The Postresearch Condition

19.30-21.00: (Postponed to May 21) Proposition by Peter Osborne (Kingston University, London), No Going Back – But not Forward to There Either, and discussion with Hito Steyerl (UdK Berlin). Moderated by Henk Slager (Conference organizer, HKU Utrecht).

15.00-18.00: EARN Working Group 1: Methodologies (co-organizer: Uniarts Helsinki). Workshop: Continuous Prototypes. Rethinking Artistic Research through the Concept of the Continuous Prototype. In the workshop we introduce the Continuous Prototype ­– a metaphor, a construction – through which it is possible to examine both artistic work and research practice.

18.00-19.30: Vytautas Michelkevicius (Vilnius Academy of Arts), Launch of the Atlas of Diagrammatic Imagination: Maps in Research, Art and Education (eds. Vytautas Michelkevicius & Lina Michelkevice, VDA 2019); Florian Cramer (Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam), Research practices of self-organized collectives vs. managerial visions of artistic research. Moderated by Arja Veerman (HKU, Utrecht).

15.00-18.00: EARN Working Group 2: Sustainability (co-organizer: UCL London/Slade School of Fine Art). Workshop: Sustainability: Re-Visioning the work of Art and the Academic Conference. This workshop addresses two overarching questions: What are the methods and forms of a sustainable art practice? What are the possible models for a sustainable ‘academic’ conference?

18.00-19.30: Proposition by Denise Ferreira da Silva (University of British Colombia, Vancouver), Corpus Infinitum, moderated by Mick Wilson (Valand Academy/Gothenburg University).

10.00-13.00: EARN Working Group 3: Curatorial Issues (co-organizer: HDK-Valand Academy Gothenburg). Workshop: Expo-Facto: Into the Algorithm of Exhibition? The ascendancy within the contemporary art system of e-flux announcements, social media posting, art-blogging, website mediation of exhibition and jpeg-enabled art sales has been in place for some time.

14.00-15.00: Proposition by Terike Haapoja (Helsinki/New York), How to Become Human, Moderated by Annette Krauss (HKU Utrecht / Academy of Fine Arts Vienna).

15.15-18.00: EARN Working Group 4: The Politics of Aesthetics (co-organized by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) This workshop explores the relationship between politics and aesthetics, how can aesthetic forms challenge the violence of interpretation based on the subject – object dichotomy, processes of categorization bringing about inclusion / exclusion, or the spectacle of the pain of the others. Instead, how can they strive for indeterminacy, adjacency and an openness to difference beyond integration and othering. Does an encounter with alterities in the aesthetic realm prepare for an encounter with alterity in the social field?

18.00-19.30: Proposition by Amanda Beech (CalArts, Los Angeles), Art’s Intolerable Knowledge. Moderated by Iris van der Tuin (Utrecht University).

10.00-11.30: Collective Proposition: PhD in Practice program, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna: Angela Anderson, Anca Benera, Rehema Chachage, Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew, Masimba Hwati, Hyo Lee, Serena Lee, Azar Mahmoudian, Aykan Safoğlu, Anna Tjé, Sonic Entanglements. Moderated by Kitty Zijlmans (Leiden University).

12.00-14.00: EARN Working Group 5: Value (co-organizer: Luca School of Arts Brussels). Art and research create new forms of insight, experience, communities of learning, non-disciplinary forms of knowledge and action. Their recognition and appropriate application require different forms of attention, valuing, and articulating what we value. Outlining the roles of trust, recognition, and expressing preferences, this session asks fundamental questions around what we value, at a time when the prosperity of life—including our own—on this planet, is questioned daily.

14.30-15.30: Closing Proposition by Irit Rogoff (Goldsmiths, University of London), Not Yet. Moderated by Odile Heynders (Tilburg University).

'No Going Back – But Not Forward to There Either:
Once More on Art and/as Research'

This talk will reflect upon the contradictions between the intellectually substantive and the purely administrative and legitimating functions of discourses of artistic ‘practice as research’, and how they might be mediated and negotiated by practitioners. These discourses and the distributive practices they establish and sustain are not likely to go away in the near future. The idea of a ‘post-research situation’ is merely a paradoxical extension of the ‘research situation in the same way that the terminology of the ‘postmodern’ was a reflexively self-contradictory way of extending the temporality of the modern under the conditions of the aging of a particular ‘modern’.

www.kingston.ac.uk/staff/profile/professor-peter-osborne-392/

Intervention

Following on from Peter Osborne’s presentation Hito Steyerl will focus the discussion through a series of questions and comments.

http://www.andrewkreps.com/artists/the-work-of-hito-steyerl

Atlas of Diagrammatic Imagination: Visual Argumentation in Artistic Research

How does a diagram differ from a text? What are the pros and cons of diagrams when compared to text? Can a map be a research component, an artwork, and a scientific means of communication, all at the same time? How do diagrams mediate between different cognitive systems? How can diagrams convey bodily experiences and gestures? How do they facilitate education? These are only few questions that delineate a general research territory where the book authors’ imaginations overlap.

