About

The Three Topics

Keynote Speakers

• Kristen Kreider & James O’Leary
  Kristen Kreider & James O’Leary

  The beautiful mess we’re in

  On Inspiring Failures

  In his essay ‘Mistake  Mystique’ from the collection Education Automation: Comprehensive Learning for Emergent Humanity, Buckminster Fuller discusses the importance of error and mistake in any learning process. Rather than viewing mistakes as something to be avoided, Fuller sees them as something to be made – and continually so – since, in his words, ‘thinking accrues only after mistake-making which is the cosmic wisdom’s most cogent way of teaching each of us how to carry on’. This talk takes Fuller’s idea as a starting point to discuss the role of failure, mistake, and error in the process of art research. Along the way, and guided by the figure of Kybernḗtes, we will look at aspects of decision-making and judgement; action, work and labour; materiality and resistance; rhythm and governmentality. All the while other figures will be falling - we hear something about philosophy, laughter, architecture, war and the beautiful mess we’re in.

  Thursday March 21st
  5.30pm
  Concert hall, 7th floor, 7.K12

  Or follow on livestream here.

  Kreider + O’Leary are a poet and an architect who collaborate to make work in relation to sites of architectural and cultural interest such as prisons, military sites, film locations, protest sites and desert environments.  Combining visual, spatial and poetic practices, they develop performance, installation and video work and instigate architectural interventions directly on-site. Their work has been exhibited widely, including at the Tate, the Royal Academy and The Whitechapel in London as well as in gallery venues and sites across the UK, USA, Europe, Australia, South America and Japan.  Kreider is the author of ‘Poetics & Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subjects and Site’ (I.B. Taurus, 2014).  Kreider + O’Leary have co-authored two books: Falling (Copy Press, 2015) and Field Poetics (Ma Bibliothèque, 2018).

  Dr. Kristen Kreider is Professor of Fine Art and Director of the PhD Programme at Goldsmiths College, London. 
  James O’Leary is Associate Professor and Director of the MA Situated Practice programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London.

  See: http://www.kreider-oleary.net

• Rebecca Hilton
  Rebecca Hilton

  I see less, I hear less, I feel more 

  On Productive Gaps

  Is a ‘productive gap’ productive only as long as it remains a gap?
  Trans-disciplinary Research involves people from discreet disciplines working together, people whose fields of knowledge may not overlap. There will be gaps between their different interests, experiences and methods, how the researchers communicate across these gaps determines the quality of research production. How might a trans-disciplinary research project operate as a ‘productive gap’ factory?

  Every Thursday afternoon for much of 2018, I spent time at the Malarbacken Residential Elder Care Home in Stockholm. Alongside residents, carers and my fellow artistic and scientific researchers, I was working on doing choreographic practice in the context of the everyday activities at Malarbacken.
  This residency was named På Plats and it was part of DöBra (Good death), a large-scale, trans-disciplinary, action research program hosted by the Karolinska Institutet investigating experiences of, and relationships to, death and dying in Sweden.

  This exposition seeks to relate some of the gaps, productive and otherwise, generated by this soft-impact, long-term research residency. Some gaps, like the one continually at play between ethics and aesthetics, may resonate with many artistic research practices, others, like the one produced by the question: What does it mean, no, rather what does it do to practice art in a place described by one resident as ‘my last place’? are particular to På Plats.

  I SEE LESS, I HEAR LESS, I FEEL MORE details some ‘productive gaps’ emerging from a situated artistic research process: mapping some of the discontinuities between scientific research and artistic research, between art-work and academic work, between the instrumental and the affective, between one language and another, between solitary and collaborative processes, and, between ageing and dying.

  Friday March 22nd
  10am
  Concert hall, 7th floor, 7.K12

  Or follow on livestream here.

  “I’m an Australian born dance person living in Stockholm. My research practices incorporate dancing, performing, choreographing, conversing and writing. At the Stockholm University of the Arts, as Professor in Choreography for the research area Site Event Encounter, I am working on GROUPNESS, series of experiments researching relationships between embodied practices, oral traditions and choreographic systems. I work in environments including universities, hospitals, community based organisations, friendship circles and family groups. Currently I am an artistic researcher in residence at Malarbacken, (Sweden's largest elder care centre) as part of DöBra (Good Death), a scientific research project orchestrated by the Karolinska Institute. DöBra is a decade-long, nation-wide research program exploring relationships to death and dying in Sweden.”

• Cathy van Eck
  Cathy van Eck

  Microphones, loudspeakers and gestures: fostering the dialogue

  On Enhanced Dissemination Formats

  Upon publication of her book Between Air and Electricity, Cathy van Eck launched the website microphonesandloudspeakers.com. This website is not only used for the audiovisual documentation of her book, but also spans further the research undertaken in her thesis by covering more, primarily contemporary case studies. Most of these new contributions are the result of a dialogue between van Eck and the artists, discussing one of their works in detail. Today, by constant and ongoing adding of cases, the website has become an evolving archive of the many ways of employing loudspeakers and microphones as musical instruments. Due to the agility of a website, and by disseminating the articles with the help of social media sites, artists and researchers exchange details on artistic ideas, technology and setup, and make suggestions for further cases for future articles on the website. Her book introduces a methodological framework to investigate historic and contemporary artistic practice. The content spans from fundamental investigation into origins and technology to the artistic practice of (mis)using microphones and loudspeakers over the last 60 years. The current analyses of works on the microphonesandloudspeakers.com website are not only used to enhance the thoughts as developed in the book. These new cases also expand the artistic ideas and sometimes even contradict them. The website is therefore approaching the topic from a present-day perspective. The dialogue between the book and website results in possible further investigations of the subject, which can be both useful in research and in education.

  For her new research project on composing gestures for electronic music and sound art this artist community gets an active role from the start. By exploring productive combinations of different mediums and formats of dissemination the research process itself is not only enriched, but also becomes an ongoing exchange.

  Saturday March 23rd
  10am
  Concert hall, 7th floor, 7.K12

  Or follow on livestream here.

  Cathy van Eck is a composer, sound artist, and researcher in the arts. She focuses on composing relationships between everyday objects, human performers, and sound. Her artistic work includes performances with live-electronics and installations with sound objects which she often designs herself. She is interested in setting her gestures into unusual and surprising relationships with sounds, mainly by electronic means. The result could be called “performative sound art”, since it combines elements from performance art, electronic music, and visual arts. She has a teaching position at the Sound Arts department of the University of the Arts in Bern, Switzerland. In her book Between Air and Electricity she investigated the use of microphones and loudspeakers as musical instruments.

Programme

Sessions

Contributors

• Lucy Abrams
• Alena Alexandrova
• Jamie Allen
• Jennifer Anyan
• Annette Arlander
• Jonathan Bass
• Marita Batna
• Erick Beltrán
• Giorgio Biancorosso
• Till Bovermann
• Johanna Braun
• Mariske Broeckmeyer
• Katrina Brown
• Flavia Caviezel
• Tom Clark
• Emma Cocker
• Cristina Cojanu
• Outi Condit
• Henry Daniel
• Cordula Daus
• Florian Dombois
• Henryetta Duerschlag
• Régis Dumoulin
• Dave Evans
• Maria Almås Frantzsen
• Wiktoria Furrer
• Ana M. Gallinal
• Nikolaus Gansterer
• Bernhard Garnicnig
• Claire Gauzente
• Davide Giovanna
• Marisa Godoy
• Mariella Greil
• Thomas Grill
• Susannah Haslam
• Gesa Helms
• Simon Henein
• Duncan Higgins
• Riikka Theresa Innanen
• SPECIAL SESSION JAR
• Nathan Jones
• Hanna Järvinen
• Simo Kellokumpu
• Esa Kirkkopelto
• Søren Kjærgaard
• Julian Klein
• Lucie Kolb
• Harri Laakso
• Pierre Larauza
• Gunter Lösel
• Susanne Martin
• María Martínez-Morales
• Erika Matsunami
• Flavia Meireles
• Pierre-Emmanuel Meunier
• Christof Migone
• Elfie Miklautz
• Ruth Hol Mjanger
• María-Isabel Moreno-Montoro
• Jane Mulfinger
• Tero Nauha
• Antti Nykyri
• Christoph Oeschger
• Aneta Panek
• Eleni-Ira Panourgia
• Benoît Pascaud
• Shailoh Phillips
• Pilvi Porkola
• Demis Quadri
• SPECIAL SESSION RC
• Filippo Romanello
• Laura Rosser
• Leena Rouhiainen
• Vincent Roumagnac
• Charlotta Ruth
• Johan Sandborg
• SPECIAL SESSION SAR2019
• Almut Schilling
• Mario Schulze
• Olivier Sidet
• Aurel Sieber
• Ralf Richardt Strøbech
• Maryam Tafakory
• Heidi Tikka
• Nika Timashkova
• Adrian G. Vidal
• Katja Marie Voigt
• Sarine Waltenspül
• Elizabeth Waterhouse
• Julia Weber
• James Wood
• Michael Zinganel

• Ralf Richardt Strøbech

  Theaetetus 2 –
  An artistic research-project exploring knowledge and money laundering

  Productive Gaps — Long format

  2018 has been a dramatic year in Denmark. One of the biggest cases of money laundering ever seen hit the biggest bank of Denmark, Danske Bank, and both the CEO and the chairman of the board were eventually forced to resign. 
  It was also discovered that the Danish tax-system had been systematically exploited in a major transnational tax fraud-scheme, and this scandal added to the huge sums of money changing hands in mysterious and obscure ways. Enormous sums and huge figures, to big to fathom, were mentioned almost every day on the news, and the case was and is investigated by numerous groups of people in different capacities, in order to understand who knew what and when, so that blame, and responsibility could be assigned. It is a legal issue, a moral issue, and a business issue.
  
  The now former CEO of Danske Bank, Thomas Borgen, has been oddly quiet this whole time. Who is this man? What goes on in his head? What do people see, when they look at him? Is it even possible for a CEO of a company this size to know everything that goes on in his kingdom? How are these cases seen, understood and felt by citizens and consumers? How is it presented by journalist and lawyers? What are the facts? What are facts to whom? What is knowledge in this case, and how do you get it? And what happens when we look at it through art?
  
  What constitutes knowledge in law, journalism, and in art? And how is this knowledge performed by lawyers, journalist, and artist in practice?
  
  This artistic research-project looks at knowledge and how it is performed through the huge financial scandals of 2018 in Denmark, the Theaetetus-dialogue of Plato, and the poetry of Queen Elizabeth I.
  
  In this case, it is exactly the gaps between the different sources of knowledge that illuminates the issue. It is an interesting case, because the branch of knowledge production normally associated most closely to truth and facts, the natural sciences, have absolutely nothing meaningful to say. It is the sort of truth that can only be glimpsed through the gaps. And it is imaginary in nature.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block I, 11.15am
  Viaduktraum, 2nd floor, 2.A05

  Currently Head of artistic Research at The Danish National School of Performing Arts. I worked as artistic director at the Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma for many years. I have made performative work for several years. The one I am the fondest of is an electro-opera called Tomorrow in a Year, dealing with issues of evolution and diversity. My educational background is in architecture, musicology and public governance.

• Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil

  Choreo-graphic figures: Scoring aesthetic encounters

  Enhanced Dissemination Formats — Short format

  How can we create a digital archive capable of reflecting the durational and relational aspects of the research process, a mode of online dissemination that communicates the liveness or vitality — the energies and intensities — of collaborative live exploration? Beyond the limitations of the static two-dimensional page, how can an enhanced digital format enable a non-linear, rhizomatic encounter with artistic research, where findings are activated and navigated, interacted or even played with as a choreo-graphic event?

  In this presentation, we — Cocker, Gansterer, Greil — reflect on questions, possibilities and challenges explored in the production of Choreo-graphic Figures: Scoring Aesthetic Encounters, a research catalogue exposition for ‘scoring an aesthetic encounter’ with the multimodal — visual, textual, sonic, performative — findings from the artistic research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line. Choreo-graphic Figures stages a beyond-disciplinary, inter-subjective encounter between the lines of choreography, drawing and writing, for exploring the knowing-thinking-feeling produced in collaborative exchange. Evolving through a series of Method Labs (test sites for experiential knowledge production) our enquiry focuses on how to give articulation to the how-ness within artistic research-creation: the micro-processes of unfolding decision-making, thinking-in-action, the durational ‘taking place’ of something happening live.

  Through an experimental, iterative research process (2014 — 2017) we have devised a set of ‘practices’ (of Attention, Notation, Conversation, Wit(h)nessing) for focusing on the event of figuring (those hard to discern yet transformative energies that often steer the evolving artistic activity) and the emergence of figures (the point where the undifferentiated awareness of ‘something happening’ [figuring] is recognisable through a name). In conjunction, we have developed an innovative ‘score system’ as a research tool or apparatus for bringing-into-relation these different practices and figures through the event of live composition. Our exposition tests how this permutational score system might operate within an online environment, as a device for endlessly (re)organising our research materials to better reflect the contingency of the research process itself.

  https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/462390/462391

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block I, 11.15am
  Seminarraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  Choreo-graphic Figures is a collaboration between Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil. Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University [not-yet-there.blogspot.co.uk]. Gansterer is an artist-performer, lecturer at the Institute for Transmedia Art and was guest professor, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria (2016 — 2017). [www.gansterer.org]. Greil is a dancer-choreographer who lectures internationally [www.mariellagreil.net].

• Jane Mulfinger

  Finding a balance
  Introspection in the general public

  Enhanced Dissemination Formats — Short format

  I develop works that collect ‘data’ from the general public regarding hidden thoughts (especially those we don’t want to share). I have come to understand the question of dissemination by arriving at a balance of analog and digital formats and a process of giving back when receiving important personal information. It is the quality of introspective texts that I find is enhanced by direct human interaction.

  I will start the ten-minute talk with examples of my work and how I changed strategies over time. The first examples use analog methods - essentially by word of mouth – to gather contemporary jokes and "Common Knowledge", from one European country about another, in their original languages. I then will discuss an ongoing series in which I gather anonymous local regrets in the context of learning from the past.

  The early works on regrets were exhibited via the traditional gallery model. In order to reach a larger audience, I shifted to a digital format in Regrets Cambridge, an interactive archive, public conceptual artwork, and study regarding the human capacity for remorse. The enticement of greater numbers of individuals being able to respond was a very important part of the work; however, we quickly learned that by focusing on our specific audience in real space and time in city centers, we would receive submissions that qualitatively exceeded what we were receiving purely online. What became much more important to the series in Cambridge, UK., Paris, Linz, and Santa Barbara, was the performance of the work. This performance became a platform for discussion between students we hired and the general public. The ensuing conversations about human regret—whether it is a positive or negative human thought process—evolved into a ‘real’ exchange. Participants were rewarded by receiving 5 regrets back, in the form of a poem, that the computer deemed similar.

  Most recently, in Spectral Latencies, Schuld im Überblick, in Bielefeld, Germany, I was asked to respond to the research question of whether or not human guilt is productive.  In this work, I returned to a greater emphasis on analog. I argue that without face-to-face interaction, the collection and dissemination of anonymous thoughts are inadequate for a full spectrum of human narratives.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block I, 11.15am
  Seminarraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  Professor Jane Mulfinger makes sculpture, photography, installations, and performances as time-based, phenomenological constructs. Her work addresses the contemporary urban environment; in particular, the relationship between architecture, memory, and the human body. With objects and texts, she posits the sociological, political, and formal/spatial contexts of architecture and history. Her work has been exhibited in 11 countries and reviewed in Flash Art, The Times (London), La Stampa, Guardian, and BBC.

  http://janemulfinger.com

• Duncan Higgins, Johan Sandborg

  In a place like this (IAPLT)

  Enhanced Dissemination Formats — Short format

  The research is questioning through artistic methods specific identified conflicts inherent in the act of reading research.

  • How does IAPLT engage in an exploration of place making and belonging with materially embodied knowledge?
  • How can this inquiry effectively share its findings across multiple forms, knowledge platforms and both public and private encounters?

  What might be the Academic impact:

  • On the field of artistic research, the understanding of conflict legacies and understanding of practice-based methods.

  IAPLT is producing artefacts as responsive critical ‘friction points’ that perform in relation to an ‘image saturated’ culture where images produced and read within specific contexts proceed to be instant, disposable and forgettable. 
  IAPLT is exploring how the image and the act of making images can directly communicate and question moments of erasure and remembering in order to contribute to an understanding of historical and personal narratives that have direct reference to specific moments of displacement, belonging and place making. 

  The research methodology is constructed through a deliberately indistinguishable collapsed and interwoven collaborative methodology consisting of fieldwork, photography, drawing, painting and text. This utilises the form of artist publications – on-line, peer reviewed hard copy, large scale unique hand bound editions, exhibition/installation and teaching – as points of critically engaged dissemination and containers of conflict in itself– a place for the tension between conflicting ideas and investigation to be explored through discussion.
  Embedded in this is an exploration of particular questions concerning the ethics of representation and the conflict inherent in the depiction of ourselves and other/s. In this sense an examination of the act of remembering as a thing in itself and the critical dynamics of a changing material relationship between the act of reading images and how they perform as objects in both physical and web-based platforms. 

  The proposed paper will be delivered as a discursive and critical live event within the conventional form of a conference paper/presentation, we wish to present 2 of the unique hand bound books as a live event, along with a live stream from the web-based research archive in order to open up, expand and engage through the material research itself.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block I, 11.15am
  Seminarraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  Johan Sandborg is Professor of photography at Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design – University of Bergen
  Duncan Higgins is Professor of Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University and Professor of Fine Art at Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design – University of Bergen.

• Dave Evans

  Wearing the network – exploring digital asceticism

  Enhanced Dissemination Formats — Short format

  This performative lecture will ask how artistic research can use ‘Enhanced Publication Formats’ to acknowledge the fundamental the ways in which the Internet influences it?
  
