The space we are in
(2024)
author(s): Sergio Sánchez Perera
published in: KC Research Portal
As musicians, we work in a variety of different spaces, some of which are unfamiliar and with their own dynamics. But in order to be as productive as possible, we have internalized the notion that, particularly as performers, we must keep our personal and professional lives apart.
In my personal case, after moving to the Netherlands to begin my master's program and finding myself without a place to live, I became aware of how much this circumstance affected my playing.
Despite the initial negative impact of the situation, I was able to see potential for an artistic endeavor, leading me to embark on the creation of an interdisciplinary piece titled "The space we are in" – a composition for amplified viola, tape, and video – in an attempt to materialize the feelings and thoughts surrounding my personal situation.
In this study, I documented each stage of the artistic development process, alongside an analysis exploring the philosophical and psychological connotations of the concept of space, and contrasting it with the idea of place. Additionally, I delved into intriguing concepts such as Kathleen Coessens' artistic web of practice and examined various artistic works where the interaction with space plays a significant role.
While working on this project, I discovered a specific interaction with my environment that not only helped me adjust to my new living situation but also –and this is something that I hope to share with the readers of this research– increased my sensitivity and helped me comprehend my artistic vision.
CCC at the mdw: Interweaving Artistic and Musicological Exploration at Music University
(2024)
author(s): Chanda VanderHart, Judith Kopecky
published in: Research Catalogue
Even at one of the world's oldest and largest music universities, the mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, the siloing of fields is the norm. Thanks to budgetary and organizational structures, it is rare that artistic practice and traditional musicology teaching are actively combined; what conservatory students learn in music history seminars and what they learn from their performance teachers exist largely separately from each other.
This exposition documents an ongoing, pragmatic attempt to interweave traditional music research with artistic practice and interventions, thereby introducing students to Artistic Research at bachelor's and master's levels. The CCC (Content-Concept-Context) module was initiated by Judith Kopecky at the Antonio Salieri Department of Vocal Studies and Vocal Research in Music Education and has enjoyed cooperation with the Institute for Musicology and Performance Studies (IMI) for the past three years. Here she, Stephen Delaney and Chanda VanderHart reflect on the promises, surprises, limits, and potential for intertwining scholarship and artistic practice in an institutional setting.
Listening Into the Lattice
(2024)
author(s): Jorge Boehringer
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
This exposition details the opening phase of new research between an experimental sound artist and an archaeologist, with a detailed examination of critical epistemological questions that have arisen from the beginning of this project. Both collaborating researchers are situated within hybrid specialisations. As the project unfolds, archaeo-chemical data is explored and animated through methods developed from intersections of data science and musical practice, resulting in performance and installation environments in which knowledge of material culture of the ancient past may be made present through listening. However, beyond a case study, this exposition points to how interdisciplinary artistic work produces results that have value outside of normative paradigms for any of the fields from which it is derived, while offering critical insight about those fields. This exposition is formed of these insights. Readers are introduced to the structure of the data, its relationship to the materiality of the artefacts described, the technological apparatus and compositional methodology through which the data is sonified, and the new materiality of the resulting artistic experiences.
Sonification exists at a nexus of sound production and listening, interwoven with information. Meaning and interpretations arise from artistic decisions concerning sound composition and the context for listening to take place. Meanwhile, listening teaches us about data and about the physical and cultural spaces into which we project it. In this way, sonification is always already interdisciplinary.
Creating an audiovisual performance through interdisciplinary collaboration
(2024)
author(s): Sanne Bakker
published in: KC Research Portal
Research exposition of Sanne Bakker, as part of her master at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague.