Even though cartographic references play an important role, many of the maps presented and discussed in this atlas go beyond the geographical notion of map, and they often bear no reference to either a location or its representation. They may involve multilayered diagrams, trajectories of a freely moving body or a hand, visual signs of hesitancy, tools of material or visual thinking, charts of tacit knowledge, notations of sensual data, or the models of research hypotheses or findings.

Atlas of Diagrammatic Imagination: Maps in Research, Art and Education, Lina Michelkevičė & Vytautas Michelkevičius (eds.), Vilnius Academy of Arts Press, 2019

https://vilnius.academia.edu/VytautasMichelkevicius

Research practices of self-organized collectives vs. managerial visions of artistic research

This lecture will compare the practices of multidisciplinary art/research collectives to the definition of "A.R." ("Artistic Research") in the 2020 Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research written by European art schools. The material, cultural and community-oriented research of artist collectives such as Display Distribute and Jatiwangi Art Factory sharply contrast with the "A.R." that art schools now claim to own and legitimize through standard means of academic validation. Can these two forms of artistic research still be reconciled?

My examples and arguments draw on the NWO research project 'Brideging Art, Design and Technology through Material Practices' and a critique of the "Vienna Declaration" I co-wrote with Nienke Terpsma from Fucking Good Art (to published in OPEN!).

http://floriancramer.nl

Corpus Infinitum

As a contribution to reconsidering artistic research, in this talk I return to the description of the mental operation – Kant’s judgement -- grounding the post-Enlightenment notions of the scientific, ethic, and aesthetic. Instead of an analysis or an exegesis of judgement, I propose a thought experiment that guide a speculation on a basis for thinking, an image of existence, which is not contained by the presuppositions and prescriptions of the Kantian program.

Neither a concept nor a notion, this image of existence radically departs from post-Enlightenment thinking and its metaphysical basis, onto-epistemological descriptors, and onto-epistemological pillars (separability, determinacy, and sequentiality). In doing so, it allows for an approach to knowing that does not presume something like a mind (Kant's I think) and its separation from something like a body, nature, or world (that is, everything else that exists). As the title shows, the proposed image allows for descriptors that presume that every existent (human and more than human) is a body (corpus) without limits (infinitum).

https://grsj.arts.ubc.ca/person/denise-ferreira-da-silva/

Art’s Intolerable Knowledge

From the studio to the essay, it is normatively expected that the work of contemporary art is to make us think. But what is this thinking? The most common answer is that the general claim “to think” by art must operate without telos, project or aim and be located in the present temporalities of expression, far removed from meta narratives or any legitimizing practices that would verify art’s use value, for this would claim art to be akin to either the physical or natural sciences.

Such anti reductivist claims have historically been wrapped up in an opposition between critique and reason. Today’s predilection for immanent critique now discloses the bottom-line belief that, by simply being art (ironically) art represents the opposition to the normativity of reason itself. In this way art has served its political purpose as being without purpose, since its openness leverages the possibility of other worlds from the space of the fictive, the hypothetical and the imagination. But beyond this antirealism, the question of knowledge remains, the stakes of how art might be a form of knowing, as well as if it can produce knowledge remains ignored and unanswered from the side of postmodern critique. In a world of post-truth politics, how can art speak to the problem of the real, truth and facticity from inside a disciplinary practice? This is where we must advance a turn to another perspective on reason.

http://amandabeech.com

How to become Human?

Laura Gustafsson and Terike Haapoja’s three channel video installation Becoming (2020) explores emergent ways of relating to ourselves, others and the world. In the video 37 interviewees chart the current state of the world and its people. They contemplate phenomena that are in bud at this very moment, and which should be nurtured. The project is accompanied by a publication Bud Book – A Manual for Earthly Living that makes suggestions for how to live as a human being in a world endangered by the old way of being human. In her presentation How to Become Human Terike Haapoja discusses the problematic universalism of the anthropocene discourse and what art can contribute to the task of becoming human otherwise.

www.terikehaapoja.net

Listening / Sounding and the Politics of Aesthetics

The PhD in Practice Program (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) provides a collective proposition, which discusses in a series of short experiments in how far sounding and listening might mine and undermine the violence of normative dualisms in the art-based research and thereby explore the potentialities of concepts like the break, frequency, listening to images, or resonance.
With: Angela Anderson, Anette Baldauf, Anca Benera, Rehema Chachage, Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew, Masimba Hwati, Hyo Lee, Serena Lee, Renate Lorenz, Azar Mahmoudian, Aykan Safoğlu, and Anna Tjé.

www.akbild.ac.at/Portal/studium/studienrichtungen/phd-in-practice

Not Yet

‘Hope”, Ernst Bloch tells us, “Resides in the Not Yet”. Research shares the same drive towards the not yet known, the not yet imaginable, the not yet articulable. This presentation will focus on that which is in the works, rather than that which can be calculable and pre-empted. If, as I believe the case, we currently work from conditions rather than from inherited knowledges, then our conditions are constantly changing - at this moment so visibly around contagion and around racialisation - then the drive of our research shifts its course fuelled by different urgencies.

