| 1. |
- Akner Koler, Cheryl
(author)
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Form & Formlessness : Questioning aesthetic abstractions through art projects, cross-disciplinary studies and product design education.
- 2007
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This research is based on empirical, embodied studies aimed to generate and regenerate aesthetic reasoning through three approaches:an educational approach concerned with developing an aesthetic discipline, supporting a formgiving process aimed to create tangible artifacts.an art-based approach supporting an open exploration of distortion and formlessnessa multi-disciplinary exploratory approach concerned with aesthetic experiences shared in laborations demonstrating complexity and transformation. The overall aim of the thesis is to explore different types of aesthetic abstractions that elaborate aesthetic reasoning about form and formlessness. The thesis develops methods and models for aesthetic investigation that support, challenge and go beyond the normative conceptions of beauty, with high relevance for teaching 3-D formgiving aesthetics and research by design methodologies. A central method applied throughout the entire research project is a cooperative inquiry method engaging students and experienced professionals as co-researchers in embodied/ interactive physical form studies and laborations. The content of the thesis is presented in three parts relating to the approaches above: -Part 1 defines an aesthetic nomenclature organized within a taxonomy of form in space. This aesthetic taxonomy is outlined in five levels based on essential aesthetic abstractions, emphasizing structure and inner movement in relation to the intention for the development of a gestalt. It originates from the educational program of Alexander Kostellow and Rowena Reed and has been further developed through an iterative educational process using a Concept-translation-form method, resulting in the Evolution of Form (EoF)-model. This EoF-model reciprocally weaves together geometric structures and organic principles into a sequence of seven-stages. To question the normative principles of beauty inherent in the EoF-model, a bipolar +/- spectrum was introduced at each stage to expand the model, aiming for a more inclusive approach to aesthetics. -Part 2, both challenges and expands the aesthetic reasoning in part 1 through i) solo sculptural exhibitions exploring properties of distortion and transparency in a constructivist art community ii) collaborative projects with physicists concerning infinity and studies of continuous complex curvatures and iii) explorative studies of material breakdown and non-visual studies with ID masters students at Konstfack. - Part 3 problematizes the taxonomy of form by applying methods and results from a cross-disciplinary study of complexity and transformation involving artists, physicists, designers and architects. The three year study explored temporal events of changing phenomena and formlessness that did not comply with any traditional aesthetic norms. Based on the experience from 12 laborations, three models were developed: The Transformation-model and Framing the dialogue-model were developed to physically interact with as well as to document and discuss change and transformation through bipolar reasoning. The Aesthetic phase transition-model was developed to capture the particular properties expressed in a transformation and unify stable objects with changing events. In conclusion, the thesis claims the value of an inclusive aesthetic mode of abstract reasoning in the scientific and design communities. A provisional 3 modes of abstraction-model is presented placing numeric, linguistic and aesthetic modes of abstraction as interdependent within a spectrum from separation to contextualization.
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| 2. |
- Avila, Martin, 1972
(author)
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Devices. On Hospitality, Hostility and Design
- 2012
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis studies and speculates upon the interrelations of artefacts with human and nonhuman agents. These interrelations form assemblages, some of which have emergent properties, becoming manifestations of processes that we cannot fully control or understand. The work started by exploring the theme of hospitality and hostility with the ambition to better understand the ecological complexity of the design process and its results. As an assemblage, this work combines different literary, philosophical and theoretical discourses and traditions with experimental design in order to develop and articulate the concept of device. A device organizes, arranges, frames our environment and thereby defines and limits possibilities of relation. Since relations can only be thought through a so-called natural language such as English, they must be taken into consideration through the process of languaging, understood by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela as communication about communication”, and as the most characteristic feature of the human species. My focusing on linguistic and biological phenomena is a response to this concern, in an attempt to understand how this process influences our perception of the world. Through a series of design projects, the thesis examines the potential range of an artefact’s relations. It does so by exploring grammatical associations that affect design onceptualizations, creating tools (prepositiontools) as well as studying and articulating forms of symbiosis that an artefact might develop in and with its environment (¡Pestes!).
