Research Catalogue

Center for Art Design + Social Research Un-Writing Nature Spoleto, Italy

This exposition is a guide for students and teachers alike on the methodical approach of the subject Aural Skills and Improvisation.

Is there a method to die?

 In the spring of 2009, I attended a course in aesthetic-based qualitative research at Stockholm University. My mother was becoming very weak at the time. As I set out to write on method and methodology within the course, she had to go to hospital for some days during which I kept her company as much as I could. Tests didn't prove anything wrong with her though, and she was sent back home. When she was lifted from the stretcher and gently put her back in her own bed by the transport team, she looked around her and smiled. From the well-known paintings on her walls and the books in her bookshelves, she turned her attention to at me. Still smiling, she looked into my eyes, saying: "And now begins a new and exciting phase in our lives."

Less than a month later, she deceased. 

 The day after her death, I took one of her carpets on the back of my bike and went to the shore of a lake to clean it, the way she used to do it when I was a child. Out of this situation, the question emerged. Absurd though it seemed, it echoed through my further reading, listening and thinking.

Utdrag fra samtale med Kristian Balke og Stine Marie Olaussen fra SKANSKA på befaring av Østre Aker vei 25.

This article concerns “absolute void” as an impossible notion to describe via a reductionist approach, whose irreducible relativity emerges from efforts to imagine it – from the CERN laboratories to the artworks at MoMA. Science teaches correlations among things, not things themselves. For this, with photography and artworks, the article reflects in detail on objectivity, multivariate universes, minding the time that brings exclusive universes into the same framework, conceiving an infinite intelligence, an artificial consciousness to see things in that time.

The art of Raoul Servais is concerned with the most serious criticisms of 1968 and looks for the freedom and justice that humans pursue, touch a lot of areas and contexts from religion to science, mythology to science fiction, psychology to culture: authoritarian regimes that eliminate science; armies trying to sweep colors from the world; executives trying to share the body of a dead mermaid; filmmakers trying to be faster than their shadows; bosses who incorporate hippies' colorful ideas into their own benefits; 'super powers' that invite people to religion with theocratic gas bombs. Consumption, technology, authority, unhappiness and lost meaning woven with commodity values.