Research Catalogue

A worklog exemplifying my practice of making situated interventions through narrative storyworlds and animated worldbuilding. My art often brings some conditions attached that aim at transforming the mindset and routines of the environments I enter, as a way to ”world” them. Constructing alternative inner story worlds has always been the basic mode for me to perceive the world, process the world, and to find ways to act in the world. worldbuilding as an artform also serves my interest in systems and “the whole”. an interest that brings about the desire for sustainability, for things to be fair, balanced, for “the whole” to sustain and thrive. My artworks often materialize as a response to something in my environment, a response that carefully takes form within the fictive storyworld. Examples of responses are a proposal to update the permanent exhibition on mining at Tekniska Museet, staging a shutdown of the university or introducing climate budgeting into film courses. This method of careful responses aligns with the concept of “worlding”, a term from material feminist thought about making “cuts” in the world, enacting interventions that produce the world I inhabit. “Worlding” is acknowledging the relations, how I am entangled in the world, while acting. Being embedded in a “storyworld” gives me the critical distance that enables me to respond more creatively, ”as if” things could be a whole lot different. Due to my interests in the full range of things, from material to structural to epistemological and ontological, I prefer to make interactions on all levels simultaneously in order to trace their effects, how they are connected, how they interact and affect one another. In order to reach initiated understanding into all parts of “the wholes” *I often engage in transdiciplinary collaborations with researchers from many different disciplines.

Growing Likeness, a study in biological authored portraiture and bioart experiment in the aesthetics and value of bio-facial construction, challenging the sustainability of growing human-like structures in a deep-rooted vision. A mapping of intelligence systems disguised as human, this research strikes a visual analogy to the science and the system matrix of crop roots. The aesthetics and symbolic resemblance to the human head is a creative and philosophical query, provoking the viewer to challenge their perception, if in fact any, likeness to human identity. How is the biological intervention of the plant seedlings aiding the construct and metaphorical meaning of being human? Simple experiments with seeds, are in fact, a means to expand knowledge of leading science and technology research whilst communicating this knowledge through art. https://www.ecu.edu.au/schools/arts-and-humanities/ecu-galleries/past-exhibitions/related-content/exhibitions/2024/growing-likeness

In our exploration of the spatiality of language and, specifically, the activation of the site where writing "makes" rather than takes place, we propose a multilayered experience of the book as an object, as well as a geometrical, topological, and especially performative space, which we understand as an "ecology of the book". Extending this practice beyond the book's margins, yet simultaneously embedding it within the material and technical affordances of the book’s medial articulations, we evoke a "new" ecology—one unfolding alongside the interaction-landscape and its actual and invented inhabitants, as well as the techniques of its production. Texts, drawings, figures, figurations, methods, and both human and non-human authors weave together the heterogeneous texture of the book’s "new" ecology. In our monographs, "Fauna. Language Arts and the New Order of Imaginary Animals" (2018), "Flora. Language Arts in the Age of Information" (2020), and "Fiction Fiction. Language Arts and the Practice of Spatial Storytelling" (2023, De Gruyter/Edition Angewandte), we explore and map the territory of language arts. This approach manifests, on the one hand, through the transgression of traditional scientific methodologies and a shift in models—from thinking-of-the-other toward thinking-with-the-other, and on the other hand, through the agency of our eponymous characters, Fauna and Flora, who not only title our books but also act as conceptual operators—figures that navigate, perform, and activate the very spaces our texts explore. Applying Michel Serres' methodology of thinking by inventing personae, these characters move within and percolate through the margins of text (written, figural) and space (concrete, fictional), reconfiguring the notion of authorship and placing literary texts and digital drawings within the frame(less) collective of more-than-human and more-than-organic actants.

