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.
Sounds of walking: Can sound re-present the embodied experience of movement time and distance in the landscape?
(2024)
author(s): Martin P Eccles
published in: Research Catalogue
In this thesis, having introduced my research questions, in Chapter 2 I present a layered analysis of the important contexts of my practice—walking, sound, walking poetry, and place. In Chapter 3 I present and discuss three works that together explore how it is that I know the world as a sensate embodied walker. In Chapter 4 I develop what I came to call replicated walks—walks made more than once in the same place. Begun in order to re-configure time, they also led me to extend my consideration of place beyond that defined by geography, to place defined by biological phenomena or socio-cultural coherence. In Chapter 5 I describe my emerging ideas of human-scale of place and my underlying ideas of island-ness. Initially I worked on real islands, walking circumferential routes and those defined by chance procedures. From this I developed an imaginary island in the foothills of Northumberland’s Cheviot Hills; made from the human-scale of my embodied walking this led to my creation of an imaginary pandemic island of containment, created in a city, in my locale, made, and made real, by the traces of my embodied walking. Together my works constitute a body of work that represents a contribution to knowledge with specific contributions of: the use of Replicated Walks as a method of experimenting with time and place; Walking Words – the presentation of poetic text in forms (concertina-fold books, scripta continua, scrolls) that requires walking to engage with it, and that also function as metonyms for my original walking act; Walking Islands –the use of human-scale walking to imagine an island into existence, and then invoke the island as a lens through which to continue to pursue the idea. My work also contributes knowledge to the methods of how to record the sounds of the world whilst walking through it, over extended distances and time.
RNDR M3 4S (1) 0F UR AVATAR GRLS*
(2023)
author(s): AMUSED
published in: Research Catalogue
This thesis is aimed at investigating virtual embodiment and how it can affect a performer's experience of; and relationship to the physical body. With this auto ethnographic case study I hope to shed some light on the ways virtual reality technology enables critical experiences and what effects these experiences could have, through my own personal journey. The study was conducted in the setting of my home using a Pico 4 VR head mounted display and HTC vive full body tracking. The project used for the case study was an audiovisual pole dance performance that was performed on the platform Neos VR and streamed to Studio 44 in Stockholm. The research is rooted in the artistic field but draws knowledge from psychological and social research on VR as a cognitive and embodied technology. The research methods used to gather and analyse the research material were visual research, phenomenology and deep listening. The data collection consisted of visual and text based data. On the visual data I applied thematic analysis, coding and categorising of the text based data and analysing hyper reflections with a phenomenological approach. I found that the experience of virtual embodiment did change my relationship to my own body in a positive way by feeling more grounded and accepting. I was less anxious about performing and felt more confident in myself. Because of the entanglement of the study it was not possible to solely contribute the outcomes of the effect to virtual avatar embodiment in itself. It did however demonstrate how these VR technologies could be used to enable norm critical experiences by the use of norm critical design applied to avatars challenging beauty ideals and societal norms of performativity. My virtual embodiment and its effects on me can give a unique insight that would benefit developers and users active in these platforms as well as for personal introspection and self development. The study serves as a good base to build future research on and I intend to further elaborate on the extensive research data that was gathered.
Performing the ecstasis: An interpretation of Katharine Norman’s Making Place for instrument/s and electronics
(2022)
author(s): Jean Penny
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Katharine Normans’ work Making Place for instrument/s with live electronics (2013/16) combines recorded sounds, images, text, live interactive processing and instrumental music performance to create a unique experience of place. As the performer, I can choose a location, collect photographic images and recorded sounds, and interpret and re-create the score. The score is semi-improvisatory, consisting of many composed and freely pitched musical gestures which trigger text, visual animations and sound processing. This exposition traces the re-conceptualization, adaptation and performance of Making Place for alto flute. A multi-layered experimental methodology evolved that encompassed practice, discussion, description and reflection, with the performance itself forming the pivotal event, the epoché. To begin I share pre-performance thoughts – ideas of re-conceptualization and the construction of method. I follow with an account of pre-performance activities – the walk, collecting materials, transposing the music for alto flute, inserting new artefacts into the software, and rehearsals. Next come descriptions of the performance, and finally, I offer a reflective conclusion to the project. This project illuminated the quotidian through sound, image and text, transforming the everydayness of a walk along a disused railway track, turned walking/cycling track, in Victoria, Australia, into an extraordinary musical work, creating a shift from a knowing about to a knowing from within, from playing and doing to reflective awareness.
