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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We Reap What We Sow, embodiment and urban allotment gardening. Part 1: autumn- late winter, October- January.
(2021)
author(s): Polly Hudson
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
This research investigates the inquiry: how is embodiment illuminated by a relationship with the land, earth, and plants, specifically in the context of an urban allotment gardening practice? It reveals the act of writing from the body, the relationship between a movement practice and gardening, the ancient ritual of growing and nurturing plants, and notions of gardening as a somatic practice.
The research project was carried out over the space of a year, from 2019-2020, and in this exposition the activities and interventions that were carried out during part I of the research are revealed.
The work shared here is part of an on-going long-term project instigated in 2017 ‘And so we Sow’ which looks at the relationship between dance and gardening.
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Between plant fossils and oral histories: tracing vegetal imaginaries from Donbas, Ukraine
(2021)
author(s): Darya Tsymbalyuk
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition brings together multiple contexts, narratives and modes of expression to tell multispecies (hi)stories about and from Donbas region, Ukraine, where a military conflict broke out in 2014. By engaging with fossils, paleobotany and testimonies of internally displaced persons, the exposition explores vegetal imaginaries of the region in a series of drawings and questions stories we tell about Donbas and displacement, and ways in which we tell them.
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PORK KANA CAR ROT -project and its offshoot: Keyboard for plants
(2021)
author(s): Lauri Linna
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
In this exposition artist Lauri Linna discusses his PORK KANA CAR ROT project (2016-) and its offshoot the Keyboard for Plants (2019).
PORK KANA CAR ROT questions and studies selective breeding which manipulates the reproduction of domesticated plants and animals. In this project the artist's practice is to maintain a carrot population in an allotment garden that is part of his artist’s studio called “The Garden of The Not Simple”. Linna tries to affect as little as possible the reproduction of these carrots in the allotment garden . Documentation of the PORK KANA CAR ROT from 2016 until 2021 is presented.
Breeding has been suggested as an art form since the early 20th century. As Linna sees various issues with the methods of breeding, he wants to suggest practice of "non-breeding"; practice of choosing not to manipulate the reproduction of other-than-humans and to re-evaluate our methods.
To counter the effects of selective breeding Linna also suggests the practice of "unbreeding" to breed away the domestication of our production species. This practice will become important as we in the future transfer from traditional agriculture where we have individual animals or plants, to in vitro meat and plant tissue produced in labs. This causes the humanity in future to discard the old technology – the cows, the chickens, the carrots...– and cause mass killings or mass abandonment of production species and birth of new feral plants and animals.
The Keyboard for plants is an offshoot of POR KANA CAR ROT, that developed from the notion that plants have senses, can remember and change their behavior. The keyboard is a set of sensors that work like a push button that react to movements of the leaves of Mimosa pudica.
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Evolutionary Gardens and Performative Habitats
(2021)
author(s): Egle Oddo
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
My interest for plant seeds dates back to my early experiments during the '80, when I collected seeds in urban and rural contexts and translocated them in new habitats. Since then my work has taken different directions. At present I create public art works by installing living sculptures which I denominate as evolutionary gardens. The process behind this practice went through a long transformation recently enriched by the contribution of art curators with whom I engage in long term dialogue. This article explores the process of research between 2007-2017, it describes how I become reflective about my viewing and doing, how I progressively opened the work to multiple influences, and how this has generated a better integrative approach leaning towards the complexity of cognitive structures. Finally I asked a set of questions to the curators who worked with me, with the aim to offer the reader a direct view on the diverse approaches intertwined with my practice.
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Play: emotional regulation in classical music performance
(2021)
author(s): Francisca Skoogh
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Musicians examining performance anxiety within the context of their own regular concert performances, is a rare event in western classical music. The Western classical music culture, from conservatory to the professional life that follows, is tinged with disciplined practise, competitions, result-focused ambition and demands for perfection. There is little or no room to explore psychological issues connected to the profession, a silence that needs to be addressed. Classical musicians are highly dedicated to their vocation but they also suffer from more music performance anxiety (MPA) than musicians in other musical genres. This article gives examples on how musicians themselves can find new ways of emotionally regulate MPA by identifying performance values connected to the traditions and ceremonies of classical music. Built in values concerning performance can be defined and explored through experimental concert settings. Furthermore the article gives examples on how Artistic Research (AR) projects are designed to challenge the silenced artist in the traditional classical concert setting and how AR can contribute to the research field of MPA giving voice to the artist's thoughts. The experimental projects presented in this article describe how different interventions can help to regulate the artist's emotions and at the same time develop concert performance practice. One project connects neuroscientific findings to performance and the second one is based on the psychoanalytic concept of play.
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Katveen varjon sanominen koreografisena kirjoittamisena
(2021)
author(s): Leena Rouhiainen, Kirsi Heimonen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Esittelemme tässä ekspositiossa kehittämäämme paikkasidonnaista koreografista kirjoittamista, jonka ytimessä on vieraan kohtaaminen. Keskeistä kohtaamisessa on alttiiksi asettuminen ja mykän kohtaaminen, joka murtaa totunnaisen aikakäsityksen. Kerromme yhteistyömme lähtökohdista ja kuvaamme luomaamme koreografista kehystä sekä esitämme näistä kehkeytyneen koreografian. Tukeutuen filosofi Emmanuel Levinasin ajatteluun pohdimme myös vieraan ja katveen kohtaamisen ja ilmaisemisen luonnetta ja sen merkitystä niin koreografisessa kirjoittamisessa kuin taiteessa yleisemminkin. Ekspositio sisältää tutkimustekstiä, valokuvia ja koreografista kirjoittamista.