Research Catalogue

Photography with sound and net art, drawing, found folk sculpture with digital drawing, readymades, 2012, 2020, 2021. Accompanied by archival material. The exposition exposes the question of what is artistic research. Usurping the mini-essayist format, which is traditionally associated with research in say the area of philosophy, the exposition formally operates on different levels. I selectively included visual art research material from my own artistic archive, as well as anonymous material that's readily available from the internet and in film archives. In this way, I wanted to emphasise the role of archiving and using archives in the artistic process, as an element of artistic research and artistic production that might involve remediation. Taking that we live in a largely theoretic culture, which means that we use external information systems for storage and retrieval of written, visual and other material, the implication is that art is part of this theoretical system. Moreover, I specifically problematise the notion of value in relation to the visual arts by using the popular media figures of the counterfeit and the impostor, with reference to the so-called "impostor syndrome", correlated with being a minority of some sort in one's field: "A different thought is that two people may be answerable to the very same standard of success or competence, yet be subject to different epistemic standards for reasonable belief in their respective success or competence. This would be an example of pragmatic encroachment." (Katherine Hawley, "What is Impostor Syndrome?", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93, 2019). I use visual art and figurative examples as illustrations, adapting from methods, such as the example, used in analytic philosophy. I suggest that some artworks operate as philosophical provocations of the archive: "The artwork just exists", as Frank Stella argued. Artworks and archival artistic material are offered for aesthetic contemplation; they don't possess any "magical" qualities, they don't cause any phenomena or events in the world. In this view, I ordered this exposition as a design proposal for two independent, yet interconnected exhibitions: one for the final artistic exhibition show; and one as a general overview for the artist's studio, set up as a stand alone, if parallel, exhibition.

Although it is virtually impossible to formalize what ‘best practice’ on the Research Catalogue might be, it harbours by now numerous examples of expositions that ‘work.’ In this session, I want to introduce a small set of diverse expositions from JAR as a way to highlight successful choices people have taken. With a short explanation of expositionality and virtual witnessing, I aim to support an understanding of the effect that those examples have as a way of describing how media-rich articulations can productively engage with both academic and artistic expectations.

"New ideas might be conceived and developed more rapidly in disciplines that are more abstract. The inductive methods of experimental innovators in painting makes their enterprise resemble the more empirical disciplines considered by psychologists, while the deductive approach of the conceptual innovators makes theirs resemble the more abstract disciplines." David W. Galenson, "The Life Cycles of Modern Artists", NBER Working Paper Series, 2003. Artists and architects have been at times captivated by visionary ideological viewpoints, which they used as inspiration and to make suggestions for applications with their artworks and designs. My use of the diagram and the image aims to convey the simple message that art strives for evolution; meaning to strengthen the mind, to research capabilities, to communicate a disinterested, though not necessarily apolitical, view of social changes, to overcome banality and offer an alternative way of looking at the world. For many artists, this motivation has traditionally often gone hand in hand with political goals and motivations. The decline of the commercial art market in the 1980s gave rise to artists working mainly, but not solely, with ephemeral installations, including the ubiquitous video art, performance, and the broader range of conceptual art. Painting remained as an established fine art practice, with a renewed interest to conceptualism. The portrait is of the artist, myself, at a young age, dated 1993, when I was a student at the NTUA. Betty Nigianni is my name known as (aka), which I also used as my artistic pseudonym.

HACKING SOUND SENSORIALITY_how to build embodied sound objects for electroacoustic music with lofi techniques Disembodiment is not new and does not only exist because of the current technological reality. It is an experience that various practitioners, in the field of music, experience constantly. The composer/producer/musician/sound designer moves the material. The listener only perceives its virtual representation. How to bridge the gap between the bodily experience of sound creation and its fruition and further (re)creation in the virtual world? By using synesthesia in the creation of an object-based sound method and vocabulary with the use of lofi techniques. A synesthesia of sensory roots to place the body-cosmos at the centre of sound, to make this simulacrum of identity a bridge between the articulate and the inarticulate, between the real and the virtual. Lofi thought, with its techniques for creating and modifying sound, has a new vision of technology, linked to knowledge and memories of the body. The aim is to design a new vocabulary of tools and methods for the creation of sound objects with different degrees of embodiment. These sound objects will be designed to live in two worlds: in the disembodied world of the virtual and in the material world of corporeal sonority. The article explores the use of a practical and philosophical hacking that does not colonise the new virtual sound territories, emptying them of resources and meanings, but amplifies them through the semiotics of the ancient territories of the body, in order to make them habitable and fertile.

In this exposition, I invite you to the process of research carried out in the tapestry manufactory in Valašské Meziříčí. It aims to find out how to convey tapestries' craftsmanship, mediality and materiality through filming and post-production. The theme of transformation is essential: the transformation of the tapestry into a film image, but also the transformation of painting or graphics, which were the precursors of the tapestries woven in the manufactory. I am also looking for ways to use a primarily representational medium to achieve an effect of presence through materiality and corporeality. In my research, I interlace observational passages with stylized ones that emerge from a creative dialogue between the materiality of different media, artistic techniques, or post-production interventions. These methods can deepen not only the viewer's experience but also the documentary testimony and convey an almost tactile encounter with the filmed reality. Finally, based on practical experience, I distinguish working with materiality in film into three analytical cuts. V této expozici zvu do procesu výzkumu, jak skrze natáčení a postprodukci filmu o gobelínové manufaktuře ve Valašském Meziříčí zprostředkovat řemeslnost, medialitu a materialitu tapisérií a recipročně i filmové technologie. Podstatným je tedy téma proměny. Proměny tapisérie ve filmový obraz, ale i proměny malby či grafiky, které byly předobrazem v manufaktuře utkaných tapisérií. Paralelně hledám možnosti, jak pomocí média, které je primárně reprezentativní, docílit skrz materialitu a tělesnost účinku prezence. Ve výzkumu střídám observační pasáže se stylizovanými, které vzešly z tvůrčího dialogu materialit odlišných médií, výtvarných technik či postprodukčních zásahů. Tyto metody mohou prohloubit nejen divácký prožitek, ale i dokumentární výpověď a zprostředkovat až taktilní setkání s natáčenou skutečností. Nakonec na základě praktické zkušenosti rozlišuji práci s materialitou ve filmu do tří analytických řezů.

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