of the broad present (2018) and Taussig's thoughts on the adult's imagination of the child's imagination (2003), the author argues that in performance work where children are both choreographers and choreographic material, the adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination and the actual actions of the physically present child are at the same time mutually dependent on and at odds with each other, leaving the adult teetering on the edge of contemporary reality and primordial retreat. In the work proces, the child has a special propensity for easing the work for all which can only be deployed if we are able to circumvent tendencies of mutual projection of imagined imaginations. This requires a singular work process, where we - children and adults alike - can inhabit questions together without relying wholly on our previous knowledge of and experience with known performance parameters.

Our main interest is based on understanding spatial relationships from first-person experience, from our virtual and real body. Through the act of walking, movement in real time, we become cursors that dash across the interface of reality. A continuous process that brings us closer to the production of meanings, new relationships and representations, and also a dialogue with space and time, and the network. This article seeks to present a series of disruptive experiences, documented by the authors themselves, which constitute an exploratory framework of space to discover different symbolic interrelationships, and sketch out constructions of the common space in haptic, political, social and cultural mode. It offers a repository of unexpected, intersubjective encounters, from the empirical practice of walking, which arouses new perspectives to be able to interpret circumstantial spaces, to lose oneself in ‘non-places’, or reflect as to how to approach the landscape and/or the city by opening new imaginaries that add value to the ‘glocal’ place that we traverse and/or inhabit.

This exposition details the opening phase of new research between an experimental sound artist and an archaeologist, with a detailed examination of critical epistemological questions that have arisen from the beginning of this project. Both collaborating researchers are situated within hybrid specialisations. As the project unfolds, archaeo-chemical data is explored and animated through methods developed from intersections of data science and musical practice, resulting in performance and installation environments in which knowledge of material culture of the ancient past may be made present through listening. However, beyond a case study, this exposition points to how interdisciplinary artistic work produces results that have value outside of normative paradigms for any of the fields from which it is derived, while offering critical insight about those fields. This exposition is formed of these insights. Readers are introduced to the structure of the data, its relationship to the materiality of the artefacts described, the technological apparatus and compositional methodology through which the data is sonified, and the new materiality of the resulting artistic experiences. Sonification exists at a nexus of sound production and listening, interwoven with information. Meaning and interpretations arise from artistic decisions concerning sound composition and the context for listening to take place. Meanwhile, listening teaches us about data and about the physical and cultural spaces into which we project it. In this way, sonification is always already interdisciplinary.