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| 3. |
- Bauer, Petra
(author)
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Sisters! Making Films, Doing Politics : An Exploration in Artistic Research
- 2016
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- How does film become a political act? That is the question that the artistic research project Sisters! Making Films, Doing Politics revolves around. Taking Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the constitution of the political arena as its point of departure, this dissertation reflects on the aesthetic mechanisms that underlie contemporary strategies for collective and feminist filmmaking. Sisters! Making Films, Doing Politics draws on the particular historical archive of radical filmmaking and film theory that relates to the British film collectives of the 1970s: The Berwick Street Film Collective, Cinema Action and The London Women’s Film Group. Inspired by a Marxist-feminist tradition, these collectives explicitly sought to involve film in the political discussions and events that at that time took place in British society. In the dissertation’s first chapter, which deals with these film collectives, a theoretical, historical and artistic framework is established that is subsequently developed in four chapters that discuss the film productions that constitute the artistic core of the project: Sisters! (2011), Mutual Matters (2012), Choreography for the Giants (2013) and Conversation: Stina Lundberg Dabrowski Meets Petra Bauer (2010). As the dissertation argues, each of these films productions discloses specific aspects of the relation of politics and film aesthetics. It goes on to identify the precise relationships and the displacements that take place between the historical material, Arendt’s concept of the political act and the production of the films. A the centre of the investigation stands Sisters!, a film project carried out in collaboration with the London-based feminist organisation Southall Black Sisters.
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| 4. |
- Bergholm, Adam, 1977-
(author)
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Key Notes on the Unruly City : Social, Material, and Spatial Transgressions
- 2023
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This research departs from three intersecting field studies in Berlin, Copenhagen, and Paris, and includes both my interventions in the urban texture and integrations with existing communities working in the subject field of the Right to the City (Lefebvre 1968). The projects explore the mutable “nature” of cities and build on political philosophies which describe egalitarian actions that have shaped what those places could be. Laid out across three chapters (X, Y & Z) are descriptions of work processes for multiple projects that locate a social and spatial phenomenon which I call “the unruly city.”Manufactured keys, trapdoors, dug-out tunnels, informal dissemination, bricolaged furniture, loopholes, pulleys, hatches, and shacks recur throughout the thesis; each of these tools, methods or architectural elements support a praxis of transgressivism and stealth. Even if the practical constructions, historical investigations, and cultural theory analyses explored in the thesis do not give access to the physical places themselves, they unlock rooms in the reader’s political imagination, by showing that such spaces exist. At the core of Lefebvre’s philosophical and political argument is the call for action. Praxis is understood here as holding the potential of critical performativity: the possibility to merge culture and politics with claims of creating access to the urban and the production of space. A promise of going beyond philosophy and theory to arrive at praxis. Jacques Rancière (2019) theorizes that which is recognized as (im)possible through sensation. In effect, Rancière addresses a regulation of what can be done. By departing from such an aesthetic order of distributed sensibility, there is the possibility to make a true politics; one which can peel off the foreclosing façades of Western democracy, where the order of things is contested by, as Rancière frames it, the part which has no part. This would be an active politics that challenges the policed order of inclusions and exclusions regarding of what is felt, seen, heard, and perceived. A politics of affect, accomplished by spatial, material, and theoretical practices. In order to imagine the unimaginable—whether it is about spaces, living conditions, or coded systems—imagination must transgress into praxis: speech acts that contributes to our perception, and the other way around. Here, each work becomes a monument to the is-possible—a concrete, non-abstract refutation of any arguments which claim another way of creating or engaging with the city beyond that which is commercially sanctioned to be impossible.
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| 5. |
- Berríos-Negrón, Luis, 1971-
(author)
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Breathtaking Greenhouse Parastructures : a supplement to the Arcades Project from a Caribbean Perspective [and a call for a careful practice of epistemológica].
