Primary
(2014)
author(s): Marc Goodwin
published in: Research Catalogue
Discussions on photography circulate around reality, transparency, power, authorship and meaning. Convincing narratives define how photography has been used and thought of. It is taken for granted that history follows the arrow of time, thus is written after things have happened. But narratives create ruptures, changing the future of the past. Therefore, instead of looking at photography from the present backwards, what if we look from the future instead? What would that tell us about the present? Science fiction as a literary genre forces a reconceptualisation of the practice of knowledge.
This article takes place in the future.
Being an A-R-T-I-S-T: Challenges and Opportunities of Connecting Art, Research, Transformation, Imagery & StoryTelling
(2014)
author(s): girija kaimal
published in: Research Catalogue
Arts based research enables me to bring together my identities as an artist, a researcher, an educator, life story teller, and, immigrant from India to the United States. In this paper, I present my experiences with creating an artistic representation of immigrant narratives focusing specifically on a controversial visa to the United States called the H1B. The artwork was created in response to a call from the Smithsonian Asian and Pacific American Center’s first community exhibition on Indian American heritage. I used a mixed methods approach bringing together narrative methods with arts based approaches, namely, researching, storytelling and artmaking. Integrating the methods was a challenge as I struggled to find alignment between artistic representation and narrative storytelling. A potential bridge was the active evocation of imagery in the narratives that then helped build a bridge to the elements of the final artwork. The artwork was shared in a group exhibition in a gallery and will be part of a future online site in the hope of sparking broader social awareness and transformative thinking. The responses to the artwork and narratives at the exhibition added a new level of dialogue and exchange that was beyond the scope of each methodological approach alone. The experience posed several questions on the intersection of arts-based research with other paradigms. Challenges identified included the bridging data and analytic strategies in different methods. Identified opportunities include having an expanded audience, transformative means of access, generating awareness about previously unknown issues and extended engagement.
Echo Theory
(2014)
author(s): Christopher Hollins
published in: Research Catalogue
Echo Theory explores the idea that a direct objective experience of any object or an event will bring recall of a dormant way of sensing into our powers of observation, and this idea looks to create raw indeterminate shapes and imprecise colour through art to rekindle sensations that our minds work to remove from our day-to-day lives. I believe that art made to avoid learned ideas and controlled content – working to remove recognisable images, stories, social comment, composition, harmony, structural organisation and technique – gives recall of this raw encounter with material that we look to remove from our perception, and my assertion is that using raw material as art brings back to mind echo's of animal impulses that we have evolved to suppress in all we see and do. My work implies any art objects that provoke recall of these animal impulses will disturb us rather than please us, and we will find ourselves looking to reduce the uncertainty experienced in the presence of raw material by searching for imaginative imagery - faces or figures in runs and dribbles of paint, patterns in disorder, or melody in sounds, etc. because this as a behavioural response that has developed through art to keep an older experience out of our minds. I am looking to the idea that any artist unaware of this behaviour will create work that removes rawness from their work, whilst those who are aware will look to promote rawness to bring recall of the remains of a dormant way of sensing.
Complete research 2006 2014
(2014)
author(s): Massimo Pianese
published in: Research Catalogue
A complete overview of the artistic research conducted from 2006 to 2014
YOU ARE NOT A SALMON
(2014)
author(s): Massimo Pianese
published in: Research Catalogue
YOU ARE NOT A SALMON is a multidisciplinary and cross-media project that moves its action within the orbit of the concept of “reversals of flows”: natural dynamics that only superficially appear to subvert the established order – typical of a certain western vision- in a becoming which highlights the innate vocation of nature to challenge herself, but this also applies its own laws and prejudice itself perfect and flawless. One example is the salmon, a living being with unique features: born in fresh water, grows in the sea and reached maturity, traces the river
current to return there where was born to reproduce himself. The instinct leads him to make a gesture that seems paradoxical (trace the current), but which in reality behind delicate and precise trim. The man followed this founding principle in accomplishing his own evolution, applied chemistry, genetics, physics, pursuing an engineering, developing a model with controversial results. The project is a permanently work in progress and has several development areas; it has been shown in a solo exhibition at Placentia Art Gallery, Italy (April 2012 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtX5IO6BNyI) and it was the residency project developed during the AIR at Villa Sträuli, Winterthur, Switzerland. (July-December 2012). YOU ARE NOT A SALMON was hosted as a project of study and analysis during the works of the conference Change Course Conference convened by The Club of Rome, Theater of Winterthur, December 2012.
Until now, the project has been developed in very different contexts, always looking for interaction with the pubblic and the local community.
More info at http://youarenotasalmon-project.blogspot.it
Abating Aesthetic character
(2014)
author(s): Christopher Hollins
published in: Research Catalogue
This essay looks to the idea that removing aesthetic character from art provokes an inherent natural way of sensing objects and events from our minds. This concept sees controlled meaningful content in art as the basis of intellectual values that work to suppress a view that only comes to mind when these values are absent from our thoughts. I am looking to see art as a tool that can be used to give recall of an innate inborn form of awareness that we inherit from our animal origins but now keep dormant in day-to-day awareness, and my assertion is that we have evolved to suppress this original experience through controlling how we create art through intelligent learned understanding. If an artist is unaware of this they will be working to suppress, rather than reveal, these old dormant powers of perception. I have used A Note on the physical object hypothesis by Richard Wollheim as the basis of this enquiry, and I am looking to understand that when an artist removes all controlled ways of working and intellectual ideas from what they do – by working through chance and accident – the end result creates a catalyst that triggers the return of our old ability to sense through animal instinct.