Corona Influentia och den mörkare materian
(2021)
author(s): Timo Menke
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In my practice as an artist, I constantly return to the dark agency of cosmic and (micro)biological matter. I explore how it may transform, “infect” or enter into symbiotic relationships, that are linguistic, visual, and trans-material in the spirit of Karen Barad. The aim of my work is to offer an outline of what I refer to as a dark enlightenment, by using the ontological and epistemological discourses that humans are entangled in. This text is a manuscript for a performance lecture about bats, viruses, and dark matter, illuminated by a Corona inside Plato’s cave. Similar to and in contrast with the microscopic size of the virus, the pandemic is not here understood as the ultimate disaster, but rather as a footnote in a much vaster narrative that involves a manifold of associated phenomena, related to Timothy Morton’s hyperobject. From the view point of speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and hauntology, the virus may be capable of hiding future consequences that dwell in our darkened contemporary world. In short, the manuscript may be understood as a contribution to the dark microhistory of an infection. The current version of my work was adapted for online publication, with visual elements of composition.
Playing against the camera
(2020)
author(s): Erik Friis Reitan
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In this essay I describe two projects within the field of visual art. Both works are examples of how the workflow techniques of digital photography can be modified in order to produce artworks that take on a distinct physicality and objecthood, and, as such, may form a spatial and/or haptic relation with the viewer. I discuss how such an approach relates to the ability of photography to point beyond the physical situation of viewing due to the particular virtuality of the photograph. By relating my work to the ideas of Vilém Flusser and Roland Barthes, recent theory on photography and photographic indexicality, as well as contemporary artistic work, I speculate here on how my own work illuminates perceptions of the photograph and understandings of the role of photography in today’s media culture and economy.
Exploring the Efficiency of Artistic Practices within the Context of their Interaction
(2020)
author(s): Andrew Miller
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition presents the artistic research project ‘Exploring the Efficiency of Artistic Practices within the Context of their Interaction’, which examines the ways in which artistic practices interact with one another. It understands practices as the organised media and structures through which a researcher is able to initiate and continue the process of environmental constitution, the embodied process through which the world emerges as meaningful for and with us. The project is situated within the context of a phenomenological approach to consciousness and sense-making. It demonstrates the potential of artistic practices as phenomenological methods; practices not merely for the creation of art but as vehicles for investigation into human experience.
The exposition is separated into two sections:
The first section attempts to present—that is, to make present—the environment as constituted by the researcher through his engagement with the four main artistic practices; descriptive writing, auditory diagramming, sketching and composing. As part of these practices, the initial engagement with the researcher's surroundings was established through the practices of listening and hearing - making this a primarily aural undertaking. The artefacts are given to the reader in a way that hopes to facilitate desired conditions in which the researcher’s perceived environment becomes present. The artefacts relate directly to the practices which allowed the researcher’s understanding of his environment, and are therefore powerful objects, which may allow the reader to come into contact with the same dynamics that allowed the environment to appear in the first place.
The second section contains a reflective text which looks back on this process of environmental constitution in an attempt to understand the role of each artistic practice within the context of their interaction. It also contextualises the project within the framework of artistic research, by understanding the artistic practices not only as methods for art creation, but also as mediators of human experience, and therefore as tools for understanding the way the world emerges with us. The text, therefore, simultaneously addresses the idea of consciousness as an enactive process, one which sees a blurring of agency between researcher, practice and environment.
The reflection is split into two sections, each referring to two different phases of research: the first, an open and generative approach to the engagement of the practices. The second, a pre-determined and deliberate structure for this engagement.
