In parallel to our own Reading on Reading investigation, we co-organised and hosted a 3-day research event called Convocation: On Expanded Language-based Practices (16 - 18 June 2019). Forming part of the wider public programme for the Research Pavilion, Convocation helped us to contextualise our investigation of reading as an aesthetic practice in relation to the work of other language-based artist-researchers, as well as create a context for us to test some of our practices with a larger group, for further exploring the emergent we-ness generated in-and-through shared acts of reading.
Convocation — from com ‘with, together’ and vocare ‘to call’. We called for a gathering of language-based practices: from the wordless corporeality of body language to the virtuality of digital text, from the voicing of spoken utterance to the textility of words on a page. Textorium — a notion that etymologically pertains to weaving and braiding, the weaver and the woven. For phenomenologist Max van Manen the term refers to the writerly space of reflection, the experiential world of the text as it opens up for the receptive writer and reader. But how can the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ of language be put into question? How can language-based practices enable us to encounter ‘things’ anew? From textorium to sensorium, a reciprocal space for coming together through a material encounter with language experienced in its diversity.
How do we experience language’s activity, affectivity, ambiguity, capacity, corporeality, density, elasticity, ephemerality, fluidity, fragility, illegibility, instability, intensity, inter-subjectivity, hybridity, materiality, multiplicity, musicality, occasionality, opacity, performativity, physicality, plasticity, porosity, potentiality, relationality, simultaneity, sensibility, sensitivity, sonority, spatiality, synchronicity, tonality, temporality, visuality, vitality?
Convocation invites exploration of the how-ness of language within practices of: Addressing | Calling | Conversing | Describing | Dialoguing | Disrupting | Drawing | Echoing | Effacing | Evoking | Fictioning | Invoking | Listening | Misunderstanding | Moving | Muting | Naming | Questioning | Reading | Redacting | Spacing | Speaking | Summoning | Transcribing | Translating | Voicing | Wording | Writing | ____ ing
Weaving between artistic research and phenomenological approaches, this 3-day event included open workshops, live research, collective writing / reading exercises, and performative lectures, and was conceived as a reciprocal space for creating viable interconnections with a wider international community of artistic researchers — a multitudinal ‘ecology’ of contemporaneous practices — through a material encounter with language experienced in its diversity. We conceived this event as a gathering, drawing on our own networks of relations and projects alongside reaching out to individuals whose work we are intrigued by, not perhaps so familiar with. We wondered: What happens when different practices are brought into relation, into proximity? How can we invite others into the Research Pavilion to make it a shared space? We wanted to hold a space open for exploring different language-based practices. We began with a non-definitional starting point, interested in different ways of doing language-based practices — not ‘what is’ but rather ‘what if’. The format of the event involved a multiplicity of forms and modalities for sharing practices, movement through different qualities and durations of experience —spaciousness as well as intensity. Some sessions took the form of presentation and discussion; others took the shape of a workshop, an experiential unfolding or a performance. Sometimes the invitation was to stay with a mode of concentration or attention or focus — there were times when we purposefully did not invite the habitual question and response in order to hold the space of the encounter open.
We are very grateful to all those who contributed to the Convocation event with such generosity and curiosity. Contributors included akcg (anna kindgren och carina gunnars), Ajauksia group, Emmanuel Alloa, Rachel Armstrong, Alex Arteaga, Mariske Broeckmeyer, Andrew Brown, Emma Cocker, Elke Cremer, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus, Michael Dudeck, Steve Dutton, Patricia Ellis, Rob Flint, Raphaela Gilla, Viviana Gonzáles, Ingo Hampe, Katja Hilevaara, Juha Himanka, Katja Hock, Rolf Hughes, Liisa Ikonen, Esa Kirkkopelto, Stefan Krüskemper, Anni Laakso, Harri Laakso, Cedar Lewisohn, Maiju Loukola, Tracy Mackenna, Danica Maier, Ralo Mayer, Brigid McLeer, Ivana Momčilović, Michaela Nasoetion, Emily Orley, Jaana Parviainen, Andy Pepper, Elle Reynolds, Filippo Romanello, Charlotta Ruth, Harald Polzin, Kerstin Polzin, Lena Séraphin, PA Skantze, Katarina Šoškić, Derek Sprawson, Susannah Thompson, Nathan Walker, G D White.
Event details:
16 – 18 June 2019
10.00 – 20.00
Research Pavilion
Sala del Camino + theatre
Campo S. Cosmo 621
Giudecca, Venice
Convocation formed part of the public programme of the Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019. Convocation was co-organised and hosted by Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin in co-operation with Alex Arteaga. A collaboration between research cells Through Phenomena Themselves, Disruptive Processes and AIRA.
