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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Experience of Resistance -The Potential of Materiality and Spatiality in Artistic Research
(2015)
author(s): Riikka Makikoskela
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
The working title of my doctoral research is Relation Between Idea, Means and End in Three-dimensional Art Making. By making art, I study how a three-dimensional artwork evolves. I employ a phenomenological research approach in my practice-led, artistic research.
In this exposition, I present one of the case studies of my dissertation, a sculpture called From A Container to A Room for A Female Elk (2011, porcelain, glazed stoneware, rutile and Ikea table, 70 x 50 x 50 cm). I describe in detail the process of creating this artwork, for it discloses the potential of materiality and spatiality in artistic research: the experience of resistance (Biesta 2012). This phenomenon occurs in my art practice, and I study it from within the same activity. While pursuing three-dimensional artworks, I move both the materials and my own body. In my research, I analyze this aspect of three-dimensional art practice through the phenomenological theory of embodiment. In order to stay close to the experiential, I integrate academic research with the art practice. Only the confrontation with the evolving artwork may reveal the material resistance in this art practice.
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Working With a Witches’ Broom / Att Arbeta med en Markvast
(2015)
author(s): Annette Arlander
connected to: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition explores the specific materiality that a Witches’ Broom offers for performance-based artworks, referring to ideas on plant-thinking by Michael Marder (2013) and on vibrant matter by Jane Bennett (2010). A witches’ broom, Taphrina betulina, is a fungus that afflicts certain birch trees and causes outgrowths of small twigs. With such a bunch of sticks I performed for camera and live on several occasions during the years 2006-2008 creating variations with only a few elements. Working with various materials – organic matter, digital moving images and recorded speech – and the various combinations of them, including the versions discarded during the process, provides a starting point for looking at the small transformations that produce difference and for proposing variation as one of the basic methods for artistic research.
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VIRTUAALISEN MATERIAN JÄLJILLÄ
(2015)
author(s): Esa Kirkkopelto
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Kun esiintyjä esiintyy hänen ruumiinsa käy läpi tietynlaisen transformaation. Tuo transformaatio ei koske vain hänen ulkomuotoaan vaan myös hänen ruumiinsa sisäisyyttä. Ilmiö on sinänsä tuttu kaikille esiintyjille, mutta asiaa ei yleensä tavata tarkastella tähän tapaan. Esiintymisen kokemusta hallitsevat joko erilaiset psykologiset tai tekniset kategoriat, ”psykofyysiikka”. Ekspositio kohdentaa huomion ruumiillisen esillä olemisen kokemukseen sen molemmilta puolilta ja johdattaa havainnoimaan sitä kuinka virtuaalinen materiaalisuus voi ilmetä eri yhteyksissä. Tarkoituksena on etsiä esiintymisen tekniikkaa, joka ei ole enää valjastettu palvelemaan ihmisyksilön selviämistä taidemaailmassa ja yhteiskunnassa.
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Co-relation that is not – photography and coming into the materiality
(2015)
author(s): Ari Kakkinen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Sure a photograph can be divided in its mental image and its image-object. These kind of duals follow our tradition, our metaphysics.
When we rather think our corporeality as becoming to or becoming of the corpus instead of the separation of the mind and the body, we can or we even have to think the same way with photography, which traditionally has been located in-between of the nature and the culture.
This essay aims at figuring out the question of the materiality of a photograph when we have to think otherwise than with the difference between mind and body, inside and outside etc. The text argues that the ”material core” is not the origin of the materiality of the photograph, but that the essential center appears only as a trace. Instead of referring to a distant object or a distant instant the trace is the distance itself, its differing and deferring.
The materiality of the photograph consists of its materialities. In a way it is like our bodies are – actual and real, partly serving us, yet also mute and unresponsive, giving the possibility of being. Being itself, becoming.
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Spacing matters: Alternative Thinking about the Nature of Space
(2015)
author(s): Monica Raya
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
I would like to present my inter-textual reading of some theories concerning the nature of space and my reflections upon the materiality of it. I aim to open an alternative way to think about scenography. I would like to expose the theoretical process, the visual documentation and the artistic outcomes of a particular scenic event.
So far, I have used my artistic practice as a method of inquiry and it is not my interest to offer an objective approach to the knowledge of space. In my process, I have found that reflective practice has been a central productive mode for my creativity. I intend to evaluate the unintended and unexpected findings in my work, and make them available for other practitioners.
New interpretations of visual culture may contribute to the generation of extended knowledge. New insights about well-known concepts may provoke different outcomes, some of which may go beyond the basic concepts of the discipline of origin.
I am interested in sensuality as an object of analysis and reconsideration of human experience. I am excited to engage with the visual, not simply as a mode of recording data or illustrating texts, but ‘as a medium through which new knowledge and critiques may be created’ (Pink 2007, 13). I propose to connect various sources of knowledge in a way that brings alternatives to think as an architect, as a scenographer, as performance designer and as a teacher.
As much as I would like to situate the outcomes of my artistic research in the field of performance design, I hope my reflections may cross several disciplines.
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Videoteos laatukuvana/ A videowork as a genre picture
(2015)
author(s): Elina Saloranta
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition consists of a 22-minute video piece, Aamu (Morning, 2013), and an essay titled "Videoteos laatukuvana" ("A videowork as a genre picture"). The video shows a family at breakfast. The essay views the piece as a contemporary genre picture — an interior painting depicting everyday life. The whole process reflects the many different ways in which art history can serve as material for contemporary art. In the text the words, too, take on a special, tangible, material form.