RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
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About this portal
RUUKKU is a multidisciplinary, multilingual, peer-reviewed journal on artistic research launched in 2013. It is based on the Research Catalogue (RC), an international artistic research platform and database that enables multimedia publication. The primary languages of publication are Finnish, Swedish and English.
RUUKKU publishes thematic issues. See the website for the current call and further information.
6.11.2023 RUUKKU webpage is experiencing technical difficulties, therefore the issues and editorials may be currently unavailable. You may use the Research Catalogue search functions and the issue links below to browse publications within RUUKKU.
Ruukkucontact person(s):
Tero Heikkinen ![](/rc/images/email.gif)
url:
http://ruukku-journal.fi/en
Recent Issues
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19. Making Artistic Research Public
Making something public is intrinsic to both art making and artistic research. This issue of RUUKKU focuses on the variety of ways artistic research is made public and on the effect of published artworks and research on their immediate surroundings, neighborhoods or environments. The issue discusses the relevance of changes and traces that published artworks and artistic research leave in public space and vice versa. The call was opened for researchers and artists to ponder artistic research's relation to its publicity in its diversity.
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18. Responsibility
In this issue of RUUKKU, we are unpacking the notion of responsibility in/with/for arts and artistic research with five expositions and three voices. The RUUKKU issue Responsibility supplements the Art of Research VII conference organized on 3-4 December 2020 at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Finland.
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17. Everyday Utopias and Artistic Research
What kinds of perspectives can artistic research offer in seeking to cultivate political imagination and utopian thought? What kinds of tools and methods does it suggest for social action and thought? How do spaces, materiality and embodiment shape the practices of imagination? How can artistic research contribute to creating more ecologically and socially sustainable societies?
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16. Working with Vegetal
This, the 16th issue of Ruukku – Studies in Artistic Research, focuses on artists, researchers, scholars, and artistic researchers who are working with the vegetal in various ways. In the call we invited artists and researchers with an experience of working with plants and vegetation in different ways to contribute to this issue with expositions or articles, accounts of work in progress, and artistic experiments.
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15. Slowness and Silence, Inertia and Tranquility
The themes of this issue discuss the methodical, conceptual and practical connections of artistic research to slowness and silence, inertia and tranquility. What kinds of dimensions can silence or slowness open up and catalyse in artistic research? What might silence challenge, and what slowness? Depending on the perspective, slowness can either be worth pursuing or it can clearly refer to "retardation" or a lack (e.g. bureaucracy).
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14. Ecologies of Practice
This issue of RUUKKU has its starting point in the Research Pavilion #3 project that brought together more than fifty artist-researchers from twenty countries over a period of twenty months. The project started with an open call for "Research Cells" in April 2018 and evolved through a series of Research Cell Assemblies organised in Helsinki to an intensive period of activity in the context of the Venice Biennale.
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13. Sonic Art, Sonic Practice, and Sonic Thought: Artistic Research and Music
Sound is omnipresent, and we live, think, feel, and experience in and through sound every day. Sound studies have developed mainly in the disciplines of acoustics and music. The former defines sound as mechanical waves while the latter considers it as discrete sounds organised in time. Artistic Research offers us opportunities to study sound from a different perspective. How do we live, think, feel, and experience in and through sound as artistic practitioners? What constitutes such knowledge production, and how does this search for knowledge relate to the other modes of knowledge and experience often associated with ‘music'?
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12. Peripheries
RUUKKU #12 considers the conceptual, methodical, concrete and practical peripheries in the arts. This thematic issue ponders questions concerning what kinds of roles margins, peripheries or fringes have in the arts and artistic research? Can artistic research itself be conceived as a peripheral zone on the edge of the rationalistic scientific world?
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11. How to do Things with Performance
Welcome to this 11th issue of Ruukku - studies in artistic research devoted to performance and performance as research, and the question how to do things with performance. Not only what should be done, but how it should be done is today a question as relevant as ever. And some argue we should actually do less, and think a bit more, for example how we do what we do. In the research project How to do things with performance, we have been asking what can be or could be done with performance and how.
