Research Catalogue

CITY AS SPACE OF RULES AND DREAMING promotes emancipation and democratisation in urban space by cross-examination through artistic research, empirical urban research, political theory and legal theory. The study strengthens polyphony of urban space and thereby develops a more just city It asks: How is urban space formed and shared, and who has access to it? What normative and de facto instruments regulate, control and inhabit this space? What kinds of processes, structures and spaces of inclusion and marginalisation, as well as disagreement and controversy are there in the city? What kind of fractures, escape lines and dreams are hidden in the normativity of urban space? What kinds of spaces of shadow, noise, potentialities and dreams are there and how do they actualise? The study reaches beyond established art-science boundaries by bringing new and more inclusive means of “soft law” to urban decision-making and inviting different neighborhoods to dream of their own dwelling-regions through imaginary urban archaeology and fictionalising democracy combining different artistic mediums. The project is coordinated by the Academy of Fine Arts (Doctoral programme) at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Other partners are Helsinki University Faculty of Law, Helsinki University Faculty of Arts/ Aesthetics and Aalto University Department of Built Environment. In Memoriam Ari Hirvonen (1960–2021) The responsible leader (PI) of the project is Maiju Loukola at the Academy of Fine Arts / KuvA, Uniarts Helsinki. The other research group members and co-initiators are Aino Hirvola (Dept. of built environment, Aalto University), Tanja Tiekso (Faculty of Arts/Aesthetics, Helsinki University Faculty of Arts/ Aesthetics) and Paul Tiensuu (Helsinki University Faculty of Law). Since 2023 Jaakko Ruuska (KuvA, Uniarts Helsinki), Henna-Riikka Halonen (KuvA, Uniarts Helsinki) and Niran Baibulat (KuvA/Uniarts Helsinki) have contributed as postdoc artist-researchers for shorter periods. Other collaborators include Stefan Winter, Zen Marie, Brigitta Stone-Johnson, Anita Zsentesi, Chris Butler, Jan Schacher, Josue Moreno, Denise Ziegler, Simon Critchley, Antti Nyyssölä, Gabi Schillig and Kristina Sedlerova. Villanen We dedicate this project to Ari, and to Stargazing

ARTikulationen 2024 is an artistic research event conceived and organised by the Doctoral School for Artistic Research (KWDS) | Center for Artistic Research of the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG). It takes place at Theater im Palais and AULA KUG, Graz, between 02–05 October 2024. ARTikulationen interweaves in-depth artistic research presentations, a festival character (intermezzi-performances), and a mini-symposium on the topic of research journeys between artistic and scholarly or scientific practices. Topics range from current acoustic, electroacoustic, and computer composition, historically informed and contemporary performance, to improvisation and theatre.

In this exposition I’m showing you my journey for these past two years of investigating my artistic practice through the meeting of identity and aesthetics. Due to my Iranian background, I have felt a need and curiosity to bring together my Iranian and European identities. This project is a dialogue between myself and music, encompassing sounds, arrangements, physical presence, materiality, technology, context, and politics. By politics I mean; history, cultural appropriation, diversity, colonisation, beliefs, and the current needs of the western culture. A project involving confrontations with habits, default parameters, and elements within digital audio workspaces, thereby incorporating scales.

This exposition explores how different technologically mediated presentations of guitar sounds work as materials to form an acousmatic electroacoustic composition. By juxtaposing processed guitar recordings with computer-generated realizations of guitar sounds, this work considers how composition can be used to engage with changing interpretations of instrumentality and liveness that stem from new music technologies. This includes the notion that such concepts can be an integral part of a sound work that uses fixed media. Here, listening to the boundaries between real and virtual guitars is more than just a technical feature. It informs stylistic choices and references different genre trajectories in electroacoustic music. The featured piece, "Obsession", is used to discuss changing approaches to dealing with the abstraction of source material, hybridization, and algorithmic procedures as aspects of acousmatic music. Additionally, the piece serves as an investigation of the guitar as a unique electroacoustic instrument. Download Accessible PDF

The digital revolution is boosting innovations across our contemporary social life and culture with a strong impact in performing arts studies, creation and fruition. By exploiting augmented and virtual technologies and their cutting-edge applications, contemporary researchers, performers, composers and artists are spurred to renovate their traditional practices and creations, and overcome the boundaries of real stages towards virtual stages and extended reality (XR), where the physical encounters the digital. The possibility to be projected in the blended scenario of the extended reality (XR) and metaverse determines the avant-garde perspective of imagining music performance in hybrid stages where performers and audiences are involved in immersive and intriguing phygital experiences. This exposition wants to present and discuss what the investigation on augmented and virtual reality in artistic research in music entails, and how and why to create a XR music performance in the metaverse. The focus will be on my personal artistic research experience in the creation of a phygital piano performance "MetaPhase: A contrapuntal dialogue between a pianist and her avatar in the metaverse". Download Accessible PDF

SKVR:n kantelerunot alueittain koottuina ja vanhakantaiseen kanteleperinteeseen linkitettyinä. The SKVR collection (1908–1948, 1997) comprises 34 editions and 89,247 texts of oral Kalevala metre lyrics collected from Karelians, Ingrians, and Finns and published by the Finnish Literature Society. This exhibition features texts from the collection relating to the mythical origins and music of the kantele. The front page provides an overview of the regional characteristics, and the tabs offer texts from each region. The exhibition is in Finnish.