recent activities
Art + Tech Lab — Exploring Audiovisual Futures Through Storytelling, Technology & Creative Entrepreneurship
(2025)
Christer Windeløv-Lidzelius
This exposition introduces the Art + Tech Lab at Stockholm University of the Arts — an emerging artistic research environment dedicated to the intersections of storytelling, technology and creative entrepreneurship. The Lab explores how artistic narratives evolve when shaped through immersive, interactive or algorithmic systems, and how technological experimentation can open new pathways for audiovisual futures.
The exposition outlines the motivations behind establishing the Lab, its artistic and pedagogical grounding, and its role within Uniarts’ wider research ambitions. It reflects on the challenges and opportunities of building interdisciplinary research spaces inside an arts university, and considers how the Lab may develop through collaborations, residencies and cross-sector exchange. Rather than presenting a complete archive, this exposition offers a conceptual frame and an initial articulation of the Lab’s research questions and future directions.
Metamorphosis of Home 2.0
(2025)
Annamária Zemková
My project explores the topic of identity, belonging, and freedom through illustration, poetry, and urban space.
This semester has been dedicated to finishing my project. I placed new works across several areas, continuing to spread my posters and presence of pigeons within the urban spaces.
Songs We Sing
(2025)
Hans Knut Sveen, Alwynne Pritchard
This project began in 2018, with the simple desire to play songs that we love. These could be pieces with strong associations, ones we had enjoyed singing and playing before, or songs we had never sung and that were, perhaps, even new to us. When the songs were written or what genre they might come from was not important. Original instrumentation (piano, harpsichord etc) and received ideas about vocal style were also not a priority. Finding a way of creating renditions with the tools at hand (Alwynne's voice and Hans Knut's harmonium) is what originally defined the project.
recent publications
Against the Compulsive Urge to Interpret By Dorian Vale
(2025)
Dorian Vale
Against the Compulsive Urge to Interpret
By Dorian Vale
In this incisive essay, Dorian Vale issues a direct challenge to the modern compulsion to interpret everything—especially art that resists it. Against the Compulsive Urge to Interpret dissects the psychological, academic, and cultural forces behind overexplanation, and reveals how this reflex can become a form of violence.
Rather than a celebration of ambiguity or mystique, the essay makes a precise philosophical argument: that some works—especially those grounded in grief, ritual, trauma, or the sacred—must be approached through presence, not penetration. Vale argues that relentless interpretation disfigures the very things it claims to illuminate, replacing witness with possession and flattening mystery into content.
This piece is both a manifesto and a moral warning: not all silence is an invitation to speak. Sometimes, to interpret is to intrude. And in such moments, the most radical act of criticism may be restraint.
Vale, Dorian. Against the Compulsive Urge to Interpret. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17075900
Dorian Vale is a chosen pseudonym, not to obscure identity, but to preserve clarity of voice and integrity of message. It creates distance between the writer and the work, allowing the philosophy to stand unclouded by biography. The name exists not to hide, but to honor the seriousness of the task: to speak without spectacle, and to build without needing to be seen. This name is used for all official publications, essays, and theoretical works indexed through DOI-linked repositories including Zenodo, OSF, PhilPapers, and SSRN.
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, interpretation in art, overinterpretation, ethics in art criticism, restraint in criticism, art and silence, witnessing art, aesthetic theory, non-extractive writing, trauma and interpretation, philosophical aesthetics, contemporary art theory
Tryllespel -å utforske, spore av frå og spinne vidare på det improviserte førespelet på hardingfele
(2025)
Gro Marie Svidal
(NO) "Tryllespel – å utforske, spore av frå og spinne vidare på det improviserte førespelet på hardingfele" er eit doktorgradsprosjekt i kunstnarleg utviklingsarbeid, innan norsk folkemusikk, gjennomført ved Norges Musikkhøgskole i perioden 2021-2025. I prosessen som har utfalda seg gjennom prosjektet, har hardingfelespelar Gro Marie Svidal fletta saman element frå sin eigen hardingfeletradisjon med idear henta frå møter med utøvarar og komponistar i andre tradisjonar. Med improvisasjon som metode, har ho søkt etter å skape musikk med ein folkemusikalsk individualitet og ein personleg identitet. Nøkkelen har vore å ta utgangspunkt i førespela på hardingfele.
(EN) "Tryllespel - To explore and remodel the Hardanger fiddle music’s improvised preludes" is an artistic research project, situated in the Norwegian folk music field, and carried out at the Norwegian Academy of Music from 2021 to 2025. During the process unfolded through the project, Hardanger fiddle player Gro Marie Svidal has combined elements from her own Hardanger fiddle tradition with ideas gained from meetings and collaborations with a selection of performers and composers from other traditions. Using improvisation as a method, she has searched for making music with a folk-musical individuality and a personal identity. The key has been to start from the Hardanger fiddle music’s preludes. The exposition is written in Norwegian.
The Custodian of Consequence: Reframing the Role of the Critic By Dorian Vale
(2025)
Dorian Vale
The Custodian of Consequence: Reframing the Role of the Critic
By Dorian Vale
In this philosophical essay, Dorian Vale redefines the role of the critic—not as interpreter, judge, or analyst, but as custodian of consequence. Rooted in the doctrines of Post-Interpretive Criticism, the work challenges the traditional posture of critique as commentary and repositions it as a form of ethical stewardship.
Vale explores how every act of writing about art either preserves or distorts the original encounter. Through sharp theoretical analysis and poetic argumentation, the essay exposes the critic’s unseen power to shape memory, public reception, and even the afterlife of a work. The true critic, Vale contends, is not the one who explains most eloquently—but the one who bears the most moral proximity to the wound.
This piece is a foundational rearticulation of what it means to “respond” to art—offering not just a new lens, but an entirely new ethic.
Vale, Dorian. The Custodian of Consequence: Reframing the Role of the Critic. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17075493
Dorian Vale is a chosen pseudonym, not to obscure identity, but to preserve clarity of voice and integrity of message. It creates distance between the writer and the work, allowing the philosophy to stand unclouded by biography. The name exists not to hide, but to honor the seriousness of the task: to speak without spectacle, and to build without needing to be seen. This name is used for all official publications, essays, and theoretical works indexed through DOI-linked repositories including Zenodo, OSF, PhilPapers, and SSRN.
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, art criticism ethics, role of the critic, aesthetic responsibility, non-interpretive writing, witness-based criticism, philosophy of criticism, contemporary art theory, moral proximity in art, language and power, poetic criticism, ethics of response, conceptual art critique