DOCUMENTATION
Our introduction to the event acknowledged the complexity of documentation within the field of artistic research. We invited participants to be-with, to be in the moment – not to use social media during the event. We invited different modes of textual documentation – a wall for gathering questions, thoughts, words, fragments, traces in relation to specific encounters or the overall frame of expanded language-based practices. We invited the different contributors to consider how they might document their contribution in different ways, where documentation might be folded in as part of the approach, or where participants themselves might support the process of documentation. We made clear the right for individuals to not be documented at their request.
Image: Omspelning-Replay-Uusintaotto-Repetición, launched as part of Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice. Photograph by Jonas Williamsson.
Images: Danica Maier, Associated Thoughts on Line, in Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice. Photographs by Mika Elo.
Silent Questions | Elle Reynolds
Silent Questions is a quiet call for the bringing together of small groups in a performative work. Silent Questions encourages participation through performance and is positioned between an exchange of gestures, a collaborative interrogation of language and demarcation of spatial boundaries. Participants were encouraged to work directly with words to make new meaning and with questions that provoke interactions. The spacing of words, texts and complete sentences are explored through gestural exchanges and collaborative acts.
Images: Elle Reynolds, Silent Questions, in Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice. Photographs by Mika Elo.
The multilingual book Omspelning-Replay-Uusintaotto-Repetición is the result from a collective writing project inspired by Georges Perec and his experimental work An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris from 1975. This experiment was replayed by a group of writers in the town square of Tammisaari in Finland over 3 days in August, 2017, with the texts edited according to a timeline that displays the square in a reciprocated text and as a shared space. Writers: Hami Bahadori, Moa Franzén, Ulrika Gomm, Minna Heikinaho, Behzad Khosravi Noori, Joanne Lee, Jaime Mena de Torres, Pia Sandström and Lena Séraphin. Graphic design by Jonas Williamsson. Pro Artibus Foundation, curator Juha-Heikki Tihinen.
No Telos is a collaborative artistic research project for exploring the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity within creative practice and during uncertain times. This artists’ book comprises a series of ‘scores’ drawing on exercises and practices first developed and tested in Venice (2017). 'Scores' and instructions from the book have been activated during the day by Brown, Cocker, Hock, Maier and Reynolds. During the launch, the book was animated through a series of moving-image fragments and extracts by Steve Dutton, Tracy Mackenna, Andy Pepper, Elle Reynolds and Derek Sprawson.
PART I: ON CONVOCATION
Framing | Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin
The collectively built Temporary Agora (facilitated by Anni Laakso) provided a physical structure for the inauguration of Convocation. We began by framing the event as a gathering of expanded language-based practices engaged in different tactics and thematics; sharing our intention that Convocation would evolve over three days through the rhythmic interplay of gathering and dispersal, listening and speaking, sharing and responding.
Image: Opening framing of Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice, taking place in the collectively built Temporary Agora by Anni Laakso & Disruptive Processes. Banner on the left by Jaana Kokko. Photograph by Mika Elo.
Images: Andrew Brown and Katja Hock, Walking the Line, in Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice. Photographs by Mika Elo and Rob Flint.
Flux Us Now | Dorothee Richter and Ronald Kolb
Situating Fluxus as a critical precedent of expanded language- based practices and especially in relation to the notion of 'score', Richter and Kolb presented two film chapters from the project Flux Us Now: “What is Fluxus” of “Politics and Fluxus”.
By Chance - playing, experiencing, finding, translating|
Viviana González
Viviana González put into practice a game designed to produce actions aimed at recognizing public spaces "from within". This system proposes a spatial experience determined by chance. Objects such as dice or spinning tops determine the focal point of the experience.
Day 1 began with Bodied Languages: Moving | Feeling | Sensing, a series of corporeal, experiential encounters with language through participatory workshops and collective actions. This was then followed by Affinities + Activations: Reading | Listening | Translating, the activation of reading as a generative space of invention and intervention, performed scores for doing and becoming.
Category - Agora | Juha Himanka
In Aristotelian logic category means highest notion. For example, place, time and quantity are categories. In Greek kategorein means “to speak against, to accuse, assert, predicate” and it comes from kata, ‘down to’ and agoreuein, “to harangue, to declain (in the assembly),” from agora “public assembly”. Drawing on the etymology of 'category' and 'agora', in this short opening reflection philosopher Juha Himanka established a grounding for the convocation within a wider lineage of practice.
