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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taiteen vaikuttavuus
(2020)
author(s): Pekka Kantonen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Vaikuttamisen festivaali oli vuosina 2016–2018 Baltic Circle -teatterifestivaalin osakokonaisuus, jossa etsittiin ja tutkittiin taiteen mahdollisuuksia vaikuttaa ja luoda vaikuttavuuden tiloja. Tämä ekspositio käsittelee taiteen vaikuttavuutta käsittelevää taiteellista tutkimustani, jonka toteutin festivaalin osana. Sovelsin tutkimuksessa tohtorintyöni metodia, videokuvan sukupolvittelua (Generational filming). Haastatteluissa tiedustelin festivaalin tekijöiden ja osallistujien näkemyksiä festivaalin vaikuttavuudesta. Haastattelin heitä sekä ennen tapahtumaa että sen jälkeen. Jälkimmäisessä haastattelussa kukin haastateltava näki koosteen edellisestä kerrasta ja reflektoi aiempia kommenttejaan. Projektin lopussa järjestimme työpajan, jossa keskusteltiin taiteen vaikuttavuudesta kuvaamieni videoiden pohjalta.
Tutkimuskysymykseni nousevat saamastani työtehtävästä: Mitä videokuvan sukupolvittelun avulla voi kertoa festivaaliin osallistuvien näkemyksistä taiteen vaikuttavuudesta? Mitä metodi tuo esiin taiteen vaikutuksesta festivaalin osallistujiin? Millä tavalla metodi tuo esiin osallistujien näkemyksiä taiteen yhteiskunnallisesta merkityksestä? Millaista itsereflektiota metodi synnyttää? Vaikuttavatko videoidut haastattelut kokemukseen taiteesta? Mitä metodi tuo esiin taiteen mitattavuudesta? Mitä taiteellinen lähestymistapa tuo taiteen vaikuttavuuden tutkimiseen?
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Sensory excursion as a site of encounter
(2020)
author(s): mari martin
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
In this exposition I discuss a human’s relationship with the environment, in terms of sensation and encounter. I describe my artistic practice implemented with the artist group Ajauksia, as a member of it. We, as a group, explore various sensory encounters with the environment through sensory exercises and, to that end, organize sensory excursions in different urban environments.
We participated in the Research Pavilion # 3 (RP #3), coordinated by the University of the Arts Helsinki in the context of the Venice Biennale. Here I describe the work of Ajauksia within the project, from my perspective. I join in the theme of this Ruukku publication, ecologies of practice, by describing how we developed sustainable modes of artistic research in and through processes of collaborating, performing and discussing. Now, after the project, I reflect on the ideas, experiences and opportunities for interaction with different parties. I focus in particular on the two very different environments where we worked, the Kontula suburb of Helsinki and the island of Giudecca, Venice, where Research Pavilion #3 was located.
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Ecologies of Practice: Landscaping With Beavers
(2020)
author(s): Laura Bissell
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
An interdisciplinary group of ten researchers including artists, cultural geographers, and anthropologists, led by theatre-maker David Overend and human-geographer Jamie Lorimer, visited the Bamff estate in Perthshire, Scotland for four days to explore “landscaping with beavers” and the possibility of multispecies collaboration. Building on previous experiments in Performing Wild Geographies at the Knepp estate in Sussex in 2017 and 2018, this project hoped to further develop our understanding of wild performatives, exploring the shifts in the local landscape in the wake of the introduction of a keystone species. This paper reflects on what emerged from our transdiscipline experiments and what endeavouring to collaborate with more-than-human actants taught us about developing multispecies ecologies of practice.
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EPISTEMIC BUGS AT WORLDMAKING
(2020)
author(s): Tuula Närhinen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This text-based exposition looks at epistemic affordances embedded in the insect condition. Drawing from the scientific study of insects, my project INSECTS AMONG US sets out to fathom insects’ ephemeral existence through art works. A rich media presentation of the project is available in the RC: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/474888/514952.
INSECTS AMONG US was exhibited at the Helsinki Uniarts Research Pavilion 2019 on Giudecca Island in Venice. The Pavilion housed a series of small-scale site-specific installations that visually and acoustically mediated the eerie life worlds of insects to human ears and eyes.
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The Eco-Mesh Approach: A Sustainable Methodology for Socio-Culturally Interrogative Artistic Research
(2020)
author(s): Charulatha Mani
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
One of the most striking features of Artistic Research is that apparently disjointed issues including pressing calls to action from social, ethical, political and cultural perspectives can organically unfold, evolve, and shape interdisciplinary academic discourses through the centralised lens of artmaking. It thereby creates a holistic picture of research in a manner that only an artist’s singular perspective can yield. A methodology approach that looks from the enmeshed and messy microcosms of ecologies at interplay to the broader macrocosms of the world, through the lenses of socio-cultural interrogation and ethical accountability, I argue, presents an sustainable model for a decolonised artistic research ethos to emerge. According in this publication, I offer "an ecomesh approach" to achieving a framework for "socio-culturally interrogative artistic research" with music and culture as my two key modes of inquiry. As a female native culture bearer of South Indian Classical music now also active within the sphere of Western academia, I feel that I have an ethical responsibility towards the ways in which culturally contingent aspects of my music and culture are represented in and communicated to the world (both in education and artmaking). I leverage my insider/outsider position to problematise aspects of power, belonging, and ownership in global ecologies of dissemination and reception of material and material labour.
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Situating Practices: An ecological approach to exhibition making
(2020)
author(s): Claire Robyn Booth-Kurpnieks, Louise Atkinson
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Situating Practices was a research-led exhibition (17.05.19- 01.06.19) as part of the Temporary Contemporary programme in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. The exhibition was a showcase of the practice-based research work of nine postgraduate researchers from the University of Huddersfield and other higher education institutions.
It explored what it means to do research in, with and through practice and the potential new configurations of knowledge that is produced through their display, this included artist practitioners, architects and researchers working at the boundaries of social science and creative practice.
This exposition questions the concept of “curating research” (O'Neill & Wilson, 2015) from an ecological perspective, considering the interdependent, emergent and developing relations and tensions when curating research for public display in the context of the Situating Practices exhibition.