i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
About this portal
i2ADS — Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
i2ADS is an R&D Unit based at the Faculty of Fine Arts of University of Porto, Portugal (FBAUP).
Its mission is to promote research in the fields of Fine Arts, Design, Drawing and Performing Arts, with an emphasis on the practical and educational impact of artistic research in society. The main goals are the creation of a shared research culture between artistic areas to inform and enhance its practice and the promotion of debates regarding the social, cultural and technological frames of art and design.
i2ADS’ organization comprises Research Programs and Art-Based Labs on Arts Education, Critique and Society; Interculturality and Society; Artistic Production, Processes and Technological Studies; Artistic Practice, Politics and Social Engagement; Computation, Hybrid Practices and Culture; and Drawing Across Disciplines. The Unit supports two Doctoral Programs (Fine Arts and Art Education) at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto.
Its team is composed of researchers from the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Architecture (University of Porto) and the School of Music and Performing Arts (Polytechnic of Porto), PhD FCT grants and collaborating researchers from several Universities.
i2ADS is an Institutional and Portal member of the Society of Artistic Research (SAR) and the European Educational Research Association (EERA).
contact person(s):
Paulo Luís Almeida 
,
Fabrício Fava url:
https://i2ads.up.pt/en
Groups
DRAWinU
DRAWinU — Drawing Across University Borders.
PÁR-A-GEM
PÁR-A-GEM — The importance of Time in times of Time compression within contemporary artistic practices
OPDrawing
OPDrawing — The Observation of Perception, considered through Drawing
2SMART
The intersection of art and science, or art and engineering, or art and technology, is a common trope since the 1960s when collectives such as “E.A.T.” were formed to explore and promote collaborations with the then-new technologies. But this “intersection of art and technology” is often bandied about in somewhat unclear terms about what it may mean and what its results can be.
Art and technology don’t so much intersect as they almost overlap, at least in the sense that we cannot even fathom art without technology. To be realised, art demands a medium and hence, technology. Art cannot be without technology; art is unthinkable without technology.
We can frequently witness two types of dynamics in art and technology collaborations. The first is when art works as a function of technology, towards technology, becoming somewhat goal-driven in its aim. This is where we can find commissions with motivations squarely grounded in technology and science.
The second is where we find technology and science providing resources to art, such as new materials, tools, methods, etc., that artists use in their work. Occasionally, these can even be developed at the artists’ demand, but they can also result from independent research subsequently put at the artists’ disposal.
Neither of these constitute modes of collaboration in which both parties are led to outputs resulting in effective contributions to both fields and where real synergies are developed or where the arrow points both ways.
Is this type of synergy possible? Can art and technology cooperate? What can art bring to technology, engineering, and science? Can it produce effective contributions to these fields?
i2ADS’s participation in the 2SMART project was steered towards two closely related, albeit quite different, goals. One of these was focused on communication design and communicating science by exploring data visualisation and other media design techniques for the sciences. The communication processes of scientific and engineering teams — those in the 2SMART project, but also in a broader sample of the Portuguese science and technology ecosystem — were studied with the goal of understanding their most frequent needs and of devising design patterns that could be used as tools for researchers to deal with design decisions when designers may not be available. This led to direct contributions to scientists’ and engineers’ design literacy and indirect contributions to a broader scientific literacy. Furthermore, this effort also allowed us to map other needs and opened avenues for future research within i2ADS and the Faculty of Fine Arts.
Another goal was focused on art. However, rather than promoting collaborations with science and technology, it aimed to foster creation in a context of science, technologies, and engineering, bringing artists to the laboratories for creative residences for extended periods of time. André Rangel in NANO4MED lab, Carolina Grilo Santos in the Processes Products and Energy group, and Catarina Braga in the Environmental Sciences and Technologies group, all labs of LEPABE, developed processes of artistic research in the labs, exploring and discovering its spaces, the people that work in them, and the technologies, materials and processes they work with.
At the start of each of these residences, the artists didn’t have constraints beyond a maximum duration for the residence and the expectation of showcasing the outcomes of their work in an individual show at the Library of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto.
The residences resulted in very diverse works — in media, concepts, approaches, and in the focus developed by each artist during the residence — leading to the different ways that the works resonate with the contexts where they were developed. However, we may also discover convergent traits in the works, perhaps because of their shared history or the forces that shaped them.
With this cycle of residences, we tried to bring the epistemological processes of art to sciences and engineering, to look at STEM processes through the perspective of art, something which may lead to the development of new critical perspectives and to a reframing and reorganisation process that can only be developed through art.
In this final show, which also marks the project’s conclusion, the three works are brought together and confronted in the Gallery of the Museum of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, provoking further dialogue between the works and the technologies that brought them to be.
Recent Activities
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by division and differentiation
(2023)
author(s): Carolina Grilo Santos
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
“by division and differentiation” is a speculative fiction or a document on the daily life as an outsider. Presented as video art, this project is the result of a residency program crossing scientific and artistic research that reveals imaging reflections, detected gestures, and alienated thoughts.
An inner monologue sets the tone for travels among accounts, wanders, and memories, invoking the divergences and parallelisms between reality and imagination. There are twisty borders in the millimeters of tension of what is visible to the naked eye and what can only be seen through the machine, between what can be touched without danger and what’s endangered — in science and art. Surrounded by volumes of data that are phenomena for others, dances of precise injections and light beams, we have lost count of the time we have been here.
