Research Catalogue

In progress Dorsal Practices — Murky Back Thinking is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orientate to self, others, world. How does cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? The dorsal orientation foregrounds active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a backwards-leaning orientation support an open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?

"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. 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.

Looking for layers, finding fragments.

Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2024. - MA Artistic Research This thesis is a fiction-based text which attempts to answer to the research question of how can art and archaeology contribute to the blending of the fictitious with the real, which has direct consequences on our understanding of (art) history.

For its Issue #2, HUB continues to develop work along the lines of artistic research, focusing its attention on multiple creative practices and the transversality of the processes explored. Marking one year since the launch of Issue 0, HUB is committed to the Research Catalogue platform and ways of exploring and viewing multimedia material that can do justice to the dynamics between content and reading and browsing modes.

In January of 2022, I traveled with my family to Catarata Gocta, a two-tiered waterfall in the high rainforest, just outside of Cocachimba in Peru’s northeast. I seized this opportunity to conduct an artistic research experiment combining field recording, mystical participation, dream work, philosophy, and psychology. I incite and analyze dreams, peel back the perverse layers of my capitalist induced fantasies, exhaust liquid metaphors, engage in forms of mystical participation, discuss whether it’s even possible to record a place at all and draw connections and conclusions whose coherence is, well, maybe not so coherent. This essay touches on Sonic Journalism, the psychologies of Jung, the art criticism of Sontag and Berger and the art of Cage, Duchamp, and Hunter S. Thompson. The field recordings and images presented here are shreds of evidence supporting my own twisted brand of Gonzo Journalism. It is a tight rope walk across microphone cables and book spines, fueled by coffee, internet databases, and obsessive listening. The gravitational current pulling the waters of Catarata Gocta earthward is the dense center around which this essay orbits. Stretching across its horizon, I feel myself emptied, my thoughts laid bare and made available for self-examination.