This research started with the aim of creating a better theoretical understanding and breaking down the creation process regarding the making of performances with lights. Ultimately, it became a reflection on the performative practice of a classical musician and the interdisciplinary collaboration while making an audiovisual performance. In particular, the process of the visualization of music. Through literary research into interdisciplinarity, audiovisual performances (specifically with classical music), and by doing a musical and narrative analysis through a case study of Paul Hindemith’s Sonate für Harfe, a theoretical framework is created for collaborative preparation with a visual artist and live experimentation. This research then shows the working process and the experiments that were conducted. It concludes with a reflection on the collaboration, the final product, and how playing the harp sonata in this audiovisual setting has affected the performance of the music.
CRITICAL CONFABULATIONS – Corresponding Practices and Mappings
(2023)
author(s): Jim Harold, Alex Hale
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition is based on an archaeological survey in the landscapes around Kilmartin Glen, Argyll and Bute, western Scotland, and references digital datasets – archaeological reference points –alongside the acts (enactments) of field walking, photography, drawing and poetry – experiences and representational discourses – to consider how land and landscapes may be read as dynamic palimpsestic and multi-dimensional fields of entanglement.
Digital datasets were used by the survey to garner fruitful material to aid identification and to analyse (subtle) surface archaeological remains in the inhospitable terrain on the hills bordering Kilmartin Glen. By analysing, categorising and archiving such information, through naming and cataloguing, archaeological methodology effectively orders and tames such wildernesses. We, by contrast, are seeking to draw art and archaeological practices into dialogue with one another in order to assert the importance of recording experiences and random acts as a part of field research and, thereby, to both re-vivify and re-wild our encounters with landscape.
Our exposition, and shared practices, intentionally encourage nuances of reading and interpretation that are found at the dialogic intersection between an artist/poet encountering archaeological landscape survey, and an archaeologist experiencing artistic, poetic and linguistic readings of land: reflecting in the process upon contemporary methodologies and underlying theoretical discourses. As such this research sits within the wider contemporary turn towards interdisciplinary practice, and seeks to establish a dialogue across disciplines; between humans and landscapes, practice and matter, that provides emerging approaches and hopes to remind us of the wild experience.
The Ecology of Artistic Research
(2023)
author(s): Elizabeth Torres
published in: Research Catalogue
In the past decade, artistic research has emerged as a prominent means of generating new knowledge while addressing pressing issues such as sustainability and environmental concerns. However, due to its relative newness, the field lacks a clear mainstream understanding regarding its potential, meaning, structures, and limitations. The Ecology of Artistic Research is an interdisciplinary investigation that aims to explore the multifaceted dimensions of the field, with a particular focus on the significance of artistic research to researchers and practitioners themselves, and how they perceive, process, and embody knowledge through their practice. This project seeks to identify sustainable approaches to artistic research, demystify and clarify the language of artistic research for lay audiences, visualize the mechanisms of the field, and visibilize structures and networks that pay closer attention to the narratives of our world in transformation.
The investigation is conducted through a cycle of conversations and artistic responses, with a particular focus on the Nordic countries of Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Through engaging contemporary artistic practitioners, academic institutions and researchers in conversations, the project seeks to gain insight into their work, concerns, and personal experiences. The output of this research takes various interdisciplinary forms, including audiovisual interviews, articles, and a multimedia exposition.
The application of creative practice as a means of disrupting or re-defining the dynamics of power in, with or for different communities.
(2022)
author(s): Sabrin Hasbun, Gareth Osborne, Rachel Carney, Julika Gittner, Catherine Cartwright, agnes villette, Harry Matthews
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
In this exposition, seven research practitioners investigate how creative practice can be applied as a form of knowledge production in order to disrupt or re-define the dynamics of power in a range of different contexts. These applications of creative practice take varied and complex forms, often transferring creativity from the practitioner-researcher to their participants, increasing participant agency or re-defining existing hierarchies, as they form, empower, and enlighten real and conceptual communities. This collaborative exposition has been developed through presentations and discussions over the course of two years. Although each researcher applies different methodologies to their individual projects, our work as a group followed a pattern of creative practice, reflection, and reformulation, as we responded to each other’s research, creating a research community of our own. We want to emphasize that creative practice can not only disrupt or re-define the dynamics of power in a range of different contexts, but that it can do this in an infinite number of ways. In this variety and adaptability lies the potential of creative research.