  Claire Bishop, in her 2012 essay ‘The Digital Divide’ suggests that much of contemporary art disavows networked media, with artists often drawing on the global network during research but returning to local engagement, images and objects in exhibition practice. This input will speculate on forms of dissemination that acknowledge artistic research as the nexus of individual and networked activity in two simultaneous ways. Firstly, I will present a short, written piece of research that explores historical practices for resolving individual activity within virtually incomprehensible networks by drawing on the medieval monk’s habit as a location for the acknowledgement and exploration of their relationship with an ephemeral higher power. I suggest that there is an implicit correlation being between the systematic complexity of the medieval church and the systematic complexity of the global internet on the one hand and the individually sovereign monk/artist on the other, with the habit/garment as a ‘document’ on which the tensions between the two can be played out. To further explore this, I propose to wear a customised habit/garment during the presentation that locally broadcasts its own wireless network – acting as an ‘embodied’ entry point to the global web during the input. The garment is a customised denim jacket with a built-in raspberry pi computer and lithium polymer battery through which attendees can connect and see additional research materials via their own laptops or smart phones.
  
  This embodiment of the network as artistic research attempts to address the intentionally pervasive nature of the network by disrupting our seamless integration into it. This is accomplished by intentionally positioning artistic research in the space between the personal and global through the creation of individual, wearable access points that disrupt conventional connection and dissemination. This input also hopes to raise discussion around how the Internet has changed artistic research and if, as a consequence, it should be more explicitly referenced.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block I, 11.15am
  Seminarraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  Dave Evans is an artist and researcher based in Liverpool. His work explores the relationship between digital networks and their users, specifically looking at historical asceticism as an research framework through which networked interactions can be examined. Evans works with Internet access points and makes sustainable, small scale Local Area Networks as artworks. Recent projects include Battle Jacket at Signal Culture in New York and Edge Hill Garden Network at Edge Hill Station in Liverpool.

• Alena Alexandrova

  Can anything be said in praise of fragmentation?

  Inspiring Failures — Short format

  Is failure a concept, or a gesture, or an event? It somehow associates itself with two statements, two conceptual gestures. One I mentioned above, Ekhart’s “I do it because I do it,” and Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to.” Both describe a praxis, a strange one to be sure, which is haunted by the powers of tautology. Failure can be considered as an effect, or more precisely as amside-effect.

  What is on one’s working table when they start writing? Objects, images, notes, network of significant quotes. What processes take place? Observation, distracted thinking, interest and attraction, feverish obsession, pondering, laughter, attachment, floating attention, rigorous analysis, dismantling a thought, imagining, cold thinking, exclusions, inclusions, moods, fluctuations of moods, moods attached to thoughts, thoughts that trigger moods, thoughts that are defined by colours. All this forms the background of the text, and simultaneously a residue, a constellation of small but significant fragments, that never make it to the text, that fail to make it, to become part of the text, of a text. Fragmentation could be an intentional style of thinking and writing, which resists the explanatory or descriptive modes. Lost or missing objects leave an empty place. This negative space is always a double figure. It signifies an absence and irretrievable loss, but at the same time is has its positive presence as an outline. Residues have fragmentary nature. They also carry fragments of the psychological process and personal history of the writer. Almost always and almost all of them end up being excluded from the final text. I would like to discuss a significant but rarely mentioned thinking moment related to the questions - what happens before the text is written? What determines one’s moves and thinking, the background of one’s thoughts?

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block I, 11.15am
  Seminarraum, 4th floor, 4.T33

  Alena Alexandrova is a cultural theorist and an independent curator based in Amsterdam. She teaches at the Fine Arts and the Photography department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Currently she is writing a book titled Anarchic Infrastructures, and is the author of Breaking Resemblance (Fordham University Press, 2017). She curated a sequence of exhibitions exploring the conceptual figure of anarcheology.

  alenaalexandrova.com

• Erika Matsunami

  N.N-Zwischenliegend – a progressive investigation into errors

  Inspiring Failures — Short format

  In part of my artistic research in the project N.N-Zwischenliegend, namely digital photography, I am investigating the potentiality of inspiring errors and imperfection. There are three research methods. First, according to the definition, “errors” in this artistic research are not intentional, but are created in the concept by chance. In the concept of experimental documentary photography of N.N Zwischenliegend I did not try to photograph things (Dinge) and objects (Gegenstände) only, but rather I tried to grasp temporal depth as well as potentiality; I have implemented this idea in an image with photographic techniques and double exposure, so these photographs were combined in the same documentary photo series.
  Second, I examine the photos for errors from the perspective of different disciplines such as photochemistry, physics, phenomenology, cognitive science, science of images, philosophy, and psychology to reflect whether there are flaws or gaps in the entire N.Nzwischenliegend series.
  Thirdly, in the N.N-Zwischenliegend project, I deal with the image as an error or gap with the philosophical reflection on the subject of “estrangement” as well as the alienation and self-alienation of the situation and the object.

  If the potential of the fault would open up to us, and if the error would thus contribute to an “elasticity” of consciousness, then could the fault inspire us in this sense? To answer this question, in this article I connect to the evolution of consciousness from the point of view of psychology and neuroscience.
  “The AST (Attention Scheme Theory) covers a lot of ground, from simple nervous systems to simulations of self and others. It provides a general framework for understanding consciousness, its many adaptive uses, and its gradual and continuing evolution.”1 At the same time, it deals with the question of experimental photography today or digital photography today, its perfection and errors both in the world of artistic photography as well as in digital culture.

  1: Graziano, Michael, A New Theory Explains How Consciousness Evolved - A neuroscientist on how we came to be aware of ourselves, The Atlantic, June 2016.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block I, 11.15am
  Seminarraum, 4th floor, 4.T33

  Eika Matsunami *1963 in Hiroshima, Japan, lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She is a visual artist and artistic researcher creating transdisciplinary works and projects in a wide spectrum of media. She graduated with a degree in fine arts, liberal arts, KAW – esthetic education / art and cultural studies / Institute for Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts, Germany, in 1997. Postgraduate professional education: 2009–2010 and 2011–2012 study of music, UNI.K l Studio für Klangkunst und Klangforschung, guest auditor under honorary professor Dr. Martin Supper, Berlin University of the Arts.

• Elfie Miklautz

  Mistaken failure

  Inspiring Failures — Short format

  My presentation refers to experiences with failure in the transdisciplinary artistic research project “knowledge trough art” (funded by FWF, www.spaciergang.org) that brought together a composer, a multi-media artist, a conceptual artist, a philosopher, an author, a film director, a stage designer and producer of space installations, and a sociologist. On the one hand it deals with the results of the interpretation of in-depth-interviews we did within the research-group that included the topic of failure respectivly the fear to fail in working processes, on the other hand it reports concrete situations within the project where failure was a possible result of our work. Discussions within the project group showed that although failure would not have been sanctionized by the funding institution we tried hard to avoid it and to hide every indication of possible failure in the final report. The question is: why is it so difficult to accept failure as a productive force?

  The most astonishing experience was the reciprocal attribution of mistakes and failure when one of us tried to bridge the gap between the disciplines in taking over methods and concepts of “the other side”. It seemed like entering forbidden terrain that was strictly defended by the authorized “owners”. Instead of being pleased about the willingness to take over the perspective of the other we refused every contribution that tried to assimilate concepts or methods of other approaches and alleged it as insufficient. To give some examples: A musician refused philosophical reflections about music, a philosopher dismissed the application of aesthetic theory that an artist tied to his work, an artist defended art against playful artistic experiments of a social scientist, an author degraded the use of literary language by others and so on and so forth. One of the reasons of these denials might be the very difference between art and science: whereas art is based on a kind of setting with no ifs or buts, science is based on reason and arguing. Therefore we have to take into acccount that the kind of possible failure is not the same. Beckett seems to be right: “To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail”.
  I’d like to connect these experiences with those gained in other artistic research projects of participants of the conference and to discuss the different ways of failure.

  Friday March 22nd
  Sessions block I, 11.15am
  Seminarraum, 4th floor, 4.T33

  Elfie Miklautz is professor of sociology at the WU Vienna University of Economics and works on the interface of art and science. In her interdisciplinary orientated research she combines sociological, philosophical, anthropological and aesthetic concepts. Her current work deals with knowledge through art and with curiosity. 
  
  Publications:
  Neugier. mehr zeigen. Ed. together with Wilhelm Berger, Paderborn 2017: Fink
  In Defence of Stupidity. In: Geoff Cox e. al. (ed): Artistic Research Will Eat Itself, 2018

• Julia Weber

  Failures!? – ‘Loitering around’ as a research object and an artistic research practice

  Inspiring Failures — Short format

  What does ‘loitering’ mean? In everyday language, ‘loitering’ (Herumlungern in German) has a negative, even offensive connotation and is a synonym for hanging around and leading a dissolute life. In contrast to these discursive and everyday attributions, I am interested in my artistic PhD research in everyday ‘loitering’ as diverse physical and imaginative practices of a variety of groups, which take place temporarily and routinely in specific public locations. My artistic research practice of ‘loitering’ as an ethnographic field research method is based on examining exemplary ‘loitering’ practices – their inner logic, temporality and space dimension – by protagonists belonging to different milieus (social welfare recipients, asylum-seekers, ‘sans-papiers’, ravers).

  In ethnographic fieldwork, there always exists a tension between pre-formulated research questions and unpredictable and uncontrollable events within the concrete process of the (artistic) research process. Using ‘loitering’ as an artistic research practice, I argue, the play and encounter with unexpectedness, contingency and unpredictability in view of my research subject is even more enhanced.

  In my presentation which is set up as an input for discussion, I will especially evaluate my failures concerning the development of long-term collaborations with protagonists belonging to precarized social-cultural milieus, e.g. asylum-seekers, social welfare recipients and ‘sans-papiers’. I will examine the question of how unexpected withdrawals, disappearances, deceptions, etc. of potential collaborators became productive events in my artistic research process and how they produce essential knowledge of / about my research subject and the artistic research practice of ‘loitering’.

  My conference input is based on my own in situ observations, experiences and reflections of ‘loitering’ as an artistic research practice and on textual and audio material which I collected during my field research. In the discussion, we will explore the following question: How, if at all, do the failures outlined render problematic and challenge the often unconsciously incorporated societal and cultural perceptions of and attitudes towards ‘loitering’? The input and discussion are open to all conference participants and are organised within the 20 minutes format of the conference.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block I, 11.15am
  Seminarraum, 4th floor, 4.T33

  Julia Weber (MA, MA) is a research associate on the SNF-Project „Fragmented City“, at the Institute of Contemporary Art Research (Zurich University of the Arts). She is pursuing an artistic PhD on the subject of “’Loitering’ as Everyday Practice in Public Space – ‘Loitering’ as an Artistic Strategy”. She studied sociology at the University of Zurich and Fine Arts at Zurich University of the Arts.

• Henryetta Duerschlag, Wiktoria Furrer, Aurel Sieber, Nika Timashkova

  Artistic research is a verb

  Inspiring Failures — Long format

  Since there are no established research methods which would allow to investigate and accurately describe how aesthetic practices operate, we are forced to create our own. The forging of those tools requires in itself a form of aesthetic thinking that relies on failure as an epistemic tool just as any craftsmanship. This holds true especially for Artistic Research as its exponents are forced to unlearn and revisit traditional dichotomies such as theory and practice. 
  Our group is looking for ways to show and articulate this process: We offer a glimpse into our journey of learning to unlearn, of learning to find a balance between mimesis and entanglement on the one side and distance and objectivity on the other. 
  To highlight the fact that Artistic Research is a constant act of balance as well as alertness to one’s own bias, we choose a set of verbs to represent key notions of our experience in Artistic Research. We found that only verbs are capable of expressing the levitating frame of mind required in our practice.
  
  In our collective lecture performance, we will use these verbs in the form of hexagons to create a honeycomb structure on the floor. The arrangement and rearrangement functions as a tool to juxtapose our individual research with one another. This will allow to uncover alliances, reveal mutual problems and create new and unforeseen links between our respective work.
  At the end of the lecture performance, participants are invited to engage with and contribute to the discussion by proposing new constellations of the hexagons and adding their own experiences. 
  The maps that we will create in this process shall be at the same time a reminder of the malleability of our research practice as well as provide a certain degree of guidance for those who find themselves overwhelmed at times and lost in the mostly uncharted territory of Artistic Research. 

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block I, 11.15am
  Aktionsraum, 5th floor, 5.K06

  The presenters are PhD-candidates of the SNF-Sinergia-Project «Practices of Aesthetic Thinking», which is a cooperation between four Universities of the Arts in Switzerland. Aurel Sieber (UZH/HKB) approaches aesthetic thinking by the essayistic practice, Henryetta Duerschlag (FHNW/ETH) by modes of critique, Nika Timashkova (ZHdK) by textile processes and Wiktoria Furrer (HSLU) by micropedagogical practices.

• Outi Condit, Simo Kellokumpu, Vincent Roumagnac

  Q̷̯͎̑̆̇̔̇͝ŭ̵͉̠̪̅̄͘̚͘A̶͔͖̒̏͌̿͆Ř̵̖̜͛̉̈́͆̾ţ̵̛͕̠̩̬̎͒̄̒͛ź̸̟͓ ̷̡̲̰͒̃͂̀͠(̵̮͙͈͔̐̀̊̑̚ỏ̷͕͇͓́ṕ̵̢̧̲͒͒ę̵̤̮̻̘͌͆͠n̶̖̽̈̓̑̒͆i̷̤͆̅n̷̤̜̦͒̅̉̌̚g̶̞͓̏͗)̴̖͉̞̝͇̙͊̕̕

  Enhanced Dissemination Formats — Long format

  *On the occasion of SAR 10 artists and doctoral researchers Outi Condit (cyberactor), Simo Kellokumpu (choreoreader) and Vincent Roumagnac (redirector) propose a 90'n performative launch of their new platform QuARtz – Queering Artistic Researtz.

  
  ̵̭̘̝̹͚͐̉͝
  q̶̣̱͉̼̟͔̜͌ṷ̷̥̤̇́̋͑ę̷̬̽͌̚ë̷̢̪̯̦̠̊̀͋̌͒̕͘͘ŗ̵͓̟͔̠̞̹̰̬͖́̐͌̈́͌̌͘͠ȅ̵̬̳͉̖̝͉̪̯͍̻̿̑̉̇̀̔̀̚͝d̶͔͙̻͂̇̎̒̓̏̍̆̕ ̷̢̡̺̱̼̻̥̭̓͌̾̎͐̾̓̄̚̕f̷̬͕͂̄̔̓͂͐̿͛̚͠ȯ̷̧̲̙̥̠̺̼̖̻͐̅̏̃̀͠r̶̰̦͓̪͊̇̐̒̀̋͜͝m̸̢̕s̸̨͍̰̙̒̏͊̎͠ ̴̨͕̜͔͓̯̘̭̊͑̏͌̍́ͅó̶̺͖̜̟̩͇͙̹́̓̈́̓̚͠n̷̡̜̝͙̊̀̽̚̕ ̵͉̼̫͍̳͍̺͈͐̇̐̍̕͘t̴͎͙̱̼͊̽̅̚͠h̸̟̏ė̵̻͔̥̣̜̄̽̈́͌̔̈́͘ ̵͇̰͆̀͊̔͛̑p̴̢̭͔̠̮͓̫̀̈́̆̿͆̑͠ó̷̰͈̀̓r̶̦̣̟͙̻̝̦̝̟̀̆̏̌̕o̶͎̪̘̻̻̼̓͂̋̅́̋̚͘͠ū̸͉̩̯̣͍͍̥̊̀̽͗́̀͘̚͜s̷̢̫̠̫̦̮͔͖̫͂̄̐́ ̷̪͍̰̫̻̼̲̘̈́̊̀̓̏́́̚͘͝b̸̪̖̠̟̆͊̾͌̋̿̀̏͆͠o̷̺̬͍͎̙̝͙̺͊̋͆̇͑
  
  
  *Warning: In this in between technology and experience, human bodies may turn into screens, which may turn into stages, which may turn into glitches.
  
  ȓ̷̛̙̞̟̜̲̣͍̠̌̊̓̚̕ḍ̴̨̻̳̲̲͚̩̃͂́̓e̷̜̞̺̼͙̋̅̃͆̈́̂͑̈́͘͝ͅȓ̴͕͋͋̅̇̈́̚̕̚s̷̨̛͉̤̮͕̈́̇̊̃ ̸͉͕͖̥̺͈̮̕͜o̸̦͎̙̤̾̓̑̆̈́͠f̸͈̯̝͈̐̐́͒͌̐̌͂̾͠ ̸̟̞̺͈͚͈̤̭̜̄̀́͑́̕̕͠s̵̗̼̘͐̿̈́͊̄̊̂̚͜,̶̧̢̭͕̘̥̫͗͑ ̴̧̣͖͉̯̖̘̓͜t̴̨̻̤̮̱̄̈́̈̍̉͆̇̾ẹ̷͓͓͙̯̽̋ͅc̴̛̖̿͒̏̽̉̑̄̈́͝ḩ̷̛̘̻̜̻͓͕̻̪̓͝n̴̢̺͔̦̺̓̌̇̀͑͝o̵̳͉̯̺̩͛͒͜͠/̴̭̞̙͉͔̽̓̀̋̈̈́̏̿͝f̷̬̝͔̮̃̾̐͊̂̊̿͠l̶̹̹̞̰̉̇ȩ̴̧̳̭̦̤̭̩̪̒͋͒̽̆̚͝͝ş̵̹̞̲̯̰̣̣̪̀̈́̅̂͑̆h̸͚̽͐͆̆̒̊͘͘͝ 
  
  
  *QuARtz cluster invite SAR10 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the conference and artistic research gaps and fails and queered forms on the porous borders of self/other, techno/flesh, and fabulous reality. Welcome!
  
