Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

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 Arts 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).

This Portal is financed by national funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within the project UIDP/04395/2020.

DRAWinU

DRAWinU — Drawing Across University Borders.

status	active
portal	i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
admins	Fabrício Fava, Paulo Luís Almeida
members	Paulo Luís Almeida, RC i2ADS, Marina Vale Guedes, David Lopes

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PÁR-A-GEM

PÁR-A-GEM — The importance of Time in times of Time compression within contemporary artistic practices

status	active
portal	i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
admins	Fabrício Fava, Paulo Luís Almeida
members	RC i2ADS, Daniel Sorrentino

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OPDrawing

OPDrawing — The Observation of Perception, considered through Drawing

status	active
portal	i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
admins	Fabrício Fava, Paulo Luís Almeida
members	Mike Croft

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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.

status	active
portal	i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
admins	Fabrício Fava
members	Ana Duarte

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  ‘[…] Biology of One Body’s work’: A video collage of seconds counted while drawing + 2-minutes’ playback layered a number of times (2021) author(s): Mike Croft published in: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society
  A three-minute video, including title and credits, concerns a second re-working, in effect layer three, of a drawing that references incidental observation of the inside of a glass jar and additional materiality, such as an action camera worn in front of the eyes and how the jar is attached to the drawing’s surface to enable the process’s video recording. The audio concerns the counting of seconds while drawing and the prolonged intonation of the word RAUM, German for space. Each of these vocal elements directs and impacts on the drawing procedures, the latter of which are implemented with pencils designed for marking on non-porous surfaces such as plastic and glass, and erasure of such pencils on laminated white cardboard. The video fades in and out of the drawing at each of its three stages, two of which were from times prior to making the video, the last of the stages of which was up to the time of beginning the video. The video is also interspersed with scrolling typed indication of the various correspondences between the counting of time and phrases of spoken monologue, the latter of which has been divided into two audio layers through having been recorded onto both the camera’s microphone and an external voice recorder. At 1: 47mins of the video the content fades to a muted simple scroll-through animation of the completed drawing of the previous video content played back a number of times, which had been responded to through the layering of the drawing the same number of times across nine pieces of handmade paper, 51 x 36cm, in plastic-based pencils and acrylic paint. The video encapsulates the above-mentioned individual facets as a single entity that provides some comment on the diverse nature of time in the context of its experience in and as drawing. Keywords: drawing; time; monologue; language; intonation
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  Desperfilar as artes visuais, o objeto enlouquecedor e o movimento das coisas (last edited: 2025) author(s): Orlando Vieira Francisco, FELIPE Argiles, Ana Sofia Ribeiro This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
  Exposition of the seminar "Deperfilar as artes visuais, o objeto enfrenquedor e o movimento das coisas" (Unprofiling Visual Arts, the Disturbing Object, and the Movement of Things) and publication of the same name for the series Desajustados - Coleção de Textos Falados (i2ADS). The event was organized within the “Arquipélago” program promoted by ID_CAI - IDENTIDADES_Coletivo de Ação/Pesquisa (i2ADS) in October 2024. The results presented arise within the scope of visual and performing arts by approaching a transdisciplinary analysis of the historical, epistemological, and categorical profile in which the subject and nature are perceived, the territory is thought, and science merges. The event and its derived publications are part of the research project program “From the top of the mountains we can see invisible monuments: transnational artistic investigation on landscape environmental changes caused by infrastructure space” (i2ADS).
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  Atelier Nomade (last edited: 2025) author(s): Pure Print Archeology connected to: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
  Atelier Nomade is a research seminar around the practical use of lithography outside of the printmaking workshop.
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  Pôr o Mapa em Perspectiva (last edited: 2025) author(s): DrawingU connected to: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
  (eng.) Putting the Map into Perspective: Drawing Territory and Landscape in Geography The aim of this collaborative Drawing Workshop is to discuss on-site issues on drawing and reading the landscape starting from the map. Fine Arts and Arts and Humanities Faculties collaborative Drawing Workshop, as part of the research project DRAWinU – Drawing Across University Borders (PTDC/ART-OUT/3560/2021). University of Porto, Portugal.
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  Pure Print Archeology (last edited: 2023) author(s): Gravura: I2ADS/FBAUP connected to: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
  Pure Print archaeology (PPA) 1st research meeting aims to reflect on photomechanical printmaking practice and its research status.
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  Desenho e Observação para Médicos (last edited: 2023) author(s): Marina Vale Guedes connected to: i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
  PT Desenho e observação para médicos é uma Unidade Curricular de Competências Transversais que promove o ensino do desenho, adaptado aos estudantes de medicina e medicina dentária da Universidade do Porto. Esta UC desafia os estudantes a reconhecerem a importância do desenho e da sua linguagem visual como um instrumento de apoio à aprendizagem enquadrado na sua formação académica. Considerando que o ensino da Medicina se apoia na observação do corpo humano e das imagens que o representam, a prática do desenho pode tornar-se útil não só no entendimento da Anatomia, mas também como uma ferramenta importante de comunicação entre médicos e pacientes. A possibilidade de entender e comunicar construindo as próprias imagens contribui para consolidar e complementar competências cognitivas e comunicacionais relevantes para as suas áreas de formação. O desenvolvimento desta UC está integrado no projeto de investigação DRAWinU – Drawing Across University Borders (i2ADS-FBAUP). EN Drawing and observation for doctors is a course of drawing specially created for medicine and dentistry students at the University of Porto. This course challenges students to recognize the importance of drawing and its visual language as a learning tool to support their academic training. Considering that teaching within medicine context is based on the observation of the human body and the images that represent it, the practice of drawing can become useful not only in understanding anatomy but also as an important tool for communication between doctors and patients. The possibility of understanding and communicating through their images helps to consolidate and complement cognitive and communication skills relevant to their areas of training. The development of this course is part of the research project DRAWinU – Drawing Across University Borders (i2ADS-FBAUP).
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