TICK VARIATIONS
(2020)
author(s): Esa Kirkkopelto
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
The research exposition consists of a case study in non-human phenomenology. The topic of the study derives from Jakob von Uexküll´s (1864–1944) classic ecological studies on the “lifeworld” (Umwelt) of animals, the focus being on the lifeworld of a tick. The tick experience is approached in an embodied manner, as developed by the author based on his artistic practice. The study demonstrates that it is possible and meaningful to create virtual corporeal interfaces between human and nonhuman species. What are the epistemological and ecological consequences of that disposition? On what kind of knowledge can planetary co-habitation among radically heterogeneous beings be based in the future?
Reading on Reading: Ecologies of Reading
(2020)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Lena Séraphin, Cordula Daus
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Reading on Reading is a series of experimental reading practices developed collaboratively by Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin whilst working together in the Research Pavilion #3, Venice, 2019, for exploring what alternative modes of sense making are produced when reading is undertaken artistically, as an aesthetic activity.
Reading on Reading explores three interrelated foci: How can aesthetic practices of reading: (1) Shed new light on the phenomenology (or how-ness) of reading? (2) Transform the often-solitary activity of reading into a shared or communal act — and explore what modes of sociality, solidarity and emergent ‘we’ emerge therein? (3) Operate as a disruptive process unsettling normative conventions of reading through focus on the poetic, affective and material dimensions of readerly experience?
Within this artistic research collaboration, we consider the act of reading beyond the relation of the reader to a text read, as a micro-political or ethico-aesthetic practice through which to re-consider — perhaps even re-organise — the relations between self and other(s), self and world. Drawing upon Félix Guattari’s notion of ecosophy with its three ecological registers of environment, social relations and human subjectivity, in this exposition we consider how the modest practice of reading together could contribute to a wider ethico-aesthetic project: for cultivating shared poetics of attention, for the re-sensing of language through embodied vocalisation, for tending to the temporary gatherings of ‘we’ that reading together affords.
The aim of this exposition is to share the reading practices tested and explored in and through the collaboration of three artist researchers, alongside reflection on the questions and concerns emerging within this enquiry. Whilst operating as a document or archive of a specifically time-bound research activity, the intention is that our reading practices have scope to be activated by other readers.
Site-integrity: a dynamic exchange between site, artist, device and audience
(2019)
author(s): JULIE MARSH
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Site-integrity is a proposal for a working methodology - a particular but original mode of site-specific practice that potentiates a dynamic exchange between site, artist, device and audience. Non-haptic, non-temporal ways of representing place have come to dominate contemporary practice. When site is reduced to representation, the experiential qualities are lost. Site-integrity repositions the act of representation from its retrospective or projective dimensions towards that which is performed and is experiential. This exposition presents three specific projects; Assembly, Moving site/sight and Screen space that explore temporal relations with space and place via motorised recording/display devices. These projects are examples of artistic devices that contributes (not exclusively) to a specific practice - site-integrity.
The aural garden of sounding materials: performing within the materiality of Et in Arcadia ego-music performance
(2018)
author(s): Assi Karttunen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
'Et in Arcadia ego'-music performance is an auditory garden deriving its inspiration from 17th-century European meditation gardens. It was premiered at the Helsinki Music Centre in autumn 2016 and performed again in summer 2017 as a part of the Venice Research Pavilion of the University of the Arts Helsinki.The performance was initiated as my KeKe-project 2014 (Sibelius Academy’s former Development Centre, KeKe) and the research question was, how to develop classical music’s performance practices by subtly varying its performative parameters. By pre-recording organic sound material related to wooden instruments like organ pipes, psalteries and harpsichords, including also concrete sounds of wood, cones, stalks and sticks, these sounds were projected into the concert venue and heard among the music repertory and alive improvisations. Moreover, I wanted to pose a question, whether a concert venue could be understood as a compound of resonating elements and shapes. Is it possible to animate the concert venue by studying its auditory features more carefully? The 'Et in Arcadia ego'-performance develops performativity of classical music by subtly varying and extending its performative techniques. This artistic research is articulated in line with phenomenologists such as Don Ihde and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and philosopher Gaston Bachelard.
