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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Jaloittelemassa – Kävelemällä piirtäminen ja viivojen paikat
(2021)
author(s): Kalle Lampela
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Tässä ekspositiossa esitän, kuinka tuotan jälkeä ja havainnoin maailmaa kävelemällä. Jaloitteleminen saa kehon liikkeeseen, jonka jälki piirtyy paperille. Käveleminen piirtämisen keinona on kuitenkin sillä tavalla performatiivista, prosessuaalista ja syntyhetkensä tapahtumiseen kiinnittynyttä, että pelkästään jäljet paperilla eivät voi antaa siitä kattavaa kuvaa. Siksi tarkastelen jaloitteluani kokonaisuutena.
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Piirretty hiljaisuus – Hiljaisuuden merkitys osana piirtämispraktiikkaani
(2021)
author(s): Elisa Alaluusua
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Tämä pohdinta hiljaisuudesta, ja sen merkityksestä piirtämispraktiikassani, on tehty tutkivan kuvataiteilijan näkökulmasta. Käyttämäni lähestymistapa on autoetnografinen ja taustalla vaikuttava ajattelumalli nojaa hermeneuttiseen tulkintaan ja fenomenologiseen analyysiin. Kirjoittamiseen olen lainannut työskentelytapoja piirtämispraktiikastani, ja siitä kasvanutta metodia kutsun sisäänpäin kirjoittamiseksi. Tarkastelen hiljaisuutta lähtökohtaisesti lappilaisuuden kontekstissa. Tehdessäni tätä kirjoitettua piirrosta ymmärrykseni hiljaisuudesta on tarkentunut. Minulle hiljaisuus on erityisesti kehollista läsnäoloa, mutta se on myös fyysistä toimintaa, jäljen jättämistä ja rytmiä. Ymmärtämystäni on syventänyt paikkasidonnaisten kokemusten tarkastelu; minulle merkityksellisiä paikkoja ovat Luusuan kylä Lapissa sekä Lontoo. Kirjoittamalla piirtäminen on tapahtunut spiraalimaisesti; tämä prosessi näkyy kirjoituksen rakenteessa sekä tarinamaisessa luonteessa. Sisäänpäin kirjoittamisen kautta paljastuneet ilmiöt, kuten kehollinen ymmärtäminen ja lapsuusmuistot, ovat yhdistyneet suuremmaksi kokonaisuudeksi. Tämän eksposition kaikki elementit – niin tämä kirjoitettu piirros, kuin muutkin teokset – kuuluvat piirtämispraktiikkaani, jonka avulla työskentelen kohti syvempää ymmärrystä itsestäni ja maailmasta ympärilläni. Näkökulmani hiljaisuuteen on paikkasidonnainen ja konteksti ajatuksilleni löytyy nykypiirtämisen kentältä.
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Kotini joki – Betoniin piirtyvä hiljainen vastarinta ja vastarinnan performatiiviset ulottuvuudet
(2021)
author(s): Mari Mäkiranta
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Tutkimusekspositioni keskiössä ovat pohjoisen jokialueilla toimivan aktivistiryhmän voimalaitoksen betonisiin ja alumiinisiin seiniin vuosina 2019–2020 maalamat, joen valjastamista kritikoivat kirjoitukset ja kuvat sekä erityisesti niiden poistamiseen liittyvä prosessi. Maalausten – erityisesti niiden jättämien tahrojen ja poistojälkien – pohjalta rakentamissani valokuva- ja videoteoksissa vuorottelevat melu ja merkityksistä tiheä hiljaisuus. Voimalaitosmiljööseen tehdyt maalaukset kehottavat ja vaativat, kamppailevat alisteisten tai marginaaliin jäävien ryhmien, luonnonsuojelijoiden ja kala-aktivistien rinnalla pohjoisen jokien käyttötarkoituksista ja luontoarvoista. Maalausten signaali asettuu poikkiteloin hallitsevien sääntöjen, energiayhtiöiden intressien ja yhteiskunnallisten järjestysten kanssa. Myös valokuva- ja videoteokseni kantavat mukanaan kamppailuja – ironisia kannanottoja ja merkitseviä muotoja siitä materiaalisesta semiosiksesta, jossa kuvat ja kirjoitukset muokkaantuvat kerroksiksi, pinnoiksi, umpeen maalatuiksi ja poispestyiksi, hauraiksi ja huokoisiksi vastarinnan signaaleiksi.