  ř̵̹̮̗̜͘y̶͈̙̹͑͌̅̒̏͂̇ ̸̛̳̪̺̹̫̰̹̯̃̊a̸̢̨̗̦͙̮̩̔̈́̿͐͛͛̂́̕n̵̯̼̖̂d̸̡̠̟͙͓̃̈́̓̈̇̋ ̴̢̘̙̒̔͋̄̏̑̾̑̚͠a̸̢̖̼̼̺̖͚̋̑͝r̶̳̉̿̃͛̄͐͗̽͘͝ţ̶̤̳̟̬͔̠̭̜̺͗̐̌͒͛ì̴̛̝̩̖̦̟͈̻͎̦̐̕s̸͇̰͈̥̟̗̝̺͂t̸̗͇͉͕̯̫̙̩̊̀͊͐́͗̄̕͜i̷̗̥͐̊̀́̓c̴̭̬͆͗́

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block I, 11.15am
  Kunstraum, 5th floor, 5.K12

  h̴͕͆̀͝r̴͕̹̝̣̙̣͇͊̋̀̌e̸̛̲̗̰̞̬̳͗̎͗̕̚e̵̛̳̣̳̍͋͋̒̅͗ ̵̬̰̫̯͍͋̌̋̓̉̈͝ͅở̷̡̧̯͙̬̼̮̾̚f̷̛̲͇͙͊͝͝ͅ ̶̪̥̖͎̜̀́̋ţ̴͓̣̓̽͘h̷̛͇̺̺̲̗̖̋́̈̓ẽ̸̬͔̠̻͓̟́̍̍̈́̀̎ͅm̷̧̤̰̬̌ ̴͉̣̪̠͗͐̾̅̋̕h̶̹͆a̴̢̦̗̙̙͋v̷̜͇̺͎̤̎̀͌̑͂̔ẹ̴̝̋̈́̔̂͠
  
  *QuARtz is established in 2018 as a collorative platform by three artists researchers: Outi Condit (FIN/US/UK), Simo Kellokumpu (FIN) Vincent Roumagnac (FRA). The three of them conduct doctoral artistic research projects at Performing Arts Research Centre, Uniarts Helsinki. 

• Eleni-Ira Panourgia

  Gaps as interface: navigating the edges of artistic media

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  The on-going combination of sound practices with practices that operate in visual-spatial dimensions such as works of installation art, audiovisual composition, and sound art has not only created new aesthetic challenges concerning the combination of features and modalities of the different art forms but also new ways for developing, interacting with, and experiencing artworks. Strongly associated with ideas of hybridity, mediation and collaboration, the process of combining material qualities often concerns methods of mapping ‘translating’ aspects of the one medium/discipline to another for ‘bridging the gaps’; how does this treat new insights and innovative processes within artistic research? What if such material gaps were regarded as generative, as means for navigating across the edges of the different artistic disciplines and not as something problematic?

  By discussing examples of collaborative and solo artistic environments that produce, negotiate and structure relationships across sonic, spatial and visual, I propose an alternative approach to the combination of such material qualities through strategies of mediation that are performative, and seek to treat gaps as essential part of the process of material transformation of the artwork. I suggest that gaps in the 'know-how' of a creative process could provide with new modes of thinking that are multi-layered, mutually articulated across disciplines and material-driven. Through a comparison between personal and collective endeavour the focus will be directed toward gaps in skills, methods and temporal levels of the creative process and its progress: how does a solo environment make the process of combining artistic disciplines different from a collaboration? Engaging with ideas of causality, time and trace, I will discuss how the processes in question are experienced by both the artist-performer-researcher and audience.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block I, 11.15am
  Kammermusiksaal, 6th floor, 6.K15

  Eleni-Ira Panourgia is an artist working simultaneously with sculpture and sound, and a PhD candidate at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, as a scholar of the Onassis Foundation. Eleni-Ira’s work focuses on intersections of visual-spatial and temporal dimensions in a responsive and interactive way in relation to materials and processes. She is member of Greek Sculptors’ Association, the Chamber of Fine Arts of Greece and RAFT. She is co-founder and editor of Airea Journal.

• Mariske Broeckmeyer

  Migraine music: an artistic descent into a wondrous blackout

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  The migraineur lives a disrupted life. When the attack arises, all senses tremble. The rattling rhythm of life becomes an unendurable commotion and temporary isolation proves to be inevitable. Slowly, the body in pain slips into a void where chaos and torment thrive. For hours he 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. In this perverse heterotopy, trapped in passivity, he waits and endures. Eventually, he knows, the torture will temper and the aversion abate. Migraines don’t kill and when the sky clears after all its rumble and tumult, the body is left intact and the mind all the more refocused. Life continues and the migraineur healthily returns to his daily routine. The plausibility of another attack, however, is inescapable and ever looming. He therefore constantly manoeuvres between the holes and navigates around the craters.

  Migraine is a chronic condition effecting 11% of the world’s population. Many artists have turned to their migrainous sufferings as a source of inspiration. As a singer, composer and migraine patient, I research existing Migraine Art and Migraine Music. Combining these findings and my own experiences, I engage in a compositional practice.

  This paper defines the ‘gap’ as three different phenomena. First it is seen as the ever-recurring migrainous blackout that disrupts the continuity of the sufferer’s life. What does the artist encounter when he chooses not to bypass the blanks but actually enter, examine and exploit these voids? The second ‘gap’ is the communicational divide between sufferer and non-sufferer. When pain destroys language, is there a suitable artistic alternative to expose these otherwise so private and hidden sufferings? The final ‘gap’ suggested, is the interspace between different migrainous artists engaging in co-creative practice. In order to return the migraine experience to the public spheres, I attempt to expose its essence through sound. In a co-creative process, however, one partly moves away from the inner-space where the experience originated and enters the inter-space between artists. Will this motion be a necessity or a challenge in the attempt to universalize the migraine experience through art and will it stimulate or counteract the effort to lead the experience back into the realm of shared discourse?

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block I, 11.15am
  Kammermusiksaal, 6th floor, 6.K15

  Mariske Broeckmeyer is a Brussels based singer, composer and PhD Researcher at the Department of Composition, LUCA School of Arts campus Lemmens. She holds a Master of Jazz degree from Royal Conservatory Brussels and joined the Composition programme at Iceland Academy of the Arts. Her research currently focuses on the artistic relation between migraine and music and is entitled: Migraine Music: a Submersive Dive into the Absurd World of the Migraine Sufferer - Towards the Creation of an Experimental Opera.

• Giorgio Biancorosso

  The case for a theory of musical practice: a view from Hong Kong

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  The gap between theory and practice is a thorny issue in curriculum design and implementation in conservatoires, music departments in universities, and music schools alike. Yet it is ignored, when not obscured altogether. This is the case the world over but it is an especially acute problem in the post-colonial context of Hong Kong. Music scholars on the one hand and performers on the other often operate in blissful ignorance of one another’s preoccupations. This is the case even when they work in the same institution. Aside from the history of performance practice and the study of period instruments, practically all other subjects of musicological inquiry—history, aesthetics, criticism, media theory—are mere 'tags,' requirements that practicing musicians fulfil out of a sense of obligation (and reluctantly at that). Performers have come to view music scholars merely as living repositories of arcane facts that may or may not impinge on their careers depending on how heavily their practice depends on the detailed factual knowledge of a certain instrument, performance practice or literary genre. In turn, scholars have turned inward and come to view performances as pleasurable pastime rather than the occasion to revisit the meaning and direction of their scholarship. Instead of creating the conditions for their productive collision, the perceived incommensurability between history, theory and practice has not only led to entirely different professional figures but also to mutually segregating approaches to the same subject. For such a productive collision to take place, the gap between theory and practice must be not only acknowledged but also built into the curriculum. The relatively small size of the Hong Kong music scene has made the gap between theory and practice more visible and thus, ironically, more bridgeable. Synergies, compromises and even conflict have led to the emergence of new modes of creation and delivery of musical content. A seemingly perennial sense of isolation and lack of confidence, however, have also inhibited further experimentation and what is more the consolidation of what we might call ‘best practices.’ Drawing on my fifteen-year experience as music professor, chairman of a music ensemble, and festival consultant, I discuss these issues as they impinge on a general ‘theory of musical practice.’

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block I, 11.15am
  Kammermusiksaal, 6th floor, 6.K15

  Giorgio Biancorosso is Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at The University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema (Oxford University Press) and is currently completing the monograph The Anxiety of Representation: Wong Kar Wai's Soundtracks (under contract with Duke University Press). Biancorosso is Chairman of the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and a member of the Programme Committee of the Hong Kong Arts Festival.

• Annette Arlander, Hanna Järvinen, Tero Nauha, Pilvi Porkola

  Long table on productive gaps – How to do things with performance?

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  We propose a 90 minutes session related to the main topic of “productive gaps”, investigating the experiences in our research project of the problems and possibilities – hence productivity – of the interdisciplinary gaps between artistic research, performance philosophy, dance history and, in some sense, the environmental posthumanities. We propose to undertake a performative version of the classic feminist long table instigated by louis Weaver (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Table) here developed to include four performative contributions by the members of the research group – Annette Arlander, Hanna Järvinen, Tero Nauha and Pilvi Porkola – augmented by invited artist-researchers (to be confirmed) and then opened to the people present. The topic we begin with is 1) How to do things with performance? 2) what are the gaps in our understanding of what ‘performance’ is or could be? and 3) what are the gaps in our views and experiences related to what ‘doing things’ entails? Starting from here we hope the discussion could evolve to take up the participants’ experiences of productive gaps and other related concerns in the room and to develop in an open manner, which traditionally has been the main purpose of the format.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block II, 2.30pm
  Viaduktraum, 2nd floor, 2.A05

  Annette Arlander, DA, is an artist, researcher and pedagogue. 
  Hanna Järvinen, PhD, is a dance historian and performance studies scholar. 
  Tero Nauha, DA, is a performance artist and visual artist. 
  Pilvi Porkola, DA, is a performance artist, researcher and writer.

  
  More info on project website http://www.uniarts.fi/en/howtodothingswithperformance

• Jennifer Anyan

  Fashioning the voice: the gap between visual and vocal styling

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  Fashioning the Voice is an interdisciplinary research project that brings together the expertise of Yvon Bonenfant an artist-academic who extends voice across media to explore innovative ways of creating (University College, Cork); Dr. Tychonas Michailidis, who’s work focuses on sensor technology and interactions (Research Fellow at Solent University) and myself.

  Fashioning the Voice emerged from a starting point of exploring the connections between fashioning the body and fashioning the voice. The body is a site of construction and communication, both dressing and speaking are situated bodily practices that allow the individual to stylise themselves, to make them selves distinct and to respond to their environment. Using a range of sensors that gather data from the wearer Fashioning the Voice seeks to mix and entwine styling the body and styling the voice through (at this stage a prototype) trench coat that literally sings in response to the wearer. The live art project outcome articulates a vision for an immersive, participatory experience, that entices individuals into exploring the relationship between how we fashion ourselves, stage ourselves, and glory in the dramatic amplification of the fashioned self across sensory registers.

  My research interests in this project are concerned with the sensory experience of wearing the trench coat drawing upon the field of affect studies by focusing upon the “practical experience of the clothed body in space” (Ruggerone, 577:2016). I am investigating how this coat affects the wearer, how in the experience of being clothed in this singing coat their focus might shift from what the body is, to what the body does and the feelings that engenders. Our stylistic and physical interactions with the coat such as popping the collar, pushing up the sleeves, tightening the belt can connect to vocal styling through the technology embedded in the coat. I would like to use this session to share the coat, and to contemplate with my peers the gap between visual and vocal styling; the gap between sensation and affect. Can we construct a meaningful connection through this tech enabled trench coat to connect styling the body with styling the voice, or is the gap too large? What is the value in doing this for a live art setting?

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block II, 2.30pm
  Seminarraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  Jennifer Anyan is an artist, creative director and fashion studies scholar. Jennifer’s research engages in a critical and playful exploration of the fashioned body using interdisciplinary methods. Jennifer also uses her practice as a starting point to write about the fashioned body, working within a theoretical framework that considers both the identity and experience of styled bodies. She is Head of Postgraduate Provision in the School of Art, Design & Fashion at Solent University.

• Cordula Daus

  Exercises in new meaning

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  In a first episode of my literary work 'Kay or a case for Intensity', a woman and a man meet over a year to practice a radicalized form of sex: meaning lesser sex. Voluntarily trying to circumvent the codes of love, the protagonists experience a gap between the I(s) and other(s):

  “Kay wants to make Ran say something. On particular parts of her. ––My knees, for example. I need a minimum surface. Just one, two words. Could you place them here? Ran tends not to say anything. ––Is it possible that women generally need more meaning? ––I am no woman, says Kay. Kay is MORE. We don’t want meaning. We want to fuck.” 

  A special emphasis of my work lies in fathoming particular gendered codes of silence. Through writing I try to understand how those gaps feel, sound or look like. In her text 'Against ordinary language: The language of the body', Kathy Acker undertakes the experiment to write about bodybuilding only to realize that she forgets to write after each workout: “I shall begin describing, writing about bodybuilding in the only way that I can: I shall begin by analyzing this rejection of ordinary or verbal language. (…) In a gym, verbal language or language whose purpose is meaning occurs, if at all, only at the edge of its becoming lost.” Like bodybuilding, sex can be understood as a language of the body that both uses and defies words in order to maintain intensity. 

  I’d like to read selected passages from my text and use this situation as an exercise. After the reading, I’d like to initiate a discussion about writing and its capacity to reflect cultural and political implications of sex and language. Can we dose, trigger or undo effects of meaning? To what extent can writing be a practice of sensing and re-sensing? How to invent new kinds of bodies and feelings?  

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block II, 2.30pm
  Seminarraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  Cordula Daus is a writer-artist working with and across theory, fiction and performance. Since 2009 she publishes the journal Toponymisches Heft. She has presented her work at Secession (Vienna), Centre d'Art Santa Mònica (Barcelona), Conceptual Poetics Day/Akademie der Künste (Berlin), Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Copenhagen) among others. 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.

• Henry Daniel

  Contemporary nomads

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  Can the movement of the human body through space and time generate a capacity for embodied knowing? And can a re-organization of these movement maps create a dynamic such that this knowledge is claimed by the mover? My current research - Contemporary Nomads - seeks to investigate patterns in the current large-scale movements of bodies across international spaces by thinking of them as a transnational choreography, one that speaks to the deep fragmentation that exists between communities within as well as outside national borders, between nationalized and personalized bodies, and between social and political institutions and the ordinary people they were meant to serve. Working across disciplinary platforms but prominently featuring dance, theatre, performance, film, installation and new media technologies, Contemporary Nomads investigates the dynamic organization and re-organization of movement(s) along and around a number of axes. The research investigates five stages of the ‘traveler’, ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee’s journey (in the broadest sense of these terms), seeking to find out how, when, and why individuals and populations move from place to place.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block II, 2.30pm
  Seminarraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  Professor of Dance, Performance Studies and New Technology in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Dr. Daniel is a scholar, choreographer, performer, and Artistic Director of Full Performing Bodies with a PhD in Dance, Performance Studies and New Technology from Bristol University. He was a soloist with the José Limón Dance Company of New York, a member of TanzProjekt München, Tanztheater Freiburg, and Assistant Director, Choreographer, and Dancer for Tanztheater Münster.

• Charlotta Ruth

  AAR - Analogue Augmented Reality

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  For the focus productive gaps I suggest a 10 minute fold in time and space by inviting you into one of my analogue augmented reality practices.

  The situation plays with memory as an instable recording technology and gives a practice based insight into my concept of meta-liveness. Inside the experiment we will conduct, the concept can be understood as the sensation of the gap or glitch between what takes place live and the situation that unfolds through memory.

  Meta-liveness is a central concept in my artistic research project Choreographic Contingencies for on- and offline. The research questions, envisions and explores what liveness is and what it possibly can be in our postinternet era. Artistically it approaches the gap between on- and offline realities as a space for creating reality-glitch art. The research is placed between choreography, relational art and e-poetry and uses instructions in different media as a central element.

  I believe this experiment can create a productive gap in the conference situation and provide grounds for conversation about how we attend (daily) life. How does experiencing technical augmentation reprogram our ways to be inside, remember and imagine situations also when technology is not applied? How can artistic research participate in exploring these cognitive shifts and how can the tacit knowledge we develop inside artistic practices be part of our reasoning?

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Seminarraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  CHARLOTTA RUTH (S/A) plays with time and perception inside choreography and arts-based research. Her work has been presented at, for example, Tanzquartier & Brut Vienna, MDT, Dansens Hus & Uniarts, Stockholm. Ruth was educated at the Royal Swedish Ballet school and holds an MFA in choreography from DOCH/Uniarts Stockholm. She also studied computational thinking & basic programming, media activism, e-poetry and the writing of Live Action Role Play. Ruth is a PhD student in Artistic Research at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna

  charlottaruth.com

• Florian Dombois, Christoph Oeschger, Mario Schulze, Sarine Waltenspül

  No problem, no failure

  Inspiring Failures — Long format

  Definition of the T
  According to Mittelstrass, “Transdisciplinarity is research [...] that defines and [...] solves its problems with a view to non-scientific developments, independently of individual disciplines”.  Meanwhile, Klein et al. offer the following definition: “The core idea of transdisciplinarity is different academic disciplines working jointly with practitioners to solve a real-world problem”.  There may therefore be different approaches from an academic perspective. From the perspective of the arts, we primarily see one commonality: there is a problem to solve.