Not urgencies to solve problems, that is the arena of applied research, but in creating problems: creating better, sharper, more insistent problems. I have been working with the term ‘Advanced Practices’ for the past few years, thinking of how we advance the grounds for practice without landing it in the metrics driven evaluation process that demands knowing in advance, rather than giving practice driven research the opportunity for advancing.

www.bakonline.org/person/irit-rogoff/

(co-organized by Uniarts Helsinki)

Rethinking the Concept of Prototype – Demonstrating Artistic Research

Speakers: Methodology group members Petri Kaverma, Tero Heikkinen, Denise Ziegler
Guest speakers: Katarzyna Depta-Garapich, Falk Huebner, Nicholas Laessing

In the workshop we introduce the Continuous Prototype ­– a metaphor, a construction –through which it is possible to examine both artistic work and research practice. The continuous prototype can be a concrete object but most of all it is a combination of thinking and doing. It demonstrates the current state of a work (or text) in progress and/or indicates the direction of development it might take. As the continuous prototype has non-chronological or non-stable features it aims at continuously disassembling itself and constructing new prototypes instead of developing existing ones.

After an introduction of the concept of the Continuous Prototype (in contrast to the prototype used in industrial product development or the prototype concept used in behavior theory), the following questions are starting points for the workshop:

What is:

• the continuous prototype of skills (in contrast to the prototype of skills)?
• the shape of the continuous prototype, what does it actually look like?
• the next useful metaphor to describe and to develop artistic research?

Where is:

• a continuous prototype to be found?
• the limit of a continuous prototype?

During the workshop the participants will also make something with their own hands. This way we put into practice how the Continuous Prototype might be useful in artistic research praxis, how it works as a playful part of the learning processes. Our suggested concept of the Continuous Prototype can be an impetus for reflection on the participants’ own recent working processes and their states of completeness – How finished our works have to be. When is a continuous prototype ready?

Instruction: Bring paper and pencils to the workshop.

Programme:

• 15.00 Opening
• 15.10 Introduction: Continuous Prototype research method
• 15.20 Case exercise 1 - Petri Kaverma
• 15.30 Case exercise 2 - Denise Ziegler
• 15.40 Case exercise 3 – Tero Heikkinen
• 15.50 Questions
• 16.00 Break
• 16.15 Response Guest 1 – Kasia Depta-Garapich
• 16.45 Break
• 17.00 Response Guest 2 – Falk Hübner
• 17.30 Final Discussion

(co-organized by: UCL London/Slade School of Fine Art)

The Slade doctoral programme presents a set of workshops and presentations addressing issues of ecological and cultural sustainability. These include: a workshop revealing historical connections between medieval trade routes and ballad translations; an interrogation of the concept of Europe through mapping; propositions for a sustainable art practice; proposals for the sustainability of public space; a prototype for an imaginary new sensory tasting device; a reconfiguration of the relation between ‘nature’ and ‘human’ as a new form of ‘we’; sustainabilty of art materials, in particular paint; a choral voicing of our differences as mutual.

Presenters: Zoë Quick, Kasia Depta-Garapich and Nastassja Simensky, Nick Laessing, Re/Source (Esther van de Wiel/Joost Adriaanse); Ellie Doney, Christina Della Giustina and co-ordinated by Onya McCausland.
Each participant needs to be able to make a sound recording (via mobile phone or laptop) and uploaded via Zoom.

Programme:

• 15.00 Opening address - Sharon Morris
• 15.10 Ballad Translations - Zoë Quick
• 15.30 “Broad of Aspect” - Kasia Depta-Garapich and Nastassja Simensky
• 15.50 What are the methods and forms of a sustainable art practice? - Nick Laessing
• 16.10 Break 20 minutes
• 16.30 You are variations a performative lecture - Christina Della Giustina
• 16.50 Landscape painting (who owns this anyway?) - Onya McCausland
• 17.10 Chorale of The Nameless Choir: listening to self and other, the local and the global - Christina Della Giustina and Sharon Morris

Expo-Facto: Into the algorithm of exhibition

(co-organized by Valand Academy/Gothenburg University)