PART II: BODIED LANGUAGES ||
MOVING | FEELING | SENSING |
3 parallel workshops to select from:
WORKSHOP 1 : Sensory Experiences in Urban Space | Ajauksia
What is bodily energy and how is it generated? What does the encountering between two or more subjects or between subject and object produce? What is the importance of corporeality and embodiment? What will happen when the spoken language is excluded, and what language does the body use in these situations? The workshop consisted of collective exercises based on bodily sensations. During the exercises we pay attention to our senses and let them guide us. The exercises are opening up different ways of observing and experiencing the environment. Sensory input offers possibilities to a variety of experiences, dialogues and encounters with the environment.
WORKSHOP 2: Walking the Line | Andrew Brown + Katja Hock
Drawing on their contribution to the No Telos! publication, Andrew Brown and Katja Hock guided participants on a blind walk through Giudecca, designed to overturn the predominantly visual experience of Venice, providing an opportunity to individually explore through body language the apparently contradictory states of togetherness and solitude, being guided and feeling lost. The exercise offered participants a liminoid space in which the real-world consequences of being lost are side-stepped.
WORKSHOP 3: Temporary Agora + Where Did Art Go / Get Lost! |
Anni Laakso + akcg (anna kindgren och carina gunnars)
The workshop by akcg was an attempt to learn/unlearn from other artists and locals to understand and try out IF and HOW art can still be an activity somewhat autonomous from the concept of a capitalist driven market. Simply put, where did art go?/get lost! It took place within the Temporary Agora, an on-going collective construction of a sculptural space within the Research Pavilion. The Temporary Agora (facilitated by Anni Laakso) developed during a process of constructing together - it enhanced the skills of material negotiation. The working process included a building process that adapted to each participant's needs and desires.
Rewording
Wording – Collaborative Writing in Public Space took place 12-14 June 2019 when 50 participating writers in different locations from Medellín in Colombia to Marksjön in Sweden wrote in a public space. In Venice 16 writers returned to the same square in Sacca Fisola over 3 days to notate what they observed. During Convocation, the writers returned to the location of this observational writing once more to read their texts aloud, such that the dialogue - and maybe also transformations - formed between writing and place was further enhanced through the re-installation of text and act of collective reading. Wording is inspired by Georges Perec and his book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris from 1975. Venice participants: from the write.in-Gruppe Elke Cremer, Raphaela Gilla, Ingo Hampe, Stefan Krüskemper, Michaela Nasoetion, Harald Polzin, Kerstin Polzin, from the Ajauksia group and akcg (anna kindgren and carina gunnars), Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Ulla Prami and Lena Séraphin. Re/wording is facilitated by Lena Séraphin.
Towards No Telos - Reading-Wandering | Thinking-Weaving | Questioning-Spacing
Drawing on and activating the project-publication No Telos (see evening book launch) a series of different approaches to thinking-with language as a process-led exploration. No Telos considers different tactics for resisting the increasingly outcome-motivated or achievement-oriented tendencies of contemporary culture, by shifting emphasis from a mode of telos- or goal-driven productivity towards experimental forms of subversive playfulness and willful irresolution.
Reading Between the Lines | Emma Cocker
Texts resonate at different frequencies according to their enunciation; new meanings revealed by changed inflection, in the pauses and durations breathed between the words.How do we read as artists, as writers, as poets? Against utility, against informational acquisition: what other modes of reading might we cultivate? What emerges in the shifts and slippages from one text to another, by reading between the lines? Cocker invited Convocation delegates to engage in a reading practice called Circuiting, where a mode of sense-making emerges by through the chance encounters between the lines within a collective act of reading. Convocation participants engaged in a shared practice of Circuiting on the steps of the Chiesa del Santi Cosma e Damiano and in the courtyard of Sala del Camino.
Associated Thoughts on Line | Danica Maier
You are invited to listen laterally rather than literally to a live reading using the words of others to chart a path through Danica Maier’s thoughts and explorations on drawing, text, textile and line. Weaving together a meandering line of associated thoughts – these readings explore the act of writing, its fundamental connection to textile processes, and the drawn line within Maier’s practice. Listen to hear the line that is being drawn between the connecting points.
Images: Viviana González, By Chance, in Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice. Photographs by Mika Elo.
Book launches:
No Telos + Omspelning-Replay-Uusintaotto-Repetición
The first day of Convocation closed with the launch of two publications within which the city is approached as a working ground or live laboratory for artistic research and aesthetic investigation, for poetic inscription and playful experimentation.
Images: No Telos, launched as part of Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice. Photographs by Beam Editions.
COME IL LAVORO / PIACERE IL LAVORO (LIKE WORK) |
Rob Flint
LIKE WORK is a speculative enchantment in which collective speech is used to actively contemplate the strength and weakness of words by testing their function in a group. LIKE WORK uses unrehearsed volunteers to read a prepared text as a ’score’ out loud, in an auditory event which blurs the distinction between participant and audience. LIKE WORK explores how language makes possible the idea that language is inadequate.
