Through live activation of an ecology of aesthetic research practices, the aim is to provide the conditions for acquiring evidence of a specific form of thinking: aesthetic thinking. The performed aesthetic research practices are not presented as illustrative examples but rather as ongoing processes of research, as aesthetic thinking in action.
Artistic researchers Emma Cocker, Alex Arteaga and Nicole Wendel have worked together collaboratively (also with Sabine Zahn) since 2019. See https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1190257/1299139
What aspect of your research is most connected to this political/cultural moment?
To practice and to reflect aesthetic thinking through aesthetic thinking contributes to destabilize the hegemonic epistemic paradigms and, furthermore, epistemology as theoretical framework. We understand these processes as a contribution to disclose new forms of transformative understanding in order to approach the current collective crises in more skillful ways.
Proscenium is a video artwork that unfolds across the urban landscapes and anonymous virtual locations. Using experimental editing techniques, it explores the collapse of "real" and virtual space by combining a narrated essay with visuals that activate the viewer’s perceptual and physical responses.
Allyson Packer is an artist whose work examines our embodied relationship to a dematerializing world. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and is represented by birds+Richard gallery in Berlin.
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
My research concerns the ways we negotiate our physical relationship to an increasingly immaterial reality. In my video and installations, I enlist the viewer’s perception as a way to more critically understand ourselves as both subjects and agents, upholding the centrality of embodied experience in a dematerializing world.
During this conference I’m conducting a series of live Air Reports: written sensory analyses of the air as I experience it in the moment, published at twitter.com/airtasting and airtasting.com. In this session I’ll discuss this project within the context of Air Tasting (my practice of studying and facilitating sensory experiences of the air) and my current work that focuses on the medical history of the air cure and climatic health spas as sites that elicit curative effects through establishing a therapeutic relationship with the local environment. Reinstituting the air cure treatment for the 21st century, the Kurhaus Alpenblick Air Tasting Menu records daily air degustations at a former Swiss alpine air cure sanatorium. The Menu is available to guests at the Hotel Alpenblick’s restaurant and can be seen here: https://airtasting.com/assets/kurhaus-alpenblick-air-tasting-menu.pdf
Alex Gru¨nenfelder is a Swiss Canadian artist. His work employs printed matter, performance, olfaction and informal pedagogy to explore the perception of space, landscape, and the air. alexgrunenfelder.com
What aspect of your research is most connected to this political/cultural moment?
The subject of the air has obviously gained a lot of cultural significance in light of our respiratory pandemic and the increasingly dire effects of climate change, but there is little attention to how people experience the air personally. My work advances direct sensory awareness of air in the everyday as an important embodied knowledge.
Andrea Frank will introduce the collaborative trans-disciplinary process format she calls System Drawing and discuss the unfolding process of Eddy at New Paltz, an emergent collaboration which aims to transform education as we knew it. The presentation will be followed by a collaborative online System Drawing process around a shared concern.
Andrea Frank is an artist and Associate Professor in Art at SUNY New Paltz, NY. Her artistic research focuses on emergent embodied processes within a Just Transition framework.
www.andreafrank.net
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
My most urgent research challenge is how to hold generative space for deep listening and for creative emergent transformative collaboration processes in the context of environmental and social injustice.
3 hour workshop.
Please note, limited seats. Your registration to this workshop is bounding. A unique link will be sent to you right before it takes place.
To pass on as an artistic method is a presentation of an ongoing research where Anna Öberg explores passing on (Sw tradera) as a concept and artistic practice, transformed from being an implicit pedagogical tool in the cosmology of folk traditions into a choreographic strategy for materials and composition in the contemporary choreography context.
ANNA ÖBERG (S) is a dancer and choreographer working in Sweden and abroad, using Swedish traditional dance as the starting point for both her artistic and research work. www.annaoberg.se
How has this time of Covid-19 affected your research questions and/or methods?
Over the years, my research questions have often been linked to aspects of the human need for togetherness and shared social spaces. During the pandemic, when the effects of loneliness and distance have been very much present, my convictions about these issues have become even stronger. I also want to create more collective research processes.