Modes of Music Listening and Modes of Subjectivity in Everyday Life
(2018)
author(s): Ruth Herbert
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Technologically mediated solitary listening now constitutes the prevalent mode of musical engagement in the Industrialized West. Music is heard in a variety of real-world contexts, and qualities of subjective experience might similarly be expected to be wide-ranging. Yet though much is known about function (music as a behavioral resource) less research has focused on ways in which music mediates consciousness. This essay critiques conceptualizations of music listening in extant literature and explores how listening to music in daily life both informs and reflects subjectivity.
Psychological and musicological literature on music listening commonly distinguishes between autonomous and heteronomous ways of listening, associating the former with unusual and the latter with mundane, habitual listening scenarios. Empirical findings from my research, which used ethnographic methods to tap qualities of subjective experience, indicate that attentive and diffused listening do not map neatly onto 'special' and 'ordinary' contexts and that a distributed, fluctuating attentional awareness and multimodal focus are central to many experiences of hearing music.
images and their agency
(2017)
author(s): glad fryer
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition Images and their Agency presents a text alongside a group of paintings. The text is a reflection on the practice-based research being carried out across a number of paintings concerning images and there agency. This project is ongoing.
We need to grasp both sides of the paradox of the image: that it is alive but also dead; powerful but also weak; meaningful but also meaningless. (wjt Mitchell, what do pictures want)
In the text I respond to W.J.T Mitchell’s suggestion to consider the aliveness and the deadness of images. I take a phenomenological perspective and consider how we experience their power and weakness, their meaning and meaninglessness - how we experience their agency. I do this by critically reflecting on a group of paintings I begun making in 2004; I enquire into the capacity of these paintings to address the agency of the image and how it is felt or experienced.
I am concerned with a common ontological or moral proposition that they as a group of images pose. This proposition of the image is the focus of my practice-based research.
I frame the enquiry into this group of painting through three sets of questions. The first set of questions concerns the image, which is explored through Badiou’s ideas on the truth process. The second concerns the body, which is explored through J. Bennett’s research into affect and trauma. The third concerns Flesh, which is explored through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflections on the relations between eye and mind.
ANCHORAGE: a phenomenology of outline
(2017)
author(s): Joe Graham, Steven Dickie, Chantal Faust
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
'ANCHORAGE' constitutes a collaborative piece of phenomenologically inspired drawing research, undertaken by artists Joe Graham, Steven Dickie, and Chantal Faust. Comprising forty drawings plus a written text, the objective is to ‘outline’ an understanding of the phenomenon of outline, described in an effort to overcome the traditionally definitive descriptions of it that abound (Rawson 1987; Maynard 2005; Thomas and Taylor 2003). In this respect, it constitutes both a relocation and an online extension of an earlier stage to the project, published in print: 'ANCHOR' (2015). In outlining an alternative form of reply to the earlier question (what is an outline?), the purpose of 'ANCHORAGE' is to revisit what was left uninspected or simply assumed; namely, whether an invariant understanding of outline in relation to drawing as a form of art might sensibly be defined. To address this notion, a variety of hand drawn ‘outlines’ by Graham, Dickie, and Faust are supplied for analysis, using original material from 'ANCHOR' as a guide. As lead investigator, the text by Graham seeks to unpack these variations as a part of a Husserlian-inspired methodology (Husserl [1950] 1999). This is geared towards seeking what an essential or perhaps even ‘truthful’ understanding of outline might look like, contingent on the drawings presented here.
Immersion and proximity: music, sound, and subjectivity in The Memory Dealer
(2015)
author(s): Sarah Hibberd, Nanette Nielsen
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
With a focus on narrative film music techniques and sonic constructions of subjectivity, this article explores the soundtrack of The Memory Dealer. We account for whether and how immersion is achieved and discuss the ways in which TMD brings novelty to the area of sound studies, not least through its relevance for phenomenology. Analyzing participants’ responses, we argue that immersion in TMD is less dependent on a narrative understanding of the soundtrack and more reliant on a particular kind of subjective immersion that is deepened and maintained through sound. We show how, in order to achieve this immersion, the soundtrack needs to support a balance between players’ self-reflection and their self-consciousness: whereas the former can deepen engagement, the latter can be distracting and pull the player out of the experience. The various levels of subjectivity and sonic interaction in TMD reveal new avenues for immersion through sound in pervasive drama.