  No problems, no language
  Perhaps one can think of art as language, but perhaps that is already a form of subordination. Perhaps art could be tentatively read as a form of knowledge production, as is en vogue in ‘artistic research’. From the perspective of reception, we consider the epistemic take on art to be not implausible, however, we see things rather differently from the perspective of production, as the epistemic assertion is rarely productive. If verbal knowledge pushes ahead of production, the work threatens to devolve into a mere illustration. Perhaps art is neither language nor knowledge production.

  What is a problem?
  Must we always think of research as being driven by problems? Indeed, do the sciences not result in many interesting solutions being found before problems are identified for them to solve? And are problems not then designed retrospectively for the solutions? As Theodore Maiman once wrote: “A laser is a solution seeking a problem.”  And why, in fact, do we always seek solutions? Does that not obligate us to passing time, to progress and to following the thesis–antithesis–synthesis model?

  Cuckoo!
  When you take aim at a problem, you begin a movement that is expected to end with hitting your target. Boom. Stop. Done. Yet when the problem is removed from the equation at the right time, your arrow can continue sailing through the air. We are interested in the second scenario. We work this way by imagining that our work can continue – that our ‘solutions’ are not exhaustive. We also like to aim for a target when we know that someone will remove the target at the opportune moment. Indeed, experience has shown to us that when we really hit something, it is typically not what we had initially aimed for.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block II, 2.30pm
  Seminarraum, 4th floor, 4.T33

  Dombois (*1966, artist), Oeschger (* 1984, artist), Schulze (*1986, science historian) and Waltenspül (*1986, media historian) are a research group around a wind tunnel. They investigate on the (im)possibilities of filming the wind, studying historic examples as much as tempting film cameras to document what is invisible. 

• Laura Rosser

  Un-learning space: diagrammatic (mis)adventures

  Inspiring Failures — Long format

  ‘Error is not a yes - no. The feelings associated with different error categories are complex.’ (Williams, The Phenomenology of Error, 1981) 

  Joseph Williams’s taxonomy is influenced by a logical approach to the categorisation of error. Using this as a point of departure for my research, I explore the slippages between types of error and the way in which logic starts to break down when blips, mistakes and failures occur. Informed by my socially engaged artistic practice, I propose a more fluid error taxonomy through diagramming, to establish flexible clusters of error types. 

  These methods go against the ways that errors are commonly understood in digital culture, where systems try to reduce, if not erase, error. In relation to diagramming, a more open and speculative approach to error is encapsulated by my adoption of the phrase ‘misadventures of thought’ (Deleuze). My interest is in a meshing together of these tendencies: from the hard logic of communication and more subjective, artistic modes. At the core of this research is a concern with errors in the context of the ‘postdigital’, a perspective in which artists embrace error and failure as creative tools (Cramer), where error can be seen to exhibit agency (Latour) and is a critical contributor in making non-knowing. This concept begins to suggest how artworks can fade in and out of meaning and how in the context of my research, errors, mistakes and anomalies have epistemic value and become active participants in the process of making meaning.

  In addition to my artistic practice and diagramming I draw on a number of methodologies in order to understand the agency of error in more detail, including: Actor-Network-Theory (Latour) for the way in which errors demonstrate agency through relationality; Speculative Realism (Shaviro) for its focus on non correlationist thought; and New Materialism (Bennett) for providing a framework on the force of things (errors). 

  Through a performance presentation of (mis)folding diagrams and a participatory diagrammatic workshop, the session will question how error indicates a co-constituted agency in its ability to persist, disrupt and create disorder – which I position as creative opportunities. Through the presentation and workshop I propose to create an un-learning space that disrupts digital orderliness through a methodological process of creative disorder.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block II, 2.30pm
  Aktionsraum, 5th floor, 5.K06

  Laura Rosser is a lecturer in Fine Art at Plymouth University on the BA Fine Art programme. She exhibits regularly both nationally and internationally and has received a number of awards for her practice.

  In October 2017, she was awarded a 3d3 (AHRC) funded doctoral studentship.

  Through her research Laura questions the significance of error in the context of postdigital print. Her work embraces participation, as method, exploring the relationship between participants, print, technology and error.

• Erick Beltrán

  Dissemination. Proposed reflexology

  Enhanced Dissemination Formats — Long format

  Speaker teaches audience how to realize a complete body massage to another person on a chair. The audience could be involved (optional) creating couples, taking stage, following instructions while seeing the slideshow (rest of audience).
  Technical drawings and diagrams of stressed muscles will be showed BUT will never be referred directly in the speech. Physical activity will focus on bodies but discourse will address dissemination of information and the definition of social machines. Creating an speculative anatomy of ideology. 

  Frame
  My work is an ongoing investigation on the concept of edition. It focuses on the mechanisms that define, value, classify, reproduce and distribute images creating a social, cultural, political and economical discourse in contemporary societies. A long-term research into the mechanics of appearance and validation. Keywords: Format, distribution.

  TOPIC
  Creating devices able to reveal the inner ideological structure of the media in which they are embedded. Not for everyone but viewer could be anywhere.
  Conference (during workshop)
  Analog Strategies
  
  An index (with images) of different works 2001-2018 to distribute not only information but formats, figures of representation and language.

  • Intervened newspaper Standard editions of real national newspapers (the one bought at news stands) edited with small but drastic structure gestures (upside down prints, vanished characters etc) 01-06
  • Mental confetti, money and other viruses work in public streams
  • Synesthetic banquets eating a conference. TBA21, MCAD Manila, Berlin Biennale, Kadist SF 11-16
  • Poster city invasions Luca, Ghent 05-06

  Media
  An index (with images) of main stream media when disrupted.

  • the real eating media: collection of events at limits of political and myth.
  • attempts in media: historical cases mass media fisures.
  • curating/introducing messages in national media without institutional framing: TV, billboards, etc 11
  • idiosyncratic newspapers: from activism to personal theories. Who is speaking? Who is the audience? 06-18

  Public (theories and questions)

  • Spectacle is something that originally has been taken from the audience. 
  • Furio Jesi is able to recognize the social body (a muscle) when conflict (tension) is applied to the collective. Class struggle as image of a body. 16
  • The Mythological Machine. Carnivals, parties and interruption. 18

  
  Massage ends.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block II, 2.30pm
  Kunstraum, 5th floor, 5.K12

  Erick Beltrán (México D.F., 1974) studied visual arts at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (ENAP-UNAM).ENSAD (2000-2001), Rijksakademie (2002-2003), Phd KUVA Uniarts Helsinki. Solo presentations: "Laocoon's Dream", La Tallera Mexico; "Typology of the mirror" Odeon Colombia; Kadist Foundation, USA. Recent group shows Biennale Cuenca; MMoma Moscow; Moca Yinchuan; Vac Foundation, Venice; CCTlatelolco Mex; among others.

• James Wood

  An attempt at failure: Mono-disciplinarity

  Inspiring Failures — Short format

  Is it possible to conduct (artistic) research without interdisciplinarity? 

  This question may seem counter-intuitive; certainly, there is a current movement attempting to expand our understanding, and subsequent applicability, of “interdisciplinarity”. Following my own affiliate Leiden University, I can turn to Moti Nissani in defining the term: “bringing together distinctive components of two or more disciplines, in the search or creation of new knowledge, operations, or artistic expressions”. But has “interdisciplinarity” become a term unfamiliar due to the cavalier familiarity with which we treat it? 

  This presentation is a (retroactive) experiment; I have motive but no goal. I will strive towards analysing a short, well-known piece of music (John Coltrane’s iconic “Giant Steps”) through several singular approaches. I choose “Giant Steps” for its sheer infamy for musicians and academics, as well as its improvising impetus: it holds within itself an ongoing anarchic seizure, excess and intensification; a tradition existent precisely by active embrace of improvisation in its relation to its material dissatisfaction with the opposition between singularity and the totality of its (political) effects. Am I able to read, to digest, “Giant Steps” from within one discipline? 

  Further, are “disciplines” useful at all, or merely a hurdle of description which must be overcome to engage with any (artistic) work’s totality? In a concluding dialectic, this presentation will defend the idea of “disciplines” in (artistic) research as the very condition of possibility for its overcoming; a paradoxical foreshadowed elaboration of (artistic) research determined by an incapacity or refusal to think of (artistic) research as if it were neither bound by nor originated in a(n) (inter)disciplinary binary. In order to reach this point, I will explore the apposites of genre and discipline, as necessary borders of infinite and inevitable (inspiring) failure. This presentation acknowledges that genre and disciplinarity are on trial but that, crucially, genre and disciplinarity place genre and disciplinarity on trial. 

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block II, 2.30pm
  Kammermusiksaal, 6th floor, 6.K15

  James is a musician, academic and writer who has performed across the world. He has had poetry published in The Moth, Kindling Journal and The Looking Glass. In 2017 he was shortlisted for the National Poetry Competition. In 2014 he won (with Donkey Zoo) the inaugural Cheltenham Jazz Festival Award. In 2017 he was awarded the Vinson Award from the University of York for academic excellence. He is studying for his PhD at Leiden University and is an affiliate member of ARC (Art_Research_Convergence).

• Lucy Abrams

  Hitting the right notes: the artistic role of accuracy in the performance of unaccompanied solo clarinet repertoire

  Inspiring Failures — Short format

  Note accuracy in classical music performance - playing the right notes at the right time in tune - is valued almost above all else from beginning instrumental music instruction to professional performance. As a clarinetist, accuracy is what will advance a musician from round-to-round in an orchestral audition, or grant admission to a prestigious competition. Accuracy will not, necessarily, win you the job or the top prize, but without it, you will definitely achieve neither. As a result, note accuracy has become a standard by which many musicians, myself included, judge failure in a performance. But is this an valid measure of failure, and more importantly, what is artistically lost by perpetuating this view?

  Using unaccompanied solos from my own artistic research, I will demonstrate the role that accuracy plays in the way I prepare a piece, perform it, and reflect on the performance afterwards. The goal is to establish whether focusing on accuracy hinders or aids both the generation of musical ideas in the preparation of a solo unaccompanied work and the performer’s capabilities during a performance. I propose that while note accuracy plays a crucial role in the preparation of piece, the focus on accuracy must be abandoned in the later stages of preparation and in performance. While doing so might encourage ‘failure’ in a performance, i.e. a less notationally accurate performance, it opens the possibility for greater artistic development and experimentation.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block II, 2.30pm
  Kammermusiksaal, 6th floor, 6.K15

  Lucy Abrams is an orchestral clarinetist and doctoral candidate at the Sibelius Academy. Her research explores contemporary clarinet repertoire by Finnish and American composers and the differences in contemporary music practice in both places. Lucy holds Bachelors degrees with High Honors in Clarinet Performance and Anthropology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Master of Music degrees in clarinet performance from the Eastman School of Music (Rochester, NY) and the Sibelius Academy.

• Julian Klein

  Infamous perspectives ending in an unexpected failure:
  How an ethics commission was able to subvert an interdisciplinary approach between the arts and sciences
  (precisely theatre and psychology)

  Inspiring Failures — Short format

  This is the full story of a part of the project "Infamous Perspectives" (!KF Berlin, 2013), where a theatre installation was also functioning as a psychological science lab. The art part turned out to work astonishingly well, but the scientific part was impeded by the devious routes of the scientific system of control by ethics commissions. In the installation, the visitors were invited to a self-experiment. In a white box two visitors could read aloud the two parts of the accusants in a drama that was based upon a trial against a couple who had murdered their own children. Accompanied by introductions, interviews and artistic processing, the project lead into a broader discourse about how to deal with such kind of infamous perspectives. Are we able to enter them? Should we? Or do we actually have to, to better understand them?, and: under which conditions is this perspective-taking even rewarding? These questions were debated in a symposion among various disciplines quite fruitfully in the end, but the data had to be deleted according to the veto of the ethics commission. 

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block II, 2.30pm
  Kammermusiksaal, 6th floor, 6.K15

  Julian Klein is director of the Institute for Artistic Research Berlin, Germany. He is president of the Society for Artistic Research in Germany. He studied composition, music theory, mathematics and physics. He is founding member and artistic director of a rose is. Currently he is research fellow at Concordia University Montréal. 

• Johanna Braun

  Till sick for good. On the hysteric utterance of speechlessness

  Inspiring Failures — Short format

  Against the backdrop of Samuel Beckett’s highly popular quote "Ever failed. Try again. Fail again. Fail better"–which is often mis-used as inspirational self-help mantra–and discussions around neoliberal notions of productivity as success, artistic research can provide rich and multilayered insights in linking ideas of failure and productivity, through both: a theoretical and practical approach. This performance-lecture argues for the creative and academic potential of failure, especially the failure of speech, as a critical practice.

  The "art of failure" has been the focus of several fairly recent studies, crossing disciplines from queer, cultural, art (histories) and performance studies. This investigation is in general informed by this scholarship that understands failure as not only productive for performance/art productions but that failing can be it’s very own artistic strategy (cf. Ridout 2006, Antebi/ Dickey/ Herbst 2007, Power 2010, Le Feuvre 2010, Bailes 2011, Performance Research 17.1 2012, NEA ARTS 4. 2014, Hay 2016, Patel 2017, Petroski 2018, etc.) and in particular by what Jack Halberstam has coined "queer failure" (2011).

  This artistic intervention explores the notion of performing failure of speech.
  In a time where everybody has to say something, speechlessness is often perceived as a lack of participation. Here, on the other hand, the absence of language is understood as something quite on the contrary: there are many different productive ways to be silent (silence can be suggestive, nostalgic, awkward, pleasant, aggressive, it can be used to punish, conceal or unite) and this project discusses several artistic strategies, which reveal that a language absence of words can nonetheless be intensively charged with meaning. (cf.: Sontag 1969, Alloa/Lagaay 2008, Rancière 2011, Assmann 2013, etc.)
  In reading Beckett through the lens of disability studies (Levin 2018), one can explore the productivity in failing successfully. Beckett’s often quoted "Fail better" is followed a few lines later by "Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good". (Beckett 1986) In following Beckett’s often missed revelation that failure should not be seen as an obstacle to overcome but be embraced, this performance-lecture investigates speechlessness as it’s very own productive creative strategy. 

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block II, 2.30pm
  Kammermusiksaal, 6th floor, 6.K15

  Johanna Braun is an artist-scholar and Erwin Schrödinger PostDoc Fellow (funded by the Austrian Science Fund) at UCLA, Stanford University and the University of Vienna (2018–2020). She holds an MFA and PhD from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and participated in numerous exhibitions internationally. Her interdisciplinary research was awarded with several grants from the Austrian Federal Ministry and scholarships from the Emanuel-and-Sofie-Fohn Foundation and the City of Vienna.

  johannabraun.com

• Riikka Theresa Innanen, Antti Nykyri, Leena Rouhiainen

  The suggestibility of breath and the medium of air

  Enhanced Dissemination Formats — Long format

  The proposal introduces a project that explores breathing and air through a phenomenological orientation to artistic research. In so doing, it engages with features of what phenomenologist Susan Kozel has introduced as process phenomenology. Here phenomenology is considered to occur between philosophy and performance as a processual practice that performs. Kozel argues process phenomenology to be a subjective, embodied and situated but also a critical, processual and exploratory practice that “palpates the edges of what exists, and the categories already in place for understanding the matter of experience.” (Kozel 2015, 56). Especially in arts research aside from writing, phenomenology “translates, transposes and even transgresses lived experience” into “drawings, murmurs” or other gestures when exploring affective and sensory embodiment (Kozel 2015, 54). Following these lines of thinking, the presented project aims at further articulating suggestibility and inter-corporeality through what relating to breath and air engender. 

  More concretely the project scrutinizes immediate embodied relations with environment-specific moments of breathing and being in touch with air. The sensibility these relations generate is extended by interlinking them to other written and visual views about breathing, air and the atmosphere. This is done through producing written as well as audio-visual translations with which an Internet-based artistic work is constructed. The work is meant to stimulate further generation of articulations of breath and air and extensions of inter-corporeality. The work is constructed in collaboration with choreographer and video-grapher Riikka Theresa Innanen and sound artist Antti Nykyri. The proposed presentation at the conference will introduce the artistic process and especially understanding about corporeality that the project generated. It engages with reflecting how artistic practice that interweaves choreography, sound and media art can extend and change our ways of relating to and understanding breathing, air and corporeality. The project is part of The Body and Other research initiative undertaken at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki. http://www.uniarts.fi/en/ruumis-ja-toinen

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block III, 4.30pm
  Seminarraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  Dancer-choreographer Leena Rouhiainen is professor in artistic research at the Theatre Academy (Uniarts Helsinki). Riikka Innanen is a visual artist and choreographer with an international profile and interest in social activism (www.riikkainnanen.com). Antti Nykyri is a Helsinki-based sound artist with a strong record especially in the field of performing arts and experimental work (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nykyri/)

• Marisa Godoy, Gunter Lösel

  Modelling video-based research in the performing arts

  Enhanced Dissemination Formats — Long format

  Input 1: Show. Don`t tell. 
  Dr. Gunter Lösel
  This contribution strives to develop a pragmatic frame for video-based research in the performing arts, transferring basic concepts from relevant research traditions to artistic research. It gives an introduction to methods of qualitative video analysis as used in sociology, ethnology and humanities. It will reconstruct the theoretical frameworks of Ethnographic Video-Analysis, Documentary Method, Video-Hermeneutics, Grounded Theory, Interaction-analysis and identify core features. After this we will suggest a specific model that imports the most important features into research in the performing arts, discussing various ways and degrees of making video-based research “artistic”, while still meeting academic claims of challengeability and shareability. We will propose and discuss a possible solution for the publication of video-based research in the shape of annotated videos, drawing from our own SNF-funded project Research Video (2017-20) that strives to develop a software and a professional practice for video publication of artistic research. We will present the according prototype, demonstrate its features and several use cases, discussing chances and challenges of this kind of publication.