Message Transfer Theory (MTT) A Treatise on the Reversal of Meaning, the Displacement of Intent, and the Object as Conduit By Dorian Vale What happens when the message no longer belongs to the maker? In this defining treatise, Dorian Vale introduces Message Transfer Theory (MTT) — a foundational pillar of the Post-Interpretive Movement that reorients our understanding of the art object as a conduit, not a container. Rather than treating artworks as stable vessels of artist intent, MTT proposes that meaning is displaced, reversed, or even transferred entirely — not during creation, but at the moment of reception. Here, the object becomes a threshold. It does not hold meaning — it reroutes it. The artist initiates a signal, but the work lives on in the shifts, slippages, and interruptions that occur in its wake. This theory explains how art can haunt, harm, heal, or transform in ways the artist never imagined — and how the critic’s attempt to reassert original intent is often an act of aesthetic erasure. Drawing from theories of semiotics, trauma transmission, media studies, and sacred encounter, this treatise reframes the artwork as a relational event. It introduces new terms into the Post-Interpretive Lexicon — including Conduit Object, Transfer Shock, Residue Receiver, and Reversal Gaze — each articulating a more fluid, ethical understanding of art’s unpredictable passage between maker, medium, and witness. If the artist is the sender, and the viewer the receiver, then Message Transfer Theory is the study of what the artwork becomes when neither controls the signal anymore. Vale, Dorian. Message Transfer Theory (MTT): A Treatise on the Reversal of Meaning, the Displacement of Intent, and the Object as Conduit. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17055523 Dorian Vale is a chosen pseudonym, not to obscure identity, but to preserve clarity of voice and integrity of message. It creates distance between the writer and the work, allowing the philosophy to stand unclouded by biography. The name exists not to hide, but to honor the seriousness of the task: to speak without spectacle, and to build without needing to be seen. This name is used for all official publications, essays, and theoretical works indexed through DOI-linked repositories including Zenodo, OSF, PhilPapers, and SSRN. 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)

The Viewer as Evidence A Treatise on Witness, Residue, and Critical Consequence By Dorian Vale In the age of spectacle and overexposure, the most reliable evidence of a work’s power is not the critic’s opinion — but the condition it leaves the viewer in. In this foundational treatise, Dorian Vale introduces The Viewer as Evidence — a radical reframing of how art is to be understood, and more importantly, how it is to be held. Rooted in the philosophy of Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC), this theory proposes a departure from analysis as the primary tool of understanding, replacing it with a more intimate, consequential barometer: the residue left upon the witness. The treatise asserts that the true measure of a work’s meaning is not found in its interpretation, but in the transformation — or disturbance — it imposes upon the beholder. The viewer becomes a living document, an embodied archive of aesthetic consequence. This reframes the critical act not as interpretation, but as custodianship of the aftermath. Combining insights from aesthetic theory, trauma studies, phenomenology, and moral philosophy, Vale constructs a methodology for reading the viewer, not the object — and insists that this ethical proximity is the only path to a criticism that does not betray the sacred nature of certain works. Here, criticism is not a language of conquest. It is the language of aftershock. 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) Vale, Dorian. The Viewer as Evidence: A Treatise on Witness, Residue, and Critical Consequence. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17055810 Dorian Vale is a chosen pseudonym, not to obscure identity, but to preserve clarity of voice and integrity of message. It creates distance between the writer and the work, allowing the philosophy to stand unclouded by biography. The name exists not to hide, but to honor the seriousness of the task: to speak without spectacle, and to build without needing to be seen. This name is used for all official publications, essays, and theoretical works indexed through DOI-linked repositories including Zenodo, OSF, PhilPapers, and SSRN.

The Afterlife of the Work: Viewer as Evidence in Post-Interpretive Criticism By Dorian Vale This essay presents one of the central epistemological pillars of Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC): the concept of the viewer as evidence. Dorian Vale challenges the traditional hierarchy where the critic’s interpretation takes precedence over the encounter itself, proposing instead that the afterlife of the artwork—the residue it leaves in the viewer—is its most truthful legacy. Rather than dissect the work, Vale observes what lingers after it is gone: silence, tremor, unease, reverence. These affective traces are not emotional accidents, but ethical data. The viewer’s internal shift becomes testimony, and the absence of interpretation becomes its own kind of presence. Rooted in restraint and moral proximity, this essay reframes the act of viewing as sacred evidence collection. The artwork does not exist to be understood; it exists to be endured. And in that endurance, the viewer becomes witness, custodian, and echo. Vale, Dorian. The Afterlife of the Work: Viewer as Evidence in Post-Interpretive Criticism. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17076535 Dorian Vale is a chosen pseudonym, not to obscure identity, but to preserve clarity of voice and integrity of message. It creates distance between the writer and the work, allowing the philosophy to stand unclouded by biography. The name exists not to hide, but to honor the seriousness of the task: to speak without spectacle, and to build without needing to be seen. This name is used for all official publications, essays, and theoretical works indexed through DOI-linked repositories including Zenodo, OSF, PhilPapers, and SSRN. 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)