Research Catalogue

The background introduction is about three character bassists in Japan. It analyzes and studies the three famous Japanese performers from different perspectives such as artistic style, characteristics, learning experience, and playing style.

Photography with sound and net art, drawing, found folk sculpture with digital drawing, readymades, 2012, 2020, 2021. Accompanied by archival material. The exposition exposes the question of what is artistic research. Usurping the essayist format, which is traditionally associated with research in say the area of philosophy, the exposition formally operates on different levels. I selectively included visual art research material from my own artistic archive, as well as anonymous material that's readily available from the internet and in film archives. In this way, I wanted to emphasise the role of archiving and using archives in the artistic process, as an element of artistic research and artistic production that might involve remediation. Taking that we live in a largely theoretic culture, which means that we use external information systems for storage and retrieval of written, visual and other material, the implication is that art is part of this theoretical system. Moreover, I specifically problematise the notion of value in relation to the visual arts by using the popular media figures of the counterfeit and the impostor, with reference to the so-called "impostor syndrome", correlated with being a minority of some sort in one's field: "A different thought is that two people may be answerable to the very same standard of success or competence, yet be subject to different epistemic standards for reasonable belief in their respective success or competence. This would be an example of pragmatic encroachment." (Katherine Hawley, "What is Impostor Syndrome?", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93, 2019). I suggest that some artworks operate as philosophical provocations of the archive. "The artwork just exists", as Frank Stella argued.

WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER is conceptualized and conducted collaboratively by Charlotta Ruth (SE/AT) and Jasmin Schaitl (AT). The starting point are two artistic practices based on methods of mindfulness and game/play; Performances for the Mind and Choreographic Clues. These two individual perspectives on participation emerge from the project leaders’ ongoing artistic research and merge in their common artistic curiosity in the creation of immaterial material. Accompanied by neuroscientist and performer Imani Rameses (US/AT) the research asks: How does immaterial material perform within participatory situations? What role does participatory setting play and how does participation differ if situations are communicated as a workshop, a treatment, a practice or a performance? How can neuroscience support how immaterial and participatory art practices are developed and described? What relation exists beyond involvement and how can a participant become the performance rather than being part of a performance? What has to occur in the mind and body for this to happen? Through practice and dialogue conducted with experts in the fields of contemplative sciences, sound art, choreography, game art and somatics, the research explores how input from participants (e.g. memory, thought, emotion) can be placed at the centre of a flexible yet framed performance situation. “Withdrawing the Performer” collaborates with the Angewandte Performance Laboratory, and will present its research outcomes in a public series of participatory events. In the course of the project, various participatory performance formats will be exchanged within the Angewandte e.g. at the Center for Didactics of Art and Interdisciplinary Education, as well as in external art institutions. Collaborating expert practitioners and dialogue partners are: Philipp Ehmann (AT), Nikolaus Gansterer (AT), Mariella Greil (AT), Margarete Jahrmann (AT), Dennis Johnson (US/AT), Anne Juren (FR/AT), Krõõt Juurak (EE/AT), Imani Rameses (US/AT), Christian Schröder (AT), Lucie Strecker (DE/AT).

This exposition examines the curatorial project "Clew: A Rich and Rewarding Disorientation," held at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in 2017. The project is part of my doctoral research on “Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency.” “Clew” proposes a framework for curatorial dramaturgy and asks: What is the potential of a dramaturgical approach within an open-ended exhibition structure? Who, or what, is the curatorial dramaturg? How do materials and time contribute to unfolding exhibition narratives? [This exposition corresponds to Section Six: Extending Lines in All Directions: Curatorial Dramaturgy in the printed dissertation.]

How can one learn to improvise convincingly within the context of the nineteenth-century piano repertoire? And why is it important to improvise on this repertoire in the twenty-first century? Taking the music of Robert Schumann (1810−56) as a departure point, Playing Schumann Again for the First Time proposes an answer to these questions through methods towards a pianistic practice that is driven by experimentation and strives to continually find more layers where improvisation can take place, both in sounding musical practice and in notation. These practice-based methods are contextualized by a discussion of the presence of improvisation in Western classical musical practice in the nineteenth century. They are then substantiated by an argument to use improvisation as a tool for rethinking the current performance practice of nineteenth-century music. Improvisation itself and the concepts driving this term will also be addressed: improvisation in musical performance will be described as a process guided by a feedback loop between mimesis and morphosis with which the practitioner engages using his or her individual cognitive and embodied approach to listening, forgetting, and conceptualizing; the results of which bear his or her own sonic signature. The knowledge gained in this project lies within the realm of what will be described as improvisation as practice, a category of improvisational behavior that circumvents the need to be presented as art and is rather intended for the development of one’s own music-making.

In classical music there has been an effort in recent years to bring to light those whose artistic output contributed to their genre or era but were not as well-memorialized as their caucasian heteronormative male counterparts. So, what about artist-musicians, and those adjacent to them, who lived outside the gender constructs of their contemporary hegemony? What contributions did they purposefully or inadvertently make? What is their reception history and how were these histories documented? Queer Studies in- and outside of musicology has made strides to recognize the existence of historic queer and gender nonconforming individuals. Generally speaking, the aim has been to legitimize the gender spectrum and to make the lives of these noteworthy individuals known. Still it’s impossible for us to know how these gender non-conformists would have categorized their own gender in the Early Modern and Modern Periods were they to have the same terminology as we have today. In this thesis I will cite figures from plays and broadsheet ballads of the 17th century, the developing opera genre in France in the early 18th century, the “low style” in London society and theater in the early 19th century, through to the Reconstructionist United States. By illuminating queer and gender nonconforming individuals and the performative acts that defined their personal lives, I show that these communities have always existed in some iteration and in many facets of the musical universe. What emerges is a centuries-old artistic lineage between gender non-conforming people that has yet to be fully explored.