Research Catalogue

Conceived and co-organised by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin, this Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG) provides contexts for coming together via the exchange of language-based research. The intent is to support developments in the field of expanded language-based practices by inviting attention, time and space for enabling understanding of/and via these practices anew.

Documentation of preliminary steps and collection of musical material and related reflections during the first Term of the Master's Program in Improvisation and World Music. December 2022

The project 'Breaking Circles' is matriculated in the field of social design - an area within the design field that has renewed itself in recent years. Social design is user oriented towards vulnerable and exposed groups within society. Serving a sentence in prison is often associated with a range of penalties. Norway has only one penalty; denial of freedom. The inmates have the same rights as the rest of society, and are supposed to take part of it. The Norwegian Correctional Service’s unofficial slogan reads: ‘better out, than in’ meaning that rehabilitation overcomes penalty. The inmates have both the right and a duty to work, getting educated or attending amendment programs. The goal of their work is to qualify for working life after prison. Having to go to prison will without a doubt be a personal crisis for anyone, and can lead to loss of jobs, housing, personal economy and social network. Inmates could benefit from building professional networks to avoid seeking out old acquaintances in criminal networks after prison, heading into criminal relapse. Having worked with design projects in the western region of the Norwegian Correctional Service, I have seen the vast areas and systems within prisons and the service that are untouched by design strategy. Design has considerable potential to help inmates benefit from their surrounding systems, both within prison and outside. I aim to use social design to ease inmate’s transitions to becoming potential employees through their work within prison. To be able to do that, there are several problem areas to address: the content of inmate’s work in prison, inmate’s tools of sentence progress, barriers between prison and society and the lack of established professional networks to prevent criminal networks taking over after serving. Using graphic design and visual communication in social design can contribute to a dawning interest in design and creative practice to prevent recidivistic crime and social marginalization. Breaking Circles is a project with a strong emphasis on design experiments through field work in a real-life context: prison.

Our bodies are porous entities that interconnect with and depend on the broader collectivity of human and nonhuman life that exists within a shared environment. Using the figuration of synthetic bodies, this exposition aims to examine the relationships in which we are enmeshed as our bodies absorb and excrete chemicals. With a focus on involuntary exposure to industrially manufactured chemicals (as opposed to exposure to naturally occurring chemicals or voluntary experimentation with chemicals of all types), this exposition invites readers to learn about the chemicals to which we are exposed and by which we are affected. With the ubiquity of chemicals in the environment, who are we becoming? How do chemicals affect us and how do we interact with them? How can we live well with chemicals in spite of their potential to harm? Adopting a decolonial feminist, posthumanist, and new materialist approach and embracing queer ecological sensibilities, this exposition develops protocols for embodied and materially embedded research practices that trace the effects of exposure to chemicals in everyday life. In so doing, it aims to demonstrate how we might build resilience through encounters with toxicity, contamination, and impurity. Download Accessible PDF

Home page of the Journal of Sonic Studies

This exposition explores how the Betty Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen, with the artistic research project, BETTY DEVELOPS, works with spreading a collaborative practice to the infrastructure of an entire institutional theatre and how this renegotiates the notion of artistic genius and the star. The exposition offers a meta-reflection on the author’s artistic research activities at the theatre. These reflections shed light on what happens when collaborative methods of working and producing are implemented in an institutional theatre and discuss the extent to which artistic research can develop methods for collaborative co-creation as well as resistance to the neoliberal individualised performance culture. Could such methods prevent you from falling back on a modernist understanding of the artist as the original creator of an individual expression and instead support a collaborative art and knowledge practice? As opposed to defining artistic creation as something that springs from and comes from an individual (the artistic genius or star), the author argues that artistic creation is a relational act, and that art is something that comes to be between people. This exposition is a collage of empirical material, text, images, and video gathered and produced over the last five years while facilitating, documenting, researching, and sharing the development of fourteen BETTY DEVELOPS productions. Download Accessible PDF