Installation Art will serve as a grounding arena for the various media strategies in this project. Historically, Installation Art was defined as an artistic field in the 1970s but has precedents in earlier works by, for example, Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, and emerges from Conceptual Art and other expanded practices of the 1960s. This project works along the premise of Installation Art, in that it most often operates within constructed interiors and is fundamentally designed to transform the perception of space. [2]

Installation Art is an umbrella term that merges a range of artistic practices. For example, the media area has evolved through the incorporation of new technologies, from simple video installations to include complex interactive, multimedia, and virtual reality environments. As the contextual histories of Installation Art often overlap with New Media Art sources, it might be at this intersection between the two fields that this project is best positioned. [3]

However, the historical development of Installation Art seems to be even more intimately aligned with this PhD project. I will therefore touch on some points here, drawing on how Claire Bishop has mapped this history in her book Installation Art (2005).

Bishop highlights that a central aspect of the medium is the insistence on the presence of a viewer. There needs to be someone in an installation having a first-hand, embodied, real-time experience. It is the way this person moves, orients themselves, and interacts within the artwork that activates the artistic medium as an installation. [4] Bishop argues that this makes it hard to adopt an outside analytical or interpretative perspective when experiencing installation art. From this, I would argue that the art medium holds an inherent critique of objectivity, problematising the possibility of a disembodied and neutral overview. This position has also emerged in this PhD project throughout its development.

Bishop highlights that one aspect of this critique has been articulated in the history of Installation Art as a critique of the linear Renaissance perspective. [5] This aligns closely with my research on modernist artists engaging with the fourth dimension to critique normative perspectival representation in painting. I therefore lean on this media-based history and engage with it through the performative installations.

It is the requirement of an active, moving viewer in Installation Art that allows a shift in the art medium from being purely representational to becoming direct presentation, or performativity. [6] This PhD project embraces this aspect, proposing that the performative installations can become spaces for immersive and experiential reflection.

These aspects of Installation Art are activated in various ways throughout development of this project. One example is the exploration of interdimensional movement between different perspectives in the performative installations: for example, between an embodied, three-dimensional position in space and a more distant, visual, two-dimensional engagement with a screen. Additionally, the method of interdimensional artistic speculation grounds the art experience in the concrete, real-time aspect of the installation and then augments this with the insertion of text and digital technology, engaging a more conceptual, imaginative, and virtual perspectival movement.

Bishop highlights that the critique of conceptual ‘possession’ and ‘visual mastery’ in Installation Art has led to another important theme running through its history: the decentring and distribution of human subjectivity. This position, repeated throughout the works of many artists, suggests that we should approach our human subjective condition as fragmented, multiple, and decentred. [7] This has been a strong current throughout this PhD project, expressed via the emergence of an expanded, extra-dimensional perspective, which has eventually led to subjectivity and agency being afforded the installation itself as a more-than-human being.

Digital and electronic technology is central to the research, both thematically and formally. Materially, I have largely chosen to focus on digital media applications to animate the performative installations: visual programming, sensors, and video projection, as well as motors and digital sound. This makes the area of New Media Art a suitable context for the project, specifically within its sub-branches of Digital Art, Interactive Art, and Electronic Art. New Media Art, in one way, is a vague term, as the definition arises from its opposition to classical disciplines of art. However, it might be useful for this project through art and media theoretician Oliver Grau’s definition: Here, New Media Art largely covers artforms developed through an ongoing interrelation between art and science, and refers to art either produced, modified, or transmitted by means of electronic media and digital technologies. Grau emphasises that a possible reason for this fluctuating quality of the field can be derived from how artists constantly adopt new technical innovations, as well as contributing to their development through their own investigations. Consequently, there is a transdisciplinary quality to the field, where it constantly cross-pollinates with other areas. Because I chose to position this project in a more expanded intermedial way, this fluctuating quality, specifically, makes the area of New Media Art a fitting context. [11]

NARRATIVE ART – PERFORMATIVE LECTURES AND TEXT ART

Text and narrative are important devices for how the performative installations unfold

Narrative Art is an umbrella term for art that tells a story and traditionally covers literary formats. However, narrative and text have entered the realm of visual art through movements such as Conceptual Art, Performance Art, and Artist Moving Image, among others.

In this research project, I draw on literary examples as inspiration for development and literary theory to substantiate my methodology. This has been a rich source for the project and has heightened the discursive and methodological level of my use of text and narrative, as literature has a much longer and more rigorous tradition in text-based literary forms. I elaborate on this aspect further in the chapter “Conversations with the Field.”

However, here I will focus on the area of Performance Lectures, as this is an artistic form I have long pursued as an artist and have developed in this PhD project. Performative Lectures were defined as an oratory and didactic form in art in the late 1990s, providing a more aesthetic and experimental approach to scientific and academic research concepts. It might be best described as a subgenre of Performance Art, with historical roots in Conceptual Art. It could also be described as a format deriving from textual practices, specifically exploring the aesthetic and reflexive potential of text, such as art writing. It has existed since the 1960s in practices by artists like Joseph Beuys, John Cage, and Yoko Ono, but it is interesting to see how the revival of the format has reoccurred in the last 20 years, alongside a proliferation of higher academic specialisation in art. As a hybrid of research, lecture, visual art, and performative narrative techniques, the performance lecture addresses the status and potential of art in knowledge society, as well as the mechanisms of knowledge production. [12] This project has engaged how the performance lecture balances on the boundary between art and academia in this way, and explored strategies to incorporate research material directly into the artwork, while critically reflecting ingrained modes of argumentation and dissemination in academia along the way.

 THE AESTHETICS OF A WORKSHOP – RESEARCH ART

As the artistic results developed through ongoing workshops, I realised that the performative installations began to take on a more open, interactive, and process-based aesthetic. This development is a clear result of being artistic research, an engagement that entangles artistic reflection with artistic work. In this sense, all the artistic works are now also a form of artistic reflection.

The workshop aesthetic has influenced the ongoing development work, where I have attempted to balance a processual openness that allows for the emergence of new reflections, and a narrative directedness that enables deeper thematic and artistic immersion. I am curious to explore if my future work, post-PhD, will retain this “workshop aesthetic.” However, it has been rewarding to have had the opportunity to push the work this far.

One benefit of the workshop aesthetic is that it heightens the work's processual qualities as being in constant emergence. Something can arise that is not pre-planned. This quality is, of course, already inherent in performative, time-based artistic work. A way to reformulate this might be that a workshop aesthetic draws on the potential for chance to emerge, both from the academic experimental development and the artistic performative traditions.

Being able to explore in this middle space has allowed me to be directed in my planning, as well as to constantly listen to what the developing installation “articulates back to me”. This has then been used to develop the work further as an artistic experience. Inviting the audience to engage in this attentive, open reflexivity as participants has allowed the artwork to become a space for artistic reflection.

This openness has also contributed to a certain discursive poetics, allowing for articulations to arise in the work beyond my intentions as an artist. This is, of course, always what an artwork does to a certain extent; however, the artistic research art form might contribute a specific version. While writing this reflection, it is interesting to note that, however much I try to articulate and share my artistic choices, the work will always do more and other than that. I beleve that it is in this balance between control and chance, conscious purpose and intuition, that the work has presence and agency, and as such, what can make it good art or good artistic research.