| 1. |
- Akner Koler, Cheryl
(författare)
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Form & Formlessness : Questioning aesthetic abstractions through art projects, cross-disciplinary studies and product design education.
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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
(författare)
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Devices. On Hospitality, Hostility and Design
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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
(författare)
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Sisters! Making Films, Doing Politics : An Exploration in Artistic Research
- 2016
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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-
(författare)
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Key Notes on the Unruly City : Social, Material, and Spatial Transgressions
- 2023
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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-
(författare)
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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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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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-
(författare)
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Storyforming : Experiments in creating discursive engagements between people, things and environments
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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
(författare)
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You Told Me – work stories and video essays : Verkberättelser och videoessäer
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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. |
- Fridh, Kristina, 1961-
(författare)
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Japanska rum – en diskussion kring tomhet och föränderlighet i traditionell och nutida japansk arkitektur
- 2001
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Traditional and contemporary Japanese architecture is examined, with focus on the characteristics of emptiness and changeability, the point of departure being Japanese conceptions of space which are interpreted and described from a Western perspective. According to Japanese cultural tradition space is conceived as a subjective perception, a physical experience and a changeable process. A description and analysis of how these conceptions of space are expressed and perceived in architectonic forms, both in traditional sukiya architecture and in a selection of contemporary works of architecture, is then presented. The buildings discussed in the thesis are, among others, the Katsura villa, the pavilions Rinun-tei and Kyusui-ken in Shugaku-in, Shisen-do, Hillside Terrace, Church with the Light, Villa in Shimo-gamo, Gifu Kitagata Apartment Building and Tofu. The contemporary works of architecture have been designed by Fumihiko Maki, Tadao Ando, Waro Kishi, Kazuyo Sejima and Jun Tamaki. Besides visiting the buildings, articles written by these architects have been studied which convey their views on architecture. These texts reflect both Japanese and Western influences in a global debate about architecture. This thesis is based on a direct experience of various buildings together with a personal Western interpretation. In this way the subjective experience is put into focus and leads to a discussion about architecture based on concepts or perceptions. The strong Japanese architectural tradition lives on in the reinterpretations of contemporary architecture, the study of which creates a deeper understanding of the tradition. In this foreign world of architecture there is room for dimensions which could become an architectonic challenge in designing new buildings and environment.
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| 9. |
- Frögård, Maja, 1985-
(författare)
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Negotiating Tensions : Designers’ responsibilities in democratic entanglements
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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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| 10. |
- Göransson, Michelle, 1976-
(författare)
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Materlialiserade sexualiteter : om hur normer framträder, förhandlas och ges hållbarhet
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this dissertation is to analyse how conceptions of sexuality are interlinked with and formed through connections with different types of matter, and also to study what significance matter (that is, bodies, space and things) has in shaping and actuating norms, particularly heteronorms.The study is based on transcribed semi-structured interviews and go-along interviews with persons who deviate from the societal norm of man and the societal norm heterosexual. In addition, the material consists of signposts, spaces, architecture, legal documents and texts found on websites.The dissertation is mainly dedicated to the study of processes wherein bodies, things and space are linked together or separated. Bodies materialise as non-heterosexual (or heterosexual) in processes that entangle movements, spaces, things and language. Apart from analysing bodies as morphous, I also emphasise that the boundaries between bodies and things must be understood as transient. Things can integrate into bodies and limbs can turn into things. I also cast light on the fact that heteronorms are imprinted into matter such as the built environment. Boundaries are materialised, but LGBTQ- defined safe spaces are concurrently being formed. Such spaces tend to be transient in character. This stands in contrast to such things that tie into societal norms, which tend to survive the passing of time whether they be buildings, monuments or urban planning. Thus, norms are both created by and imprinted into matter. The memories, experiences and assumed needs of certain bodies and their ways of living together are given solidity. Spatially organised differences are, on the other hand, primarily accepted when packaged into events, temporary and clearly marked, which inadvertently highlight Sweden’s (imaginary) openness and diversity.
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