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10. Catalyses
Since its very beginning artistic research has openly or unconsciously deemed as its reason for existence the task of finding new ways of doing things; namely new ways of researching this world and new ways of understanding artistic practice. For many, artistic research could be defined as the amalgam of 'research' and 'artistic practice' reinventing and reconfiguring themselves in each other's shadow.
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9. Practicing New Materialisms in the Arts
This issue dedicates itself to the intersections of new materialist theory and artistic or practice-inspired research through a sustained conceptual focus on intra-action and via a wide variety of previously not presented projects. The distinctive main focus of the issue is the intra-active implementation of the notion of intra-action itself. Instead of taking this concept as a theoretical given, the issue's contributions aim to work with, enact, test, expand, and modify it within diverse intra-active settings comprised of highly varied artistic processes, research questions, disciplinary fields of action, and analytical and political concerns.
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8. Conditions of Sharing
RUUKKU – Studies in Artistic Research issue 8 has been collated under the theme of Conditions of Sharing to supplement the Please Specify! conference organized by Uniarts Helsinki together with the Society for Artistic Research in April 2017. The issue explores new perspectives on conditions of sharing research in the artistic field and thus offers a peer-reviewed platform related to the conference theme.
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7. Practicing and the Practice of Art
Each art genre has its own praxis. The way people practice a specific genre of art tells something essential about the genre and about the artists themselves. A performance, an exhibition, or an artwork is a kind of outcome, but with this RUUKKU issue, we peer inside the making of art, where nothing is yet finished and where the direction is not yet settled. Or is there a specific direction in the first place?
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6. Change in Artistic Research
The present issue, titled Change and Artistic Research, shows how artistic research and the ways in which art is made can contribute to not only societal debate but also to methodologies in other disciplines. Indeed, this focus has prompted artist-researchers to take bold steps forward in the worlds of content and form. In the process, they have borrowed and augmented techniques, not only going beyond the conventional boundaries of research but also forging into new areas of modern art, such as media art blogs and the occupation of urban space.
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5. Research Gestures
The expositions of this issue provide diverse – and in no way definitive – approaches to the role of gestures in artistic research. Ultimately the gesture that they perhaps perform the best is one of opening doors to terrain where methodological, discursive and epistemic stakes still run wild.
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4. Process in Artistic Research
Processes can be examined in relation to a starting point or a destination. Here we might as well begin from the call to this fourth issue of Ruukku. In the call we noted that articulating and opening up artistic processes has been considered one of the main aims of artistic research. Since the 1960s "process" has been one of the magic words of contemporary art, with works of art that transform and evolve through time.
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3. Materiality in Artistic Research II
Like any empty vessel, RUUKKU is potentially useful for storing a variety of materials, whether solid or in a state of flow. Are we now beginning to see the real uses of this hollow container or are we still merely testing how much it can hold before cracking?
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2. Materiality in Artistic Research
The theme of the second issue of RUUKKU came from expositions proposed for the first issue, many of which were connected to the idea of materiality. The ideas were presented both at a conceptual level and as explorations of the characteristics and artistic expression of specific materials. In this issue, we approach materiality as a loose term that encompasses different approaches to art, research, materiality and their intersections.
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1. Experience and Experimentality in Artistic Research
The theme of the first issue of RUUKKU "Experience and experimentality in artistic research" involves questions which relate to both art and research. If the concept of experience refers to past time, experimentality opens up to future. However, it is worth noticing that still during the Middle Ages, experimentum and experientia, experiment and experience, were used more or less synonymously and experiments were not arranged in order to gain new information in a systematic way, unlike in later years.
Recent Activities
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Collaborative Processes and the Crisis of Attentiveness
(2015)
author(s): Hanna Kuusela
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Collaborative artistic processes have become increasingly popular in the past decades. Different forms of community art, relational art, and participatory art, as well as artistic collaborations, and art collectives have occupied a central role in the art world. Does this collaborative taken on art, with its focus on the artistic process, entail a move towards openness and communality, or is it rather an obligation put on us? Is the growing interest in the artistic process a fruitful approach that enriches our understanding of art, or is it an unfortunate sign of art being subordinated to capitalism that pressures us to produce constantly new products, without critical reflection or qualitative criteria? This exposition investigates this dialectics between artistic processes and art objects by following my own research process on collaborative writing.