Polska Travels: Composing (at) the Crossroads. In search of an itinerant musical home.
(2022)
author(s): Krishna Nagaraja
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
This Exposition illustrates my artistic doctoral project 'Polska Travels', wherein I use composition and arrangement as practices for the hybridisation of several musical genres, with folk music from Sweden, Finland and Norway and Western art music as points of departure.
From its baroque German-Polish origins to the current Nordic local variants, the polska folk dance tune type has enjoyed a history marked by the crossing of geographical, temporal, and societal boundaries. The interdisciplinary study of this phenomenon addresses both theoretical and practical fields, such as musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, and the performance practice of the local polska styles. The gathered knowledge becomes the basis for of the creation of new music that sits right ‘at’ the crossroads of many genres but further aims at composing ‘the’ crossroads itself, in the form of hybrid, temporary “musical homes” able to negotiate a dynamic dialogue between ever-changing personal identities and external bodies of knowledge.
The artistic output is organised in four concerts, each focusing on a different geographic area where the polska thrived, and a CD recording. The written thesis summarises the research findings, taking the string quartet ‘Stringar’ based on the Norwegian springar as a case study to suggest the concept of “personal tradition” inscribed in the open, itinerant field of trans-genre contemporary music.
Rethinking the traditional concert format through the lens of Russian mystic composer Nikolai Obukhov
(2022)
author(s): Carlota Carvalho
published in: KC Research Portal
Born in 1892, composer Nikolai Obukhov belongs to the Russian avant-garde generation and was one of the pioneers in experimenting with twelve-tone systems, notation, and electronic instruments. He stands out from his contemporaries having inherited not only some aspects of Alexander Scriabin’s musical style, but, most prominently, the Russian symbolist belief in transcendence and collective spiritual uplifting through the performative act as well. The metaphysical substance and religious symbolism of Obukhov’s body of work reveals itself as a very rich and exciting source of inspiration for performers today.
In this exposition I analyze the most relevant features of Nikolai Obukhov’s aesthetic, from his conception of the total work of art, to his harmonic language and annotations on the score, contextualizing them in the broader cultural and philosophical panorama of Russian Symbolism. I focus on understanding the social function of musical performance, and by conceptualizing certain basic principles, I shape my own performative approach to Nikolai Obukhov’s solo piano works. In the creative process of building a more holistic performance practice inspired by Russian Symbolism, the role of the modern performer expands from one of mere executor to the curator of an experience both for themself and for their audience. With this research I intend to encourage the musical community to reflect on our current relation with performance, to experiment with different concert formats, and to realize that we too, like the artistic community of Russians mystics, can project our own hopes about the future of civilization in our performance practices.
FERRY EXPERIMENT: READING LINE AND SOUND | PHYSICAL MOVEMENT LAB
(2021)
author(s): Greta Pundzaite
published in: Research Catalogue
Ferry Experiment: Reading Line and Sound aims to grasp movement in different artistic elements and trace their interconnection. A sound of a ferry trip Lisbon-Berreiro is recorded as if from two differing ears of a passenger. One traces the movement of detailed noise inside while the other lowers itself to the machinery and gives an impulse of the repetitive swing of moving water. A drawing is created as a result, dismounted to its detail and used together with the sounds as a continuation searching itself in the movement of a body.
Situating Practices: An ecological approach to exhibition making
(2020)
author(s): Claire Robyn Booth-Kurpnieks, Louise Atkinson
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Situating Practices was a research-led exhibition (17.05.19- 01.06.19) as part of the Temporary Contemporary programme in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. The exhibition was a showcase of the practice-based research work of nine postgraduate researchers from the University of Huddersfield and other higher education institutions.
It explored what it means to do research in, with and through practice and the potential new configurations of knowledge that is produced through their display, this included artist practitioners, architects and researchers working at the boundaries of social science and creative practice.