Image: Rob Flint, Like Work, in Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice, taking place in the collectively built Temporary Agora by Anni Laakso & Disruptive Processes. Banner by Jaana Kokko. Photographs by Andrew Brown, Mika Elo and Katja Hock.
Images: Temporary Agora + Where Did Art Go / Get Lost! | Anni Laakso & co + akcg (anna kindgren and carina gunnars)from Disruptive Processes, in Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice. Photographs by Mika Elo.
Images: Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin, Reading on Reading [Walking-Reading], in Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice. Photographs by Mika Elo.
Images: Rewording, in Convocation, 16 June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice. Readers: Kerstin Polzin, Ingo Hampe, Raphaela Gilla, Stefan Krüskemper, Elke Cremer, Harald Polzin and Michaela Nasoetion from the write.in-Gruppe; Emma Cocker and Lena Séraphin. Photographs by Mika Elo.
Interlude: Reading on Reading |
Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin
Different ways of reading can generate different registers of sense making and affect; there is scope for testing experimental tactics. Reading can be activated mid-sentence or half way down a page, allowing for detours and distractions. Drawing on their ongoing research project Reading on Reading, Cocker, Daus and Séraphin invited Convocation delegates to engage in a reading practice of Walking-Reading, where the speed of reading and walking were explored on a journey between the Campo della Chiesa, Sacca Fisola and the Campo San Cosmo, outside the Research Pavilion.
Image: Emma Cocker, Reading Between the Lines, in Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice. Photographs by Mika Elo and Katja Hock.
Acting Repeating | Filippo Romanello
This performance-research project proposed concrete ways of practicing repetition to generate spontaneity: from the repetition of a physical/vocal action to the discovery of personal associations, feelings and meanings that go beyond the literal. The aim was to consciously exploit the iterability of the sign, particularly text, which is approached as a ‘phonetic score’.
Day 2 provided insights at the borders of artistic research + creative-critical modes of writing through Inquisitive Words >< Threshold Writing: Bordering | Betweening | Hyphening. The dialogue continued with Liminal Language: Staging | Fictioning | Ritualising, a series of presentations between performing + visual arts, activation of language through invocation, utterance + incomprehensible voicings.
The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice
Built around a diverse selection of writings from leading researcher-practitioners and emerging artists in a range of fields, The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice (eds. Katja Hilevaara and Emily Orley) celebrates the extraordinary range of possibilities available when writing about one’s own work and the work one is inspired by. It re-thinks the conventions of the scholarly output to propose that critical writing be understood as an integral part of the artistic process, and even as artwork in its own right. For Convocation, selected contributors from The Creative Critic read/presented/staged/performed/enacted/activated different interventions in response to the enmeshed relation of art and writing, the creative and the critical. Contributors: Katja Hilevaara, Emily Orley, Emma Cocker, Peter Jaeger, Tracy Mackenna, Brigid McLeer, P. A Skantze, Susannah Thompson, G D White.
Image: Patricia Ellis and Cedar Lewisohn, in Convocation, Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019. Photograph by Mika Elo.
Images: 1. Chemical Embryo. Photograph, Rachel Armstrong, 2015; 2. Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes, in Convocation, Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019. Photograph by Mika Elo.
Making Text | Patricia Ellis and Cedar Lewisohn
This presentation looked at the relationship between text, making, meaning; and the development of writing as a haptic form. Spanning key moments in the history of language, this performative lecture explored the idea of text and fiction as sculptural forms and the voice as material.
Image: Nathan Walker, Fault, in Convocation, Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019. Photographs by Mika Elo.
NEOGLYPHICS | [M]Dudeck
NEOGLYPHICS provided a brief taxonomy of alphabets, languages, hieroglyphics and pictograms invoked within Dudeck's performative mythology RELIGIONVIRUS embedded in a historical trajectory of invented languages from SF, whilst excavating the medium of the sacred religious text and probing the role of the queer and overtly fictional holy writ amongst secular Millennials in the Information Age.
Images: Creative Critic presentations, in Convocation, Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019. Photographs of event by Mika Elo. Other images: Emily Orley.
Faults | Nathan Walker
Nathan Walker's transdisciplinary practice explores the relationships between sound, writing, language and the voice. In this performance, presented over an extended duration, Walker used his voice to explore what he calls 'textual-volume' a kind of performed vocality that considers volume as amplification and as a measure of space. Specifically interested in the act of muttering and the space between illegible language and vocal sound.
