Research Catalogue

Can an acoustic grand piano be sonically and conceptually reimagined so as to re-negotiate its foundational assumptions around tuning and timbre? Why should the piano continue to be so accustomed to only one tuning system? In contrast, how can “pure sounds” (ratios found in the harmonic series) co-exist with ethnically diverse microtonal tunings? “Unburying, from Liminals, Emerging” explores a microtonal prepared piano in three artistic contexts. These include: a solo project called “Postcards of Nostalgia; a chamber ensemble consisting of saxophone trio, percussion and piano; and a “percussion ensemble with soprano saxophone called Juniper Fuse. Dialoging with a newly invented tuning system, what emergent properties might we find when magnetic piano preparations are used to evoke specific timbral effects from Balinese Gamelan and Indian Karnatik music? Collectively, how can this expanded notion of “piano” merge with spatialization to facilitate interactive experiences for audiences? How might a process-oriented Jungian-inspired dream work communicate itself so as to distill and coalesce a fertile musical landscape?

This research is an advanced research of Metamorphosis - Ethics and Aesthetics are One - from a Neuroscientific Perspective in 2024. I explore post feminist theory from a new perspective in the 21st century. Thereby I deal with spatiality between virtual reality and physical space theoretically and practically. Wittgenstein's "Ethics and Aesthetics are one" is the starting point of this research. "In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein states that 'the world and life are one', so perhaps the following can be said. Just as the aesthetic object is the single thing seen as if it were a whole world, so the ethical object, or life, is the multiplicity of the world seen as a single object". (Diané Collinson, The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 25, Issue 3, SUMMER 1985, pages 266-272) Art transcends boundaries of race, nationality and gender. It is a creative act of unifying in the context of humanity, from the subject to the various topics, by asking questions. This point is the lack of "reality" (dealing with reality) from a sociological perspective. But it is impossible to define humanity and reality based on sociological statistics alone–is my perspective of Wittgenstein's "Ethics and Aesthetics are one". Thereby, I examine 'world and life' from the 21st century perspective.

Initiated in 2020, Dorsal Practices 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 orient to self, others, world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? A dorsal orientation foregrounds an 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 back-leaning orientation support a more 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?

L’idée du passage par les étapes de foi-incrédulité est que la croyance en Dieu est une culture de doute athée.

“Vulgarization” initially appears as a word of interest in the 19th century. There arises a new adoption mode of holy books, literature and comprehension of vulgarity at this point: an unfinished project even for the philosopher or the scientist who has to coexist partially with fellow humans in the “world”, the vulgus. It is the scientist’s reduction of scientific findings and calculations to address public conscience, which does not necessarily intend to “enlighten societies”.

In A place Like This sets out to investigate and expand the issues and critical discourses within Sandborg and Higgins' current collaborative research practice. The central focus for the research is concerned with how art, in this instance photographic and painted image making and text, can be used as an agent or catalyst of understanding and critical reflection. The research methodology is constructed through photography, painting, drawing and text. This utilises the form of an artist publication as a point of critically engaged dissemination: a place for the tension between conflicting ideas and investigation to be explored through discussion. The research question is focused on how the production of the image and the act of making images can communicate or describe moments of erasure or remembering in terms of historical and personal narratives with direct reference to moments of violence and place. This is seen not in terms of a nostalgic remembrance of the past; instead as one that is rife with complicated layers and dynamics where recognition is denied the ability to locate a physical representation. Embedded in this is an exploration of particular questions concerning the ethics of representation: the depiction of ourselves and other? In this sense it brings into question an examination of the act of remembering as a thing in itself, through the production of the image and text, contexts of knowledge and cultural discourses explored through the form of an artists publication.