Research Catalogue

This performance seeks to form visually narratives about gender fluidity, identity, vulnerability, and the sense of the fragmented self in this fast changing world monitored by cameras, frames and the feeling that we are constantly observed . Body is the main research tool, a moving diary. On its surface are imprinted all the stories, desires and fears experienced during the years. They are collected, and then, interpreted kinetically, blurring the boundaries between the material reality, and the reality of the unspoken. A keeper of all the intimate and domestic moments, trying to protect them from the external world. In this journey, Camera obscura is a companion and an opponent.

This research endeavours to reveal the transformative potential of artistic creativity by combining musical improvisation and yoga-based embodied listening practices. The study incorporates three listening practices: humming and self-observation, listening only with the right ear, and listening to the space within the heart. The effects of these experiments are documented in a journal and recorded as audio files. In addition to improvisation as a musical practice and embodied listening, this research also considers how yoga, - which has become an important part of Indian culture over the centuries with its roots in Vedic culture - can shape artistic identity through its philosophical understanding of sound, and its perspectives on the human body as a cosmos. The research emphasizes subjects such as the healing power of humming, chakra energy, collective consciousness, energetic centers of consciousness in the human body and their potential role in transforming the artist's identity. The thoughts and experiences in this research are personal, but the content of this article has been written based on these experiences as an attempt to present visions for global musicians to transition their musicianship into a more universal form, and to pose multifaceted questions to the reader. This paper draws attention to different improvisation techniques makam terminology and explores existing literature to open innovative doors based on holistic experience. The findings reveal the vibrant and energetic connections between the effects of music and vibrations on human life and the body, and the various philosophies that nourish the artist's identity and expression. This thesis encourages improvisation as a form of existence to establish deep spiritual connections with experiences from the past and present. Highlighting dimensions of music that are unnoticeable due to existing industrial structures and education models, the most importantly, esoteric knowledge of the body, inviting the reader to be open-minded for all sonic possibilities.

The context of generative processes encapsulates relevant data that influence the behavior of an algorithm including mental domains and 'internal' dimensions of a particular context such as goals and decision making. Of creative importance is how an algorithmic process reacts to the influence of its environment, the enclosing conditions from which it emerges. Given a clearly defined set of resources, a variety of processes can operate within the boundaries imposed by a certain context. Such a shared space can be seen as a composable structure, a space where both composition and generative activity take place. Contributing to the evolving properties of a certain situation, the persistence of state means that an environment behaves according to the previous activity that has occurred within it. Opposed to an amnesic situation, a persistent environment can resume previous developments, adapt to long-term interactions and evolve over time. Based on persistence and gradual change, the temporal unfolding of generative processes has an important impact on the becoming of compositional algorithms and the sound material they create.

This exposition examines the intersection of drawing, installation, and handmade objects informed by popular culture, spectacle, and visual symbolism. Central to the practice is the duality between physical materiality and virtual environments, a framework through which fictional realities are constructed and analyzed—often reflecting states of exhaustion, overload, and alienation characteristic of hyperactive contemporary culture. The use of low-budget materials and do-it-yourself methods introduces a deliberate tension between meticulous craftsmanship and intentional “amateurism,” while simultaneously subverting the capitalist logics of mass culture through the reuse and recontextualization of its visual language. Connecting introspective and social dimensions, the exposition offers not only an aesthetic experience but also a critical lens on everyday consumer routines, media-shaped reality, and processes of personal self-reflection.

The exhibition is deeply rooted in local history—the artist group explores the story of the white pigment titanium dioxide's industrial origin in Sandbekk, and how this world sensation from 1910 has influenced our world today. Titanium dioxide white pigment is a global color phenomenon. Ilmenite is transported from Titania to its sister company Kronos Titan in Fredrikstad, where it is refined into titanium dioxide. From there, the pigment circulates seemingly invisibly in a global network of systems. It is used in paint, plastics, paper, ink, cosmetics, medicine, sunscreen, and millions of products we use daily. This history is the starting point for the development project TiO2: The Materiality of White. Over the past two years, the artist group has visited Titania's mines and deposits, gathering materials from the local history. Just as geologists examined the areas in Sokndal over 150 years ago in search of valuable minerals, the group has wandered through the landscape, picking stones and collecting sand, clay, and rust-colored earth. These findings have been brought back to the ceramic laboratory at KhiO, where they have been processed through ceramic methods.

This exposition comprises textual fragments (both written and voiced) produced through the act of returning to (in turn re-activating, re-configuring, even re-imagining) conversational transcripts generated within the artistic research project Dorsal Practices, a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker. Initiated in January 2021, Dorsal Practices is an artistic collaboration for exploring how the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude might shape and inform our embodied, affective and relational experience of being-in-the-world. Conceived at the threshold between choreographic-movement practices and language-based artistic research, Dorsal Practices explores how the experiences of listening, languaging, even thinking, might be shaped differently through this embodied tilt of awareness and attention towards the back, moreover, through a practice of coming back, the act of (re)turning. The original transcript material that forms the basis of this exposition was produced through a practice of conversation undertaken within six interrelated blocks of exploration, taking place over 18 months between October 2022 and February 2024. Within this period of enquiry, we — Brown and Cocker — focused our attention on the act of returning within our shared practice, re-imagined as a "dorsal turn". Through the intermingling of two registers of language-based practice, that is, through the performativity of both the written and spoken texts themselves, within this exposition we attempt to make tangible how the dorsal gesture of the turn and the circling principle of re- become operative as a spinal thread within our shared enquiry. Deviating from the straightforwardness of a strictly linear text, we invite a form of dorsal listening-reading that might engage through loops and returns. We conceive the research artefacts generated through the practice itself as the central focus within this exposition, alongside a supporting text where we introduce the wider enquiry of Dorsal Practices, reflecting on how we conceive the act of turning and of re-turning therein.