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.

This research project explores how theatre can contribute to democratic engagement. The starting point was artistic probes investigating aspects of democracy: participation, deliberation and inclusion. The probes resulted in three productions presented at theatre institutions in Sweden. In Skapa Demokrati (Creating Democracy), participation was promoted by encouraging the audience members to create a democracy together. The performance thus allowed participants to experience a democratic process by actively engaging in the making of a constitution. In Öva Demokrati (Practicing Democracy), deliberation was in focus. The performance allowed the audience to deliberate on suggestions for strengthening Swedish democracy. Through methods inspired by political science, the audience was invited to speak and listen to arguments for the different proposals. In the performance, they were also presented with a variety of ways of voting to illustrate how different electoral systems can encourage engagement and give minorities a chance to be heard. In Monument, different strategies were used to promote inclusion. The project started with the idea that monuments say something about society. The monuments were used as vehicles to include voices from the residents of Helsingborg. The artwork presented these different experiences through a multi-perspective script. Other outreach activities also helped enable inclusion. Narrative analysis for theatre was used to reflect on these probes, allowing for a deeper understanding of how performances were conceptualised and structured, and how they made meaning for the audience. Lastly, the performance Ibsendekonstruktion II: Brand was written and staged to reflect on how the research has changed the artistic practice. The research has resulted in strategies for inclusion and a novel theatre format, the conversational theatre, which encourages participation and deliberation. These outcomes provide the theatre with methods to be in dialogue with society.

Psychoanalysis is always targeted in theory with armchair theorizing. A very distorted sense of the phenomena from the armchair introspection and speculation and almost-limited theorizing in behavioral psychologies and even in psychoanalysis invests itself in human experiential stances instead of objective observation. To construct a theory based upon these phenomena, however, there’s too much data. What psychoanalysts do is to demonstrate to the people, through self-experiments, how simple it is to misunderstand what is actually in their consciousness and in their first-person data. What’s remarkable about consciousness is that it is not continuous. There are countless voids in the information of consciousness, some of which work in the psychoanalytic experience of diagnosing symptoms in first- person data, the beliefs about the experiences to which individuals have exclusive access. Its discontinuity, the voids and the holes are limited to these beliefs. For the fact that language works discursively, humans may renounce their privileged access to these experiences and shift their focus from what they believe to what actually is the case. In the end, there will be a scientific narrative in which the conscious self will not be a character. A living body, a living brain, and everything else is all that exists. The first-person narrative would be extracted from that third-person account. The conscious self never exists in any other sense. Thinking that it would exist is the illusion.

“Havana Syndrome” has so far been shrouded in a controversial secret as a medical condition and reluctantly made available in the scientific discourses. In spite of the reluctance, global availability of technologies to conduct the violations reported by the US diplomats was never a hidden agenda for conspiracies. US and various NGO accounts illustrate the deployments of these high-tech tools in warfare and beyond, targeting both diplomats and civilians.