This exposition questions the concept of “curating research” (O'Neill & Wilson, 2015) from an ecological perspective, considering the interdependent, emergent and developing relations and tensions when curating research for public display in the context of the Situating Practices exhibition.
The Red Shoes Project Revisited
(2018)
author(s): Lise Hovik
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The author addresses various approaches to artistic research on the basis of her own artistic research project, The Red Shoes Project (2008-14), which consists of three closely related theatre performances for young children (0-3 years). The project was concerned with the development of dance theatre for the youngest children, in which opportunity was given for the children to participate actively and bodily in the performances. As a PhD project The Red Shoes Project (Hovik, 2014) explored the theatre event through three different art settings, following theories on performative aesthetics. Methods and research design are from the field of artistic research. The Red Shoes [De Røde Skoene] (2008) was a dance theatre performance for 1-year olds, Red Shoe Missing [Rød Sko Savnet] (2011) was an art installation, and Mum´s Dancing [Mamma Danser] (2011) was an improvised dance concert, both for 0-3 year-olds. All of these productions had red shoes as a connecting theme and playful artistic material. Playing and musical communication are core concepts guiding this interdisciplinary artistic research practice.
The research methodology changed during the 6 years of artistic research and theoretical studies. Henk Borgdorff’s division into an interpretative, instrumental and performative research perspective (Borgdorff, 2012) provided a comprehensive theory for the development of this research process. These research perspectives together are helpful methodologies in the artistic process of creating art for the very young, and the artworks demonstrates the possibility of creating common artistic experiences between performers and children, in which both can take part in reciprocal interaction and improvisation.
This exposition aims to give a presentation of the artistic research process as a whole, leaving out the more theoretical discussions from the PhD thesis, emphasizing the visual aspects of the artistic works .
As the initial research questions from 2008 might be outdated today - there are a multitude of interactive performances for babies in 2018 - the presentation will touch upon some new relevant works and perspectives within this topic. Looking back on the research process and outcomes, focus will be on the investigating progress and methods in this specific artistic research. The exposition will connect text and visual research material, and open some internal reflections on the development of the research questions along the way. The shifts in methodological perspectives will be highlighted as this still can be fruitful in further research on the topic, both as artistic and academic research.
Extra-musical Systems in Music: their implementation in contemporary music in the context of multimedia
(2016)
author(s): Andrius Arutiunian
published in: KC Research Portal
The purpose of this research is to define methods of applying extra-musical and data-based systems in multimedia music works. The first part of the paper concentrates on the outline of the motivation and reasoning for using extra-musical systems from a composer's or sound artist's perspective and gives a historical precedent context. Parallels are drawn together with contemporary art and art critique examples. The second part of the research outlines the possible modes of the data-based systems application by analysing multiple multimedia works by composers or sound artists written in the last two decades including a piece by the author of the paper. The types of multimedia and its connection to sound are discussed, the conceptual deconstruction and its semiotic implications of the data used are analysed. The given conceptual and semantic context is applied for analysing the musical parameters and data's usage in sound control. Each of the pieces discussed outlines a particular mode of the conceptuality towards the extra-musical system usage and functions as a primal device for further conclusions drawn. The final part of the research consists of the general overview of the conclusions drawn and attempts to establish a general outline of the motivation and the resulting outcome behind the usage of the extra-musical systems in multimedia works.
Palestinian Wildlife Series: embodiment in images, critical abstraction
(2016)
author(s): Rania Lee Khalil
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The expanded cinema performance ‘Palestinian Wildlife Series’ parallels posthuman and postcolonial circumstance, using appropriated imagery of African animals shot directly from a television set in Palestine.
Chronicling the experimentation and process that went into this work of ‘animal-video choreography’, the author interweaves research on Palestine, materialist film, and Afrofuturist thought. The exposition reflects on the impact upon Khalil’s work of women performance artists and avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra, presenting a journey from text-based and signifier-heavy early experiments to the wordless and open-ended cinematic outcome the author comes to defend.