- 2020
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Breathtaking Greenhouse Parastructures is a doctoral work that supplements the unfinished modern opus The Arcades Project [in German Das Passagen-Werk (Mit Bindestrich und Werk mit Capital W) ]. The supplement takes the form of a sculptural, historical, and technological deposition of ‘greenhouse’ that presently oscillates between a past-background and future-foreground to Walter Benjamin's ‘theatrical’ handling of the Parisian arcades. From my Caribbean perspective, that oscillating treatment of ‘greenhouse’ affords me a prop from which to activate the following question: is colonial memory the drive of Global Warming? That core question has led me to retrospectively hypothesise that the technology of ‘greenhouse’ is—beyond metaphor—the illusory (dis)embodiment of the toxic binaries of interior & exterior that are still shaping various influential frameworks such as the modern & Marxian ideas of superstructure, as well as the past & future of Western natural sciences (and their histories). Because of that illusory, spectral, if paranormal power, ‘greenhouse’ becomes at once the Western colonial enframing to both the messianic promise for conserving biological history, as well as the messianic remedy to suppress the traumæ that are destining Global Warming. Also, because of that potent (dis)embodied character, the robust analysis of the manifold instrumentalisation of ‘greenhouse’ is set to play a primary role in deposing the geological timeline of the Anthropocene. Now, while the book-supplement is itself the dissertation (as an unpacking of the aforementioned hypothetical findings), the PhD also relies on two other research devices that are worth mentioning: an installation (titled Anarquivo Negantrópico), and an online journal (titled Intransitive Journal). Altogether, the dissertation offers a field from which to asses my broader experimentation with infrastructures, epistemic things, and social pedestals. Moreover, the dissertation revises the so-called forgotten list of ‘Epistemologica’ (the categorical of Western display preparations and phenomenotechnologies) so to format my study and practice into an adaptable, careful, and differentiated kind of epistemológica…a careful study and practice that we may share as object-relations that proportionately (dis)play more-than-human perspectives for (re)mediating the forms and forces of the climate crises.
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| 6. |
- Broms, Loove, 1977-
(author)
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Storyforming : Experiments in creating discursive engagements between people, things and environments
- 2014
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis introduces and critically reflects on a design programme, Storyforming, that explores ways to design objects and places to enrich daily life narratives. Using an experimental design approach, the goal is to exemplify and explore this idea with discursive artefacts that, through their physical and temporal form, act as catalysts in the construction of meaningful experiences.In the current sustainability discourse, behavioural change has been pointed out as a key factor in achieving a sustainable society. Historically, design has been very effective in increasing production and consumption behaviours by creating new types of needs and, in a way, manufacturing desire (Forty, 1986). Drawing on this, the overarching aim of this thesis is the investigation of the ways design, through a suggested programme, can afford alternative types of meaningful experiences in contrast to the prevailing consumer culture.The empirical work reported in the thesis stems from several research projects looking into the matter of energy use in relation to design. In addition, two of the projects have been carried out in the author’s own design practice. Some concepts are explored more in-depth—involving events such as field studies, situated interviews, workshops, prototype building, design interventions in the form of domestication probes, and contextual studies ranging from a few weeks up to a year—while other concepts exist only as sketches or photo montages. The diversity of these concepts, the design experiments, helps span a design space becoming a new provisional design programme. The idea for this programme has evolved from observations and reflections made throughout the experiments presented in the thesis.The general results are the suggested approach of Storyforming, which focuses on the design of artefacts supporting daily narratives that can be used to create engagement, meaning, and alternative values applicable to the discourse of sustainable behaviour.Specific contributions are the selection of design experiments. In the thesis, the experiments have first been examined from the perspective of stories and forming as a basis for the new programme formulation. Through this articulation of the programme, the experiments are revisited through three leitmotifs, part of the provisional programme focusing on different properties related to the aspect of forming. From the perspective of the user, these themes—seeing and accessing designs, exploring and expressing complexity, and sharing experiences and negotiating use—are finally elaborated on in relation to other theoretical concepts as well as their implications for future research.
