Research Catalogue

"Platonic devices to reflect the contemporary" is a plastic artwork about the performativity of shadows and the relation between human and nature in the contemporary.

P.A.F. is a project designed to give visibility to road defects that can become obstacles in urban traffic. Taking care of our cities is a real challenge. In Europe, tourist and historic districts are subject to rehabilitation, leaving other areas neglected. Awareness starts with the importance we attach to things. Making things visible is a way of raising awareness. Our cities need to be inclusive, and we need to take care of them in order to take care of our bodies and our uses. The city studied here is Porto (Portugal), but the project is adaptable to a European scale.

This is an archiving project initiated by Siobhan Davies Studios, UK. The Archiving of the performance work "Truth and Transparency" Questions what it means to archive dance as well as what happens when a dance is archived acknowledging that some types of choreographers' work have historically been archived while other types of choreographers have not. What does it do to a dance and choreographer to be archived? This project is also interested in the changes in the creative process of performing the dance which was first choreographed in 2007 and is now being given new life through this archiving project. Truth & Transparency (2007): a performance work for three (two performers and one dancer manipulating projected image onto the performance space using a mirror). The work was inspired by Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ and Adesola’s reflections on bringing up their own children as two masculine presenting Black youth at the time. The piece researched Step and Crumping dance forms as well as foreshadowed new technology using projection in real-time to manipulate the audience’s perception of dancers and space.

Pamela Breda’s (Digital Arts) contribution "Notes On Artificial Intelligence And The Rise Of New Images" explores how hyper-realistic computer-generated images (CGI) reshape our perception of reality and its implications for human creativity. Her considerations stem from an ongoing interdisciplinary artistic research project that combines positions from visual cultural studies, cognitive psychology, and perceptual theory with historical perspectives. Breda’s contribution reflects on the historical background of CGI, its influence on various domains of individual and collective life, and its philosophical implications, her contribution provides current viewpoints on the position of AI and its past implications.

Thomas Ballhausen's (author and philosopher) and Elena Peytchinska's (Institute of Fine Arts & Media Art – Stage and Film Design) contribution "Herbarium of Words: Literary Style at the Scale of a Street" artistically explores the interrelations of space, language, and literature and takes us on a walk through Vienna’s streets. The herbarium serves as a point of departure for historical observations, which is seen as a form of subjective and personal archiving of urban experiences by means of linguization. Their performative approach combines film stills, poetry, and theoretical backgrounds to transform the boundaries of text and bibliographic formats.

Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023. BA Photography. The research paper serves as a base for understanding the memories on a case of a person with dementia and their connections to the medium of photography. Photography is used as an attempt to retrieve my grandmother’s autobiographical memories which are often hard to retrieve. It is based on the assumption that every memory, no matter how vague, is still accessible by restoring to a proper process, similar to the latent image on the photographic film that becomes visible only after appropriate processing. Based on existing experimental memory research I constructed a method of finding a cue that can trigger specific memories in a conversation. Photographic images from the past were used as a base of the conversation. In most cases, they didn’t directly trigger involuntary memory, but they served as a starting point for a conversation, allowing my grandmother to start actively thinking about a period of her life. Due to dementia, the responses within one conversation were often repeated, yet after some time, the chain reaction of retrieving memories allowed her to remember some specific details. Her understanding of the fragility of memories was constantly present. On multiple occasions, she expressed that an artificial device, such as photography or writing, should be used to preserve them. The research doesn’t give a complete understanding of how memories and their retrieval work in general, but it gives a better understanding of how it can efficiently be done with my grandmother. The process I developed can be applied to other people if properly adjusted to them. I believe that essentially what counts is not what kind of cue we choose, but that we patiently take time to listen and guide conversations with some previous knowledge about their past.