  Input 2: When is enhanced?
  Marisa Godoy
  This presentation offers an insight into the process of enhancing video data through the annotation prototype Research Video (RV) as part of my doctoral research into creative processes in dance. Enhancement suggests magnifying, strengthening and upgrading, but it can also denote inflation and swelling. So when does enhanced publication make the sharing of research results greater – as may be assumed – and when does it potentially inflate/swell the research output? As data analysis develops, what has the right to be highlighted and how? Does the audio-visual enhance the text or the text enhance the video? What does the RV prototype afford in the context of my study? My narrative will focus on the experience of my PhD, in which the use of this annotation tool was a given at the outset. I will discuss the impact of the use of the prototype on the research process, share failures and findings of this journey so far, also moving through my methodological approach and research design.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block III, 4.30pm
  Seminarraum, 4th floor, 4.T33

  Gunter Lösel is heading the Research Focus Performative Practice at the Zurich University of the Arts, developing models for artistic research in the performing arts. Currently he is the main applicant of the project “Research Video” (SNF-funded).

  Marisa Godoy is a dance practitioner-researcher. Creative practice involves stage productions, video installations and performances in alternative spaces under the label OONA project. PhD candidate at Coventry University; research associate at the IPF/ZHdK.

• Till Bovermann, Thomas Grill, Almut Schilling

  Rotting sounds – thinking degradation as transformation

  Inspiring Failures — Short format

  In the artistic research project "Rotting sounds – Embracing the temporal deterioration of digital audio" [1], we explore artistic opportunities arising from obsolescence, degradation and information loss in digitally represented sound.

  Compared to a gradual and graceful degradation and eventual disintegration of analog sound, common digital representations tend to exhibit an abrupt breach into fail and thus silence. Decay is, however, inevitable to any representation. We therefore propose to tightly integrate it into the artistic practice and embrace its (seemingly negative) effects as aesthetic benefit.
  By means of experimental digital audio toolchains designed to fail easily yet graceful, degradation turns from disastrous errors into transformational, generative elements, hence offering a palette of opportunities to the artist.
  This disposition to (re)act to circumstances of unanticipated behavior asks for a certain capability to tolerate the unexpected and improvise. 

  Within the project, we are also exploring to integrate said perspective into both our decision processes and our documentation: The fact that concepts require flexibility to adapt to such complex context is a rather trivial insight. However, the dissolution of ideas, strategies or methods seems less easily digestible. We note that, analogous to our case of deteriorating media, there will always be a residuum that sediments and is researched for emerging follow-up concepts. One method to facilitate sedimentation and documentation is to assemble convolutes of media artifacts. Although we lose control about the exact form of such legacy, we leave a composting sculpture, anticipating the future form of our residues, to be rummaged through and re-interpreted by those who follow. The success of the prospection is depending on the coordination and motivation of the seekers.

  Notably, our embracement of data loss is in obvious conflict with currently enforced "Research Data Management" policies, demanding sustainably stored research data. In the interest of our research topic and more generally, in the interest of artistic freedom, we must claim the right to let our data degrade, and, eventually, even vanish.
  
  [1] http://rottingsounds.org (funded by the Austrian Science Fund, AR 445-G24) 

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Seminarraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  Thomas Grill works as a composer, performer and researcher of sound. He investigates digital media on a fundamental level at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

  Till Bovermann is an artist and scientist, researching the sensation of sound and interaction, also developing with SuperCollider. He is with the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

  Almut Schilling is a conservator and researcher specified in preservation of electronic art. She likes working through challenging projects and thinking transdisciplinarily.

• Katja Marie Voigt

  Tiny data – failure and utopia

  Inspiring Failures — Short format

  Failure is inherent to the concept of utopias. They are breaking standards and constitute alternatives to the conventional. Former utopias were often judged as impractical in reality and doomed to fail in the first place.

  China plans to implement their compulsory social-score-system aiming to punish incorrect behavior by 2020. Penalty points represent individual mistakes and are collected in digital records, which have an effect on creditworthiness etc. Isn’t this form of standardized error measurement an utopian vision, since it strives to create a flawlessly functioning human for the future? Is this score system promising a better future scenario by uncovering a present social failure, or will it turn out to be a failure itself? – a matter of perspective.

  In the Western world as well, algorithmic evaluation strategies are current to evoke "right" behavior – be it the online rating of the Airbnb host with 1 to 5 stars or the shitstorm about the unfriendly electronic seller.

  The experiment ‚Tiny Data’

  As an error in the system of external evaluation the artistic experiment Tiny Data turns rating systems into it's opposite: Tiny Data is an analogue real time tracking system. Instantly after every interaction with a human I rated myself with 1 to 5 stars. This approach results in drawn diagrams with an aesthetic impression to be evaluated again.

  In a narrative lecture I will describe the tools, process and failures of the experimental experience and discuss whether and why this artistic experiment could be conceived as an utopia of evaluating practice: I think it is very likely that contrary to the tendency of proclaimed self-alienation by „big data“, the collection of tiny data through radical sensory perception will play a role in creating a future with additional sensual awareness.

  In evidence based scientific methods a hypothesis’ verification or falsification is central. Contrarily, my experimental research method autonomously files radically subjective perceptions collected in a specific context. In Tiny Data the judgmental authority and the evaluated subject are no longer juxtaposed, but embodied by one single individual, which eliminates the general hierarchy inherent in evaluation and enables a viewpoint where a reflection on failure within the context of artistic research becomes merely a matter of perspective.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block III, 4.30pm
  Aktionsraum, 5th floor, 5.K06

  Katja Marie Voigt is Ph.D candidate at Bauhaus University Weimar and part of the research group at Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin. Her work deals with the perception of lifetime during phases of either self-determination or heteronomy. She examines contemporary debate’s immediate effects on mentally and bodily comprehensible dimensions during artistic self-experiments. 2014 she published the „Handbuch zur Überwindung der Zeit“ which now belongs to the collection of the Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar.

• Maryam Tafakory

  Rewriting failure into non-failure and striving to reproduce more
  (Performative talk/ screening)

  Inspiring Failures — Short format

  The thought of performing in a site where my body is forbidden for being female was not new in my work. In fact, it was not long ago, when I filmed myself performing ‘menarche’ (the occurrence of the very first menstrual bleeding) in an old but in-use public men’s bath in south of Iran. But this time, everything was planned so precise that ‘failing’ never occurred to me. I was on my way to Kurdistan, a few kilometers from Iraq border for a field trip as part of my practice-based research, filming Darwish-men (Sufis) in a Pir-Shaliar ceremony, through the lens of a female filmmaker entering a space where women are not permitted.

  Preparing a plethora of thoughts and ideas around the shots, sounds and textual material, were enough to keep me at a distance from the thought that I may end up facing closed doors. And so it happened and none of my carefully planned ideas became a key to this lock.

  I was in tears feeling as if I lost a child and I was not allowed to attend the funeral. This was after all, my PhD submission film. I was guided out and into women’s room in the basement. I sat on the floor, hiding my camera in my bag, a woman places a cup of tea in front of me. Seeing my watery eyes, she asks if it was a family member that I lost. I remain silent. I was ashamed of my tears for a research failure when women have gathered here, grieving the loss of their fathers. What followed hit me as a shock. 

  Had I known that my failure would result in unveiling a Darwish-female ritual concealed in one room, I would have planned to fail much earlier.

  This performative lecture, is an assemblage of ethnography, surrealism, and film, unfolding my failed journey in the attempt to inscribe a fading tradition of over one thousand years of age. The hidden bodies here, their chants, the tears, the self-beatings, the singing and the wailing concealed in one room, become allegories for a social critique that is screamed but not heard.

  Incorporating a fragmented “I” through first-person narrative, a sense of the self emphasising the uncertainty, plurality, and precarious nature of this research and the researcher is unraveled.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block III, 4.30pm
  Aktionsraum, 5th floor, 5.K06

  Maryam Tafakory is an artist-filmmaker based in London. Part performance, her work draws on womanhood and rites of passage, interweaving poetry, (self)censorship and religion, combining a formal minimalist syntax and figurative mode of representation.

  She studied her MFA at Oxford University and she is currently writing up her fully funded PhD by practice at Kingston University.

  http://www.maryamtafakory.com/

• Cristina Cojanu

  Training meaning beyond its failure: a body building proposition for artistic research as invention

  Inspiring Failures — Short format

  The spaces opened by different forms of knowledge refusing language —and this is precisely what is at stake in both artistic research and in the workout of the human body — carry an equal force in the production of knowledge(s). 

  This performative intervention considers two things: the essay “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body” written by American writer Kathy Acker in 1992 and the allegorical possibility of employing in artistic research bodybuilding intensification methods for working out beyond failure, such as ‘forced reps’, ‘cluster sets’ or other ‘cheating strategies’ in order to train meaning beyond signifying sense. This intervention proposes a research path of working beyond the failure of sense through invention, fiction and the fantastic. 

  In accordance with Martin Heidegger and Catherine Malabou (in ‘The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy’), the fantastic designates here the phenomenality of ontico-ontological transformations, the foreigner on the inside, and the whole of the metabolic force that sleeps without sleeping in what is, the very face of being that concepts cannot say without losing face. The fantastic, this imaginary production without a referent, the pure ontological creation of meaning, is the limit of the exhaustion of all systems of significations and one has to work and research within and beyond this limit and imminent failure.
  Thus, the hypothesis of invention figures out a phantasm as a modality for research-production. Through this process something is made visible as such. In this proposition, artistic research becomes the stranger on the inside, the monstrous manifesting itself in and through the fantastic as invention. Artistic research becomes its own monster: a monster that cannot be presented, that can only ever change.

  But, how is one to be-friend the fantastic? — that which is “unlocatable, undatable, and unthinkable”? — that which gets displaced and is the nucleus of any form of change; this “motor of thought” (Malabou 2011:13)?

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block III, 4.30pm
  Aktionsraum, 5th floor, 5.K06

  Cristina Cojanu earned her Mag. art in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 2002 and Mag. phil. in Philosophy at the University of Vienna in 2009. She is a graduate of the MA course in Painting at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London, where she also earned her PhD by project in 2013. Cristina Cojanu is a practicing artist, researcher and lecturer and her work has been exhibited internationally.

• Katrina Brown

  Writing body, annotating gesture: 'intersect' as methodological suspension

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  The presentation consists of a single moving body and projection. A body (my body) engages in a process of moving and forming itself – and yet is never quite arriving or settling into a shape; a self-generating, self-transforming and self-erasing gestural dance, working with what remains in the body to connect, listen and orientate to itself, others and surroundings; this dancing body is working with the rhythmic traces - previous and still to come - that lightly score and linger in the body – and extend as gestural suggestions of what is not yet named – a dance of formless. Alongside this not-quite-a-dance, written annotations appear projected on the flat surface of the wall/screen of the session-room that offer descriptive observations of what is happening for performer and viewer. 

  With this short event, I would like to invite the conference audience to a particular kind of watching/reading and to prompt a discussion on how gesturing body and projected annotations usefully interrupt and intersect each other. What is appearing in the gap or 'intersect' between moving body and annotated observation, between performed gesture and reflective note, between action and thought, between breath and light. And what possible future annotations might be provoked in the intersect of presenting, watching and reading? What kind of philosophical or poetic narratives emerge from a descriptive mode of annotating? 

  I would like to introduce a notion of 'intersect', which I developed and implemented in my PhD practical research into this new situation at SAR 2019, proposing 'intersect' as conceptual and practical investigative device which opens a space of observation, a place to linger, suspend judgement and slow a making-process down, allowing time for small shifts and nuances to be considered. 'intersect' operating less as a gap to be bridged but as a conceptual skin and screen, allowing the unexpected detail to surface and generating an observational mode of working, noticing and describing, so that philosophical themes and connections can take shape from within the conditions of practice.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block III, 4.30pm
  Kunstraum, 5th floor, 5.K12

  Katrina Brown (UK/NL) is an interdisciplinary choreographer working across performance, drawing and artist pages (material and digital), involving hybrid modes of documenting and transmitting live processes. Her PhD thesis (2018) investigated drawing as a choreographic activity in relation to material process, score and surface dimension and proposed a 'quiet' orientation of the performing body amongst other materials, bodies, surfaces. She is Senior Lecturer Choreography at Falmouth University UK.

• Flavia Caviezel

  Performing the gap

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  The research project “Times of Waste” deals with paths and transformation processes of materials, especially electronic waste. Our interdisciplinary team of seven examined transformation processes and revaluations of a smartphone and its components. A digital archive, the “smartphone object biography” (https://objektbiografie.times-of-waste.ch/en), maps the various routes and recycling movements of this transnational research setting, which extends from the local Swiss context across Europe and into global entanglements.

  Fractures and fragmentation are characteristic of transnational research, as they arise from new conditions, local and transnational contexts and from inaccessible areas. Accordingly, we described our approach 2016 in a project workshop as "performing the gap". The fragmentary nature also characterizes the edited visual, auditory and textual field material. The "concatenation" of the various media fragments makes it possible to place the routes and transformation processes of the objects and materials in an overall context, as described e.g. by Arjun Appadurai in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986). The media-artistic basis is provided by the conceptual framework and the implementation’s design of the smartphone object biography. It enables individual reception movements through the materials accessible online and thus to create an own chain story – similar to a montage. This also corresponds to the characteristic that the object biography can only be told in multiple variations.

  I am particularly interested in discussing the smartphone object biography as a way to represent transnational audio/visual/textual research and its potential for mental rearrangements through gaps generated by montage, as described by Christian Suhr/Rane Willerslev in Transcultural Montage (2013): "The subversive potential of montage lies in its capacity for altering the obvious first sense of an object, image, or perspective by combining two or more elements [...]. Montage is the splintering of preestablished orders of visuality, but it is also the reassembling; and beyond these assemblages, new order may appear."

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block III, 4.30pm
  Kunstraum, 5th floor, 5.K12

  Flavia Caviezel is an ethnographer and vidéaste with many years of experience in artistic research and teaching on border issues, ecologies, critical posthumanism, agency and interactive presentation formats. Transdisciplinary collaborations at the interface between artistic-scientific practice are characteristic of her work, as in the recent research project Times of Waste. She is currently a PI and lecturer at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW.

  www.flaviacaviezel.comwww.ixdm.ch/team/flavia-caviezel/ 

• Tom Clark, Susannah Haslam

  indeterminate — infrastructure

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  Among thinkers, educators, artists and curators, we observe an increasing imperative to inhabit a space between that demarcated by the institution of art and the institution of education. This space appears, in theory, to encompass what Michael Schwab has termed to be ‘indeterminate’; a place or form of practice without criteria to include or exclude, and one that in turn has, in theory, capacity to be autonomous. In practice, however, we encounter the inverse of this, where attentions concerning the organisational, infrastructural and curatorial practices between art, educational and political contexts are enmeshed, become static in discourse. This is also a space that is conditioned in advance by the very infrastructures that make such indeterminacy possible.

  Amid the manifold forms of artistic research — its practices, thinking and instrumentalism, in and out of the institution of education — we find some opportunity in its many productive, chiasmic gaps between the promise and experience of indeterminacy to articulate a new form of ‘extradisciplinarity.’ Similarly, in our own discussions that so far begin to articulate the notion of a productive gap found between practices, thinking and organisations of art, design, education and policy, we also find already existing practices of extradisciplinarity. Lodged within this notion is the possibility to instrumentalise the idea of this productive gap. 

  This gesture of the extra—disciplinary though yet to be fully configured, producing rough workings out, illogical conversation, nonetheless is underpinned by an exploration of infrastructure and indeterminacy. These keywords, which have emerged from conversations across the expanded fields of art, its discourse on education and curating, ground the beginnings of a critical practice. Situated by these, we are able to locate forms of instituent practice in which the field of artistic research is put to use — a methodology of critical practice resolutely looking outside of itself.

  We propose to use this opportunity to model initial ideas that begin to map out this space of, what we might tentatively call, indeterminate—infrastructure; we believe in its capacity to articulate and propose a form of extradisciplinarity, whose only condition is to keep pace. We believe this to be a move towards defining a way of understanding and acting out a necessary alternative politics.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block III, 4.30pm
  Kunstraum, 5th floor, 5.K12

  A research duo thinking/modelling new organisational practice and blurry disciplines around education, design, arts:
  Tom Clark is a curator, writer, and lecturer. He is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, researching infrastructural figures, politics and culture in art institutions.
  Dr Susannah Haslam is a research practitioner and teaches across art and design at University of the Arts London. Her research explores possible forms of infrastructuring between education, policy and cultural sectors.

• Elizabeth Waterhouse

  Dancing together! Agape and ahoy!

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  Two dancers stand onstage quietly, their arms resting at their sides. They are separated by a gap of ten meters. After waiting for the audience to hush, the performer at the left of the stage inhales audibly and begins a continuous movement unwinding her right arm. Microseconds later her partner hears the message (inhale) and synchronously unfolds the same gesture. For the next twenty minutes, the two women continue to dance together—not always in unison, but sharing the same context, listening to one another and dialoging using common movement codes. 

  In this presentation, I will show a video and provide an input from the duet that I have just described, William Forsythe’s choreography “Duo”, which I know both as a dancer and as scholar. A duet is by its nature a gap: a choreography modulating the field of attention of the audience (separated from the dancers) and each dancer (separated from one another). As a dance of rhythmical relation, the types of togetherness in “Duo” include certain gaps while excluding others—the dancers have varying names and imagery for the same moves, they try to surprise each other rather than to be perfectly on-time in a non-playful mode, and they take ‘breaks’ to solo and rest. Comparing different performances, one sees gaps that nurture the partnership (quietness, breaks in routine, surprise) and other types of gaps (hierarchy, stress) that don’t. Gaps in this sense, can be understood as that which modulates relation, not only separations in space or time. 