A village close to an ex Nazi concentration camp. Very close together. Bengt Bok has been there many times, meeting people. The Anonymous is a journey through time and space via the people who live in the village today. Through their voices. To search for a free space between the documentary and the subjectivity, between archives and memory.
Bengt Bok, Award-winning documentary filmmaker and radio program maker having made documentary film features and several radio documentaries. Professor at the Department for film & media at Stockholm University of the Arts.
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
To complete it.
Internal Singing is a practice exploring a sensitized voice-body connections by vocalising on both the inhale and exhale, vocal imaginaries and self-administered touch that calms the body in states of over-stimulation. As it builds through breath, pleasure and circulation, it attempts to prise open a space where acute sensitivity can be valued as skill.
Cara Tolmie’s practice at large centres itself upon the voice, the body, the listener and the complex of subjective as well as socially determined links between the three. http://caratolmie.tumblr.com/
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
Connecting to other voice-body practices in order to discover how we might share knowledge about voice-body connections, sensitive non-verbal communication, group vocal improvisation, technologies and contexts of the voice-body, radical vocal imaginaries, the politics of listening and how to situate this as an interdisciplinary discourse.
How do we sense the elsewhere? The presentation re-iterates an experiment from Alliances & Commonalities 2020, creating a second temporal layer and documenting the evolving sensory and social space of the artist-researcher community. It continues a cross-disciplinary dialogue on the issues of public space, participation, oral history and locality.
In the summer of 2018, an architect, a theatre director and a sound engineer met at an artistic research conference and started a dialogue. Since then we have collaborated from time to time.
How has this time of Covid-19 affected your research questions and/or methods?
The original ideas we had when we started to collaborate were related to places and the feelings, memories and encounters that people have in and through them. We also wanted to build a material device that would enable the sharing and documenting of these feelings and memories and also create encounters. This device is still in progress due to the...
A performative film-lecture proposing the “slow bullet point” as an artistic and political tool. Playing between forms of the Diaristic, Poetic, and Academic, the artist will present research between the bullet point's various histories, institutional anti-racism initiatives, and textual cinema.
Charles de Agustin is an artist based in Brooklyn making films, performances, and texts. BFA Rutgers University (US), MFA University of Oxford (UK). charlesdeagustin.com
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
Regarding issues of access and appropriation, I’m focused on defining a “new didacticism” in contemporary art/cinema through my practice. The logic of caricature—which “renders (media) highly readable but also places it on the edge of readability” (Eric Herhuth)—is a vital tool in this effort to support a didacticism that transcends its own limits.
The presentation will consist of a reflection on the methodology of a research-based artistic project on the digital phenomenology of a two-decade long email archive done on the occasion of a quarter-century of Internet experience in India. It will be followed by a short experimental video art piece resulting from the project.
I have taught at various film institutes in India. Video art, films shown in galleries and film festivals internationally. Presented papers at international conferences.
kkjaiswal.academia.edu/DGanguly
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
The important research question for me is how to qualify cinematic experience, temporalities in terms of intersubjective and intermedial positioning, through blending of discourses of both the rational and rhetorical order. I look forward to a much needed, and much delayed phenomenological turn, to track the multi-modal digital becomings of self.
This Fan is a desktop performance in which the artist manipulates found YouTube ceiling fan videos. Sometimes the videos feature techno music and video effects, sometimes they seem borderline unintentional. As the performance goes on these videos are used to build mesmerizing audiovisual collages, ultimately winding back around to show the overlap between artist and YouTuber.
Dina Kelberman’s work is based in the recontextualization of found media, often accumulating digital content into monuments displaying the human need to connect, create, and destroy. She lives online at https://dinakelberman.com.
How has this time of Covid-19 affected your research questions and/or methods.
This project and its subjects were analogous; people stuck inside trying to find ways to connect across the internet. As an introvert I felt a freedom in lockdown, exhilarated by the fact that I was now allowed to delve into this keyword without the distractions of “real life.” The ceiling fan people seemed to have already found a similar freedom. This Fan suggests we may not be as alone as we sometimes feel.