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Keinuva käynti ja muutoksen tila
(2015)
author(s): Marika Orenius
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
In my text, I ponder a process of making and researching art. As in my doctoral thesis (Home base - bodily response and spatial experiences processed to works of art) I shall now go through the process as an opening to a multiple spatial and temporal thinking. In addition to some philosophical reflection, I approach the social and political meanings of space-time and corporeality. Of these subjects, I have filmed various spaces for my upcoming video installation. The working title of the process is Parousia. The video material shown in the exposition is the raw material of the work.
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Can one wade twice into the same Seine?
(2015)
author(s): Assi Karttunen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
In 2013, the Elysian Fields working group received a grant for two concerts based on the concept of a musician’s relationship to a specific city. The idea was to reveal the musician’s living relationship to history in the context of three European towns; Amsterdam, Paris and Helsinki.
I belonged to the group planning the Paris concert, and therefore my article deals with the musicians’ working process and the phases of the practising/rehearsing in preparation for this event, which was staged in January 2015. The Elysian ensemble comprised: Varpu Haavisto, viola da gamba; Essi Iso-Oja, harp; Assi Karttunen, harpsichord, Katja Vaahtera, soprano; and Hannu Vasara, violin.
During the artistic process, the chosen material is shaped, crystallized, constituted and transformed. All of these forms of working are referred to as ‘processing’, where the word is used to describe otherwise invisible stages of working through which the collected material starts to give birth to relevant sets of themes that emerge from the music and its performance practices. During a musician’s decades of processing, the encountered ’alien’ musics and cultures are appropriated and incorporated into his or her own musical identity.
It is typical that in the practising/rehearsal period, the arising themes begin to grow connections to each other as well as outwards to the ’world’. These connections and relationships, their mutual dynamics and causalities, may be explored and analysed. The multidisciplinary and multistage processing and analysis of the material (finding, collecting, producing, practising/rehearsing, delivering and performing) could be called artistic research or practice-based research.
For a musician, Paris is like a university of the mind from which one can never graduate.
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We Can Work It Out - Calibration as Artistic Method
(2015)
author(s): Anna Einarsson
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Based upon the work with the chamber opera Ps. Jag kommer snart hem! (Eng. Ps. I will be home soon!), this presentation aims at describing the working process towards a new musical work, as it takes place in the setting of exploratory workshops. Drawing upon observations and conversations, benefits and challenges are brought forward and discussed through the use of examples. An over-arching concept of calibration is presented; the work in focus housed calibration on at least two different levels: calibration towards the work and calibration within the work. As the article concludes, this process is of great artistic value and may also assist in facilitating for the commissioner, and possibly in extension, the presumed audience of a new musical work.
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Making Making Matter: Paper as Paradox in Practice-as-Research
(2015)
author(s): Katja Hilevaara, Emily Orley
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
In this exposition we articulate and question our own artistic working process and aesthetic, while exploring how we can make the making of work matter as much as the documents that are made afterwards. We use the remnants of the making of a performance, which began as a dialogue, to make a new performance, with images and words which we take apart and put back together. The act of talking is transcribed, then transformed then transcribed again to be reflected upon now. By exploring the materiality of the paper we read and write on, and examining how it is made, we question the hegemony of text and the pressure we are all under in the Academy to produce evermore outputs. We investigate the complex relationship between practice and research and question whether we can make and think, create and theorise, do and write about doing, without devaluing one and prioritising the other.
As practitioner-researchers, we have been collaborating for the last eight years to produce a series of short performance installations called Brief Encounters (or The Breaking of Images). Drawing inspiration from makers and thinkers alike (from Francis Alÿs to Brian Massumi, from the Gutai Group to Rebecca Schneider), we have presented work around the UK, Finland and in the Netherlands. We have tended to prepare our work at length, engaging with the places in which we find ourselves, only to perform it for a few minutes before removing (or attempting to remove) all traces of it. By removing (nearly) all traces of it, we lose evidence of our process. The making that happened in the performance, it seems, matters no more. We are interested in thinking about how we might make it matter still without compromising what was made in the first place, without devaluing the act of performance. So we set out to ask here: how can we celebrate the making while thinking about how and why the making was made? How can we keep the making and thinking about making critical and creative at the same time?
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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.