Research Catalogue

This video essay explores the sacred landscapes of Delphi and Delos, studying their historical significance as a centres of female knowledge, through embodied, intuitive, and affective engagement. Thinking about Ada Lovelace’s notion of poetical science, the site visits seek to trace the contextual and geographical roots of this concept. The film approaches knowledge as a sensuous, relational and embodied process, one that resists dominant rationalist and technocentric paradigms. The voiceover, recorded in Greece, threads reflections from Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa (1976), Karen Barad’s Diffracting Diffraction (2014), and Sasha Biro’s The Oracle as Intermediary (2022) from Otherwise Than Binary, New Feminist Readings in Ancient Philosophy and Culture Decker, J.E., Layne, D.A. and Vilhauer, M. (2022). Through these situated readings, the film proposes curating research and thinking through place as not merely interpretive but performative: an intra-active practice between self, site, and matter. The work explores myth and reverie, positioning the body in context as instrument. It proposes an expanded curatorial methodology rooted in presence, sensual attention, and poetic science - where intuition is included, and the landscape is approached as co-creator.

Jenny Sunesson (b. 1973) is a Swedish artist predominantly working with sound. Her practice ranges from field recording and live collages to conceptual sound art and video. Sunesson uses her own life as a stage for her dark, tragic and sometimes comical re-contextualised work where real and invented characters and derogated stereotypes, collaborate in the alternate story of hierarchies and normative power structures in society.

“Something” still taking from a vignette, with a running time 05:04. A reading by a reader, accompanied by a moving image vignette, features a page-turner, recorded by the recorder. 2022. The introduction to Elle Reynolds' PhD 2024.

What if failure is not collapse but recalibration? This research reconsiders seismic activity as a speculative site of vibratory instability, adjustment, and relational tension, rather than disaster. Drawing on seismic data from the most significant Romanian earthquakes between 1977 and 2023, the project translates magnitudes into an immersive sound installation that renders the inaudible perceptible through algorithmic processing and low-frequency vibration. The resulting sonic environment invites discomfort and disorientation as productive states, reframing failure as a mode through which we may interpret stability itself differently. The work draws from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Jung’s archetypal theory, Bohm’s field theory, Deleuze’s pataphysics, Priest’s aesthetics of failure, and Eshun’s sonic fiction to position seismic resonance as a speculative and unstable threshold between sensing and knowing. Rather than presuming to represent the Earth’s voice, the installation critically engages with the ethical implications of translating geophysical data into sound, acknowledging the gaps, distortions, and interpretive acts involved. Instead of breakdown, failure becomes a condition of listening – one that resists mastery and opens a dialogue between human and more-than-human temporalities through sonic practice.

This exposition explores the paradox of rendering visible a research that seeks to remain unseen. It examines concealment, obfuscation, and selective disclosure as strategies of resistance and protection, questioning the ethics and politics of visibility in academic and artistic inquiry. Absence, silence, and ambiguity are explored as ways of invoking presence, challenging dominant paradigms of transparency and access, and proposing alternative modes of engaging with hidden or fugitive research. Central to this inquiry is the operatic prompter, an unseen presence that feeds lines to the performer, ensuring continuity while remaining hidden. The prompter’s role complicates the link between knowledge and articulation, shaping the performance without claiming authorship. Like other fugitive voices in history, the prompter embodies a marginal agency, whispering from the wings.

Gestaltology Encoded is an experimental research article in the form of an exposition, centered around the development of an artificial organism, Arcana, coming to life through the artistic research project Gestaltology (2020–2023). The project aims to explore AI and robotics in a way that challenges Cartesian dualism, by investigating the interplay between mind, body, and environment. By engaging a transdisciplinary team, the project delves into evolutionary biology, AI, and robotics, creating an artificial organism that evolves through symbiosis with its environment. Arcana’s artistic process, rooted in these conditions, emerges through its ability to create visual outputs that transcend human-centric perspectives. This research proposes a posthuman approach to AI development, emphasizing an ecocentric and performative perspective that reshapes the relationship between technology, art, and ecology. The article reflects on the project's iterative nature, where failure is viewed as an inevitable and creative catalyst, guiding the project toward unforeseen futures.