Research Catalogue

Projeto auto-propostp. Explorar dois tópicos: 1º A Membrana (Corpos adoptados) e a Caixa Sensorial

Thesis of the Royal Art Academy, The Hague, 2024 BA Fine Arts In the landscape of modern society, alienation is a common denominator to the experience of individuals. Whether this is due to society’s perpetual acceleration, or the experience of life through the ever-present lens of consumerism, alienation is an unmissable part of the contemporary human experience. This extends to the art world, where the chasm separating an ever-booming global market for the arts, and institutions struggling to get their pre-covid-19 visitor numbers highlight the disparities in the experience of art today. These disparities will ultimately transpire in the experience of the viewer. But how, and why can art be a catalyst for alienation in late-contemporary society? This Graduation Research Paper is an attempt at exploring the relationship between the artwork, the audience, and the artist, so as to attempt and provide a comprehensive notion of the ways in which relationships form around artworks, notably through communication theory. This GRP will also explore examples of elements of influence in the formation of communicative structures between the art and the audience. Notably, this paper will discuss the myth of the artist, and its influence as an authority in the experience of art, as well as the influence of spatial context on the reception of art. The paper will conclude that the artist possesses limited agency in the reception of their artworks, and that in order to provide an honest experience to a contemporary audience, the artist must seek to understand and deconstruct the codes which surround the audience's consumption of art.

Performance philosophy is still something of a ‘wild frontier’ where fundamental questions can be re-posed concerning the nature of wisdom and love, life and truth. For if love and wisdom are not co-extensive with verbal communication, then philosophy may be legitimately pursued by performative means. In this session the participants aim is to enact and unfold a set of trajectories rather than describe or 'define' their work in words alone. Passion and grief are disruptive currencies. Passion and grief not only seem un-necessary for biological life, they frequently threaten it. Yet a life lived without them would seem impoverished. Whether one views these turbulent affects as parasites, invaders, or as the engines of higher culture, they inhabit philosophy as an ineradicable black-market haunts all states and empires. We aim to consider this under-zone on its own terms, weaving theory with demonstrations of transferable techniques for cross-disciplinary research.

This article provides insight into the choreographic situation LUFTIG, where the idea of air as conveyor of tactile experience is passed on, reworked and performed by children and adults. It examines how shifting the focus from movement language to a distinct expressive idea affects the choreographic process, and looks at how involving young people as choreographers and choreographic material affects the aesthetic experience of the now for artists and audience. Drawing on Tygstrup's idea of transformative time (2018), Gumbrecht's concept of the broad present (2018) and Taussig's thoughts on the adult's imagination of the child's imagination (2003), the author argues that in performance work where children are both choreographers and choreographic material, the adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination and the actual actions of the physically present child are at the same time mutually dependent on and at odds with each other, leaving the adult teetering on the edge of contemporary reality and primordial retreat. In the work proces, the child has a special propensity for easing the work for all which can only be deployed if we are able to circumvent tendencies of mutual projection of imagined imaginations. This requires a singular work process, where we - children and adults alike - can inhabit questions together without relying wholly on our previous knowledge of and experience with known performance parameters.

Our main interest is based on understanding spatial relationships from first-person experience, from our virtual and real body. Through the act of walking, movement in real time, we become cursors that dash across the interface of reality. A continuous process that brings us closer to the production of meanings, new relationships and representations, and also a dialogue with space and time, and the network. This article seeks to present a series of disruptive experiences, documented by the authors themselves, which constitute an exploratory framework of space to discover different symbolic interrelationships, and sketch out constructions of the common space in haptic, political, social and cultural mode. It offers a repository of unexpected, intersubjective encounters, from the empirical practice of walking, which arouses new perspectives to be able to interpret circumstantial spaces, to lose oneself in ‘non-places’, or reflect as to how to approach the landscape and/or the city by opening new imaginaries that add value to the ‘glocal’ place that we traverse and/or inhabit.

This exposition details the opening phase of new research between an experimental sound artist and an archaeologist, with a detailed examination of critical epistemological questions that have arisen from the beginning of this project. Both collaborating researchers are situated within hybrid specialisations. As the project unfolds, archaeo-chemical data is explored and animated through methods developed from intersections of data science and musical practice, resulting in performance and installation environments in which knowledge of material culture of the ancient past may be made present through listening. However, beyond a case study, this exposition points to how interdisciplinary artistic work produces results that have value outside of normative paradigms for any of the fields from which it is derived, while offering critical insight about those fields. This exposition is formed of these insights. Readers are introduced to the structure of the data, its relationship to the materiality of the artefacts described, the technological apparatus and compositional methodology through which the data is sonified, and the new materiality of the resulting artistic experiences. Sonification exists at a nexus of sound production and listening, interwoven with information. Meaning and interpretations arise from artistic decisions concerning sound composition and the context for listening to take place. Meanwhile, listening teaches us about data and about the physical and cultural spaces into which we project it. In this way, sonification is always already interdisciplinary.