Research Catalogue

Art activism is powerful. Also known as activist art, protest art, visual activism, artivism and creative activism, it changes lives, situations and is and has been a powerful weapon across a whole spectrum of struggles for justice. Teresa Sanz & Beatriz Rodriguez-Labajos(2021) relay that art activism has the unique ability to bring cohesion and diverse peoples together and it can, as Zeynep Tufekci notes, change the participants (2017). As Steve Duncombe & Steve Lambert (2021) posit, traditional protesting such as marches or squats are no longer as important as they once were. As a result of my own lived experience in activist activities, I very much agree with Andrew Boyd & Dave Oswald Mitchell (2012) that the reason people use art activism is that it works, by enriching and improving protest. In the past, when I lived in a metropolis and was not a parent, I used to be an activist. Now I no longer have immediate access to international headquarters at which to protest and I have to be concerned with being arrested, I am hindered from protesting. This project is an attempt to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism. By devising methods which include at least one of the following: that do not require on-site participation, that can take place outside the public gaze, that reduce the risk of arrest, that open up protest sites that are not “big targets”, that include remote locations, that involve irregular timing, my thesis aims to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism to those who are underserved by more mainstream methods of conducting art activism. Textiles have unique properties that enable them to engage in subterfuge and speak loudly through care and thought(Bryan-Wilson, 2017). They have strong connotations of domesticity, the body and comfort that can be subverted within art activism to reference lack of this domestic warmth and protection(O’Neill, 2022). Being a slow form of art-making, they show care and thought, attention in the making, so that the messaging is reinforced through this intentionality in slow making.

This exposition presents the audio recordings produced within the ESP Duos project, a series of remote improvisations performed by long-term collaborators under conditions of complete acoustic and visual separation. Each duo was recorded simultaneously in isolated spaces, without any form of real-time interaction, and later combined into a single auditory perspective available only to the listener. Rather than testing whether musical interaction can be sustained at a distance, the project explores how residual traces of collaboration continue to shape improvisatory behavior when the other performer is imagined rather than perceived. The recordings foreground imagined co-presence as an enacted orientation grounded in embodied memory, shared history, and relational expectation. As artistic outputs, the ESP Duos invite listening not for coordination or synchronization, but for emergent coherence arising from contingency, alignment, divergence, and retrospective sense-making. The exposition situates these recordings as both documents of a research process and autonomous aesthetic artifacts, offering access to a mode of togetherness that persists beyond physical co-presence.

Arts-based-philosophy is an emerging research concept at the cutting edge of the arts, philosophy and the Sciences in which cross-disciplinary research collectives align their research practices to finally stage their investigations in field-performances, shared with the public. Our research explores the significance of the HEART in artistic research and performance philosophy from a cross-cultural perspective, partially based on the concepts of the HEART in the works of two artist-philosophers, in which philosophy already became arts-based-philosophy: Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Aurobindo’s poetic opus magnum Savitri. We generally assume that the works of artist-philosophers are not only engaged in “creating concepts” (Deleuze), but their concepts are also meant to be staged artistically to let them bodily matter in fact. The role of the HEART in respect to this process of “bodily mattering” is the core objective under investigation: Firstly, because we hold that atmospheres trigger the HEART of a lived-body to taste the flavor of things it is environmentally engaged with basically in an aesthetic manner (Nietzsche). In this respect the analysis of the classical notion for the aesthete in Indian philosophy and aesthetics, sahṛdaya––which literally means, “somebody, with a HEART”––becomes crucial. Secondly, because the HEART is said to be not just reducible to one’s manifest Nature, but has access to one’s virtual Nature as well. The creation hymn in the oldest of all Vedas (Rgveda) for instance informs us that a HEART is capable of crossing being (sat) & non-being (asat), which makes it fluctuate among these two realms and even allows its aspirations to let virtual possibilities matter. Such concepts show striking similarities with contemporary concepts in philosophy-physics, e.g. the concepts of “virtual particles” and “quantum vacuum fluctuations” (Barad).

The project presents a distinctive mythopoeic audiovisual language created to express the experience of aging in a female body in the period between the twenties and thirties. Within the context of life in a late capitalist patriarchal society, and both individual and global events, it reflects on the age-old questions of the passage of time and the search for the meaning of life. At the same time, it examines the feelings of pressure, heaviness, and disposability that are part of the shared common experience of women. Through written word, cinematic language, and original author-composed music, it interweaves symbols and situations in which mud and natural metaphors play a significant role.

This exposition is part of The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, a series dedicated to examining the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators navigate hybrid identities across composition, performance, production, and technological craft. This interview features Arnold Kasar, German composer, pianist, producer, and mastering engineer, whose work spans improvisation, ambient sound worlds, classical heritage, and studio-based experimentation. Moving fluidly between the piano, prepared piano techniques, and digital production environments, Kasar constructs musical landscapes where acoustic gesture, electronic texture, and spatial depth coexist as a single expressive field. In the conversation, Kasar reflects on improvisation as the generative core of his practice, on the piano as both an instrument and a source of raw sonic material, and on the studio as an expanded compositional space. He discusses the continuum between writing, producing, and mixing; the role of technology as a creative partner; and the influence of spatial audio, room acoustics, and Dolby Atmos on his musical language. The interview also touches on collaborations, the aesthetics of ambient music, the cultural impact of streaming platforms, and the challenges and possibilities posed by artificial intelligence. Kasar’s reflections reveal a vision of music grounded in human presence and intuitive creation, yet deeply attuned to technological and spatial possibilities—where composition, sound design, and performance converge into a fluid, embodied process of listening, resonance, and transformation.

This publication presents the outcomes of the Connective Symposium, which took place at Fontys Academy of the Arts in Tilburg, in November 2022. The symposium was the first time that the professorship and research group Artistic Connective Practices, initiated in 2021, opened its work to the international field: We invited practitioners from all over the world to share their work and exchange about the concept of "artistic connectivity". "Artistic Connectivity Unfolding" is an attempt to share the experiences during the symposium with the broader artistic research audience, and to contribute to the body of artistic research work that is socially engaged. The exposition is potentially many things: In part, it is a piece of documentation of the symposium, in part reflections on and proceedings of it. It is also an explorative contribution to our emerging and unfolding discourse of artistic connectivity, — unfinished, fluid and moving — and thus a springboard for our future work on artistic connectivity.