Research Catalogue

Photography with sound and net art, drawing, found folk sculpture with digital drawing, readymades, 2012, 2020, 2021. Accompanied by archival material. The exposition exposes the question of what is artistic research. Usurping the mini-essayist format, which is traditionally associated with research in say the area of philosophy, the exposition formally operates on different levels. I selectively included visual art research material from my own artistic archive, as well as anonymous material that's readily available from the internet and in film archives. In this way, I wanted to emphasise the role of archiving and using archives in the artistic process, as an element of artistic research and artistic production that might involve remediation. Taking that we live in a largely theoretic culture, which means that we use external information systems for storage and retrieval of written, visual and other material, the implication is that art is part of this theoretical system. Moreover, I specifically problematise the notion of value in relation to the visual arts by using the popular media figures of the counterfeit and the impostor, with reference to the so-called "impostor syndrome", correlated with being a minority of some sort in one's field: "A different thought is that two people may be answerable to the very same standard of success or competence, yet be subject to different epistemic standards for reasonable belief in their respective success or competence. This would be an example of pragmatic encroachment." (Katherine Hawley, "What is Impostor Syndrome?", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93, 2019). I use visual art and figurative examples as illustrations, adapting from methods, such as the example, used in analytic philosophy. I suggest that some artworks operate as philosophical provocations of the archive: "The artwork just exists", as Frank Stella argued. Artworks and archival artistic material are offered for aesthetic contemplation; they don't possess any "magical" qualities, they don't cause any phenomena or events in the world. In this view, I ordered this exposition as a design proposal for two independent, yet interconnected exhibitions: one for the final artistic exhibition show; and one as a general overview for the artist's studio, set up as a stand alone, if parallel, exhibition.

Although it is virtually impossible to formalize what ‘best practice’ on the Research Catalogue might be, it harbours by now numerous examples of expositions that ‘work.’ In this session, I want to introduce a small set of diverse expositions from JAR as a way to highlight successful choices people have taken. With a short explanation of expositionality and virtual witnessing, I aim to support an understanding of the effect that those examples have as a way of describing how media-rich articulations can productively engage with both academic and artistic expectations.

"New ideas might be conceived and developed more rapidly in disciplines that are more abstract. The inductive methods of experimental innovators in painting makes their enterprise resemble the more empirical disciplines considered by psychologists, while the deductive approach of the conceptual innovators makes theirs resemble the more abstract disciplines." David W. Galenson, "The Life Cycles of Modern Artists", NBER Working Paper Series, 2003. Artists and architects have been at times captivated by visionary ideological viewpoints, which they used as inspiration and to make suggestions for applications with their artworks and designs. My use of the diagram and the image aims to convey the simple message that art strives for evolution; meaning to strengthen the mind, to research capabilities, to communicate a disinterested, though not necessarily apolitical, view of social changes, to overcome banality and offer an alternative way of looking at the world. For many artists, this motivation has traditionally often gone hand in hand with political goals and motivations. The decline of the commercial art market in the 1980s gave rise to artists working mainly, but not solely, with ephemeral installations, including the ubiquitous video art, performance, and the broader range of conceptual art. Painting remained as an established fine art practice, with a renewed interest to conceptualism. The portrait is of the artist, myself, at a young age, dated 1993, when I was a student at the NTUA. Betty Nigianni is my name known as (aka), which I also used as my artistic pseudonym.

The art of Raoul Servais is concerned with the most serious criticisms of 1968 and looks for the freedom and justice that humans pursue, touch a lot of areas and contexts from religion to science, mythology to science fiction, psychology to culture: authoritarian regimes that eliminate science; armies trying to sweep colors from the world; executives trying to share the body of a dead mermaid; filmmakers trying to be faster than their shadows; bosses who incorporate hippies' colorful ideas into their own benefits; 'super powers' that invite people to religion with theocratic gas bombs. Consumption, technology, authority, unhappiness and lost meaning woven with commodity values.

Pourquoi commander un nouveau Star Wars était-il nécessaire?

Cet article interprète l'adhésion au passé qui le conçoit comme l'idéal et la véritable manière de faire progresser, en gardant les yeux fermés sur le fait que l’évolution culturelle peut rendre ce qui était "sage" même inapproprié ou nuisible. Les études de cas présentent donc une dimension globale de l’époque autoritaire en Turquie, allant jusqu’aux idéologies cachées derrière le voile des sciences. L’idéologie autoritaire en Turquie est une question de droit et d’exception. Le fil qui relie aujourd’hui la Turquie et le monde moderne est l’idéologie capitaliste. Les habitants d’un même “village global” se réveillent et partent de chez eux vers des chemins différents où ils peuvent se retrouver avec des idéologies de négation, remplacées par des sciences confidentielles dans un monde qui croit en l’ouverture et la démocratie, qui est toujours au cœur des pratiques scientifiques.