SKENE + GRAPHEIN | WRITING SCENE |
Liisa Ikonen, Maiju Loukola & Ivana Momčilović
Compositional elements on a writing scene by two scenographers
and a dramaturge
– what are the special ways of argumentation in arts?
– how are the sceno-graphic components in relation to one another?
– in what ways do they exist in connnection?
they are fictional
they have familiarity with dreams and hallucinations
they are magical
they are real
COMPONENTS 1, conditions
skene + graphein
COMPONENTS 2, material
paint brush
water
coal
ink
air
i_i
COMPONENTS 3, methodologies
Kuleshov’s effect
+
Oulipian ideas
Incantations: Invoking the ecological era |
Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes
Can language summon dreams and desires into the world?
From the ancient practice of ‘naming’, we develop incantations to summon the living realm. Beyond the sterile modern laboratory, our experiential experiments invoke an ecological era of thinking, making and living – and, with it, a new poetics of critical practice
J e n s | Cordula Daus
Cordula Daus studies the writability of intensities. Currently she is working on a speculative emotional fiction based on the female character Kay. Seeking to suspend heterosexual feeling frames and imperatives of love, Kay pursues a radical form of interrelation: meaning lesser sex. J e n s is one of her objects of desire – a proper name and word-physiognomic study into different states of matter in language. J e n s will be presented through an audio-graphic play consisting of different voices and typographical fragments.
Impulsive Incantations: Re-voicing the Migraine Body |
Mariske Broeckmeyer
When the attack arises, the migraine patient retreats into the dark, shielded by silence and solitude. During this blackout all coherency is lost, all sense of temporality damaged and all language destroyed. How then to rejoice in the aesthetics of a failing voice through evocative text, vocal improvisation and the development of a migrainous singing technique?
PART VII: LANGUAGE BASED PRACTICES +
ARTISTIC RESEARCH
Convocation was conceived as a gathering of artistic researchers whose practice engages language in different ways. How could this be developed further as a network or even Special Interest Group within the frame of the Society of Artistic Research. This discussion event explored ideas for building on the momentum of Convocation, gathering interest for future events and sharings. Moderated by Alexander Damianisch, Executive Board of SAR, and contributor to the recent publication Artistic Research and Literature, 2019.
PART VIII: AT THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE | BLURRY WORDS + LUCID IMAGES || RELAYING | REPEATING | REMEMBERING
Don’t Look Now - On images between words and sounds |
Harri Laakso
The presentation/exchange explored the possibilities of an audioplay/installation as a form of artistic research. "Don’t Look Now” is an ongoing fictocritical project that takes as it’s departing points trauma and clairvoyance in the Venice-related novella (by Daphne du Maurier) and film (by Nicolas Roeg), both with the same title.
Reflection & Closing
facilitated by Charlotta Ruth in collaboration with the participants of Convocation. A space of reflection and for gathering thoughts at the end of the event through different inputs and questions.
Image: Closing reflections facilated by Charlotta Ruth in the collectively built Temporary Agora by Anni Laakso & Disruptive Processes. Photographs by Mika Elo.
The final day began with an exploration around different phenomenological and artistic research practices of writing and furthermore language-based practices. This was then extended in the afternoon with artistic research presentations for investigating language-space and text-image relations around the theme, At the Limits of Language | Blurry Words + Lucid Images: Relaying | Repeating | Remembering.
Image: Meeting on language-based practices, in Convocation, Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019, taking place in the collectively built Temporary Agora by Anni Laakso & Disruptive Processes. Photograph by Mika Elo.
PART VI: PHENOMENOLOGICAL + ARTISTIC WRITING / LANGUAGE-BASED PRACTICES AS RESEARCH PRACTICES
In this session different phenomenological and artistic research practices of writing and furthermore language-based practices were presented and critically discussed. According to the aims of the research cell Through Phenomena Themselves, practices are comparatively examined in order to identify possibilities of hybridization and mutual enhancement. Organised and facilitated by Alex Arteaga. With Emmanuel Alloa, Alex Arteaga, Juha Himanka, Esa Kirkkopelto, Jaana Parviainen.
Astray Letters | Katarina Šoškić
How is reality of thinking in a foreign language related to my way of dealing with an image? Is it the text that supports the photograph, or am I in need of an image in order to deal with the complexity of thoughts, languages and text. In this gap - between words and images – I live and work. During Convocation, Šoškić presented some fresh sketches and prospective chapters for an “audio-photo-book” - a format she invented in order to deal with limitations that she faces while operating in between image and text.
Unearthing: the tower, the echo, the prison |
Ralo Mayer
I went to Japan to look for a Metabolist tower that had inspired an ecological spaceship. Turns out it had been demolished years ago. But as we say around here in the realm of Serendipity: Wer schlecht sucht findet. And so I found a Space Echo, a grieving tower devotee, some remains in the yard of the architect’s widow, lunar colony cells, and a new understanding of “unearthing”. Decolonize Space and the Earth will follow!