  When in 2016 this duet was placed as the focus of a multi-disciplinary research project, the project “Motion Together” at the Free University of Berlin, the participating artists and scholars engaged with it all intensely, but with different interests and motives. Using a case study as a common focus was a strategy to “map the gap” in the sense of having a commonality that exposed each other’s differences. Over the course of two years the team experimented: tracking spectators’ eyes as they watched a video recording of “Duo”, making a drawing of the choreography, and creating a digital video archive visualising the piece’s history. As a model of cooperation, the example of “Duo” has helped us to think of gaps with regard to the potential of interaction and process.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block III, 4.30pm
  Kunstraum, 5th floor, 5.K12

  Elizabeth Waterhouse (b. 1979) is currently finishing her dissertation within the SNSF project “Dancing Together” at the University of Bern/HKB. For a decade she performed in Ballett Frankfurt and The Forsythe Company. Liz is informed by (in chronological order) ballet, programming, music, physics research, contemporary dance, German, human anatomy, Gyrotonic, ethnography and process philosophy. In 2016 she started the interdisciplinary group “Motion Together” at the Free University of Berlin.

• Christof Migone

  Soundfullessness

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  Are the predictable associations between sound and darkness, night and music, based solely on the ability of the aural sense to focus thanks to a reduction of the visible field? Even if the answer lies in a correlation between physical manifestation and physiological adaptation, the socio-cultural scaffolding that stems from this simple fact is of interest.

  Sites of investigation: John Oswald's pitch black performances, Studio 303's Noises from the Dark series, James Turrell's Ganzfeld meets anechoic chambers, Adrian Piper's Untitled Performance at Max's Kansas City, Andre Lepecki's (and by extension Fred Moten's) "shared aurality" active in the quartet of darkness/blackness/potentiality/freedom, Derek Jarman's Blue and especially Akira Mizuta Lippit's analysis of the film where sound becomes image and image becomes sound, the use of darkness and a "disquieting recorded soundtrack of hysterical inmates at an insane asylum" at the famed 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, the Saydnaya Military Prison, Guy Debord's 1952 film Hurlements en faveur de Sade, amongst others.

  Emergent questions: What is the color of sound? How bright or dark is it? What is the time of sound? What is its place? Judging by the Nietzsche's statement from Daybreak that the ear evolved best in "obscure caves" and music is "an art of the night," it is doubtful that Nietzsche would say high noon in a clearing. Is sound necessarily of the dark, from the dark, in the dark? Eclipses and shadows, caves and caverns—moments and sites where and when sounds thrive, or at least are invoked and conjured. Actual and rhetorical entrapments amplify each other and shade the site of the encounter. Put on your headphones, and close your eyes—enter the night of listening. How does the night sound? Merleau-Ponty begins to answer the question by depicting the night as generator of a different kind of space, one that "has no outlines; [...] is pure depth without foreground or background, without surfaces and without any distance separating it from me." The implications of the inside/outside blur, the porous muddle, on sound are that its sensorial properties have ontological consequences.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block III, 4.30pm
  Kammermusiksaal, 6th floor, 6.K15

  Christof Migone is an artist, teacher, curator, and writer. His writings have been published in Aural Cultures, Experimental Sound & Radio, Musicworks, Radio Rethink, Semiotext(e), Performance Research, etc. He obtained a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at NYU in 2007. A book compiling his writings, Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body was published in 2012. He lives in Toronto and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Western Ontario.

• Aneta Panek

  Alchemy of punk

  Inspiring Failures — Long format

  ALCHEMY OF PUNK is a punk opera, I have been developing over three years within the framework of my artistic PhD at the University of Arts, Berlin, with Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski as scientific supervisor, and at Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing, France, with Alain Fleischer as artistic supervisor. The Genealogy and subversive reinvention of punk is at the center of my research exploring punk poetics, motives and imagery from the art historical and media archaeological perspective reaching as far back as the Middle Ages and the tradition of poets, thieves and assassins, beggar’s operas and murder ballads.

  It is an eclectic video installation, composed of baroque cantatas, mediaeval madrigals, industrial rock songs, cabaret pieces and chansons; a groundbreaking extravaganza, bringing together the greatest voices of classical opera, post punk and industrial rock in an explosive spectacle, melting together theatrical and musical experience, video installation and live performance. The Punk Opera is constantly crossing the lines between high art and subculture, deploying transgressions regarding genre, gender, time and age, the exploration of interspaces between dance, music, theater, video and the melting together of classical music with popular music into an eclectic composition, in search of a possible genealogy of punk.

  It is about a heritage of subversion, rebellion and freedom, discovered and transmitted in many forms throughout art history.

  Featuring the star soprano Simone Kermes, along with underground diva Mona Mur and the legend of industrial music En Esch (exKMFDM), FM Einheit, acclaimed industrial and electronic musician, and founding member of the Einstürzende Neubauten, the French chanteuse Zazie de Paris, together with the brilliant German baritone Max Raabe, the multimedia artist and great performer from Paris Jean-Luc Verna, the Swiss conceptual artist Dieter Meier, founder of the famous electro-pop duo Yello and many more. All these artists have one thing in common: strict uncompromisingness, lust for transgression, and claim for authenticity.

  Trailer: https://vimeo.com/260955554

  My presentation will have the form of a film projection, followed up by a discussion.

  I proposed to include my presentation to the Topic 3 – “Inspiring Failures”, since this Punk Opera became an antiphrasis of punk even though it clearly addresses its genealogy. An open process of play, experimentation, discovery and exchange with the invited artists was at the origin of this project and its outcome became in many ways a surprise, or if you wish an “inspiring failure”.

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block IV, 11.15am
  Kino, 3rd floor, 3.G02

  Aneta Panek is a Berlin based film maker and performance artist, working in the fields of performance, opera, and film. She is currently working on her practice-based PhD at the design faculty of the University of Arts Berlin. Her research is concerned with transgression, subversion and poetry in the punk avant-gardes. While her practice culminates in experimental film, she also stages live performances to challenge the existing norms of performing knowledge.

• Nathan Jones

  Freeport critical: post-disciplinary, distributed critique and new media art

  Enhanced Dissemination Formats — Long format

  FREEPORT
  The nnn.freeport.global platform is inspired by new networked geographies like duty-free art storage sites and free-trade zones, the darknet, and other liminal spaces, to ask what challenges and opportunities these spaces – and concepts – pose for anonymity, autonomy and authorship. Built as an alternative space for the sharing and distribution of content, nnn.freeport.global uses the backstreets, black markets, and divergent parts of the internet to share and debate the value of art. The platform experiments with the peer-to-peer, content-addressed system Interplanetary File System (IPFS) as backend. IPFS is one component in an emerging stack of web technologies — while still in its infancy, it promises to steer the development of digital communications in a distributed, peer-to-peer direction.

  THE SESSION
  This session addresses questions of distribution arising from this platform, specifically around how the works it promotes – themselves often distributed across different sites and forms and times – can be understood and engaged with, without separating them from their conceptual contexts. We ask: How can we apprehend a new breed of critical media artworks that emphasise their own distributed and networked nature? How can the meaning of artistic research practices embedded in unfamiliar cultures, and emphasising a relation to technologies that are themselves difficult to understand, be disseminated to other relevant disciplines and publics?

  The solutions proposed by Nathan Jones (Lancaster University) and Ruth McCullough (Director, AND Festival) focus on new critical trajectories opened up by this context – in particular those that draw-in views from the social sciences, computer science and philosophy. This presentation at SAR2019 takes place two weeks after a pop-up exhibition at Manchester Media City, in which new artworks will be shown, and hybrid interdisciplinary critical platforms will be tested out. Artworks by Kyriaki Goni, Geocinema Collective, and Heather Dewey Hagborg, offer the opportunity to bring scholars together with expertise in fields as diverse as classical-era Greek economics, internet infrastructure, migration studies, and globally networked sensors. We will be able to share samples from new podcast and other discursive material being developed from this week-long event, illustrating how their aesthetics engage with the themes and questions at stake.

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block IV, 11.15am
  Seminaraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  Nathan Jones is lecturer in Fine Art (Digital Media) at Lancaster University. He is editor of Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain, and contributor to Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. His most recent artwork was Unicode Class Vernacular, commissioned by Liverpool Biennial.

• Flavia Meireles

  OCCUPY TREE - urban indigenous resistance in Brazil

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  From 2006 to 2013, a group of multiple indigenous ethnicities gathered around an abandoned building in Maracanã, in the core of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Until 2013, this building was occupied with the indigenous activities of Tupi Guarani language teaching courses, cultural events mixing indigenous culture with art and other social movements. On December 17th, 2013, indigenous activist, Urutau Guajajara, stayed for 26 hours resisting the final eviction of Maracanã tribe on the top of a tree inside the territory. This act was a result of the invasion by police in Maracanã tribe and is known as Occupy Tree. He climbed a tree and stayed underneath for 26 hours, the effect of which was to put a hundred policemen and firemen in a state of suspension. Urutau cannot be accused of anything: climbing trees is not a crime; on the contrary, it is an everyday act from non-urban spaces, forest and child play.

  This is a discussion about a tactics of resistance and its performative effects within social movements and what can be learnt from some of the urban indigenous struggles in Brazil that could animate the debate of important gaps in western and non-western epistemologies and its relation to action and art. How can we understand multiples ways of inhabiting the cities, especially in contact with indigenous cultures? Performatively, this act points out gaps and possible bridges amongst different worlds from a decolonial perspective. As a brazilian performer and researcher, I have been, from 2012 up to now, inventing ways of supporting this indigenous movement through a connection with Urutau that turned into a lecture performance and seminars developing new artistics strategies from indigenous people and, at the same time, reflecting about boundaries of art in relation with communities and social movements. Art seems not to be the place of social transformation in most of the cases, so, what does artistic practices actually do? How can we rethink activism using activation and reactivation (ROLNIK, Suely) as a possibility to understand 21st century drive towards action and politics? How can we relative productively, which means also in a decolonial perspective, with this everyday huge gaps between social movements and art practices? 

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block IV, 11.15am
  Seminarraum, 4th floor, 4.T33

  Flavia Meireles is Dance Professor at CEFET-RJ (Brazil) and Ph.D. Candidate in Communication and Culture at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is visiting researcher of the Angewandte Theaterwissenchaft (ATW) at Justus-Liebeg Universität (Giessen) with a scholarship from CAPES - Brasil. The present work was realized with the support of "Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior" - Brasil (CAPES).

• Gesa Helms

  Casual gaps among office furniture: drawing, teaching and seeking (beyond) the institution

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  The object at the centre of this contribution is a pair of metal filing cabinets situated in an institutional office space. More precisely, the investigation started with the shadow space between these two cabinets, with one leaning slightly towards the other. The gap, as a project, presented the first of a series of investigations into an institutional space (corridor, offices, the grounds below). Over a year or so, it was conducted within two modalities: at first as researcher/ interloper; second as fixed-term member of academic staff. Was I, the researcher, still an interloper on a teaching contract?

  A series of related works explored not only an expanded field of drawing (via photocopier, manuals, site-specific interventions and temporary performances) but also kept returning to the gap between the filing cabinets to ask what was and could be in that void and in that leaning gesture from one to the other.

  As focus for this contribution I would like to map a series of movements concerning contemporary possibilities of institutional space, positionality and critique: 

  • observing and drawing the spaces within and beyond the office and corridor: on the continued possibility of other spaces
  • as former and current researcher and artist in human geography; as part-time teaching assistant in an institutional space; as final year student for an undergraduate degree in Creative Arts. 
  • the possibility of institutional critique in critical institutional spaces

  In doing so, this talk proposes an input that at once seeks to open up the gap productively: as starting point and as practice for an expanded field of drawing and institutional critique that attend both to the presence of contemporary work within the institution and the possibility for other spaces among office furniture (see as part of these discussions e.g. David 2017, Sawdon & Marshall eds 2015, Vishmidt 2017).

  The filing cabinets have remained unused throughout this period.

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block IV, 11.15am
  Seminarraum, 4th floor, 4.T33

  Dr Gesa Helms is an independent researcher, educator and artist and a Human Geographer by training (Universities of Goettingen, Germany and Glasgow, UK). Her current research as practice combines (auto-)ethnographic approaches with facilitation in group and one-to-one settings, interested in the production of public and private spaces. She is currently a part-time member of teaching staff at the University of Glasgow and a final year student in Creative Arts (BSc) (drawing/photography) at UCA/OCA. https://close-open.net

• Pierre Larauza

  Dance in art museum: or the beauty of bridging a gap in spectatorial experiences

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  As part of the exhibition The smile of mutation, presented in Vietnam at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ho Chi Minh City in January 2018, the living body penetrated the walls of the museum where my sculptures were exhibited: two worlds collided, intertwining their differences and gaps.

  This communication takes a comparative look at these choreographic experiences (performance art, workshop, rehearsals, show): four different temporalities and modalities through the dance piece Mutant, questioning their differences with regard to the visitor-spectator hybrid reception, analysing the productive gap that each mode would have on the artistic mediation between the exhibited art works and the public.

  In echo to the title Mutant, a mutation is being configured by immersing dance in museums. However, the concept of future museum must be thought as multiple and heterogeneous, to avoid cultural difference being erased under the weight of generic and ethnocentric models. More than ever, reflection must be both transcultural and out of step with the lure of our cultural certainties.

  Through this testimony of this Vietnamese museum experience, made hybrid by the co-presence of the living body and sculptures, the challenge of reflection is here to explore and question the productive beauty of the difference between the action of being a visitor and being a spectator, more precisely the beauty of filling a “spectatorship gap”.

  Faced with the living body in a museum environment, when precisely and in what way does the visitor punctually transform himself into a spectator? What kind of break exists in the experience of a visitor versus a spectator? What is the status of this hybridization? 

  This project has contributed to what could be called an “aesthetic of the gap”, born of the confrontation between different reception habits and yet far from being incompatible with each other. This stimulation of differences is in line with one of the approaches to intermediality where a symbolic fusion of paradigms takes place, giving rise to a reflection on the essence of one medium through the intermediary of the other.

  This talk is thus an invitation to explore new museum practices where dance and contemporary art feed each other despite the gap between these paradigms, between the living and the inanimate: We’ll see in which way this distance is so productive.

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block IV, 11.15am
  Seminarraum, 4th floor, 4.T33

  Pierre Larauza is a transdisciplinary artist also involved in university research. He co-directs Transitscape with choreographer Emmanuelle Vincent where they explore movement in hybrid forms. At the same time, he develops a practical and theoretical work on the notion of “Documentary Sculpture” through historical reenactments. Currently a PhD student in Art in Brussels, he is also co-director in Vietnam of Máy xay sinh tố, a transcultural laboratory dedicated to artistic and cultural crossing.

• Shailoh Phillips

  (Dis)connectology: can artefacts be critical?

  Productive Gaps — Long format

  Everything is interconnected - but how exactly? Starting with the rope, I have been collecting a growing, yet incomplete material library of different kinds of connectors: zip lines, wrapping paper, handcuffs, string, rubber bands, paper clips, staples. You can connect things by folding them, and then in the field of origami, there are different kinds of folds, connecting separate pieces of paper in chains, or connecting corners by bends. Things can interlock with sewing, weaving, zipping, by hooking, buttoning. And then there are, clasps, snaps, velcro - which is quite interesting as a type of connection, a dense tangle of flimsy loops and hooks that can so easily be done and undone, silent when connecting and loud when pulled apart. Some connectors or things on their own, some things connect by virtue of their formal qualities. Sticky things connect: stickers, goo, icing, peanut butter, glue, tape. The mechanical realm of cogs and wheels, of springs, joints, braids, hinges, pullys. There are so many kinds of tape: magnetic tape, transparant tape, double-sized tape, masking tape, which not only connects but protects. And there are adhesive substances such as cement, paint, metal coating, shrinkwrap. And then the vast realm of digital connectivity, which does not replace, but supplements the physical realm. Social networks, network cables, USB ports, downloading, streaming, hubs and routers. Then there is the entire field of social bonds of kinship, marriage, friendship, rivalry – what are the material operations that connect, physically, and symbolically? 

  When we look at the world through the lens of connections, such connective constructions are everywhere, and they are all different in their qualities, their (ir)reversibility, and how they respond to forces of pressure. In my practice, I do not collect in order to own, to tame, to classify and quantify, rather to understand the critical turning points where connections shift. Working with inflatable sculptures and building patented green technologies, there is a critical point where the surface is punctured and the form deflated, where things break down or collapse. What then is the agency of such an artefact? I entertain the proposition of elasticity, buoyancy, thrust, collapse, decay, flipping and switching as critical modes. In my research on connectology, I look specifically at the critical turning points where connections shift, by joining, separating or transforming. To what extent can these material operations be seen as a form of critique?

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block IV, 11.15am
  Aktionsraum, 5th floor, 5.K06

  Trained in Anthropology and Philosophy, she has spent the past 10 years working in the field of digital media and media arts education, as well as cultivating a collaborative studio practice of cross-media projects such as interactive installations, digital crafts, animation, game design, creative writing and facilitating workshops. Her practice revolves around fostering forms of resistance and pressure points to act in the face of social inequalities and impending ecological disasters.

• Régis Dumoulin, Ana M. Gallinal, Claire Gauzente, Benoît Pascaud, Adrian G. Vidal

  Strange encounters – Art (myth) meets Management (myth)

  Productive Gaps — Long format

  Our French-Spanish research team takes the occasion of the 10th edition of SAR conference to explore the possibility of crossings between disciplines, languages and narratives. More specifically we intend to explore, experience and perform the gap(s) between two apparently opposite disciplines : Art and Management. Those two disciplines are generally thought as orthogonal. However, although for different reasons (one being aesthetic, the other being socioeconomic), both of them may be considered as « universal » languages which may open a conciliation path. We hence face a paradoxical gap. While bridging, dialoguing, assimilating are possible strategies to manage the gap, we suggest an alternative path : controversy and proliferation. We propose to over-emphasize the gap and over-minimize it, to develop irony along with connivance. Those opposite movements represent waves that roll the gap-stones, attempting recursively to polish the apparent (genuine?) opposition between Art and Management.

