Research Catalogue

Cylinders and discs recorded

This artistic research exposition serves as a virtual presentation of the sound art installation, 'Welcome Children (Stay Small)', on view at 'The WaveCave: An Experimental Sound Space' at California Institute of the Arts within the Herb Alpert School of Music from September 14 - 20, 2025. Works: Welcome Children Color video with sound 14 minutes 19 seconds (loop) 2025 Stay Small Color video with sound 3 minutes (loop) 2025 Artist Statement: Welcome Children (Stay Small) is a multimedia installation exploring a series of manipulated Google Search images of diverse children, which are juxtaposed with moving images of a children’s night lamp. The images are concurrent with drones and reverberated audio samples, which sonically collide. Through the symbolism that sound and image provide, this installation highlights the inevitable reality of children losing their innocence in an imperfect world and the longing of so many of us to protect them from the harm of life and adulthood. Welcome Children (Stay Small) was inspired by the song “Stay Small” by former North American post-rock band, The Receiving End of Sirens, and the New Testament theological essay, “Jesus Loves the Little Children: A Theological Reading of Mark 9:14-29 for Children with Serious Illnesses or Disabilities and Their Caregivers”, written by Dr. Melanie Howard. It is important to note that from 2004 - 2018, I worked with children as a music teacher and Christian educator. I dedicate Welcome Children (Stay Small) to those who also work with children and seek to help them become resilient in the face of life’s pain and ambiguities.

Raschx is a series of mutational performances based upon two fundamental materials: Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana op. 16 (1838), and Roland Barthes essays on the music of Schumann, particularly focusing on ‘Rasch’ (1979), a text exclusively dedicated to Schumann’s Kreisleriana. To these materials other components may be added for every single particular version: visual elements (pictures, videos), other texts, or further aural elements (recordings or live-electronics). The main goal is to generate an intricate network of aesthetic-epistemic cross-references, through which the listener has the freedom to focus on different layers of perception: be it on the music, on the texts being projected or read, on the images, or on the voices. Situated beyond ‘interpretation’, ‘hermeneutics’, and ‘aesthetics’ the series Raschx is part of a wider research on what might be labelled as experimental performance practices—practices that productively deviate from conventional (repetitive) performative strategies and that lend the audience to think during the performative moment, transforming familiar artistic objects into objects for thought.

Language as Custody — Writing Without Harm in Post-Interpretive Criticism By Dorian Vale In this critical essay, Dorian Vale addresses the often overlooked violence of language in art criticism. Drawing from the philosophical core of Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC), this work reframes writing not as interpretation, but as custody—an act of ethical stewardship over what cannot be explained without distortion. Vale explores how clinical, ironic, or overly descriptive language can flatten the moral gravity of witness-based artworks—particularly those dealing with trauma, silence, exile, or the sacred. Instead of attempting to decode or resolve these works, the essay proposes a discipline of linguistic restraint, where words become protective vessels rather than invasive instruments. Through real case studies and comparative language analysis, Language as Custody offers both a conceptual foundation and practical framework for how one might write without harm. The goal is not to say more, but to write in a way that holds what the work cannot say aloud. This is not a guide for translation—it is a doctrine for presence. A refusal to violate what resists interpretation. And in that refusal, it calls for a quieter, more reverent kind of authorship. Vale, Dorian. Language as Custody — Writing Without Harm in Post-Interpretive Criticism. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17077653 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) post-interpretive criticism, Dorian Vale, study guide for art criticism, five principles of art ethics, ethical witnessing in art, presence over interpretation, restraint in criticism, moral proximity, viewer as evidence, rejecting performance, contemporary art criticism, poetic criticism, art education resources, museum pedagogy, witnessing trauma in art, art writing without interpretation, anti-interpretation philosophy, critique without harm, non-extractive art writing

Fractured Curation: On the Cost of Discontinuity Author: Dorian Vale In Fractured Curation, Dorian Vale exposes the silent violence of discontinuity in institutional exhibition-making. Drawing from the principles of Post-Interpretive Criticism, this essay critiques not the art on display, but the fragmented and careless curatorial strategies that sever meaning, rupture context, and erode ethical witness. Focusing on spatial logic, visual sequencing, and the absence of coherent narrative threading, Vale reveals how curation can either dignify or disfigure the viewing experience. When works that bear trauma, memory, or moral weight are mishandled—isolated from their context or stitched into spectacle—the institution itself becomes a site of erasure. This essay stands as a manifesto for curatorial reverence. It reclaims the role of the exhibition not as entertainment or aesthetic collage, but as a moral architecture—one that must be approached with continuity, restraint, and care. The cost of ignoring this? A public who walks through beauty without bearing its consequence. Vale, Dorian. Fractured Curation: On the Cost of Discontinuity. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16996506 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) Dorian Vale, Post-Interpretive Criticism, fractured curation, curatorial ethics, art exhibition critique, museum responsibility, trauma in curatorial practice, continuity in curation, moral proximity in exhibition design, witnessing through curation, ethical curation, spatial narrative in museums, careless curation, art and erasure, institutional critique, aesthetic sequencing, exhibition as architecture, custodial art criticism, reverent exhibition design, post-critical museum theory, viewer disorientation, discontinuity in art spaces

Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2025 BA Interior Architecture and Furniture Design Summary (8968)