Research Catalogue

People interested in artificial intelligence usually ask whether computers could become as intelligent and creative as humans. I decided to think about it the other way around: I'm interested in the extent to which the creative process of artists is algorithmic. It's not difficult to create something that will look like art; you just need to imitate an already existing genre or style. The challenge is to create something that will be able to trigger an art experience. In this visual essay, I'm studying where, in a spectrum of different kinds of experiences (jokes, magic tricks, pleasure from solving a mathematical or scientific problem), there are thrills triggered by art. All of these experiences depend on a sufficient amount of novelty. Therefore, the creators of experience triggers face the same problem: the impact of a joke, a magic trick, or an artwork tends to diminish when heard/seen repeatedly. The human brain has evolved in a way that it is able to distinguish repeating patterns, formulas, schemes, algorithms. Uncovering an algorithm causes pleasure. But once an algorithm is uncovered, it does not cause pleasure any more. To trigger an experience of the same intensity, we need a new trigger. In this work, I also address the question of why certain types of triggers wear off more slowly than others. The outcomes of this project are a book—a visual essay in which drawings and texts form one line of an argument—and a series of lecture-like events, in which I combine sincerity and directness of lectures, panel discussions, and guided tours with richer ways of expression typical for object theatre, performances, and magic shows.

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?

The Dogs Who Outlived Philosophy : On Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Some Unexpected Events Sometimes Bring Momentary Happiness (2005) By Dorian Vale In this quietly devastating reflection, Dorian Vale examines Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s 2005 video work Some Unexpected Events Sometimes Bring Momentary Happiness through the lens of Post-Interpretive Criticism. Rather than analyzing the dogs, their dying, or the death they face, the piece invites the viewer to endure them—without commentary, without resolve. Vale argues that these dogs, abandoned yet alive, offer a kind of sacred presence that survives beyond theory. They do not symbolize death. They resist being used as metaphor. Instead, they remain—breathing, ailing, present—while the camera holds still and the world looks away. This essay is not an interpretation. It is a vigil. Vale, Dorian. On Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Some Unexpected Events Sometimes Bring Momentary Happiness (2005). Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16945906 Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Dorian Vale, Post-Interpretive Criticism, contemporary Thai art, Some Unexpected Events Sometimes Bring Momentary Happiness, art and death, ethics of witness, dying animals in art, aesthetic of silence, witnessing suffering, art of presence, slow video art, moral proximity, non-interpretive art writing, visual elegy, sacred presence, trauma in Southeast Asian art, art without metaphor, art and abandonment, ethics of stillness, dogs in contemporary art 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)

Canon of Witnesses: On Zarina Hashmi’s Home Is a Foreign Place By Dorian Vale In this elegiac and piercing reflection, Dorian Vale inducts Zarina Hashmi into the Canon of Witnesses through her seminal work Home Is a Foreign Place. Rather than interpreting the piece, Vale engages it as a ritual of moral proximity—where each word etched on handmade paper becomes a relic of memory, exile, and untranslatable grief. Zarina’s restrained use of language, the materiality of her paper, and her refusal to perform trauma are treated here not as minimalist strategies, but as ethical gestures. The essay resists biographical reduction or historical summary and instead approaches the work as a sacred geography of loss—one that cannot be decoded without doing harm. Drawing from the principles of Post-Interpretive Criticism, Vale positions Zarina not as an artist of silence, but as a custodian of what language can no longer hold. What remains is not narrative. What remains is presence. Vale, Dorian. Canon of Witnesses: On Zarina Hashmi’s Home Is a Foreign Place. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17072625 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) Zarina Hashmi, Home Is a Foreign Place, Post-Interpretive Criticism, Dorian Vale, art and exile, Urdu in art, trauma and memory in art, minimalism vs restraint, sacred aesthetics, witness-based art criticism, moral proximity, non-interpretive art writing, handmade paper in art, ethics of language in art, feminist art critique, contemporary South Asian art

Collected Works as Cognitive Trace By Dorian Vale In Collected Works as Cognitive Trace, Dorian Vale reframes the act of collecting not as possession, but as psychological imprint. Drawing from the principles of Post-Interpretive Criticism, this essay explores how personal archives—particularly collections of art, objects, and texts—can reveal unconscious maps of memory, loss, longing, and identity. Vale argues that every collected item leaves a residue of the self: a cognitive scar, a symbolic placeholder, or a momentary alignment between inner and outer worlds. These collections become autobiographies of the unspoken—not narratives, but traces. What we keep is not always what we value most, but what we could not leave behind. This piece expands the Post-Interpretive lexicon by introducing the concept of cognitive residue and emotional indexing, urging readers to view their shelves and storage boxes not as aesthetic decisions, but as quiet cartographies of becoming. Vale, Dorian. Collected Works as Cognitive Trace. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17070885 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) Dorian Vale, Post-Interpretive Criticism, art collecting, cognitive trace, personal archives, art as memory, symbolic possession, collection psychology, memory and art, autobiographical collecting, object curation, emotional indexing, art and identity, private archives, post-interpretive lexicon, collecting as residue, slow criticism, aesthetic psychology, witnessing through objects, non-interpretive art theory