BC Time-Slip (The Empire Never Ended)
(2019)
author(s): John Cussans
published in: Research Catalogue
BC Time-Slip (The Empire Never Ended) is the first phase of a long-term artistic research project called The Skullcracker Suite. Taking its name from Philip K. Dick's 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip, the project uses the story of Dick's visit to Vancouver in 1972, and his stay at a rehab clinic for First Nations ex-cons, as a pretext to investigate the cultural politics of decolonization in British Columbia since the 1960's from ethnographic, Indigenous and science fictional perspectives, with a specific focus on the potlatch culture of the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples of the Pacific Northwest.
Artistic research in breeding : The Bifrost Eucalyptus project
(2019)
author(s): Jens Staal
published in: Research Catalogue
Genetic signs of domestication of plants and animals date as far back as the oldest known evidence for other artistic expressions like painting, music and sculpture. Breeding is often seen as a science or a craft and is rarely considered art. The Bifrost art project aims to combine the spectacular bark and growth rate of the rainbow gum Eucalyptus deglupta with the cold hardiness of the cider gum Eucalyptus gunnii and possibly other cold-hardy species. The cold hardiness introgression should make it possible to grow amazing rainbow-colored trees in a European or North American climate. The project has been initiated and is expected to continue for decades or centuries in a distributed, participatory, manner. The project explores breeding as an art form, and through extension landscape and ecosystem manipulations that may last beyond the time when human kind has driven itself to its extinction. The project also questions commonly held beliefs about “pristine” and “natural” as being better than “artificial” and “anthropogenic”.
Aesthetics (presentation at CARPA6)
(2019)
author(s): Hanna Järvinen
published in: Research Catalogue
This is the script and work shown at the 6th Colloquium on Artistic Research in Performing Arts in Helsinki 2019. The exposition is intended as an addendum to the forthcoming Conference Proceedings.
"Mineraler og naturfenomener – kunstneriske uttrykk gjennom regelbasert forskning "
(2019)
author(s): Katrine Køster Holst
published in: Research Catalogue
I stipendiatprosjektet "Mineraler og naturfenomener – kunstneriske uttrykk gjennom regelbasert forskning " har Katrine Køster Holst undersøkt hvordan keramisk kunst kan utvikles gjennom teknikker som tar i bruk naturens grunnleggende prinsipper for formdannelse. Undersøkelsene er bygget på mange års erfaring innen det keramiske fagfelt. Sentrale spørsmål har vært: Hvordan vokser, forflyttes og forsvinner landformer gjennom langsomme naturlige prosesser som eksempelvis erosjon, sedimentering og forvitring? Hvilke forhold binder en forms kjerne til sin overflate? Hva handler min emosjonelle tilknytning til leiren og landskapet om?
The Choreography of Gender in Traditional Vietnamese Music
(2019)
author(s): Nguyen Thanh Thuy
published in: Research Catalogue
This Ph.D. project in artistic research is concerned with the function of gesture in traditional Vietnamese music. Building on gender analysis of musical performance in TV shows, and further on autoethnographic inquiry throughout the artistic projects, the artistic output articulates a critical understanding of these practices. The aims of the project are to investigate the social function and meaning of musical gesture in traditional Vietnamese music, and to develop artistic responses that articulate an individual voice. The research questions that emerge from these conceptual and artistic aims are:
1. What gender conventions can gesture analysis of musical performance unveil?
2. In what ways can music created through the choreographic structuring of movement reveal
and question gender conventions in musical performance?
3. How can my performance, in intercultural and interdisciplinary artistic collaborations,
challenge current gender norms and instigate change in practices of traditional Vietnamese music?
The method and design of this Ph.D. project builds on qualitative analysis of gesture in musical performance, with particular emphasis on employing a gender perspective in this analysis. In the artistic work, analysis of gesture has constituted a point of departure for the creation of a series of intermedia works that seek to develop methods that combine the practices of choreography and musical composition. Intercultural collaboration has provided particular challenges and possibilities in the development of each of these works. The results of the artistic work are published online in The Research Catalogue.
The outcomes of the project outline how gendered gesture is taught in higher music education in Vietnam, and taken together with the historical overview of how nationalism and communism has shaped the country, that this teaching has an immediate relation to nation branding. The teaching of traditional music is equally related to the commercialised views of women as it is grounded in the preservation of tradition. Further, the development of a practice of composing music using gestural-sonorous objects as material became the central artistic method throughout this Ph.D. project. It has offered novel possibilities of approaching gestural materials and creating new choreographies and music based on a critical approach to the image of women in popular media. The results finally suggest that intercultural and inter-disciplinary artistic practice can propose social change, and provide counter images of traditionally gendered behaviour.
Mediating "Eugene Onegin"
(2019)
author(s): Viktoria Volkova
published in: Research Catalogue
“The sun of Russian poetry”, Alexander Pushkin, wrote his novel in verse “Eugene Onegin” from 1823 to 1831. Since then it has been regarded as a masterpiece of literature and Pushkin’s key work. From the school curriculum every student is familiar with Pushkin’s famous iambic tetrameter, an unusual rhyme, which is also famous as the “Onegin stanza” or the “Pushkin sonnet”. But what still has been disputed by Pushkin researchers, is the query, what is it which is so unique about “Onegin”: is it the poetic structure of the novel, and the tempo-rhythm which the poetic structure produces while reciting and acting on stage? Or is it the national cultural content, called by the Russian critic Vissarion G. Belinsky "the encyclopaedia of Russian life”?
There were many attempts to interpret the novel. But to interpret Pushkin is not the same as to recite him. That is why the former director of Taganka Theatre in Moscow Yuri Lyubimov (1917-2014) staged “Onegin” in 2000 focusing on the tempo-rhythm of the Pushkin stanza. However, “Eugene Onegin” remains undoubtedly “the encyclopaedia” where national manners, customs, and cultural traditions from every field of life are described with brilliant virtuosity. In this connection, Alvis Hermanis’ (1965-) interpretation of “Eugene Onegin” at the Schaubühne Berlin in 2011 should be mentioned. Hermanis
concentrated particularly upon Russian cultural embodiment. Five actors embodied the main characters of the novel and were both its narrators and historians who allowed the audience to the backstage of Russian and European everyday life. So it was the actors themselves who embodied the “encyclopaedia of Russian life” in Belinsky’s sense on stage. Both, Lyubimov and Hermanis, chose heterogeneous forms of mediation for their performances. In my paper I investigate mediation practices applied to preserve the tempo-rhythm on the one hand, and to reveal cultural traditions on the other.