  Each member tackles the (un)bridgeable (?) gap between Art and Management in a controversial proliferating mode with or in reaction to the other members. The production/objection/destruction of different acoustic, poetic, plastic, narrative and managerial forms will be shared in a generative dialogue during months prior the Zurich conference. The proliferation of dialogic forms will then be managerially and critically considered in order to develop consistency in our project (project being : experiencing and performing the gap between Art and Management). The whole approach can be re-labeled in theoretical terms using the contribution of Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch to Organization Theory. They state that two organizational regulatory mechanisms are at work in organizations : differentiation and integration (Lawrence & Lorsch, Organization and Environment, 1967). The first movement (differentiation) recognizes the need for singularity and alterity while the other (integration) examines varied coordinating mechanisms allowing to reach shared higher-order narratives.

  We will invite the audience to experience those two movements in their complementarity based on the artistic material we will bring as well as the material that will be generated during the session itself.

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block IV, 11.15am
  Kunstraum, 5th floor, 5.K12

  Régis Dumoulin is a musician and sound-artist. He is professor of Organization Theory at the University of Angers, France. 

  Ana Maria Gallinal is a professor at the Department of Fine Arts, University Complutense Madrid, Spain. Her research and practice pertains to body in space and the relationship between Arts and Society. 

  Claire Gauzente is a visual artist and professor of Research Methods in Management Science at the University of Nantes, France. She is involved in several interdisciplinary programs where she explores the generative properties of research methods for art.

  Benoît Pascaud is a visual artist and head of the Print Department at the Fine Art School of Nantes, France.

  Adrian Garcia Vidal is a researcher in Literature Theory and Comparative Literature involved in Mitos Critica Research Group, University Complutense Madrid. He also works with video editing, web design or marketing on an interdisciplinary basis. 

• Jamie Allen, Bernhard Garnicnig, Lucie Kolb

  Premisses: Other places of work

  Productive Gaps — Long format

  The spaces between things are spaces where everything happens. Knowledge practices in institutions are negotiated, deliberated in the interstices of institutional cultures and environments: stairwell and water-cooler conversations, elevator pitches and coffee break meetings, lunchtime chats, conference dinners and last drinks at the bar. These are the academic and artistic scenographies of both art and research where cultures are produced, languages relaxed, methods modulated, skills and knowledge transferred, identities reconstituted, in and as back- and side-channels to representational, academic discourse. It is in these gaps that all the work really gets done. These gaps become constructive as they help us refuse what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten phrase as “the call to order”. Such spaces of refusal allow dissonance to continue and resonate, as they invoke sessions, conversations and exchanges which refuse the call to begin, to formalise, to order, to end. The interstitial gaps of the physical spaces and architectures of art and research allow study to continue, but study that precedes our call and will continue after we have left these spaces. 

  In investigating our other places of work, this session will take the group of researchers, artists in attendance to architectural gaps of ZHDK — stairwells, elevators, hallways, coffee and tea kitchens — presenting at each a specific conversation. Mapping these in advance of the discussion to develop links to the ongoing themes of SNSF project “Institutions as a Way of Life” (IWL, www.institutions.life/), each space/discussion will evoke the emancipatory authenticity that non-plenary, informal institutional spaces allow and even encourage. During the session, IWL researchers will propose short inputs based on their respective practices of artistic research, as physical-institutional critique, highlighting relations to each place and situation. These hallway conversations and watercooler chats open into discussion, as digression and elaboration by all participants, helping to render apparent the identity and category slippages that occur when institutional roles and scenographies are enacted and relaxed. These conversations about arts, knowledge, performance and place are our other workplaces, in the gaps of the institutions we occupy, that cannot be called to order.

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block IV, 11.15am
  Kammermusiksaal, 6th floor, 6.K15

  Institutions as a Way of Life is a four-year research project funded by the SNF and hosted at the IXDM HGK Basel. Lucie Kolb, Bernhard Garnicnig and Jamie Allen are the principal investigators. Through IWL we aim to critically illuminate the notion of institution as a verb and a creative practice emerging in forms of micropolitical actions, radical pedagogies and artistic processes.

• Søren Kjærgaard

  INTERFERENCES

  Enhanced Dissemination Formats — Long format

  What potential lies in the interferences between dissemination and performance, between retrospection and improvisation, between replay and play? And how can these seemingly disparate fields be converged into a multi-layered, immersive experience where insights are not presented but played out, performed live, in sound, on film? 

  These are some of the core issues at work in the research practice of solo pianist, Søren Kjærgaard, which seek to relocate the pianist in multiple positions: physically, sonically, visually, virtually. 

  In this regard, interference is to be understood as an impulse, a signal of disturbance that fluctuates in-between formats, clouding clarity, obscuring the message, yet allowing for an altogether different approach of the artist as a messenger, a mediator who transmits information while being at the same time in immediate interplay with his or her own material.

  The purpose is also to contribute to how practitioners, especially solo artists, can work across formats more dynamically and with greater flexibility in the interaction between the various conditions of their work, and to contribute with approaches to documenting and disseminating these processes in more hybrid and non-textual forms of communication. 

  In Kjærgaard’s own work, this led to the question of how one could re-contextualize the documented material in a performative setting. 

  This has resulted in the development of the video keyboard, an audio-visual sampler that resembles the 88 keys of the piano, but in altogether different instrument. Now, each key represents a sample of a previously documented event, which can be dialled up and played out in an instant.

  The vast archives of documentation across formats such as handwritten sketches, voice memos, drawings, graphic design, text, photo, video and sound, thus become a virtual memory map that awaits new circuitry. As the physical limitations of pianist and the relation player-piano are massively expanded, a new set of problems arise: How to navigate this ‘time machine’? How to travel across and re-actualize this reservoir of information as an improviser?

  The presentation will be an attempt to give play to these questions live on the video keyboard.

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Kino, 3rd floor, 3.G02

  Søren Kjærgaard (DK) is a pianist, composer and associate professor at Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. As a solo performer he is engaged in how one can open a differential field of potential within the natural limitations of the solo piano format, both by expanding its field of practice and crossing into other disciplinary territories. As a pianist, composer and improviser he has performed both solo and in numerous collaborations across the world.

• Harri Laakso

  The body that is missing

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  My input refers to a particular gap relevant to artistic research: our encounter with image objects, rather than the objects themselves. I follow the lead of French writer and philosopher Jean-Louis Schefer, who maintains that something remains invisible, unseen and unheard in our encounter with art objects – images and texts alike – something he calls the paradoxical body, which is based on a foundational division and separation. 

  The example of watching a film, a moving image, might clarify this: When watching a film, we are living in two worlds at once. The film viewer is confronted by a world projected without memory, to which the viewer brings her own memories, even if they are paradoxically excluded.

  Within this division the paradoxical body that emerges signifies everything the (doxical) systems of representation cannot account for, signifies the body that is missing. For if an image acts like a mirror, it does so not because it reflects our bodies, but because images reflect what we lack. What needs to be made visible is our "internal body", "the unknown centre of ourselves". 

  Should we then stop orienting ourselves to art objects in the accustomed way, and to instead fantasize the constructions of new bodies, corpuses, that emerge from our encounters with them; "polymorphous objects", which then "like prisms" sometimes give us images of the object (that is the world), sometimes images of the mediating bodies we have created, like transparent language or photography or film, but most importantly, sometimes – "like a stain in a mirror" – something forgotten about ourselves?

  In order to conjure up and address the missing body which is produced in the gap between the art object and someone who encounters it, my input takes the form of an image/audio piece (i.e. a short "radio play" with limited visuals) which is vocally annotated (i.e. the live lecture/conversation interacting with the pre-recorded material) (10 mins).

  The latter part of my "short format" is organized as a series of questions or claims addressed to the audience, for them to respond or discuss, accordingly also engaging their personal lives (10 mins). All in all, the aim of my contribution is to think artistic research as the creation of such "paradoxical bodies", the promise of such an enterprise and its limitations.

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Seminaraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  Dr. Harri Laakso (b. 1965) is Associate Professor of Photography Research in the Department of Media at Aalto University, Finland.Laakso is an artist, researcher and curator interested in photographic images and theory, artistic research and word/image relations. He has led and participated in many research projects and artistic projects and published texts and curated exhibitions especially related to photography and contemporary art.

• Filippo Romanello

  Pre/texts for an emerging dramaturgy

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  My proposition is to discuss three basic questions about productive gaps in performance practices, particularly those that are text-based: how do gaps produce? what do they produce? how long for?

  Gaps seem to disclose fields of unknown possibilities lying behind all that which is known. Ultimately they produce difference. In a text for example, it is the linguistic openness generated by separations or juxtapositions of different individualities that multiplies meaning: all the different interpretations stemming from the spaces between each word, sentence, paragraph, simultaneously infused by anything hovering about each word and its own signifieds (hovering, that is, in other words). What when these parted and juxtaposed individualities are the same ones? In the event of performance of a text for example (reading included), when words, sentences, paragraphs and ideas may stay the same, the productive gap is generated by repetition. For artistic fields dealing with performance matters, it might be interesting to explore how long for such gaps can remain productive. My research suggests that they remain productive for as long as repetition manages to ignore representation. How can we manage that?

  “The misfortune in speaking is not speaking, but speaking for others, or representing something”.

  Readings of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1994) inspired a way of approaching text for performance based on the assumption that the “fault” of representation lays in a claim that a subject (actor) maintains before (or while) repeating. If one could carry out the repetition of an action, the repetition of its pure form, forgetting, or otherwise not assigning it a content, a meaning or an intention a priori, yet maintaining that “open feeling” Gertrude Stain writes about in The Making of Americans (1925), then one could achieve difference precisely by remaining receptive to the possible affects emerging throughout the repetitive act. In performance as in life, such repetitive acts are mental, vocal or physical acts. This way achieved, difference would not be the designed product of representation (of a previous idea), nor a will to novelty, but rather the sprout of a spontaneous reaction to the form itself, being it a performance text, or a humble set of everyday tasks.

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Seminarraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  Filippo Romanello is a theatre practitioner and PhD researcher at Liverpool John Moores University. His artistic research explores new approaches to writing for performance and dramaturgy that aim at stimulating the actors’ spontaneous reaction to the text and the circumstances around its performance. Theatre-making credits include, as writer: Vice Device (extracts at Soho Theatre and More Storm Festival, London 2015), Embarrassing Circumstances (Cockpit Theatre 2015, Lyric Hammersmith studio 2014); as dramaturg: Yusuf’s (Villa Elisabeth, Berlin 2016), Preludes of Orchestral Theatre (Tatwerk, Berlin 2015).

• Demis Quadri

  Challenging the shadows of language

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  The language of and the linguistic approach to research projects can have two important consequences: on the one hand, to create “architectural barriers” that risk compromising access to research contents; on the other hand, to shape the contents themselves through the forms that seek to express them. The first one can have negative consequences with respect to, for example, communication between researchers and artists who often do not share the same “language”. The second can be critical in dealing with themes such as Physical Theatre, which can be understood as a theatrical form where the body and movement of the actor/performer are at the centre of the dramaturgical process (the body as a working tool, movement as the origin of artistic forms and contents): if the logic of a dramaturgy of this kind should be different from that of spoken/literary drama, how is it possible to talk about it and analyse it without imposing the logic of written and spoken language on a sphere that would like to distinguish itself from them? The logic of Phyisical Theatre can become even more elusive (and perhaps even unattainable) if we think of the human being in terms of “parlêtre” (Lacan, 1981) – that is, of a creature with a body shaped by language and of a product of the anthropogenic machine (Cimatti, 2013) –, because if this perspective is right there seems to be no possibility for us of an experience that is not lived through language. But perhaps it is precisely this gap between the human being and the physical experience that can lead to new approaches to research. In this regard, the approach of Artistic Research (as a way of doing research “by conducting an original investigation in and through art objects and creative processes”, Borgdorff, 2006) can be particularly productive in helping to find new ways for academic investigation and, perhaps, to push for a shifting or widening of paradigms. A starting point could also be extremely playful, for example in exploring the use of grammelot in research to reverse the logic between verbal and body expression by giving words the value of gestures and gestures the value of words (Meldolesi, 1978).

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block II, 2.30pm
  Seminarraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  With a degree in Italian Language and Literature, Romance Philology and Ethnology, Demis Quadri obtained a double doctorate in Italian Language and Literature and Theatrical Studies at the Universities of Fribourg and Bern. He collaborated with the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft at the University of Bern on a research project on the topic of Commedia dell’Arte. In 2018 he is nominated as SUPSI Professor of Research and Teaching in Physical Theater and Head of Research at the Accademia Teatro Dimitri.

• Davide Giovanna

  How can we make sense of violence? 
  Failures and discoveries in re-staging violence

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  This paper is based on the artistic post doc research: The Imagination of Violence, that Davide Giovanzana is currently doing at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki in collaboration with the BA acting students. This post doc research uses artistic research methods to investigate the implication of representing violence. 

  The actual “state of emergency”, which since the beginning of the third millennium, tends to become the normal state of our governments, and which pushes for the first time the citizens demanding to be controlled; the hegemonic neoliberal market, that obliges the individual to do more relentlessly normalizing the phenomenon of the “burn out”; the drive of the media to increase the need for sensational news; the recent flow of refugees, which polarized and intensified aggressive speeches in political debates, are all events contributing to what has been called the phenomenon of “adiaphorization” of violence in the everyday life (in the sense that the level of what is considered unacceptable violence is quickly decreasing). But if violence becomes a normal way to interact, how can we make sense out of this new way of communication?

  Starting from this recognition the paper presents and discusses a series of exercise developed in the post doc research that aimed to make visible the “normalisation” of violence. The exercises consisted in restaging and transforming iconic violent images found in the media. The aim of the exercise was to examine through practical exercises the impact of these images on the viewer and the strategies to disrupt the viewer’s expectations. However, while practicing the “restaging/re-enacting” we (the students and me) had the feeling, at first, that the we failed in our attempt. But then in a second time, we realized that these failures were exactly the problems that the representation of violence obliterates. 

  The presentation will examine this transition from “failure” to “discovery” and show how the very notion of failure unearthed the consciousness that violence is a limit experience, which is commodified (or instrumentalized) by the normal channels of communication.

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Seminarraum, 3rd floor, 3.K13

  Davide Giovanzana is a Swiss theatre director and researcher based in Helsinki, Finland. He has been working in several countries with different theatres ad theatre academies. His PhD investigated the phenomenon of play within the play and the dimension of the self-representation. 
  In 2017 he received the title of Honorary Professor of the Latvian Culture Academy. His current post doc artistic research, The Imagination of Violence, examines the representation of violence in the everyday life.

• Esa Kirkkopelto

  Method or medium: How do we surpass a gap without filling it up?

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  All research implies a gap between ignorance and knowledge. In academic research, this gap is surpassed by applying more or less established research methods. In artistic research (AR), however, the existence and the significance of methods is questioned. As I will argue, the lack of methods in AR is neither due to the institutionally underdeveloped nature of the research field nor to the inherent freedom of artistic creativity. Instead, it relates to the way in which AR surpasses the gap between its starting point and its results.

  As I have argued in earlier occasions, AR must aim to produce a transformation in our given ways of perceiving, behaving or performing (Kirkkopelto 2016, 2017), in order to be considered as an institutional practice. In this perspective, it seems obvious that there can be no “method”, but a medium of transformation. This short format presentation is devoted to the study of the very difference between these two.

  In methodical approach, new knowledge is built upon the old one, so that the increase of the body of knowledge annihilates the initial gap between ignorance and knowledge. In medial approach, the gap is left wide open, instead. Thus, what surpasses, is the medium, a medium that takes our bodies to the other side – a medium, which transfers, translates or transposes our bodies to dimensions they could never have accesses without the help of the new medium.

  The reflection of these transfers creates the basis for understanding the special manner in which AR constitutes an inter- or transmedial practice. This practice challenges the medial nature of disciplines. Moreover, it breaks down the divides that different media produce between the arts.

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Seminarraum, 4th floor, 4.T33

  Esa Kirkkopelto (born 1965) is a philosopher, an artist-researcher and a performing artist. He has been working at the University of the Arts Helsinki first as professor of artistic research (2007-2017), then as head of the post-doc Centre for Artistic Research (CfAR, 2017–2018). Currently, he works in the same institution as a visiting researcher. His research focuses on the deconstruction of the performing body both in theory and in practice.

• Marita Batna

  Aesthetic gaps: Thinking production and co-production in curatorial methodology

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  Exhibition-making and curatorial methodology bring to the front consideration of production on simply material, ontological terms. Projects usually involve sections of processes, for example, we can identify that there is an artistic production phase, then – the viewer’s engagement with the work. Processes are connected but the experiences aren’t one and the same, but different. With this in mind, the curator acknowledges the gaps, in fact, they realize that gaps are constitutive of “production” (of producing a view, representation) at any one stage. Each gap is also a productive instrument. If reading into an artwork or learning from “the other” isn’t passive but productive then  something new is produced and that makes a compounding effect in the progression of production. Understood in material aspect, gaps are important aesthetic instruments for generative and connected dynamics of production. Aesthetic gaps do not smooth out differences but emphasize the distance and agency. Passing of a story from one agent to another propagates production process.

  Co-production, as applied in my artistic research in the context of curatorial methodology, aims to unfold this processual framework of production. Methodologically, I drive the process of production by developing encounters and relationships with a specific remote site (an island).

