The Research Catalogue (RC) is a non-commercial, collaboration and publishing platform for artistic research provided by the
Society for Artistic Research. The RC is free to use for artists and
researchers. It
serves also as a backbone for teaching purposes, student assessment, peer review workflows and research funding administration. It strives to be
an open space for experimentation and exchange.
recent activities
La violenza della creazione
(2026)
Xichen Qian
This research explores creation as a form of violence that operates through interruption, erasure, and bodily pressure rather than through visible conflict or aggression.
Through a conference-performance, writing is treated as an unstable action: it begins, stops, fails, and is physically destroyed without revealing its content. The work focuses on moments where creation resists completion, and where decisions to stop, delete, or abandon become central gestures.
By placing the performer behind the audience and withholding textual legibility, the research shifts attention from meaning to process, from narrative to tension. Creation is approached not as expression or inspiration, but as a concrete and irreversible experience that acts upon the body and its limits.
Drumming spaces – Approaches to long-aesthetic drumming
(2026)
Markus Evert Snellman
This artistic research explores drumming as a practice in which cyclical motion, subtle variation, and gradual transformation converge into an ongoing rhythmic flow, inviting musical experience to shift from progression toward immersion within what is ongoing. The study asks how a drummer can create and cultivate such long-aesthetic rhythmic continuity within open-ended improvisational contexts, both practically and conceptually.
The research draws on Finnish folk music’s pitkä estetiikka (long aesthetic), minimalist music, flow theory, and improvisation literature, and adopts an artistic research methodology in which drumming practice constitutes the primary site of inquiry. Insights are synthesised from personal practice, group rehearsals, performances, and audiovisual documentation produced between 2024 and 2025 in duo and trio improvisational settings, analysed through reflective practice and retrospective video analysis.
The findings identify strategies for sustaining rhythmic continuity grounded in bodily and technical ease, held in balance with the uncertainties of improvisation. Central elements include deeply embodied ostinati, dynamic and timbral sensitivity, mindful approaches to change, and a principle of sustainability in musical ideas. In group improvisation, a slower pace of interaction, a non-reactive performance stance, and an open, undemanding listening orientation supported ongoing engagement and a spatial quality of the music. The research suggests that sustained, uneventful musicking may foster flow-like states and contribute to a broader slowing down of attention and pace, highlighting the potential of slow, continuous improvisation as a meaningful artistic and pedagogical practice.
Inistitute for Relocation of Biodiversity
(2026)
Christallina Rox
In 2017, Christina started to work under the name "Institute for Relocation of Biodiversity" that serves as platform for artistic interventions and hosts her explorations around human nature divide. Under this umbrella, she creates a series of videos that simulate, suggest and create utopian and dystopian realities connected with the contemporary discourse around the anthropocene, climate change and the current biodiversity crisis.
recent publications
between the minutes
(2025)
Ina Thomann
This essay examines the subjective perception of time during the performance of long musical forms from the perspective of the performer. The starting point is the composition "Haltezeit", which works specifically with the stretching of time. Two improvisational performances without an audience will be used to explore how the perception of time changes in the course of performances lasting several hours and how this influences improvisational behavior. Practical experience is combined with concepts from the fields of philosophy, performance studies and musical improvisation research. The artistic experiments show that physical states such as tiredness or tension as well as external disturbances significantly influence the subjective perception of duration. While inner restlessness led to an extended experience of time and more frequent improvisational interventions, calmness and concentration favored a condensed, meditative experience of time with less frequent changes.
Artistic practice thus becomes an experiential space for a qualitative perception of time beyond measurable structures. The essay sees itself as an open research gesture that invites us to perceive time more consciously as a flowing continuum in a performative context.
Rephrasing Duration: Silence(s) in 4'33"
(2025)
Guy Livingston
This article explores the shifting temporality of John Cage’s 4’33” as it propogates through the digital landscape of YouTube. Originally conceived as a timed, almost site-specific performance of shared presence and ambient listening, 4’33” can function surprisingly well online in an environment dedicated to speed, repetition, and distraction. Drawing on seven diverse video performances—ranging from the historically grounded to the amateur and experimental—I examine how silence and time are embodied, marked, framed, and performed in online space. These performances inhabit a paradox: they are situated within a system designed to fragment attention, yet they demand stillness and duration. In doing so, they unsettle the assumptions of immediacy that govern digital spectatorship.
Rather than treat 4’33” as a fixed score, I argue that each video becomes a site of temporal negotiation. The performers use silence as a gestural and visual act, creating tension between embodied time and platform time. They foreground listening not only as acoustic attention but as a durational stance—an insistence on presence within an artwork that privileges absence. The result is a form of quiet resistance to algorithmic rhythm, the embracing of non-playing, a reclaiming of boredom.
These online performances suggest that 4’33” has not lost its edge. Instead, it has adapted, becoming a mirror for contemporary conditions of time, presence, and attention. Silence here is not absence, but an expanded field—where listening, duration, and performance are reimagined in and against the temporal asynchronicities of the digital.
(painting by Morna McGoldrick, 1964)
Redefining Time-Based Art: Temporal Dimensions in Static Media Through Time-Based Materials and Imminence
(2025)
TAT KUEN KO
This article examines an expanded conceptualization of time-based art beyond artworks that unfold consecutively over measurable durations. Typical time-based art was characterized with clear beginning and ending such as performance, cinematic art, moving image, sound art, and computational installation. In contrast, this analysis investigates how static art possesses temporal qualities through alternative means. With the incorporation of “time-based materials” - substances that transform their external forms over time – we establish an alternative time-based art characterized by an imminent temporality.
Historical paintings like Goya’s "The Third of May 1808" and Bruegel’s "The Fall of the Rebel Angels" reveal early attempts to the depiction of time through compositional arrangement and juxtaposition of events. The author extends this tradition by exploring how certain materials possess intrinsic “temporal directionality” – a predictable but fluctuating transformation process. Examples include oxidation of metals that undergo the process of rusting and patination, creating visual changes that occur gradually and unpredictably, embodying what the author terms an imminent quality - known to happen but uncertain in exact duration.
The author makes use of his own artworks as case studies: "Simulacra" (2015), a juxtaposition of photographs of copper armors against the actual deteriorating objects; "The Fall of the Rebel Angels" (2022), a translation of Pieter Bruegel’s painting into an installation using patinated copper; and "Public Cemetery" (2023), an incorporation of natural phenomenon like rain and typhoons as temporal agents. These works demonstrate how materials that vulnerable to intrinsic transformation can create temporal experiences that transcend conventional time-based art definitions, offering new possibilities for expressing time through the interplay of possibility, impossibility, and imminence.