Self Portrait Battered
(2017)
author(s): Gert Germeraad
published in: Research Catalogue
A videoclip of me finalizing a sculpture in the series Ecce Homo, 2011.
Practicing with a senventeenth century organ handbook: observations on possible approaches of P. Spiridion’s Nova Instructio pro pulsandis organis (1670)
(2017)
author(s): Adrien Pièce
published in: Research Catalogue
Spiridionis a Monte Carmelo’s Nova instructio pro pulsandis organis […] (Bamberg, 1670) is a noteworthy source for keyboard improvisation in the south German, Italian-fashioned style. This handbook, which is located directly in Frescobaldi’s legacy and which often quotes him, offers tools to master musical forms that are useful for liturgical improvisation. Conceived as a compendium of musical patterns, the publication contains few textual elements. It allows the player full freedom to combine, assimilate and create his own music with musical elements such as cadentiae, passaggi and canzonette. This paper attempts to describe how such a source can be brought to life through a personal practice which involves both experience and analysis.
Tactile Paths: on and through Notation for Improvisers
(2017)
author(s): Christopher Williams
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
published in: Research Catalogue
Tactile Paths is a native digital, media-rich PhD dissertation. It aims to articulate and expand the nexus of notation and improvisation in contemporary and experimental music. The project interweaves direct artistic experience with insights from improvisation studies, the social sciences, philosophy, and various scholarship in the arts to reveal methodological connections among diverse artists such as Richard Barrett, Cornelius Cardew, Malcolm Goldstein, Lawrence Halprin, Bob Ostertag, Ben Patterson, and the author. By focusing on how notation is used, rather than on what it represents in an abstract sense, the author shows how written scores emerge from and feed back into ongoing improvisational processes. Thus, it is argued, they are not fixed texts whose primary purpose is to prescribe and preserve, but rather tactile paths in the improviser’s ever-crescent musical and social environment. This practice-based approach aims to lay the conceptual groundwork for theorizing and broadening the creative relevance of work whose importance to practitioners belies its marginal presence in academia and institutions.
images and their agency
(2017)
author(s): glad fryer
published in: Research Catalogue
The exposition Images and their Agency presents a text alongside a group of paintings. The text is a reflection on the practice-based research being carried out across a number of paintings concerning images and there agency. This project is ongoing.
We need to grasp both sides of the paradox of the image: that it is alive but also dead; powerful but also weak; meaningful but also meaningless. (wjt Mitchell, what do pictures want)
In the text I respond to W.J.T Mitchell’s suggestion to consider the aliveness and the deadness of images. I take a phenomenological perspective and consider how we experience their power and weakness, their meaning and meaninglessness - how we experience their agency. I do this by critically reflecting on a group of paintings I begun making in 2004; I enquire into the capacity of these paintings to address the agency of the image and how it is felt or experienced.
I am concerned with a common ontological or moral proposition that they as a group of images pose. This proposition of the image is the focus of my practice-based research.
I frame the enquiry into this group of painting through three sets of questions. The first set of questions concerns the image, which is explored through Badiou’s ideas on the truth process. The second concerns the body, which is explored through J. Bennett’s research into affect and trauma. The third concerns Flesh, which is explored through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflections on the relations between eye and mind.
NOTES ON PERFORMANCE ART, THE BODY AND THE POLITICAL
(2017)
author(s): Andrea Pagnes
published in: Research Catalogue
When I use the term ‘political’ related to performance art, I intend to set forth a space of possible, civil negotiation for and among artists and audience to analyse and further debate on how to overcome and transform schemes, rules, conventions and barriers, socially and culturally.
Curatorial text published in the post event catalogue of the second edition of the Live art exhibition project Venice International Performance Art Week "Ritual Body-Political Body" (2014) conceived and curated by VestAndPage.
The Last Portrait: A microscopic view of transience, mourning and loss
(2017)
author(s): Lucy Willow
published in: Research Catalogue
In 2009, I began a photographic series of work titled Memento Mori (remember that you are mortal and will die) based on the melancholic symbolism of 17th Century Dutch Vanitas paintings. Appropriating the symbolic language found in these paintings, I was looking to draw attention to the parallel beauty found in both life and death. The images contained rotting fruit, decaying animals, bubbles, extinguished candles and jewellery to serve as a reminder of the transience of everything in life. The paintings held, within them, an understanding of a narrative from 17th Century culture, which warns against the vanities and temptations in life such as wealth, knowledge, lust and earthly pleasure. The narrative emphasises how we ought not to be distracted by these, but remain focussed on the spiritual, the afterlife. I borrowed the symbolism in order to examine mortality. In the reflection of a sad and moth-eaten taxidermied magpie I saw my own grief, resting between its tatty feathers as I photographed its stuffed corpse. I bought a lambs heart and placed it in the centre of a still life, to signify young loss, vulnerability and sadness. I hid any outward signs of mourning amongst a symbolic visual language that found its expression in the photograph. What else could I do? Working into the surface of the photograph with water, I was able to bleed and merge the colours, giving the surface a visceral, opulent quality that made the image feel as though it was disappearing and rotting in the presence of the viewer. The colour was an externalization of what was happening, on the inside: the feeling of dissolving. I was looking to understand death through the arrangements of objects I assembled and photographed. An event, once photographed, becomes more real. I photographed death, drawing it close, feeling its omnipresence intimately in the midst of life. A photograph confirms reality. The scythe of death cuts through all the unnecessary in life, bringing us to stillness at the core of our being, where nothing else exists but a silent longing for the peace it brings.