This work is a result of project 2SMART, engineered Smart materials for Smart citizens, with reference NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000054, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
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HMV_II
(2023)
author(s): Catarina Braga
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
Fragments of an investigation carried out at the end of the 21st century get intermixed with the invisibility of the object of study — indoor air.
From a speculative practice between the scientific process, the artistic process and the affective, political, social and cultural process that we create with the things of the world, the appearance of a new body is proposed. It is inside a fictionalised laboratory that we get to see this collective, symbiotic and ancestral organism; a multispecies entity that transcends the borders between terrestrial bodies (mineral, human, vegetal, animal, technological) and time and space.
The exhibition and work being presented here is the result of the artist's residency with the LEPABE laboratory team of Environmental Sciences and Technologies (FEUP), which investigates and measures indoor air quality, studying its impact on human health.
This work is a result of project 2SMART, engineered Smart materials for Smart citizens, with reference NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000054, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
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(Des)Aceleração
(2023)
author(s): André Rangel
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
(Des)Aceleração is a relational system between coherent light, bioactive molecules, velocity, glass, photoluminescence, volume, surface, algorithm and programming, in continuous variation. It is the outcome of a residency in which a dynamic intermedia system was created, articulating knowledge from a spectrum of activities and configuring conditions for a spatial, optical and chromatic experience.
The computer-controlled movement of the light beam, combined with the idiosyncrasies of the glasses, their heterogeneity, and that of the riboflavin, produces indeterminable phenomena of projection, reflection, refraction, and dispersion of light. In this system, coherent light ceases to be coherent. The laser beam is not used as a stylus but produces a visual experience that results from the coincidence of the predicted and determined with the unforeseen and indeterminate, of order with chaos.
This work is a result of project 2SMART, engineered Smart materials for Smart citizens, with reference NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000054, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
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Seminar – Of Artistic Research: considered through hybrid writing and visual practice
(2023)
author(s): Mike Croft
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
The exposition involves the adaptation of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's logical square, to convey an idea of artistic research practice considered from the perspective of the human subject's position in its midst. As part of the discussion the author has used some evidence of a previous lecture presentation, integrating such material with that of a newer project concerning the visualization of a nightmare image of a phantom in a portal. The tools of the research are a hybrid form of writing that embroils fictional and academic modes as a language-based practice, and visual artistic practice. The author takes Lacan's idea of the confounding of any logical argument by automatic obfuscation of it by unconscious process, and imagines that he has an other to him as a subjective second voice. The question of voices is central to the research; the suggestion that one does speak to oneself in various ways simultaneously that may be fashioned as distinct and separate. It is argued that the research aspect of artistic practice involves just a section of Lacan's logical square, particularly concerning contingency. This orientation may call to question one's tendency to reason and find meaning from the necessary locus of inquiry from the vantage-point of the language-based Symbolic – of Lacan's three psychic structuring registers Imaginary, Symbolic, Real. The element of fiction provides a literary inclination whereby, while the artistic research speaks about itself as research and references a visual practice, the exposition could also be considered a language-based practice in its own right.
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Intimate to and transcendent of transient time qua the seen and drawn in the present: an email to a painter/academic and his reaction
(2023)
author(s): Mike Croft, derek pigrum
published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
The idea of the exposition was triggered by an email exchange between artists Mike Croft and Derek Pigrum on 30th November 2022. The two artists have for more than a year been maintaining an email correspondence on matters of mutual interest concerning their visual practice and theoretical explorations. On this occasion Croft had read something by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan on the automaton, the latter of which he knew to be of great interest to Pigrum, the email to Pigrum of which opens the exposition. The resulting email response from Pigrum has as its point of focus a visit he had made the day before to the KHM (Kunsthistorisches Museum) in his home city, Vienna, where what he terms ‘the automation of contingency that generates repetition’ was as usual in operation. The references Pigrum made in the email to his own artistic work and existing works of art and cultural and historical artefacts suggested his text might be divided and illustrated, the resulting format of which is the present exposition. Several additional responses to the email exchange’s content ensued, termed interventions in the exposition, leading to a closing email exchange dated 11th December 2022. A third email exchange between 13th and 14th December has resulted in a Postscript section. Croft’s contribution pivots, he suggests, around Lacan’s coined term ab-sense, very approximately interpreted to mean absence of meaning between patterns or continuum – in the linguistic context signifiers –that are nonetheless not reducible to mere nonsense. The running through, as it were, of contingency in Pigrum’s practice – which he points out is not his only interest and prompts a need to show the broader picture, as it were, a pivotal influence for him being Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne – may be considered informed by sense more so than meaning. The exposition is an example of how an ongoing correspondence can be an important aspect of each artist’s practice.
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The communication intent in 'matéria disponível’ (‘available matter')
(2022)
author(s): rosinda casais
connected to: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This article is based on the personal work 'matéria disponível’ (2020) by Rosinda Casais and proposes to analyse the importance of communication-driven art in its different stages. This work emerged from the objective to explore the outdoor space as a space to communicate, during the period of the first lock-down (social distancing) due to CoVID-19, from march to june 2020. Crossing this period, she and her 5 years old daughter used the debris that remained in the courtyard of the building, where both live, and started communicating through objects with the neighbours.
From the intention to interact with the other, this artwork fulfils itself, broadens and questions the communicative nature of the objects and the artistic practice as well.
Concepts, along with the capacity of the objects to change the atmosphere of a place and the common/individual memories, were developed during this work towards a sense of communication from/to it and is discussed here.