The aim of this research is to shed light on the interplay between conscious work with the body as a symbolic tool and the site-specific influence on how race / ethnicity is constructed. How do actors navigate this, what strategies do they develop, and what expressions emerge from this interplay?
Ellen Nyman holds a PhD in acting with a special interest in performative and activist traditions that touch on social and normative constructions, decolonizing processes, black studies and adoption.
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
To research in what way adaptation, adoption and acting manifests itself in bodily strategies and stage expressions.
This research reflects chronologically recorded moments during periods of lockdowns and lifted restrictions established by the pandemic. It provides a unique experience of how popular public spaces across Belfast sounded without the normal presence of human activity. The collection aids in preserving modern history through a sonic perspective.
Georgios Varoutsos is a sonic artist from Montreal, Canada. He is currently completing his PhD studies at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen’s University Belfast. www.georgiosvaroutsos.com
What aspect of your research is most connected to this political/cultural moment?
The circumstances imposed by the pandemic changed my research focus, which included immense periods of isolation but also a unique perspective on documenting the sounds of the pandemic across Belfast; later this extended to Montreal. To date, I have captured and published 87 soundscapes, which provides a chronological audio experience of lockdowns.
Using VR DESCENDANTS Portals as a case study, we allow for an open-dialectical discussion about the future of moving images, their actuality/function, and how Extended Realities (VR-MR-AR), real-time technologies, or game engines are useful tools for the creation of emergent narrative mediums.
Creative Director at Lyrical Lab Studios. Architect, writer-director, and production designer. Working on design, visual storytelling, and the construction spaces (physical/virtual/cinematic).
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
We are in a moment similar to the very beginning of storytelling when we want to make sense of the world around us. We have to make sense of a world around us that is unimaginable, complicated, difficult, unknown. We are grounding our contemporary culture. How do create new languages? How can our different “evolutions” start weaving together?
3 hour workshop.
Please note, limited seats. Your registration to this workshop is bounding. A unique link will be sent to you right before it takes place.
From Eucalyptus regnans of the Styx forest in Tasmania, to Fraxinus excelsior in Europe, Ashes to Ashes weaves poetic and haptic resonance to give voice to environmental grief. A performance and research project that asks: how do we practise the rites and rights of nature, and what is the agency of grief in the context of ecological crisis?
Julia Adzuki works with transformative processes and environmental grief through an embodied enquiry with resonance, across the fields of visual, performance and sound art.
www.juliaadzuki.com
What aspect of your research is most connected to this political/cultural moment?
Ecological grief is a psychological response to loss caused by environmental destruction or climate change. Although increasingly prevalent, there are no ready-made practices for mourning unprecedented ecological crisis. This research is focused on the effect of resonance and the development of participatory performance for grieving deforestation.
How do you share artistic editing processes? Through an immersive 360° spatial experience of the entire film material with its (precomposed) potential cut and connection points? By inviting the accumulation of familiarity with the footage from a week of filming prior to making compositional editing choices, and a rough cut of one editor's version.
Annika and Kersti both come from dance and hone collaborative feminist practices in film, stage and text. Their joint research project BLOD has been presented in many different forms since 2018.
What aspect of your research is most connected to this political/cultural moment?
Democracies are threatened, the planet is damaged and personal gain overshadows solidarity. Our research is about staying with complexity, messiness, losses, the fragility of life. Through uncompromising collaboration, we are challenged to stay susceptible to realms we don't yet know.
Storytelling in a creative environment creates aesthetics on various levels: visual, relational, and ethical, It provokes memories in how to think of the present life in hand, “the plant”. It suggests not to forget, but to think of the present life, the life that plant carries, that it will be nourished with care and love to grow even if it carries a stranger’s name.
https://khadijabaker.com/home.html
What aspect of your research is most connected to this political/cultural moment?
Dispelling Fears and Stereotypes Through Shared Stories, Memories, and Collective Creation. As we all know, Covid-19 limited access to public spaces and community encounters. I think going back to using oral stories to preserve the community’s relationships and connections is a way for our resistance eat time of isolation and after.