O≡Cyan – for a dark holism to matter
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): TM
connected to: Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Cyan and cyanides and their connected substances, organisms, and processes, constitute subject matter and material subject for the practice-based inquiry of O≡Cyan. Cyan emerges in photochemical and photosynthetic processes imaging us: the CMYK colour space, cyanide poison, cyanobacteria, and cyanotype. Cyanide capsules, cyanobacterial algal bloom and cyanide leaching in gold mining mark their outermost horizon.
Researched with a dark holistic approach, matter, method and medium are conceptually integrated and intrinsic to each other and can give rise to a critical mass of dark holistic and cyanotopic worlding – a network of narratives, phenomena, and matter. methods on the basis of dark materiality surrounding us planetary and concerning us personally, directed towards a History of Darkness - a slowly growing ABC, or material essay for Cyan and cyanides and its dark effects.
Grenzen van het hoorbare: over de meerstemmigheid van het lichaam
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Mark van Tongeren
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In our culture, vocal harmonics fuction as independent musical elements since only a few decades. Thresholds of the audible explores the changing relationship between singers, listeners and harmonics. As a research method a series of compositions (Nulpunten/’Zeropoints’) has been developed, which attempt to make a fresh approach to overtone singing and to the sonic source material of the human body. They spark off further investigations of reality and illusion of our auditory world. Using his experiences with Tibetan monks and Sardinian brotherhoods and the ‘transverbal’ oeuvre of Michael Vetter, Mark van Tongeren develops his notion ‘multiphony of the body’. The last word, according to him, must be given to readers/listeners, who are challenged to shift their thresholds of the audible with the cd It starts here and the performance Incognito ergo sum.
The Guava Platform
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Thalia Hoffman
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The Guava Platform, which is at the centre of the PhD thesis of Thalia Hoffman, was initiated in 2014 as a conceptual framework of my art practice and research. The aim of the Guava Platform is to research and create possible techniques of art-actions that are part of my quest to continue to live in the conflicted landscape, east of the Mediterranean, as an artist.
This dissertation assembles the Guava art-actions: i.e. a series of three short films, an online radio station, two performances, a geotagging website, and a scent collection as well as the research into a combined space. Both the art-actions and the research convey the Guava Platform. The leading questions of the thesis are: How can time-based art-actions in a conflicted landscape induce and take part in an embodiment of constructive political imagination? If both physical and conceptual ‘movement’ are the actions’ impetus, how can these actions adjust the socio-political impasse of the landscape? And how can they contribute to a socio-political discussion of the landscape I live in?
The outcome of this research is presented on a website. Here, the different components, the art-actions and texts, are not bound to a hierarchical relationship between theory and practice that might restrict their possibility to interact. Instead, the website enables the visitor to navigate between the different artistic and discursive elements in a nonlinear way.
Intertwined - What does it mean to be a creative person of faith?
(last edited: 2019)
author(s): Joshua Hale, Kelly J. Arbeau
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
From the most religious to the most secular, no artist ever knows exactly where their creative process is leading—but we all seem to have faith that we will get there. Many factors underlying creativity are also crucial to the act of having faith. These shared factors include ambiguity tolerance, openness to mystery, engaging with paradoxical thinking, perseverance, and questioning. Additionally, those who practice each (creativity, faith) share many guiding phrases, such as “take it one step at a time,” “go with your heart,” and “trust the process.” This interdisciplinary arts-based research project explores the experience of being a self-identified creative who practices a faith or religion. The exhibition combines methods from arts-based research, human centered design, and phenomenology to describe the intersections between the creative practices and faith perspectives of 15 individuals. The experience of our participants is that of creativity and faith combining—intertwining—to form an interactional, hybrid experience that is profoundly different from each experience on its own.