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| 7. |
- Bärtås, Magnus, 1962
(author)
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You Told Me – work stories and video essays : Verkberättelser och videoessäer
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- You Told Me is a practice-based research project and consists of three video biographies (the Who is…? series), and two video essays (Kumiko, Johnnie Walker & the Cute (2007), Madame & Little Boy (2009), an introduction with a contextualization and methodology of the field, and three essays. The dissertation is an observation and analysis of certain functions and meanings of narration and narratives in contemporary art, as well as being an experiment with roles, methods, actions, and narrative functions in an artistic medium – the video essay. Using the methods of “pilgrimage” (Chris Marker) and essayistic practices, and by revisiting and retelling biographies, this work tries to find a place in between collective and personal memory. During the practical process and the reflective theoretical work the different elements or instances of the video essay are identified: the subject matter, the images (the representation), the artist/author, the narrative/text, and the narrator/voice. In documentary film the lack of natural correspondence between these entities is often dissolved or denied – this work instead exposes the instances as separate units. A question arises: What alternative roles can be established between these elements, for example by negotiation and transference between them? The methodological part of the text focuses on the conceptual invention made during the process, which I have called work story [verkberättelse]. A work story is a written or oral narrative about the forming of materials, immaterial units, situations, relations, and social practices that constitutes, or leads to, an artwork. By discussing analogies between storytelling, collecting, and biographical accounts together with examples from conceptual art, the dissertation shows how the work story is not only crucial for the understanding of the artwork but that the act of making and the very order or sequence in which the making proceeds often have symbolic, metaphorical, metonymical, political, and even epistemological meanings. In an extended form a work story disseminates meaning rather than capturing it. This is the essayistic work story that permits a writer/artist to wander off and touch upon a subject as if in passing, reproducing its neglected genealogy and destiny in the detailed materiality of the work story.
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| 8. |
- Frögård, Maja, 1985-
(author)
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Negotiating Tensions : Designers’ responsibilities in democratic entanglements
- 2021
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis concerns the roles and responsibilities of designers when we design workshops with democratic ambitions. Reflecting on my experiences from making co-design workshops for citizen participation to support sustainable urban development in municipal planning processes, I inquire into designers’ societal entanglements and explore these from democratic, social, political and designerly perspectives. Designing workshops in municipal planning processes made me curious about the diverse interpretations and practices of democracy. Seeking to make sense of my role in relation to these, I trace intertwinements between design and democracy. I reflect on how industrial designers’ roles are historically entangled with market-driven relations, formed by production and consumption. I also look at how political theory and philosophy articulate tensions within democracy, and criticise neoliberal political rationality for erasing the tension between democracy and capitalism. As designers are entangled in past and present relations affecting our roles and practices, we are affected by, but also influence, what we engage with. Designers who engage with democratic concerns navigate these tensions and thus affect how democracy is practiced. My inquiry into these perspectives led me to argue for designers’ responsibilities and for the need to reorient our practices to respond to democratic issues. Responsibilities need to be articulated in relation to tensions, as well as from within our practices; tensions can help us consider how we orient our practices – in relation to whom, what and where we design. As our relations also form our response-abilities, these reorientations also reshape our abilities to respond in practice, critically and carefully. I propose three concerns to support designers, design students and design researchers in orienting their practices, arguing that it is important to reflect on the concerns of entanglements, tensions, and responsibilities. These concerns focus on designers’ potential of making, on tentatively engaging with and curiously proposing things. My contribution and making of theory are thus for designers to make sense of and take responsibility for in relations shaped through our own particular practices.