A transdisciplinary encounter between artist-researchers Janna Holmstedt and Klas Nevrin that engages an explorative, in-depth version of the artist’s talk. We will think collectively and experimentally with and around our artistic (research) practices, in a structured improvisation that highlights topics of listening, relationality and co-creation.
Janna Holmstedt, PhD (SHM), transdisciplinary artist https://posthumanitieshub.net/janna-holmstedt/
Klas Nevrin, Senior Lecturer Improvisation (KMH), musician, composer.
What aspect of your research is most connected to this political/cultural moment?
Artistic co-creation with an emphasis on radical relationality can engage micropolitical resistance against forces of segregation by augmenting powers inherent to art itself. It can also propel listening practices in transformative and decolonizing modes, while affording valuable connections with indigenous thought and discourses on neurodiversity.
This presentation focuses on an in-person performance for an intentionally tiny audience, to investigate modes of distribution including resistance to documentation and the archive. It addresses questions about how audiences, content, and presentation modes can, and perhaps cannot, be brought into together-ness, alliance, and (possibly) sympoiesis.
Laura Knott has performed at the documenta exhibition; in videos shot in the Californian desert, and by a police camera; and in a live-streamed performance of simultaneous dancing in eleven countries.
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
I work across media and presentation modes, but all of my work is based in investigations of place, lately examining regenerative practices for food production. Defining "place" is urgent in choosing how - in what mode(s) - to present each work; to ask: In what form(s) can the work invite alternative imaginaries (and instantiations) of worlding?
The social turn has largely been accompanied by the canonization of a small set of texts from the global North. We present a case study of raranga (weaving) and tikanga pa harakeke (customary procedures connected to the plant) as an indigenous model of social practice, rethinking creativity and community through a set of Maori concepts.
Tanya White is a kairaranga (weaver) and Kaitiaki Taiao at Unitec - Te Pukenga. Leon Tan is an Associate Professor at Unitec - Te Pukenga and Co-Editor of Public Art Dialogue.
What aspect of your research is most connected to this political/cultural moment?
This research belongs to a broader decolonial movement responding critically to the long-duration history of capitalist globalization through an interrogation of ontological differences across the North-South divide.
In "Forest Calling – A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge", we explore the possibilities of, through an artistic-juridical intervention, taking a bit of forest, located at the historic Fogelstad grounds, out of production as a means to secure its agency and survival in the infinite future.
Malin Arnell, artist, researcher, educator. www.malinarnell.org
Åsa Elzén, artist. www.asaelzen.com
https://publicartagencysweden.com/program/in-forest-intervals-responding-to-the-forests-call/
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
Imagining and practicing ‘a mutually resilient relating’ from a position where we acknowledge the complexity and liveliness of the nonhuman by admitting the porosity of our own boundaries.
3 hour workshop.
Please note, limited seats. Your registration to this workshop is bounding. A unique link will be sent to you right before it takes place.
By an interdisciplinary team of artists and researchers. An intervention in the tensions and potential of current digital cultures. It participates in ongoing discussions around the expanded choreographies of interconnectivity of mediated bodies, notions of energetic citizenship, and the pathologies of the social-political body within our own bodies.
Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir Choreography & somatic practice,Susan Kozel Philosophy & Archival Concept,Jeannette Ginslov Creation for Tablet & Visual Concept, Keith Lim AR/MR/AI Interactive Technologist
What aspect of your research is most connected to this political/cultural moment?
How to extend the human experience beyond space and time. Recognizing more than ever the importance of the politics of the somatic dance practices we work with, and the holistic and political theories they support. Now when people haven't been able to meet and grow through human resonance as freely as before Covid-19.
Three artists from Brazil, Portugal and Sweden are exploring overlapping approaches to “walking” along with drawing, writing, photography, video, theatre and circus arts. At A&C, we will discuss the potential walking provides for fabulating the present, exposing absences, and as acts of resistance.
How did this time of covid impacted your project?
