Research Catalogue

Schedule, updates and resources for the Working Group Performance and Pedagogy at PSi 29: Assembly, London, UK. Organized by Vanessa Damilola Macaulay, Leigh Anne Howard and Adelheid Mers (coordinator)

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On February 19th 2024 took place the 2nd seminar, "Illustrating the absence" of the project "[in]visible - [in]visibility of identities in Portuguese 1st-grade elementary textbooks of Social & Environmental Studies after 1974", at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (Portugal). For the reflection, illustration and critical analysis of the illustration works, there was the participation of the Master's in Illustration, Edition and Print students with the illustrator Júlio Dolbeth and the [in]visible team. Cristina Ferreira and Margarida Dias took the photos, and the session was recorded with audio.

Pamela Breda’s (Digital Arts) contribution "Notes On Artificial Intelligence And The Rise Of New Images" explores how hyper-realistic computer-generated images (CGI) reshape our perception of reality and its implications for human creativity. Her considerations stem from an ongoing interdisciplinary artistic research project that combines positions from visual cultural studies, cognitive psychology, and perceptual theory with historical perspectives. Breda’s contribution reflects on the historical background of CGI, its influence on various domains of individual and collective life, and its philosophical implications, her contribution provides current viewpoints on the position of AI and its past implications.

Thomas Ballhausen's (author and philosopher) and Elena Peytchinska's (Institute of Fine Arts & Media Art – Stage and Film Design) contribution "Herbarium of Words: Literary Style at the Scale of a Street" artistically explores the interrelations of space, language, and literature and takes us on a walk through Vienna’s streets. The herbarium serves as a point of departure for historical observations, which is seen as a form of subjective and personal archiving of urban experiences by means of linguization. Their performative approach combines film stills, poetry, and theoretical backgrounds to transform the boundaries of text and bibliographic formats.

Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023. BA Photography. The research paper serves as a base for understanding the memories on a case of a person with dementia and their connections to the medium of photography. Photography is used as an attempt to retrieve my grandmother’s autobiographical memories which are often hard to retrieve. It is based on the assumption that every memory, no matter how vague, is still accessible by restoring to a proper process, similar to the latent image on the photographic film that becomes visible only after appropriate processing. Based on existing experimental memory research I constructed a method of finding a cue that can trigger specific memories in a conversation. Photographic images from the past were used as a base of the conversation. In most cases, they didn’t directly trigger involuntary memory, but they served as a starting point for a conversation, allowing my grandmother to start actively thinking about a period of her life. Due to dementia, the responses within one conversation were often repeated, yet after some time, the chain reaction of retrieving memories allowed her to remember some specific details. Her understanding of the fragility of memories was constantly present. On multiple occasions, she expressed that an artificial device, such as photography or writing, should be used to preserve them. The research doesn’t give a complete understanding of how memories and their retrieval work in general, but it gives a better understanding of how it can efficiently be done with my grandmother. The process I developed can be applied to other people if properly adjusted to them. I believe that essentially what counts is not what kind of cue we choose, but that we patiently take time to listen and guide conversations with some previous knowledge about their past.