CONTRIBUTORS TO CONVOCATION
Alex Arteaga’s research integrates aesthetic and philosophical practices relating to aesthetics, the emergence of sense and the relationships between aurality, architecture and the environment through phenomenological and enactivist approaches. Currently he is, together with Nikolaus Gansterer, key researcher in the artistic research project Contingent Agencies (funded by the Programme for Arts-based Research of the Austria Science Fund) heads the Auditory Architecture Research Unit and lectures in the MA Sound Studies and Sonic Arts (Berlin University of the Arts), is professor for artistic research at the Research Master in Art and Design (EINA / Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) and senior researcher at KASK School of Art HOGENT.
Visual artist akcg (anna kindgren och carina gunnars) is a consequence of common experiences and thoughts on art and its political implications. HOW and FOR WHOM, have always been our starting point.
Ajauksia group explores and delivers experiential knowledge with artistic tools. Its working methods are based on equal decision making and anonymity, bodily and sensory exercises. Art can interrupt, suspend and penetrate the everyday life of the consumer-experiencer. Together we can deconstruct and re-liberate the construct of art and discover a polyphony of voices.
Emmanuel Alloa is Research Leader in Philosophy at the University of St. Gallen and teaches Aesthetics at the University of Paris 8. He is the author of various book and numerous articles at the intersection of continental philosophy, aesthetics and social theory. In 2016, he was awarded the Latsis Prize for his research, and in 2019 the Aby-Warburg-Wissenschaftspreis. He has a forthcoming book on ‘Shared Perspectives’ and another one on the ‘Critique of Transparency’.
As a singer, composer and migraine patient, Mariske Broeckmeyer researches Migraine Art and Migraine Music. Combining these findings and her own experiences, she engages in a compositional practice, developing musical pieces, which are both personal statements and universal reflections on the migraine condition. Broeckmeyer is a Doctoral candidate at LUCA School of Arts.
Andrew Brown creates walking experiences, often in the form of soundwalks, which take the forever-changing human environment as a critical prompt. He founded OpenCity in 2006, an ongoing project through which everyday behaviours are observed, sampled and released back into diverse environments across Europe, North America and Japan. Andrew is Course Leader of the MFA at Nottingham Trent University.
Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University. Her writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; Reading/Feeling (Affect), 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018, and as a solo collection entitled The Yes of the No, 2016.
Alexander Damianisch works for the transformation of understanding and understanding transformation, recently he published a paper on Poetics of Understanding: Language Arts and Artistic Research. He works at the Angewandte, Vienna (Head of Zentrum Fokus Forschung and Support Art and Research). He was inaugural manager for PEEK - Programme for Artistic Research at the Austrian Science Fund. He gained his doctoral degree in literature after studies in Vienna and Paris. He is a re- elected member of the Society for Artistic Research executive board and delegate to the Austrian Science Fund.
Cordula Daus is a writer and artist researcher working across theory, fiction and performance. Since 2009 she publishes the geopoetic journal series Toponymisches Heft (Fantôme Verlag Berlin). Cordula Daus was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie and currently is a PhD candidate for Artistic Research at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. https://toponymie.de/
[M]Dudeck is a witchdoctor, techno-priest and cultural engineer who constructs and disseminates a queer sci-fi religion and performative mythology [RELIGIONVIRUS] that is culminating in the composition and canonization of a transmedial Bible [THEMETACODEX]. Dudeck invents, performs and composes with scriptural languages that animate hybrid subjectivities, through the absense not only of gender pronouns but also nouns themselves – towards a verb-based ontology wherein sentience is depicted through neo-hieroglyphics and pictograms, as plural, fluid and in constant flux.
Steve Dutton is an artist, artistic researcher and academic. Individual and collaborative projects have been exhibited throughout the UK and internationally, including The Stag and Hound at PSL in Leeds, for which Dutton & Swindells were nominated for the prestigious Northern Art Prize. Steve is currently Head of Art and Director of the Art Research Centre at Bath School of Art and Design, Bath Spa University, in the UK.
Patricia Ellis is an artist, writer, and curator based in London. She is the MA Fine Art Course Leader at Chelsea College of Arts.
Ex:LAB comprises: Dr Rolf Hughes, writer, prose poet, specialist in artistic research, director of Artistic Research within Experimental Architecture. Dr Rachel Armstrong, author, Senior TED Fellow and professor of Experimental Architecture at Newcastle University, develops architectural applications based on the properties of life-like chemical and biological systems.