Drawing on her transition from live performance to moving image production, this exposition will interest those concerned with interdisciplinarity and embodiment in digital imagery. It examines alternative modes of art activism and political uses of abstraction and experimentalism in art, specifically where critical ethnic and postcolonial studies are concerned. It supports discussions of rights and representation within artistic research and beyond from a diasporic perspective.
Mind, the Gap. Synaesthesia and contemporary live art practice.
(2015)
author(s): Amanda Steggell
published in: Norwegian Artistic Research Programme
Misuse can mean the crossing of wires, both literally or figuratively. "Mind, the Gap" (2005-07) is a practice-based research project dedicated to the development of collaborative, interdisciplinary, performative live artworks that are influenced by the notion of synaesthesia - the cross wiring of sensory perceptions. It was conducted within the framework of the Norwegian Artistic Fellowship Programme (previously called the National The Programme for Research Fellowships in the Arts).
The documentation of the project has been reconfigured for the purposes of the Research Catalogue. Apart from some small adjustments, the content remains the same as it was in 2007.
Migration research in collaboration with Tamil Sri Lankan artists in the British diaspora
(2015)
author(s): Anna Laine
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This research exposition investigates how artistic practice is used among British Tamil artists with a Sri Lankan background to explore their multiple belongings and in-between notions of homing and migrating.
It is based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in London, Belfast, and Jaffna. Through the author’s position in the overlap between art practice and anthropology, the exposition poses questions about the possibilities of an interdisciplinary approach to artistic research.
The additional overlap with the Tamil artists’ profession challenged the relationship between self and other in the research process, and knowledge has consequently been produced in a collaborative form.
Choreo-graphic Figures: Beginnings and Emergences
(2015)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Choreo-graphic Figures: Beginnings + Emergences
Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line is an interdisciplinary research collaboration involving artist Nikolaus Gansterer, choreographer Mariella Greil, and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for investigating the nature of ‘thinking-in-action’ or ‘figures of thought’ produced as the practices of drawing, choreography and writing enter into dialogue, overlap and collide.
Central is an attempt to find ways of better understanding and making tangible the process of research ‘in-and-through practice’ — the unfolding decision-making, the thinking-in-action, the dynamic movements of ‘sense-making’, the durational ‘taking place’ of something happening live — and for asserting the epistemological significance of this habitually unseen or unshared aspect of the artist’s, choreographer’s or writer’s endeavour.
Our research enquiry unfolds through two interconnected aims: we are interested in the nature of ‘thinking-feeling-knowing’ operative within artistic practice, and seek to develop systems of notation (and exposition) for sharing and reflecting on this often hidden or undisclosed aspect of the creative process. Through this specific exposition — Beginnings and Emergences — our intent is to share findings from the prologue phase and year one of our three-year research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, during which we have explored how various processes of ‘beginning’ performed within live artistic activity might create the conditions for processes of emergence to arise. The intent is to share some of the ‘figures’ developed within this research project for articulating ‘beginning’ within a collaborative artistic process (e.g. Figure of Circulation, Figure of Shared Vibrations, Figure of Clearing, Ordering and Emptying Out, Figure of Touch and Reaching Towards the Other), alongside reflecting on and attending to the process of emergence within artistic labour itself – a process we have called ‘figuring’. Figuring – we use this term to describe those imperceptible or barely perceptible movements and transitions at the cusp of awareness within the process of “sense-making”: the moments of revelation, epiphany, synchronicity, of change in tack or direction or pace, the decision to stop, do something different, begin again. Figuring manifests within those threshold moments within the creative process that are often hard to discern but which ultimately shape and steer the direction of the evolving activity. Our research involves cultivating practices of attention (a perceptual heightening, hyper-sensitizing, sharpening of alertness) for noticing these emergent figurings within the process of creative activity, and devising systems of notation for identifying, marking and even tentatively naming these processes of emergence.
