Research Catalogue

A moving image essay in three parts.

Maxlab was a research group at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (01/01/2013–19/12/2025), coordinated by Janna Beck, that explored how digital tools could actively shape artistic practice. Unofficial Maxlab Archive offers an overview of its many endeavours, developed in collaboration with researchers, artists, students, and a wide range of partners, framing technology as a co-worker and infrastructure as a space for encounter. The archive brings together collective projects alongside distinct artistic research trajectories. Large-scale collaborative formats—such as projection environments, digital drawing platforms, and transnational studio practices—coexisted with research projects rooted in personal authorship and specific artistic questions. These trajectories were linked through a shared vision on digitalisation in the arts, grounded in adaptability, digital autonomy, and an active understanding of technology as material and condition. The projects collected here demonstrate how lightweight, flexible setups can enable artistic processes across locations and time zones, while leaving room for singular focus and situated inquiry. Digital autonomy is central: technology is neither spectacle nor end goal, but something to be understood, adjusted, and appropriated in order to keep artistic agency open. Rather than operating as a fixed structure, Maxlab functioned as an evolving ecosystem that designed situations for collaboration, circulation of authorship, and productive friction. Openness, simplicity, and adaptability were not merely technical choices, but ethical and artistic positions. Through this lens, the archive documents how research practices emerged in unexpected contexts—rooftops in Havana, community centres in Durban, deserts, planetariums, and festivals—wherever people, technology, and place intersected. The archive captures this way of working and the energy generated when a laboratory exists primarily as a method rather than an institution.

This exposition or archive is a work in progress, under construction, for gathering material of encounters with junipers.

This exposition invites you to reflect on the various things you do in your doctoral artistic research and to consider how these activities might form an interconnected system — a methodology. In a guided tour of words, images, and visits to my garden, I reconsider several research models I encountered as a PhD student investigating transdisciplinary performing practices. However, my primary aim is to carve out a pathway — from model to metaphor — one that offers a viable means of seeing your doctoral project existing within a terrain of complexity rather than utter chaos. Throughout the exposition I employ metaphors inspired not only by my artistic work, but also by my garden in Abruzzo, where I lived throughout my PhD studies. To fully discover Abruzzo, it is necessary to slow down — even allow yourself to get bored — before inevitably being revitalized and inspired by its natural beauty and ever-welcoming ambiance. I hope you will embrace this exposition’s journey. Permit yourself to be a rural-Italian wanderer, enjoy the breaks, and take extra ones so you can also enjoy an espresso or glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. Download Accessible PDF

The research project BODIES IN TRANSITION (2023-2024) searches for sensitive and collaborative bodies of the future by interlacing voices and materials from the Wadden Sea into a cosmology of plants, animals, bacteria, humans and planets. In the context of global crises, which appear as symptoms of a patriarchal and hierarchical self-understanding of human existence, three performers travel to the island of Sylt (Germany) to relearn ‘being’ in this more-than-human-world. Performative research is undertaken in the protection zone 1, the Morsum cliff and the mudflats near Munkmarsch. These dynamic ecosystems, with their tidal rhythms dictated by the moon and sun and their diverse life forms, ranging from Japanese berry seaweed to Pacific oysters, make the world’s processualism perceptible and remind us that our lives are intertwined with dynamic ecosystems. The performers immerse themselves in a fluid space of video, sound, natural materials, and performance, rethinking and questioning the diverse relationships between the organisms of the Wadden Sea and their own state as living beings. The leading question of this research is what we can learn from this dynamic interplay, to transform our existence with planet Gaia and all its organisms into a sensitive and resilient future. Download Accessible PDF

Post-Interpretive Criticism and the Seven Liberal Arts: How Ancient Disciplines Produced a Contemporary Method documents the emergence of Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC) as a methodological consequence of classical intellectual training rather than as a theoretical innovation or aesthetic preference. The essay argues that PIC arises when the seven liberal arts—grammar, logic (dialectic), rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—are rigorously internalized and applied without modification to contemporary art criticism. Rather than proposing a new interpretive framework, this study traces how long-standing disciplines of clear thinking expose structural failures within dominant modes of contemporary criticism, particularly the proliferation of unfalsifiable claims, category errors, rhetorical excess, and disproportionate commentary that displaces the artwork itself. Drawing on the trivium’s emphasis on distinction, validity, and proportionate articulation, alongside the quadrivium’s cultivation of ratio, harmony, distance, and order, the essay demonstrates how interpretive excess becomes visible not as an ideological disagreement but as a violation of established intellectual standards. The essay situates Post-Interpretive Criticism within a continuous lineage extending from classical antiquity through medieval university education, the scientific revolution, and non-Western traditions emphasizing proportion and restraint (including Islamic geometric practice and Japanese concepts of ma). It argues that PIC is replicable, falsifiable in procedural terms, and resistant to misuse because it depends on disciplined application of inherited methods rather than subjective taste or theoretical allegiance. By reframing Post-Interpretive Criticism as a diagnostic instrument rather than an advocacy position, the essay positions PIC as a restorative application of classical liberal arts to a contemporary domain that has largely abandoned them. The work contributes to debates in art criticism, aesthetics, philosophy of interpretation, and methodology by demonstrating that interpretive restraint, silence, and proportion are not evasions but outcomes of rigorous intellectual discipline. Post-Interpretive Criticism; Liberal Arts; Trivium; Quadrivium; Art Criticism; Aesthetics; Methodology; Classical Education; Proportion; Interpretation; Rhetorical Ethics; Dialectic; Grammar; Geometry; Critical Theory; Museum Studies; Philosophy of Art; Intellectual History This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and Art as Truth: A Treatise (Q136329071), Aesthetic Recursion Theory (Q136339843), The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (Q136530009), Canon of Witnesses (Q136565881)