PRACTICE
SHARING
WINTER 2020
Towards curiosity and openness, exploration beyond definition: How is language-based artistic research? Beyond words alone, how is artistic research undertaken in and through different language-based practices? The focus on language within artistic research is considered from a broad and transforming perspective to include diverse fields such as visual arts, performance, film, theatre, music, choreography as well as literature. The intent is not to define or fix what language-based artistic research is but rather to reflect how it is practised in its diversity.
Conceived and co-organised by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin, this Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG)* provides contexts for coming together via the exchange of language-based artistic research. The intent is to support developments in the field of expanded language-based practices by inviting time, space and attention for enabling understanding of/and via these practices anew.
GATHERING
11 April 2024
15 FEB 2022 (online)
7 DEC 2021 (online)
APRIL, 7 2021
SUMMER 2019
Emergent aims: To explore language as part of artistic research practice rather than as a tool of explication and accounting; to expand the idea of language-based practices (to include and to move beyond writing, reading, speaking, listening); to create contexts (physical and virtual) for language-based artistic researchers to show and share practices; to identify examples of practice within the field of artistic research and to establish shared frames of reference.
To explore alternative modes of writing within artistic research beyond academic writing; to enable connections and affinities between researchers (as well as between prospective research students and supervisors); to create a sense of solidarity and community between artistic researchers whose practice engages language in different ways; to provide a platform for generating a critical-creative understanding of language-based practices, which challenges and disrupts the privileging of the word (within academia), whilst exploring the possibilities of language practices (within both art and artistic research discourse).
How do we experience language’s activity, affectivity, ambiguity, capacity, communality, 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?
How is 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
* SOCIETY FOR ARTISTIC RESEARCH
SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP
The Special Interest Group (SIG) in Language-based Artistic Research developed from shared research enquiries emerging within the frame of the Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019. Specifically, in Venice, Cocker, Daus and Séraphin hosted the first in a series of Convocations ('from com ‘with, together’ and vocare ‘to call') for bringing together and sharing expanded language-based practices (during which the previously stated aims for the group were drafted). This exposition develops from that tentative beginning, as an initial platform for bringing together different language-based artistic research practices. This site mirrors the three strands through which we would like to initiate an exchange:
1. Gatherings: for coming together, for sharing space and time, for exploring connections, relations, and affinities, points of resonance and divergence. Assemblies. Meeting points. Towards experiential encounters with and between practices. Gatherings might take place in a virtual realm, or in a specific geographical-cultural context. An annual meeting is anticipated to take place in conjunction with the SAR conference.
2. Collaborations: Spurred on from the experience of gathering together (whether on- or offline), this platform provides a context for presenting new collaborations, for sharing and reflecting on materials/findings generated from language-based projects and activities, with a wider community.
3. Publishing: An future aspiration is to publish materials generated in and through the activities of this Special Interest Group. In parallel, references will also be collected outlining a wider context of further reading, listening and looking for artist-researchers working with language-based practices, including language-based PhD theses.