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| 9. |
- Khosravi Noori, Behzad
(author)
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Three or Four Ir/relevant Stories : Art and Hyper-Politics
- 2021
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This book documents and reflects on three artistic projects and their processes. As a “marginalia” to the projects I also presents arguments, stories and ir/ relevant discourses. What I call marginalia extends to aspects of a historical backdrop of these three projects and the stories behind them. It is partly a reflection on my process and experiences, but, more crucially for me, it is what I would like to call marginalia. It extends to aspects of a historical backdrop that were not necessarily present in the process of exhibition making. In this book, I reflect upon different modes of exhibition making and artistic research practices, however, this book is not simply a postscript to those works. It also serves as a form of marginalia to my artistic explorations in relation to art, history, and global politics. Combining fragments of histories, it constitutes a bricolage of things, events, and narratives. The book itself comprises the fourth and final story. “Three or Four Ir/relevant Stories” here mirrors the conjunction of some historical and cultural cases that, in my point of view, need to be acknowledged. It is an artistic research investigation, proposing a multi-sited, archaeological approach to histories of art and life that also constitute part of my lived experience in the Global South and the Global North. By bringing multiple subjects into my study, as well as historical reenactment in the form of a review of archival materials in the exhibition space, I explore possible correspondences, seen through the lenses of contemporary art practice, subalternity, and the technology of image production. In my investigations of certain artworks and their histories, I aim to develop everyday observations into archaeological interpretations to displace the image from its past historical location and bring forth the question: What will happen to our collective past in the future? The exhibitions themselves embody a hybrid approach, an expression that portrays multiple combinations and interpretations of various art genres and subject matters. By their very nature, the works present multiplicities of materials, which in their collection into an exhibition amount to a sort of cabinet of curiosities. I neither stick to one method of artistic investigation, nor focus on a single medium. Instead I aim to reconnoiter the possibilities that inhere an artistic survey. At no point do I follow any fixed blueprint for, or definition of, artistic production; in short, I might argue that in my artistic practices, I attempt to avoid dividing method from life’s experiences. It is, in part, the narrative fluidity of such a microhistorical investigation that enables me to imagine the exhibition as a point of departure of my artistic exploration and research of such micro elements of contemporary history. I aim to investigate whether it was possible establish a storytelling structure that would mirror the branching paths of the archaeological trace and its background—a transdisciplinary materialism that brings multiple dimensions of history into one temporary place called an exhibition. In so doing, I have sought to produce a cross-generational platform where the audience can engage with the multiplicity of the contemporary past, and per- haps also revisit their own memories.
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| 10. |
- Orrù, Anna Maria, 1976
(author)
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Wild Poethics - Exploring relational and embodied practices in urban-making
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Nature is not something separated from the city. With this in mind, this research emerges from the act of urban gardening, staging space for naturecultures that reinforce a direct relation to an urban nature. Alternate agencies can motivate ecological mindsets in urban approaches, bypass the hegemonic and paralysing attitude of the Anthropocene and render a more profound relation with the spatial environment. This catalyses a potential in embodied methodologies to generate vibrant materialist relations in urban-making. The research is positioned with a two-fold challenge; urban-making and naturecultures. The aim is to reorientate methodologies in urban-making to approach relational space matters, and promote ecological poethics relevant for practice, research and education. Three thresholds of engagement structure the exploration: the embodied, the relational and the situated. Alongside explorative practices are built up cartographies of theoretical neighbourhoods that provide alternate knowledge generation on individual, shared and collective levels. Experimental embodied interventions are grounded in artistic research through choreographical approaches using Butoh, Body Weather and swarm-behaviour practices. These approaches are set in a voyage-metaphor to a fictional Island of Encounters reaching four destinations. Each encounter unravels a particular perspective into relational and embodied practice: Alba (body/curiosity), Agora (fiction/performance), Clinamen (atmosphere/imagination), and Plūris (metaphor/swarming). A methodological choreography which corresponds with the theoretical cartographies, reveals and opens up for an urban-making founded in situated knowledges to generate a corporeal poethics – poetic, politic, and ethical. As the activated practice unfolds, interventions are supported by their theoretical neighbourhoods nested in feminist spatial practice, vibrant relationscapes, worlding, affective atmospheres, imagination, spatial-temporal in-betweeness and assemblage-thinking. Accompanying each destination are five film essay(s), each pertaining to the particular artistic interventions in the research.Using corporeal imagination and re-enactment modes of enquiry such as thinking with paper modelled texts, creating fictocriticisms with clouds, using dynamic biomimesis, and mimicking swarms, generates an enlivened relation with naturecultures that gestures the body into becoming a reflective and profound membrane with space. By encountering and immersing the body in a space/time construct, a critical materiality practice emerges that can infuse urban-making, render the body a more refined medium and reactivate architectural thinking and making.
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