Rob Flint is suspicious of the authority of the human voice - of its power to persuade, to evoke and to enchant … but still he enjoys it. He explores this contradiction using objects, groups of people, spoken words, and text. The works are often collaborative, taking place like a supplementary ritual inside existing exhibitions and events. They have happened in venues like Five Years Gallery, London; New Art Exchange, Nottingham; Collectiv National, Antwerp, and Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg.
Viviana González is a Colombian visual artist, PhD candidate in Fine Arts / Cultural Theory - cooperation between the Zhdk and the University of the Arts Linz (Zürich group). Her work is related to public spaces, landscape and nomadism. She lives and works between Baden (CH) and Bogotá (COL).
Katja Hilevaara is a collaborative artist, researcher and teacher who works in performance, installation and art-writing. Her research is concerned with (mis-) remembering, creative constraint and ideas surrounding maintenance, care and enchantment. She lectures at Goldsmiths, University of London. www.katjahilevaara.com
Peter Jaeger is a Canadian writer based in London, where he is Professor of Poetics at the University of Roehampton. He is the author of eleven books, including works of poetry, artist books, and hybrid creative-critical research. Recent work includes A Field Guide to Lost Things, a book that reframes every instance of nature imagery found in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way.
Ronald Kolb is the co head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, a scientific researcher at the PhD in Practice in Curating programme and an editor at large for the magazine OnCurating.org. Ronald published a film on Fluxus, Flux Us Now, Fluxus explored with a camera, together with Dorothee Richter, Ronald also runs a design office in Stuttgart.
Sculptor Anni Laakso works with temporary site-specific installations that encourage dialogue. Her handmade constructed forms consist of different re-used materials. Through her installations Laakso intends to create new environments within an existing environment or a public space. www.annilaakso.net
Harri Laakso is Associate Professor of Photography Research in the Department of Media at Aalto University, Finland. Laakso is an artist, writer, researcher and curator interested in photographic images and theory, artistic research and word/image relations.
Cedar Lewisohn is an artist, writer and curator. He has worked on many museum projects for institutions such as Tate Britain, Tate Modern and The British Council. He is curator for the Outside The Cube programme at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan. He is the author of two books (Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution published by Tate and Abstract Graffiti, published by Merrel). He has recently joined The Museum of London as Curator of the Curating London programme.
Maiju Loukola and Liisa Ikonen explore with the expanded practices of scenography and spatial dramaturgies. Liisa is a professor in design for the performing arts at Aalto University and Maiju is a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University. Their current artistic research project Floating Peripheries – mediating the sense of place explores ‘peripheries’ as conceptual, material and immaterial phenomenon, as well as practices, methods and epistemologies speculated as ‘marginal'.
Tracy Mackenna is an artist who employs writing as a dialogical process, testing language’s non-linear properties while inhabiting publishing as an artistic practice. With Edwin Janssen she is co-Curator of The Museum of Loss and Renewal. Tracy holds the Personal Chair of Contemporary Art Practice at DJCAD, University of Dundee.
Danica Maier's art practice uses site-specific installations, drawing, and objects to explore expectations, with subtle slippages which transgress propriety. Current projects include Returns (exploring the post-industrial landscape, manufacturing and craft skills); Bummock: Artists in Archives (with Andrew Bracey for investigating unseen parts of archives as catalysts for artworks; and Score: Mechanical Asynchronicity (with composer Dr. Martin Scheuregger). Danica is an Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, where she runs the Summer Lodge, an annual 2-week artists’ residency.
Ralo Mayer is an artist, filmmaker and researcher exploring fields like ecology, science fiction, or space exploration through cross-media storytelling. In his PhD project Space Un·Settlements he investigates the manifold relations between speculations & experiments of living in outer space and rather earthly realities here, on our planet. http://was-ist-multiplex.info
Brigid McLeer is an Irish artist and researcher/lecturer based in London. She is interested in contingency and relationality in aesthetic and political terms. Her performance-lecture ‘The Triumph of Crowds’ won the 2016 Leslie Scalapino Award for Performance Writers, and was staged in New York in 2017. She is currently completing a PhD by practice in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London. www.brigidmcleer.com
Ivana Momčilović is a dramaturge, poet, text researcher, translator and editor based in Brussels. Her work is focused on the displacement of philosophy and art in various spheres of everyday life and on exploring the relationship between fiction and ideology. Among other collectives she initiated a Ph.D. in One Night http://www.phdinonenight.net/ as a collective practice on researching the role of aesthetic education for all n the transformation of society towards equality and emancipation.