As boundaries between local and planetary, urgency and slowness, inertia and movement, the physically real and virtually possible are increasingly blurred, aesthetic spaces have imploded. What of our experience in multidimensional, omnidirectional, shared physical spaces? Through “walking” we critically reflect on these new conditions.
Raquel Felgueiras PhD candidate University of Porto. www.raquelfelgueiras.com
Marcia Nemer PhD candidate Stockholm University of the Arts. www.uniarts.se/english/research-and-development-work/phd-project/staging-absence-by-marcia-nemer
Marie-Andree Robitaille PhD candidate Stockholm University of the Arts. www.uniarts.se/english/research-and-development-work/phd-project/circus-as-practices-of-hope
The "FOOD (+) BALL UNITE US" research project, utilising two important factors of everyday life in the form of games and food, forms an interdisciplinary artistic proposal that aims to highlight the role of art as an artistic practice which strengthens the bonds of communication and contact between the heterogeneous social groups constituting community’s whole.
Marios Fournaris is an artist and a PhD candidate in Art History at the Department of Visual and Applied Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.
https://mariosfournaris.blogspot.com/
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
The investigation of art’s role as a social and utilitarian practice which reflects on matters that have to do with the natural environment’s protection, the fight against social and economic inequality and cultural discrimination, through the development of a new ontological approach of the concept of "humanness" in the 21st century.
This is an artistic investigation about unspoken conflicts between power and speech. It evokes what remains as memory even when forced into forgetfulness. Through transgenerational histories, we seek to understand the relationship between voice and silence, dealing with stories and rituals related to women’s ancestral body knowledge and expressions.
Maya Dikstein works with performance and installation, approaching voice, movement, excrement and libido. Mar~Yã<>Makabra Coqito works in the fields of political art and bodily ancestral medicines.
What aspect of your research is most connected to this political/cultural moment?
We talk about the experience of trance in women's bodies as a state of awareness in which present and past coexist. When you live a trance experience, you hear voices from the past that come back, because they demand justice. It's an opening of the body, capable of transforming the chain of unconscious repetitions of transgenerational traumas.
Perspective is an ongoing project featuring disabled interviewees responding to what access, interdependence, and more mean to them. The work engages values from disability culture in an interdisciplinary project that promotes access as aesthetic and is grounded in the disabled experience.
Molly Joyce is a composer and performer, further information at www.mollyjoyce.com
Sandy Guttman is an independent curator and doctoral student in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois.
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
What is most urgent pertains to discovering effective and impactful methods for revealing ingenuity and the singularity of disability culture and aesthetics.
Decentering the Archive is an artistic doctoral project that performs strategies of subverting the cultural archive, in this case, the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) at Stellenbosch University, which I have treated as a site for creative production and conceptual reflection.
Nicola Deane is a South African artist working in various media such as film, sound, fine art and installation. She was awarded a PhD in Visual Arts from Stellenbosch University in 2021.
How has this time of Covid-19 affected your research questions and/or methods?
Covid-19 forced me to totally rethink the presentation plans of my research, i.e., to install the creative outcomes within a domestic environment related to but distinct from the written component in the standard bound dissertation format. I had to fully integrate the artistic and written components for a virtual space reading of the research instead.
We will present projects from the United States and Brazil which rethink art, learning, and collaboration across digital, classroom, and home spaces. Shifting roles and creating spaces of equal co-authorship comfortable with uncertainty were tools needed for navigating the pandemic that came from underlying beliefs and aesthetics.
Gigi Yu, PhD, asst. prof., art ed., U/New Mexico; Gustavo Jardim, filmmaker, educator and PhD researcher, Poetics of Experience, and U/Chicago; Scott Sikkema, Ed. Director at CAPE
What aspect of your research is most connected to this political/cultural moment?
Our work is connected with the necessity of creating new meanings for collectiveness and the possibilities of making in horizontal collaboration across multiple spaces. The idea is also to establish programs of continuous formation for students and teachers connected with their background spaces/cultures, reframing what school is.