In developing this exposition, our intent has been to remain faithful to the process of investigation itself. Rather than being conclusive, our exposition reflects the process of its own production; itself a diagramming of the multiple and at times competing forces and energies operative within the process of artistic collaborative practice. We propose an exposition that unfolds less as the linear explication of a process, but rather — like artistic process itself — more as an assemblage of overlapping and concurrent components, where attention shifts between the textual and the visual, between what is sayable and what is shown.
CAAJ
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Andrea Keiz
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Choreographic art as a journey
WEGE 3 - Zur Wiederverzauberung der Welt
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Florian Tanzer, Andrea Sodomka, Doris Ingrisch
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Eine perfromative Installation zu Menschen, deren Wege und Erfolge in Zwischenräumen daheim sind.
Wir nähern uns den Menschen und ihrem Denken im Dazwischen mit dem Begriff der Haltung, in einem weiten Verständnis als immer schon gegebene Bezüglichkeit, einer vor jeglicher Bezugnahme vorhandenen potentiellen Bezüglichkeit.
Menschen wie sie in den Fokus eines Projekts zu stellen, Existenzen wie ihren nachzuspüren, und, ebenso nicht-linear wie sie selbst sich zeigen, sich erzählen und agieren, zur Darstellung zu bringen, birgt ein explosives Potential.
"WEGE / WAYS OF..."
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Doris Ingrisch, Andrea Sodomka, Florian Tanzer
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Gespräche ueber Haltungen, Vorgehensweisen, Lebenswege, kuenstlerische Konzepte... im Dazwischen. Das Interdisziplinaere hinterfragen, mit Menschen deren Wege und Erfolge in Zwischenraeumen daheim sind.
WEGE 2 - ...sich in Raum und Zeit erzählen
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Florian Tanzer, Andrea Sodomka, Doris Ingrisch
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
...sich in Raum und Zeit erzählen
Gespräche ueber Haltungen, Vorgehensweisen, Lebenswege, kuenstlerische Konzepte... im Dazwischen. Das Interdisziplinaere hinterfragen, mit Menschen deren Wege und Erfolge in Zwischenraeumen daheim sind.
Adorned Afterlife Network
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Stephen Edward Bottomley
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The Adorned Afterlife network was established by Bottomley in 2015 with a University of Edinburgh’s Challenge Investment Award. Bottomley brought together a network of international researchers from Design, Archaeology, Forensic Anthropology, History and Museology to examine hidden objects of adornment and share discourse and analysis through high-quality speculative multidisciplinary research.
Museums contain many intangible artefacts from our past that relate to the body as adornment. These objects may be represented in paintings and carvings, or literally buried in sarcophaguses or beneath layers of funereal wrappings. The interdisciplinary nature of the network enabled the examination of these items through each others specialist expert lens, leading to the insight that although we saw the same item, we used different terms and language to describe it’s attributed use and meaning. Collectively we speculated on their purpose (why were they made), significance (both then and now) and how they were made (and by whom).
The methodology followed practice-based research, comparing craft makers primary knowledge with curators secondary and tertiary sources via filmed interviews and presentations through each other’s lens of enquiry, to “learn by active experience and reflection on that experience” ( Gray & Malins, 2004).
The network’s 2016 symposium co-ordinated by the researcher explored existing precedents and new technologies for the non-invasive examining of artefacts and paintings in museums by computerised tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning. A focus was the funereal adornments, carefully sited personal objects, placed beneath the wrapped and sealed bandages of Rhind Mummy at the Granton archives, the National Museum of Scotland.
The findings of the research were further presented in the paper ‘The Quick and the Dead: the Changing Meaning and Significance of Jewellery Beyond the Grave’ (Bottomley) at the Canadian Craft Biennale (2017) and published as a ‘Visual-Textual Paper’in the Journal for Jewellery Research (2018).