Emily Orley is practitioner-researcher whose work includes performance, installation and art- (or place- or commemorative-) writing. She has been making work on her own and in collaboration for 17 years and currently lectures at the University of Roehampton in the Drama, Theatre and Performance Department. www.emilyorley.com
Dorothee Richter is a Professor in Contemporary Curating at the University of Reading, and the head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating at the Zurich University of the Arts, head of the PhD in Practice in Curating programme, a coop. of Uni Reading and ZHdK, and she is the editor at large for the magazine OnCurating.org, she also published a film on Fluxus, Flux Us Now, Fluxus explored with a camera, together with Ronald Kolb.
Filippo Romanello is a writer, dramaturg and PhD researcher at Liverpool John Moores University. His artistic research explores approaches that stimulate the actors’ spontaneous reaction to text and the circumstances around its performance. As writer: Vice Device (Soho Theatre, More Storm Fest; London), Embarrassing Circumstances (Cockpit Theatre, Lyric Hammersmith studio; London). As dramaturg: Yusuf’s (Villa Elisabeth; Berlin), Preludes of Orchestral Theatre (Tatwerk; Berlin).
Charlotta Ruth works inside choreography, participatory art and arts based research. With a site & context specific approach to public space, institutional in-between spaces, conference and online settings, Ruth constructs gaps in time and facilitates playful conversation. Ruth collaborates with institutions like Tanzquartier, WUK & Brut, Vienna, MDT, Dansens Hus, Moderna Museet, Stockholm and is a PhD student in Artistic Research at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.
Jaana Parviainen is a senior research fellow at the Faculty of Social Sciences, the University of Tampere, Finland. Her research interests include social epistemology, the philosophy of technology and the phenomenology of the body. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and papers as well as several textbooks. She has led several research projects funded by the Academy of Finland, Business Finland and the Ministry of Education. Her current philosophical and empirical work revolves around the development of post-truth politics and the epistemology of ignorance and non-knowledge.
Andrew Pepper works with projected light, holography and installation. Based in the UK, he has exhibited his work in group and solo exhibitions internationally. He has previously been director of the International Holography Fund, 2007- 2009; director of the Shearwater Foundation Holography program, 1999-2004; and spent 2 years at the Museum of Holography, in Manhattan, as a Fulbright Scholar. Andy has taught across the UK and Germany and currently is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University.
Elle Reynolds is an academic practice based researcher who explores currency in education, whether this is through probing the possibilities of teaching as a testing ground, social action or a way of inhabiting institutional space. Attention to materiality and the craft of production is fundamental to her pedagogical practice, examined through the relationships between philosophical aesthetic enquiry and kinaesthetic learning. Her PhD examines the spatial borders, boundaries and edges of alternative art school education.
Lena Séraphin is a visual artist and researcher based in Helsinki. Her artistic practice consists of collaborative writings and visual works that place emphasis on display as a dramaturgic event. Her dissertation "The Don Quixote Complex and Investigations into Fictionality" is based on observations of an artist as a varying assembly of roles/identities.
PA Skantze directs theatre and performance, teaches theatre as urgent, aesthetic and political activism in Italy and London. With Matthew Fink she is co-founder of the performance group Four Second Decay who work internationally. Her written practice includes the books Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre (Routledge 2003) and Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle (Punctum 2013).
Katarina Šoškić is an artist-researcher from Belgrade. She is interested in the potency of an image – the way its narrative qualities could be employed to question social structures. She uses photography and words to research and analyze social phenomena, culture and subculture, the impacts of tradition and history, the constriction of social roles and underlying psychological mechanisms. What she finds most challenging in her work is the choice of taking certain positions, the possibilities of switching points of view and questioning the diversity of possible truth.
Derek Sprawson is an artist whose recent exhibitions include Altars at TG Gallery, Nottingham, 2018; Pile, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, 2011 and Surface Gallery, Nottingham, 2010; Closely Held Secrets, Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, 2010; 20,000 Saints (solo), All Saints Church, Laughton, Lincolnshire as part of the West Lindley Open Churches Festival, 2010; and 14 installations, Swedenborg Institute, London, 2010. Derek was Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University from 1994 - 2018.
Susannah Thompson is an art historian, writer and critic based in Glasgow. Her research focuses on alternative, experimental and expanded forms of art writing and criticism, writing as a part of visual art practice and creative approaches to writing art history. She is Head of Doctoral Studies at The Glasgow School of Art.
Nathan Walker is an artist from West Cumbria who makes performances, page-based scores, poetry and lens-based artworks. He is Senior Lecturer in Performance, Installation and Moving Image at York St John University. nathan-walker.co.uk
G D White works in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Roehampton. His plays include an adaptation of B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates for BBC Radio 3 and he also researches on modern drama and law and performance. He rides an increasingly weary bike what seems like an increasingly long distance to work.