Research Catalogue

WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER is conceptualized and conducted collaboratively by Charlotta Ruth (SE/AT) and Jasmin Schaitl (AT). The starting point are two artistic practices based on methods of mindfulness and game/play; Performances for the Mind and Choreographic Clues. These two individual perspectives on participation emerge from the project leaders’ ongoing artistic research and merge in their common artistic curiosity in the facilitator role and facilitating the creation of immaterial material. Accompanied by neuroscientist and performer Imani Rameses (US/AT) the research asks: How does immaterial material perform within participatory situations? What role does participatory setting play and how does participation differ if situations are communicated as a workshop, a treatment, a practice or a performance? How can neuroscience support how immaterial and participatory art practices are developed and described? What relation exists beyond involvement and how can a participant become the situation rather than being part of a situation? What has to occur in the mind and body for this to happen? Through practice and dialogue conducted with experts in the fields of contemplative sciences, sound art, choreography, game art and somatics, the research explores how input from participants (e.g. memory, thought, emotion) can be placed at the centre of a flexible yet framed performance situation. WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER was realised in collaboration with the Angewandte Performance Laboratory 2021-2022. In the course of the project, a lecture was given at the Center for Didactics of Art and Interdisciplinary Education, and a public series was realised at Kunsthalle, Wien & Angewandte Performance Lab. Collaborating expert practitioners and dialogue partners are: Philipp Ehmann (AT), Nikolaus Gansterer (AT), Mariella Greil (AT), Dennis Johnson (US/AT), Anne Juren (FR/AT), Krõõt Juurak (EE/AT), Imani Rameses (US/AT), Christian Schröder (AT), Lucie Strecker (DE/AT).

In this exposition, I discuss the multimedia installation "Esparto, approached", to which I opened doors last May 10th, 2025, in Organo Hall, Helsinki Music Center. "Esparto, approached" is the first of a series of three installations representing the artistic component of my doctoral degree at the Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. The research project in which this installation is contextualized is currently titled "Listening through remembrance: An autoethnography of presence in the age of disposability". In this artistic research, the notions of listening, remembering, and presence-making are interwoven in an attempt to understand how we confer meaning and value on things despite our embeddedness in a world of disposable nature, where things are susceptible to being quickly discarded, replaced, and, therefore, forgotten. This exposition opens up a space of reflection in the aftermath of "Esparto, approached". The installation represented a collective recall of the field practice that led me to search for signs of durability in abandoned contexts of my homeland in rural Southeastern Spain. This exposition poses the following questions about it: What happened? (Description); What does "what happened" mean? (Analysis); And, how does "what happened" keep happening now? (Further becomings). The objective of creating an online exposition right after the event is to open a window to the reflective process of this investigation before its completion, thus making visible its traces. The process itself is therefore turned into an accessible outcome that manifests the continual nature of the project as a whole.

This exposition documents my explorations of pondering with pine trees. Tämä ekspositio dokumentoi yritykseni miettiä mäntyjen kanssa. Den här ekspositionen dokumenterar mina försök att fundera med furor.

MINA is a collaborative project that investigates sharing as a material condition of artistic practice. It seeks to create situations where practices can remain active and in relation, fostering exchanges between different forms of knowledge through situated encounters and provisional configurations. Rather than treating sharing as a discrete act, MINA understands it as an ongoing practice that shapes how attention circulates, how relations are formed, and how practices are sustained over time. Dialogues, exchanges, critiques, and other forms of mutual influence operate here not as supplementary moments, but as constitutive forces within artistic processes, even when their effects are subtle, delayed, or difficult to trace. Working without predefined methods, MINA approaches artistic practice as a field of orientations that emerges through games, conversations, and shared situations. Each encounter becomes a way of testing how sharing can redistribute attention, unsettle habitual positions, and open space for collective thinking.

The Research Through Art & Design (RAD) course for doctoral researchers at Aalto Arts introduces a variety of approaches, methodologies, issues, and concerns in research through practice. In this course, research through practice refers to a broad continuum of artistic research approaches, arts-based, practice-led, and practice-based research approaches, including constructive design research approaches relevant across practices in Aalto University; School of Arts, Design and Architecture. This exposition was created within a Research Catalogue Workshop offered as an additional part of the main course. During this part of the course, the participants are familiarised with the Research Catalogue as a platform and learn how to use it for creating expositions. During the workshop, participants work on their page within this group exposition, based on their current doctoral research or a topic that inspired them during the lectures. The main content is the workshop participants' individual pages within this exposition.

This essay establishes Post‑Interpretive Criticism as a formal break with the dominant aesthetic consensus of the late twentieth century, which treated meaning as something produced through mediation rather than encountered through structure. Surveying post‑1950 traditions across structuralism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, critical theory, and post‑structuralism, the essay identifies a shared assumption underlying their disagreements: interpretation functions as the necessary and ethically justified ground of meaning. Post‑Interpretive Criticism rejects this premise not by proposing an alternative theory of meaning‑production, but by questioning whether production itself is the correct frame. The essay argues that interpretation is not neutral, inevitable, or inherently liberatory, but structurally hazardous. Language, when introduced prematurely or excessively, alters the proportions of the aesthetic encounter, collapsing interval, crowding distance, and displacing presence with discourse. Meaning, on this account, does not originate in interpretation but in a relational field between work and witness that possesses structure prior to mediation. Interpretation is therefore recast as an intervention rather than a foundation—one that must justify itself ethically by preserving proportion rather than overwhelming it. Positioning Post‑Interpretive Criticism against the historical conditions that necessitated interpretive excess in the post‑war period, the essay argues that contemporary aesthetics now faces the inverse problem: interpretive saturation. Where interpretation once functioned as moral responsibility, it now frequently preempts encounter, substituting commentary for perception. Drawing careful distinctions from phenomenological aesthetics, the essay emphasizes that description of experience is insufficient without a discipline governing speech. Post‑Interpretive Criticism introduces restraint as method, silence as ethical posture, and proportion as evaluative criterion. The essay concludes by outlining the institutional, pedagogical, and critical consequences of adopting Post‑Interpretive Criticism, including reduced interpretive authority, contraction of discourse, and the re‑training of attention prior to articulation. It does not argue for universal application, but claims necessity under specific contemporary conditions. Interpretation, once required, is now placed at risk—not because meaning has vanished, but because the encounter has returned as the primary site of aesthetic responsibility. 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 Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (Q136530009), Canon of Witnesses (Q136565881) 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.