The ascendancy within the contemporary art system of e-flux announcements, social media posting, art-blogging, website mediation of exhibition and jpeg-enabled art sales has been in place for some time. However, there has been, in the context of the COVID19 global pandemic, an intensification of the relays between exhibition protocols and the culture of digital networks. In what seems like a global institutional convergence – similar in ways to the pervasive distribution of white cube though much more accelerated – there has been a widespread adoption of the exhibition-online as the immediate solution to the demands of physical distancing, lock-down and travel restriction in the context of the global pandemic. This would seem to warrant some critical reflection and analysis in its own right. What is at stake in this drive to online exhibition? What are the operative presumptions about exhibition that inform this imperative? How do we think through the protocols of exhibition as enquiry in the era of the algorithmic? (This session builds on an earlier discussion in June 2020 and is also connected to the PARSE issue in exhibition in development for June 2021.

See https://exhibition.school/exhibitions-online-what-for/ and https://parsejournal.com/opencall/on-the-question-of-exhibition/ )

Invited speakers include: The Aesthetics Group (https://aestheticsgroup.net/); Prof. Carolina Rito (https://carolinarito.com/about/) ; Prof. Noel Fitzpatrick (http://www.gradcam.ie/people/dr-noel-fitzpatrick-doc-es-lettres-dean-of-gradcam/).

Programme:

• 10.00 Introduction - Prof. Mick Wilson
• 10.15 Attention (distraction) - Prof. Noel Fitzpatrick followed by short discussion
• 10.50 The Aesthetics of Display - Aesthetics group followed by short discussion
• 11.45 Presentation - Prof. Carolina Rito followed by short discussion
• 12.40 Closing discussion
• 13:00 Close

(co-organized by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Warburg Institute London).

How to challenge the investment in the relationship between power and knowledge, the ferocity of epistemic violence, or the spectacle of the pain of others? In this workshop we claim that it is precisely the opacity of artistic practices, their refusal to be reduced to meaning and the radical indeterminacy of form, relation, and artistic matter, which has the potential to support (artistic) research's striving for decolonizing, destraightening and adjacency. How can we unfold this potential and translate these means from the realm of aesthetics into that of the social and the political? Can an encounter with alterity in the aesthetic realm prepare for an encounter with alterity in the social field?

This workshop starts off with a performance by the artist Ruth Jenrbekova, playfully setting the terms for the following experimentation with different ways of engaging with objects (of artistic research). After a general introduction into the interests of this workshop, the group then is divided into two workshop strands, one organized by Azadeh Fatehrad, and one by Renate Lorenz and Anette Baldauf.

The first workshop investigates the potentialities of close description (Anette Baldauf) and the processes of abstraction (Renate Lorenz), approached as both, aesthetics and ethics of artistic production. Description is proposed here as a tool to defer classification and instead foster attentiveness and putting oneself in relation to an other. Abstraction – introduced in relation to an exhibition by artist Park McArthur – is suggested as means of withdrawing objectification and of embracing radical difference in the encounter with art. The participants are invited to engage with the material, the concepts and additional frameworks of their own choice in writing experiments and discussion.

The second strand evolves around the significance of referring to histories in different geographical locations. It uses the keyword Decentring to invite practitioners to link their work to the EARN’s Working Group 4 glossary; a series of verbs that - together - form an evolving lexicon for the diverse modes contribute to expanded artistic practice. The focus is primarily on the multiplicity of history, visual culture and its socio-political associations that coexist (and could be traced, captured or illustrated) in different parts of the world.

Programme:

• 15.15 – 15.30: Performative introduction: Ruth Jenrbekova
• 15.30 – 15.45: General introduction
• 15.45 – 18.00: Workshops, part 1 and 2

(co-organized by Luca School of Arts Brussels)

Art and research create new forms of insight, experience, communities of learning, non-disciplinary forms of knowledge and action. Their recognition and appropriate application require different forms of attention, valuing, and articulating what we value. Outlining the roles of trust (in creating supportive, risk-taking research environments), recognition (in noticing an aspect and acknowledging its contribution to the knowledge shared by communities of practice(s), and expressing preferences (in lieu of expecting boundary-crossing work to fit existing measurement systems), this session asks fundamental questions around what we value, at a time when the prosperity of life—including our own—on this planet, is questioned daily.

Presenters: Rolf Hughes and Rachel Armstrong. Format: table discussion (world café) and closing panel discussion.

Programme:

• 12.00 – 12.30: Keynote Dialogue: Rolf Hughes and Rachel Armstrong (Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven)
• 12.30 – 13.30: Round Tables
  • Trust (moderated by Peter Peters, Maastricht University)
  • Recognition (moderated by Rolf Hughes, KU Leuven)
  • Preferences (moderated by Peter De Graeve, LUCA School of Arts)
• 13.30 – 14.00: Panel Discussion

This workshop is developed in collaboration with the Faculty of Architecture KU Leuven and MCICM Maastricht University.