The Research Catalogue (RC) is a non-commercial, collaboration and publishing platform for artistic research provided by the
Society for Artistic Research. The RC is free to use for artists and
researchers. It
serves also as a backbone for teaching purposes, student assessment, peer review workflows and research funding administration. It strives to be
an open space for experimentation and exchange.
recent activities
Many ways of mirroring
(2025)
Paoli
A journey between art object and performance where the mirror of water reflects us in various different ways to give us access to different facets of our self. Looking at oneself immersed in the space of nature, fragmenting one's anthropised ego into a multitude of cyborg possibilities, fluidifies the petrified conception of the Narcissus who only looks at himself, making him in fact a healed Narcissus, a plant that blossoms and grows instead of perishing.
Untitled (What's the last word You never heard?)
(2025)
Gianluca Di Francesco, FRANCO RIPA DI MEANA, MengYao Zhu, Xueying Wang, Mauro Palatucci, Maria Cristina Reggio, Alessia Tessitore, Elena Giulia Rossi, Claudia Digrandi, Veronica Di Geronimo, Teodora Ricci, Eleonora Scarponi, Gauri Abbattista, Ahzi Gaytan Monzani, Xaioxi Wang, Andrea Guidi, Livia Viola, Ming Lu, Valentina Saggio, Francesca Paganelli, Devrim Kadirbeyoglu, Veronica Lilli, Giulia Tucciarelli, Caiyi Li, XiaoQi Wei, ZeHao Li, Jiayi Guo
A silence lingers where words once stood, a fragile pause between what was said and what remains forever untold.
I’m gonna build the cemetery of echoes, words suspended in time, each gaze a question, each absence a weight.
Fragments of lives held in stillness, unfinished moments longing for release. Across the space, words rise like shadows.
Memory dances with loss, the tangible and the fleeting entwined. It is not closure we seek, but the tender acknowledgment of incompleteness.
recent publications
Sound Matter and More-than-Human Sound Agency in the Acousphere of Fennoscandian Ritual Sites
(2025)
Marianela Calleja, Riitta Rainio, Julia Shpinitskaya
Sounds created through reflection played a key role in the belief and ritual traditions of Fennoscandia up until recent times. The Indigenous Sámi considered echoing rocks and mountains to be sacred places where spirits could be met and conversed with. This article examines the role of sound reflections in these historical, little-known traditions using source material gathered from archives and old ethnographic accounts. We analyze the source material using concepts developed by sound studies and the philosophy of sound. We also apply a new materialist approach, which allows echoes to be regarded from a perspective more suitable to the source material: as sound energies transforming reflective material bodies into vibrant and interactive more-than-human beings. Moreover, the new materialist approach enables us to outline a philosophical basis for a materialist understanding of sound reflections and reflective material bodies, as well as the acoustic spaces associated with them. The concept of acousphere is proposed to understand this kind of space of correlation, confluence, and interchange between the human and more-than-human worlds.
Images That Hang Together
(2025)
Noemi Purkrábková
This short essay opens ArteActa’s issue AI (and) Art: Poetics of Prompting by proposing to understand generative algorithms as fundamentally metabolic: a dynamic entanglement of data, energy, affect, attention, and ecology. It argues that, given their ubiquity, generative materials can no longer be understood primarily as representations or discrete outputs. Instead, they function as metabolic processes that devour cultural material, extract planetary resources, and reshape perception below the threshold of consciousness. Prompting itself is always an act of transformation rather than merely a symbolic command, and intentional artistic experiments represent only a fraction of a larger infrastructure. The essay thus advocates for a multiscalar understanding of generative media: every prompt is already an ecosystem; every image is already a node in a planetary metabolism.
The Oracle of Delphi
(2025)
Despina Papadopoulos
Through a series of photographic assemblages that focus on texture, depth, and atmosphere, “The Oracle of Delphi” documents interactions between these assemblages and AI language models. The work demonstrates specific ways that current AI systems struggle to comprehend material qualities and contextual relationships in personal narratives, particularly when dealing with dimensionality, surface qualities, and emotional resonance. By analyzing these limitations, the work reveals the gap between human and machine perception of materiality and affect, while suggesting potential approaches for developing more nuanced human-machine encounters. Through these material encounters and a deliberate “kinking” of established patterns, the work demonstrates how algorithmic systems might be recrafted from processes of reduction into expansive sites of co-creation and possibility.