  My input as part of the conference will include sharing the experiences of my research and discussing aesthetic productive gaps, firstly, within durational artistic production in a multidisciplinary project model, and secondly – as a break-through to audience. Discussion around artistic production will consider an experimental position: what does it mean to seek a process that traces early catalyzing connections for the production through the  engagement of a remote site and facilitation of group sensibility in a multidisciplinary project model? To discuss how production is extended once audience is engaged, I will present the experiences of a communication system used in my project to tangibly play out and activate aesthetic productive gaps.

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Seminarraum, 4th floor, 4.T33

  Marita Batna is a cultural producer and curator associating with media art field. Her practice-based research with Monash University in Melbourne explores processuality through application of networked and distributed curatorial design in the context of exhibition-making and curatorial methodology.

• Heidi Tikka

  Rethinking the reality of gaps – questioning disciplinary boundaries

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  In my presentation I want to challenge the idea of a gap as something that exists between predefined, bounded entities. More specifically, I will question how disciplinary boundaries are performed in collaborations. The specific case that I will address is the inquiry into the division of work between an ‘artist’ and a ‘programmer’ collaborating on an interactive installation. Drawing on recent science studies (Latour, Stengers, Haraway, Barad) I will argue that gaps are enacted in practices. These gaps result in reversals in which the practices, collaborations depend on, are backgrounded, while the roles of individuals are foregrounded, often in ways that misrepresent the creative process. The particular case explored is a production of a publicly commissioned work of art, in which I participated in the role of an artist collaborating with a software developer. Together we produced an interactive piece for a multiuser touch screen situated in a library hosting diverse public services.

  My first point is that the story of this collaboration should be told in such a way that it foregrounds the actual practices of production, as well as different objects, tools, sites and schedules which were part of our work. My central argument is that we need to think of the specific transformations that were mediated by these different inscriptional and material elements. An example of such transformation is the way we learned to think through and share the idea of a simulated camera movement in Euclidian coordinate space. In this inquiry not only the distribution of agency, but the performativity of diverse forms of agency will be rethought. My account then will describe a set of creative labours that depend on a relational field of materials and actions that are not only human. 

  My second point is that even if we worked hard to acknowledge and to productively elaborate on our shared space of creativity, the professional identities stubbornly insisted. I will reflect on how the disciplinary boundaries were enacted in this relational field and towards what consequences. 

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Seminarraum, 4th floor, 4.T33

  Heidi Tikka is a PhD candidate at the Department of Media, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Her works range from experimental films to media archaeologies and interactive installations. Most recently she has inquired into different enactments of touch with the means of cinematic databases, biosensors and large touch screen interfaces. She also works as a writer, a curator and a visiting lecturer of new media art. Documentation of recent work: heiditikka.com

• Jonathan Bass, Pierre-Emmanuel Meunier, Olivier Sidet

  Tearing apart the gaps aka Rip it up, f**k it up !

  Productive Gaps — Short format

  Sadi Carnot laid the ground for the second law of thermodynamics with its notion of disorder and the mechanics of entropy. As our expanding universe continuously rips itself into shreds, we wanted to explore ambiguous processes of undoing, opening up gaps and dismembering or otherwise scrambling stable systems. Still in its early stages, so far our attention has focused on using locally-sourced natural materials which can for a moment be ground down, combined to serve a useful purpose or ephemeral thought, then left to disintegrate again. For designers and artists, active disassembly (mooted by Dr. Joseph Chiodo) is a paradoxical yet vital approach, conceiving not only the fabricated object as an end in itself but also as a precursor of its future destruction and after-life. In our programme of research, molecular chemistry, photonics, reversible adhesives and (dys)functional materials are all being thrown into a pot and stirred up with simple problems such as how to separate the parts of a heavy statue to facilitate stealing it (Nemesis by Paul Bourget) or piercing the secrets of dust and ash particles on a burnt cadaver (Virgil Vernier's recent film made at Sophia Antipolis in Southern France). 

  Our field of enquiry has opened up the vertiginous spirituality of the "tear-down" and led us to cross paths with architects and designers from the Cigüe (Hemlock) collective who distill their poison in granular projects close to resources available in any given community. Future work with Bruno Tainturier heads into subterranean cavities to investigate cleaving the layers of geological time. At each step downwards, backwards or sideways we attempt to comprehend the fundamental aspects of making, unmaking and what lies between.

  The research group benefits from the input of a dozen postgraduate students and has deliberately sought collaborators from widely differing spheres whose work involves disruptive protocols or emotive reactions stemming from systemic breakdown. It is too soon to draw any conclusions but we can propose a few samples of what can be envisaged as a multi-variate scatter plot of disparate data. Through the various Gestalt laws of perception we are certain that seen from various angles they will reveal imaginary connections that seemingly join up those exploded dots. 

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Seminarraum, 4th floor, 4.T33

  A team of three lecturers and tutors from ENSA Limoges School of Art: Pierre-Emmanuel Meunier is a graduate from the 3 main Parisian schools of art and industrial creation. He holds a patent for a skin-marking device. Olivier Sidet worked as an industrial designer before co-founding Radi Designers (1992-2008). Jonathan Bass was a distracted researcher in immunology, art critic and broadcaster before becoming a translator and teacher of English.

• Simon Henein, Susanne Martin

  IMPROGINEERING
  or move towards the unknown, fall into a gap, and find a body there

  Productive Gaps — Long format

  In 2017 Simon Henein, a professor in microengineering, starts an improvisation course with invited guest lecturers that is open to all master students at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), a university specialized in engineering education and research. After two semesters 24 students coming from civil-, micro-, bioengineering as well as from architecture, physics, informatics or digital humanities studies get credited for performing improvised quartets on the studio stage of Arsenic, a center for contemporary performing arts. 2018 Henein takes a second step towards the unknown and invites the performer and dance researcher Susanne Martin from Berlin to conduct a post-doctoral artistic research on the practice and knowledge of improvisation and its potential within engineering studies and engineering research. She proposes to invite the microengineering researchers from his MedTech and horological laboratories into what she calls instant heterotopic laboratories. In these heterotopic spaces researchers might meet each other barefoot and in awkward configurations to explore heightened awareness, reflexivity, improvisation and the question of collective creation.

  In their presentation at SAR 10 Henein and Martin report about their transdisciplinary project on developing innovative pedagogical methods from their respective perspectives. They talk about the gaps they found, gaps they create, and gaps they attempt to bridge. They also perform a dance improvisation together and invite everybody into a simple compositional exploration. They finally open the floor for a discussion around issues such as:
   

  • Which differences and gaps in regard to disciplinary background, methods, and projected goals and outcomes become possibly productive for whom in this project?
  • Can we think of such a project as applied improvisation research and applied improvisation training, and what are the potentials and problems arising from that idea?
  • What are the effects and meanings of including a dance into this conference presentation? What kind of possibly productive gap or interruption do Henein and Martin create for themselves and for the audience in that moment?

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Aktionsraum, 5th floor, 5.K06

  Simon Henein: associate professor in microengineering at the EPFL Switzerland. Instant composition practitioner and performer. https://instantlab.epfl.ch/improgineering-2

  Susanne Martin: Berlin based choreographer, performer, and artistic researcher in contemporary dance. Currently post-doctoral researcher at the EPFL Switzerland. www.susannemartin.de

• Maria Almås Frantzsen, Ruth Hol Mjanger

  Expression of breath - using performance lecture as a method for analysis in artistic research

  Enhanced Dissemination Formats — Short format

  The presentation will show how the genre performance lecture can be used as a method for analysis in artistic research. A performance lecture is a hybrid format between arts and academia, which draws upon knowledge of form from the fields of rhetorics, research, visual and performing arts. Through our performance lecture we aim to create a space for reflections around our artistic research processes in our serial work Expressions of Breath. 

  Expressions of Breath is a developing body of work where we are using the unique properties of glass in its hot state to "capture" a multitude of breaths from different people. The sculptural forms of breath are explored in different ways after they are blown by examining its texture, visual appearance, its fragility, sound, weight, how it fits to your body, how to carry and lift it. This body of work have these research questions: What is the shape of breath? How can the invisible become visible? How do we experience this shared and unseen? 

  By our example of a performance lecture, we present a format to explicit share our analysis and reflections about the embodied experiences from our spatial and relational artwork. Our submission consists of edited conversations from the artistic process, theoretical approaches, photos/videos and live actions including physical glass sculptures.

  After our presentation we invite the artistic research community to discuss the following questions: 

  • What is the strengths/weaknesses of using performance lecture as a method for analysis? 
  • When do the presentation cross over from being a research method analyzing and discussing a completed artwork to becoming a new artwork? 
  • How does the (in)competence of reflecting our interdisciplinary artistic work through this genre come across when one member of the artist duo has her professional field in the performing arts and the other is based in the visual arts?

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Kunstraum, 5th floor, 5.K12

  Frantzsen&Mjanger is an artist duo located in Bergen, Norway, consisting of Maria Almås Frantzsen, MA in visual/glass and Ruth Hol Mjanger, associate professor in drama. In our joint artistic research we work in various environments outdoor with glass as a starting point for performative expressions. We challenge the traditional approach to the material in a meeting between crafts and participatory, performing contemporary art. www.frantzsenmjanger.com

• María Martínez-Morales, María-Isabel Moreno-Montoro

  The virtual exhibition “No es solo una cuestión de mujeres cuando de hilar se trata” as format of dissemination in the artistic research

  Enhanced Dissemination Formats — Short format

  This paper presents the virtual exhibition as a format to disseminate the processes and results of the artistic research. The proposal addresses the dilemmas posed by the circulation, dissemination and evaluation of the artistic research, to rethink and transform the format used, showing the virtual exhibition as a space for the production of knowledge. The virtual exhibition offers an ideal format to disseminate research for those cases in which exhibiting in a space could entail problems of accessibility, lack of resources or economic cost, among others. To do so, we give an account of experience No es solo una cuestión de mujeres cuando de hilar se trata, a virtual exhibition that is part of the International Project EnREDadas 2018, support by INSEA (International Society for Education Through Art). This way, we find in the virtual platform a type of application that analyzes new formats in artistic research that emphasizes the importance of showing the results and the participation rate. We expose the design, processes and results of the virtual exhibition “No es solo una cuestión de mujeres cuando de hilar se trata”. It highlights issues that derive from the use of digital media and the virtual platform as a relational space using participative action. As well as everything involve in this process that goes from the experience of the space and networks and virtual communities associated with research. Research and experimentation spaces, which relate other representation possibilities and of performativity. In particular, an approach to these virtual spaces is proposed to explore potentiality and limits as a relational device in experimental processes. This research is a work in progress and it is open to potencial ways of dissemination that it could generate over time. The virtual exhibition No es solo una cuestión de mujeres cuando de hilar se trata (https://noessolocuestionde.wixsite.com/misitio) is part of Virtual Center Art Contemporary (https://centrovirtualarte.wixsite.com/misitio), an activity of the Research Group HUM-862 Studies in Society, Arts and Cultural Management and the Association Social Action for Art (https://hum862esagec.wixsite.com/ujaen).

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Kunstraum, 5th floor, 5.K12

  María Martínez-Morales: PhD from the University of Jaén, Spain, Teacher of Art and Visual Education at the University of Jaén, Spain. Research lines around creation in intermediate artistic practices, Artistic Research and social action through art. Assistant Director and Co-editor of the digital journal "Tercio Creciente". It carries out various projects in collaboration with communities through artistic creation. 

  María-Isabel Moreno-Montoro: PhD in Fine Arts from University of Seville, Senior Lecture of Artistic and Visual Education (University of Jaén). Researcher around intermediate art practices, artistic research and social action. Responsible for research group HUM-862, "Estudios en Sociedad, Artes y Gestión Cultural”; coordinator of the Master degree “Investigación y Educación Estética”, and Director of the e-journal “Tercio Creciente”. 

• Michael Zinganel

  Driving between nodes and knots
  Addressing communities in the field of transnational mobility and arts 

  Enhanced Dissemination Formats — Short format

  In a project, investigating the recent effects of the transformation of major pan-European road corridors, connecting the former East and West of Europe, we choose to drive the triangle between Vienna, Tallinn and the Bulgarian-Turkish border several times with a mighty Ford Transit van pulling a special adapted trailer, equipped with tools for performing and documenting live mapping exercises, building up on-site interventions, collecting and exhibiting material to trigger feedback in the very field of research.

  At selected places where the flow stops and people gather, we applied mapping and exhibiting (the verbs) as relational techniques to gain information from mobile experts from a wide range of mobilities: from shipping to migration, e.g. at the canteen of the biggest logistic company in Sofia, at the exit of a ferry-boat terminal in Tallinn, or during a bus tour to the Austrian-Hungarian border station. Maps and other items produced or collected on tour were augmented with graphic novels and audio tracks, objets trouvés and works by other artists, that we transported to and collected at our a stationary lab in Vienna: This led to a continual rhythm of research, dissemination, and re-evaluation taking place almost simultaneously, which effected methods of research and representation.

  The mobile lab allowed us to both disseminate research findings amongst mobile and local communities alongside our routes, as well as analyse further narratives and objects from the field. Results from fieldwork were displayed alongside broader findings in related locations, providing a means of involving local actors and public spaces. Contributing to research and becoming part of a project was attributing a unexpected value and respect for their nodes and knots, their way of living and doing publics, moving them from the margins of discourse to the stage of ‘Europe’ in the making.
  But for also addressing the specific academic publics and communities of art based research, interim research findings were also shown at cultural institutions alongside our routes, ending with a large exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and a proposition for the Journal of Artistic Research: Zinganel & Hieslmair. “Stop and Go.” JAR, 14 (2017): https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/330596/330597

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Kunstraum, 5th floor, 5.K12

  Michael Zinganel is a cultural historian, scholar and artist in Vienna, teaching at various universities. He worked e.g. about “The productivity of Crime for Art, Architecture and Urban Design” (his dissertation) and transnational mobility, tourism and migration. In 2012 he co-founded the independent research institute Tracing Spaces, 2014–16 he headed the project "Stop and Go: Nodes of Transformation and Transition" about traffic corridors in Eastern Europe at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

• SPECIAL SESSION RC

  The Research Catalogue as Research Tool for Individual Researchers and Institutions

  Special — Long format

  For artistic research, the mode of presentation of research results is essential, and traditional formats for research documentation are not designed for this field of research. Internationally the most prominent solution is offered by the Society for Artistic Research (SAR) through the Research Catalogue (RC), which provides an online Open Access rich media platform for research.

  The RC enables artists/researchers to deviate from the standard format of journal articles and/or research repositories/archives:

  • because images and sounds are not subordinate to, but fundamentally on par with the text;
  • because of the possibility provided to break out of the linear narrative structure;
  • because if offers an international environment for presenting and archiving research activities and outcomes within a secured rich media platform;
  • because it facilities options for continuous and collaborative research activities from initial findings to fully elaborated publications.

  The RC offers the researcher an online platform in which sound, images, video and text can be combined in an integrated format for presentation, and in which the visual disposition and the focus on different media formats can be decided by the author herself/himself.

  During this session, we will demonstrate how RC can be used for a number of research activities both for the individual researcher as well as for institutional purposes, including the benefits of becoming a portal partner within SAR.

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block IV, 11.15am
  Viaduktraum, 2nd floor, 2.A05

  The presentation will be done by representatives from the Society for Artistic Research (SAR), including the SAR Executive Officer Johan A Haarberg.

• SPECIAL SESSION JAR

  Questioning JAR

  Special — Long format

  The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) has been publishing expositions of practice as research since 2011. Its emphasis on articulations of practice in a media-rich and multimodal environment has changed the way in which artistic researchers can conduct their discourse. Peer-reviewers are asked not to compare a submission to a list of criteria, but to think with and through a submission in order to get to the artistic concerns. Since the form an exposition takes matters that what it can articulate, JAR explicitly invites unconventional, intermedial and transdisciplinary approaches in order to find out what else artistic research can be.

  The field of publishing of artistic research has changed over the years with periodicals both on and off the Research Catalogue (RC) offering different models, review processes and contextualization. While much has been achieved over the years, JAR is aware that some of the more sticky points continue to require our attention. Now that we can look back on our own history and compare it with what else is happening in the field, with this panel, JAR likes to take stock and raise questions whose discussion will influence future developments of the journal.

  In a continuing process of discussion running to the conference, the JAR Editorial Board collects a list of key questions, which it will present during the panel. Each question will be further unfolded in a short statement by one of the editors followed by a discussion with the audience. Questions that may be raised include: Why is it still so rare that artistic researchers quote and work with what others have put on the table? Why are modes of documentation not challenged more? How important is the artistic quality demonstrated in expositions of practice as research? What are the implications of subjective approaches and the frequent use of the first person singular? Etc.

  We will reserve time for the audience to raise its own questions.

  Friday March 22nd
  Session block III, 4.30pm
  Viaduktraum, 2nd floor, 2.A05

  This session will be followed by an informal Q&A JAR Open Session at 6pm: The Editorial Board of the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) is available to answer questions about the journal, its submission and peer-review process as well as what kind of submissions it seeks.

  The session is held by the Editorial Board of the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR).

• SPECIAL SESSION SAR2019

  Roundtable: SAR Conference 2019 Applications – Experiences, Observations and Surprises

  Special — Long format

  With annually more than 200 submissions since 2015 and more than 230 submissions this year the SAR Conference on Artistic Research has become internationally the place where you can get a unique insight in Artistic Research all over the world.

  Nevertheless, the participants of the conference will be able to get to know only a small part of even the selected 60 contributions that will be presented and discussed.

  The selection committee, which had to evaluate all of the submissions thought that it could be of interest to offer the participants a slot, where its members talk about their experiences, observations, surprises and where they may give some general feedback for next year’s applicants.

  Saturday March 23rd
  Session block V, 2.30pm
  Viaduktraum, 2nd floor, 2.A05

  Members of the SAR Conference 2019 Selection Committees will held the roundtable.

Registration

Practical Information