Valokuvateokseni (Virtaavaa 2020; Sulava maali 1-8 2020; (Epäonnistunut)) Lohitapetti 2020) ovat merkitsevän muodon näkemistä siinä, missä toinen näkee töhryn, lian tai sotkun. Videoteokseni (Siivouspäivä 1–3, 2020) ovat saaneet inspiraationsa jokiaktivisteille annetusta kehotuksesta siivota jälkensä. Siivoaminen – kuten myös taideaktivismin harjoittelu – on videoteoksissani osa performatiivista prosessia, jossa sitoudun kulttuurisiin toistokäytänteisiin, kuten ”oikein” tekemiseen, mutta jossa jää tilaa myös toistokäytänteiden ironiselle haltuunotolle, leikille ja liioittelulle.
Luonnonympäristö, valjastettu joki, on täynnä ristiriitaisia merkityksiä: hiljaisuutta ja melua, ihmisen rakentamaa infrastruktuuria ja ”koskematonta” luontoa. Betoniin maalatut kirjoitukset ja kuvat ovat nekin konfliktisia – huokoisia ja hauraita, metelöiviä, hiljaisia. Hiljainen vastarinta ei kuitenkaan taivu kahtiajakoihin, aivan kuten ympäröivä pohjoinen luontokaan ei näyttäydy vastakohtaisuuksina. Kuten Veli-Pekka Lehtola ja Outi Autti (2019) kirjoittavat, hiljaisen vastarinnan tekojen motiivit vaihtelevat. Paikoin vastarinta jää pimentoon, ja aika ajoin sen signaalit on määrä tulla kuulluiksi ja nähdyiksi.
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Coming Slowly to Writing with the Earth, as an Earthling
(2021)
author(s): Hanna Guttorm
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This article illustrates the slow coming to writing with the Earth inspired by both Indigenous ontologies and artistic research as well as post humanist, poststructural and new materialist theories. How does my thinking-feeling-sensing-moving body-mind-language become, or always already is, an Earthling, a habitant of this planet, in the era of super-complexity, in the need of turning the gaze towards the more-than-human(ist)? And were does this becoming/being (conscious) take this “me”? And how does writing and thinking emerge, when one has been waiting long enough?
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A Diary on Slowness at Örö Fortress Island
(2021)
author(s): Francisco Beltrame Trento
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition emerges from the field notes diary of the researcher during their stay in the Ores residency program at Örö Fortress Island. Örö, previously a military fortress, dates from the Russian Empire era and it was closed to visitation until 2015. The piece focuses on the temporalities enacted outside the city, in connection with more-than-human materialities, and, in contrast, discusses the neurotypical constraints of academic spaces. I criticise the (lack of) approach to neurodiversity in educational settings, and the temporalities implied in the required tasks in such settings, even when the subject is physically distant from the academic space. There is a growing interest in Slow scholarship (Ulmer, 2017; 2018). At Örö, I proposed experiments in video, photography and writing, by thinking with slowness in ontological terms. In this diary, slowness is approached conceptually and anecdotally, in a humorous autoethnographic fashion. The residence period coincided with the initial quarantine to neutralise the coronavirus pandemic, which resonated with the text, always existing in between a personal narrative and a conceptual discussion. The exposition features a photographic essay and several video clips.
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falling like a monster
(2021)
author(s): Susanna Hast, Maryam Bagheri Nesami
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Falling Like a Monster is a collaborative and creative practice of writing and embodying inter-textuality and multi-modality in order to experiment a non-representational archive known as a two-sided article. This heterogenous crafted piece of writing resists the hegemony of academic and artistic narratives and suggests a transformative knowledge and an alternative practice of political freedom. In our writing, crafting, recording, and failing, we are playing with exhaustion, silence and stillness as monstrous counter-strategies.