With this talk, I propose to materialize some of the language of philosophies of affect by anchoring them in specific artistic collaborations that use Mixed Reality technologies. This artistic research intervenes in the politics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and surveillance in current digital cultures, opening up scope for new alliances.
Susan Kozel works at the convergence between philosophy, choreography and responsive digital technologies. She is a Professor of Dance, Philosophy and New Media at Malmö University (Sweden)
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
It is most urgent for me to see the research come alive again, in the form of contact and exchanges. Preferably physical contact, but if this is not possible, it is important to create flow-through from the Zoom world back into social space. We need art to support peaceful exchanges and the kind of growth that does not drain the world's resources.
In my research project I have undertaken a series of laboratories together with singers and actors where we have explored the borderline of vocal expression between opera and theatre. It has been a journey through the realms of vocal technique and expressiveness with a strong belief in the voice as a carrier of meaning beyond words.
WILHELM CARLSSON is since 2011 professor of music dramatic performance at the Stockholm University of the Arts. His artistic practice is theatre and opera directing.
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
For the moment, my main object is to find ways to present the documentation and to finish the written reflection on the relationship of the voices in theatre and opera, that is, to deepen my understanding of my research with actors and singers.
This project translates theories in The Force of Nonviolence by Judith Butler within multilingual and nonverbal contexts. This format of collective artistic practice-as-research resignifies Butler’s theory through the lens of performativity and conflict resolution. Attendees are invited to participate in the process and contribute to the research.
Zoya Sardashti is a performer and socially engaged artist. They use performative interventions to generate forms of assembly and alliance within the context of cultural exchange.
https://homesoil.org
What aspect of your research is most connected to this political/cultural moment?
The framing of Black Lives Matter protests as violent by the media and opposition groups in the U.S. motivated our research group to create new approaches to forming assembly. By engaging people through collective artistic practice-as-research processes, we are rediscovering multiple ways to translate theories of nonviolence and activate them in daily life.
3 hour workshop.
Please note, limited seats. Your registration to this workshop is bounding. A unique link will be sent to you right before it takes place.
This video essay will discuss the artistic research project Carareretetatakakekerers, focusing on the integration of unplanned events of interval within normative production schedules. It will ask how to find the research within shifting forms of relationality & ethics, & how research can articulate means by which support is distributed and valued.
Nicola Conibere is a choreographer & Senior Lecturer in Dance at University of Roehampton.
Martin Hargreaves is a writer & dramaturg. He is Director of Research at London Contemporary Dance School.
What aspect of your research is most connected to this political/cultural moment?
Explorations of how bodies and relationships might be experienced, imagined, enacted and regarded in the context of the politics and potentialities of heightened forms of social and ecological interdependence.
We will present our research, and how it intertwines practice, theory and reflection, together with Jennifer Torrence, in a workshop that touches on the core of the research – forgetfulness and improvisation.
Jennifer Torrence is a musician and artistic researcher from Oslo National Academy of Music and part of the reference group of the project.
For research group bio please visit
https://lethe.nu
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
In our research we attempt to find a way to practice forgetfulness in music, by way of actually playing, individually as well as together in an ensemble. At the moment the most urgent question is to find several methods based on different definitions of forgetfulness.
3 hour workshop.
Please note, limited seats. Your registration to this workshop is bounding. A unique link will be sent to you right before it takes place.
Artistic researchers Ester Martin Bergsmark and Carolina Jinde explore how an expanded understanding of listening can contribute to the filmmaking process, if and when given a more central role. Through their coinciding projects they experiment with workflows and playfully destabilize traditional production processes within film production in order for a richer multisensory transformative experience.
This is an ongoing research project conducted by filmmaker and doctoral candidate Ester Martin Bergsmark and sound designer and doctor in performative and media-based practices Carolina Jinde.
What is most urgent to you in your research right now?
Our project has generated many insights into the potentials of interdisciplinary collaboration in film making and reveals creative potentials of working with more circular processes in film making. We enhear a broadened understanding of imagery and the voice under of our work challenges the traditional position of the image as the carrier of truth.