Research Catalogue

Jenny Sunesson (b. 1973) is a Swedish artist predominantly working with sound. Her practice ranges from field recording and live collages to conceptual sound art and video. Sunesson uses her own life as a stage for her dark, tragic and sometimes comical re-contextualised work where real and invented characters and derogated stereotypes, collaborate in the alternate story of hierarchies and normative power structures in society.

PERFORMING PROCESS is a research group within the Artistic Research Centre at Nottingham Trent University, co-led by Emma Cocker and Danica Maier, both Associate Professors in Fine Art. We ask: what is at stake in focusing on the process of practice — the embodied, experiential, relational and material dimensions of artistic making, thinking and knowing. What is the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity within artistic research? How might a process-focused exploration intervene in and offer new perspectives on artistic practice and research, perhaps even on the uncertain conditions of contemporary life? PERFORMING PROCESS has origins in a number of critical precedents: Summer and Winter Lodges originating within the fine art area (practice-research residencies or laboratories dedicated to providing space-time for making-thinking and for exploring the process of practice), collaborative artistic research projects such as No Telos, for exploring the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity; the DREAM seminar series with PhD researchers which focuses specifically on the ‘how-ness’ of practice research by asking - How do we do what we do?

This conference will explore how emerging technologies—especially generative AI and blockchain—reimagine the current notions of creative agency. Conveners: Adam Łukawski, Martin Zeilinger Artificial intelligence (AI), with its learning algorithms operating at scale, can mimic human creative agency, and blockchain technologies, through smart contracts, can augment works of art with more or less autonomous behaviours that correspond to the agency of human participants in socio-economic interactions. While such developments can destabilise traditional notions of ownership, provenance, and agency in musical practices, they can also empower artists. Those working creatively with sound and music are today increasingly becoming system-builders and curators of musical ecosystems, turning their focus from the creation of singular, standalone musical works (in any traditional sense of the term) to the design of systems capable of generating artworks. This suggests an evolving role of music-producing systems today: from fixed intellectual constructs and creative expressions to dynamic, more-than-human technological networks that not only actively participate in the production of artworks with increasing levels of agency, but which can themselves be considered as artworks that constitute generative, expressive assemblages. This shift is further emphasised in distributed contexts, where varying levels of automation blur the boundaries between human and non-human contributions, creating environments where agency is negotiated and shared across diverse actants.

All Tomorrow´s Parties: post pandemic dancing is an artistic research that undertakes the task of discovering how hiv and aids has affected the Norwegian dance scene in the 1980´s and 1990´s and all the way up until today. Many dancers got infected by the virus, lived with hiv, and died of aids. Who were they? What were they dancing? And what kind of dances would they have danced had they not died too early? By interviewing the survivors, this project aims to map out how the Norwegian dance scene was affected by this pandemic, outline the hole left behind by this generation that disappeared, and try to fill it by creating dances that they could have danced.

This paper is an exploration of collaborative artistic practice. Drawing from contemporary philosophy and ethics, it uses practical experience from three collaborative research projects to show how different approaches can be applied in artistic research. The paper draws from three collaborative research projects, each with a slightly different approach. The projects took place between 2018 and 2023, and include collaboration between artists, collaboration with more-than-human colleagues, and research collaboration.

Wearing a garment can serve as a metaphor for inhabiting the city. In both cases, a space built on a human scale is occupied, excluding everything else. Spontaneous vegetation moves slowly, so as not to be noticed. Meanwhile, the city grows and alters it, leaving an indelible mark on its form. The silhouettes of pruned plants, twisted and unnatural, resemble anthropomorphic figures, and the scene becomes suspicious. The “Costumes” series consists of disguises created from models of plants spotted in urban environments. Their shape prevents other life forms from wearing them.