Research Catalogue

Documentation of preliminary steps and collection of musical material and related reflections during the first Term of the Master's Program in Improvisation and World Music. December 2022

The project 'Breaking Circles' is matriculated in the field of social design - an area within the design field that has renewed itself in recent years. Social design is user oriented towards vulnerable and exposed groups within society. Serving a sentence in prison is often associated with a range of penalties. Norway has only one penalty; denial of freedom. The inmates have the same rights as the rest of society, and are supposed to take part of it. The Norwegian Correctional Service’s unofficial slogan reads: ‘better out, than in’ meaning that rehabilitation overcomes penalty. The inmates have both the right and a duty to work, getting educated or attending amendment programs. The goal of their work is to qualify for working life after prison. Having to go to prison will without a doubt be a personal crisis for anyone, and can lead to loss of jobs, housing, personal economy and social network. Inmates could benefit from building professional networks to avoid seeking out old acquaintances in criminal networks after prison, heading into criminal relapse. Having worked with design projects in the western region of the Norwegian Correctional Service, I have seen the vast areas and systems within prisons and the service that are untouched by design strategy. Design has considerable potential to help inmates benefit from their surrounding systems, both within prison and outside. I aim to use social design to ease inmate’s transitions to becoming potential employees through their work within prison. To be able to do that, there are several problem areas to address: the content of inmate’s work in prison, inmate’s tools of sentence progress, barriers between prison and society and the lack of established professional networks to prevent criminal networks taking over after serving. Using graphic design and visual communication in social design can contribute to a dawning interest in design and creative practice to prevent recidivistic crime and social marginalization. Breaking Circles is a project with a strong emphasis on design experiments through field work in a real-life context: prison.

Imagine words approaching a dance eyes closed or sleepwalking, words adrift beyond what can be envisioned beforehand, prompting writer and reader alike into a zone where time multiplies, where bodies grow footnotes and paper skin, savour the taste of language, attune their ears to the wavelength of blue. In a string of brief essays on her practice of writing choreographic poetry and scores, Janne-Camilla Lyster offers reflections on time, memory and the senses, on translation, punctuation and rhythm, on crevasses and mistakes, on the impossible and yet other things. What does it take to slip into another form of existence, say, a chair? Contextual note: These essays were first published as part of the book Choreographic Poetry (2019), a collection of literary scores for dance. They were written in the framework of my PhD in artistic research at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Choreographic Poetry: Creating literary scores for dance. Thanks to the dancers and musicians who contributed to the process of developing the PhD project. To Chrysa Parkinson, Anne Gry Haugland and Bojana Cvejić for their valuable contributions during the process of writing these essays. And to Jeroen Peeters and Mette Edvardsen for further editorial dialogue. Janne-Camilla Lyster is a writer, dancer and choreographer. She has published poetry, novels, essays and plays. www.jannecamillalyster.no Varamo Press embraces the unexpected and values the arbitrary circumstances in which writing comes into being. Snatching, wording, printing, it gives a paper form to various kinds of literature that have a fleeting life elsewhere. Gestures is a series of essays. www.varamopress.org

Every now and then JSS publishes a non-themed issue. What happens in general is that, over several months, people have submitted papers outside of a call for papers, or outside a thematic issue that is planned. After having collected enough of those papers, we start the usual (external) peer review and editing processes and publish an issue that has no focus on one theme which will be explored in depth, but one that presents the versatility and width of contemporary sound studies and/or sound art.

"Walking Hanoi 2024 - Reflections on improvisation, listening and being attached" is an audio visual piece, which stems from my long standing connection to Vietnam, and specifically to an artistic research project that took place in late March 2024 in Hanoi. It took place as part of an international project - led by VIetnamese researchers, musicians and artists - on thinking through how best to digitise the diverse ethnic minority music in Vietnam. A sound walk, a gamified, ambulatory listening activity, with around 50 international artists/researchers forms the basis for this reflective piece on improvisation, situated listening, on embodied being, identity and the ways we attach ourselves to things, and how things attach themselves to us. In reflecting on improvisation and being, the piece, written, narrated and produced by Franziska Schroeder, draws upon the insights of artists and writers, including Simon Rose, Donna Haraway, Lucy Suchman, Judith Butler, Martin Heidegger to reflect on the situated-ness of the 2 hour street walk in Hanoi. It is a personal reflection, informed by how unspoken, often ineffable knowledge can shape one’s internal perspective. This internal perspective, or ‘insider point of listening’ becomes a central theme in this piece, framing the perception of an improvising self in relation to her tactile and sonic surroundings.

ABSTRACT Girl army – Narrative painting in space In my doctoral research in fine arts, I study narrative painting in space and examine the narratives of spatial painting series and other spatial assemblies of paintings. My paintings’ imagery deals with girlhood, womanhood, and the colour pink. A girl army – a wild and non-vi- olent group of girls – acts as a guide on my journey of exploration. My paintings’ girls take over various spaces. My artistic research includes a written section in which I report how my research proceeds, enabling me to find new ideas through verbal language. The written section deals with my artistic work process and non-ver- bal knowledge, and it describes how the search for words adds to my understanding of narrative, narrators, focal- isation, and immersivity. As artistic work and writing blend into a trajectory, I establish the words alongside non-verbal knowledge, and, in the end, I venture to ob- serve my works’ feminism. My research includes three public exhibitions of works that explore painting narratives, the colour pink, and placing in various spaces. The exhibitions took place dur- ing a period of ten years, as follows: My solo exhibition, Playground – My work is my pleasure, was on display at Galleria Korjaamo in autumn 2009, the painting instal- lation Paradis k (Kidnap) was part of the Eyeballing! ex- hibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in 2012, and my painting series Paradis r (Rascal) was on display in the Vallaton – Rascal group exhibition at the Vantaa Art Museum Artsi during 2017–2018. My research’s main stages are closely related to these three exhibitions included in my research. My research ques- tions follow, along with the works, a painting’s simultane- ous, linear, and temporally stretched narrative. I explore how paintings, in different spaces, turn into stories and immersive experiences, inviting viewers inside of them. I invite the reader into a story in which I wander, wearing a trainer on one foot and a high-heeled shoe on the other. I compare painting with a comfortable trainer and the painting’s analytical observation with a high-heeled shoe. As an artist-researcher, I feel like I am standing near my paintings in contrapposto. My research shows how the heel wears out and the words become familiar little by little. Theorists Mieke Bal and Kai Mikkonen, as well as various other researchers, art- ists, and their works, support my journey. Written lan- guage, too, can be wild and experimental, and it is the very element that turns my works into a form that can be verbally shared. Verbalising my research has revealed that a part of my works’ narrative becomes complete only when I leave my workspace and the works are exposed to views and inter- pretations. During my research, I realised the diversity of interpretations and the extent of factors that have influ- enced my work. The key results of my research include the understanding that an artist’s research process opens to be shared and followed through words. The definitions suggested by words do not invalidate a painting’s liberty to be completely indefinable, but they help to understand the various ways a painting’s narrative works. Katja Tukiainen 8 March 2022