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- Almborg, Emanuel
(författare)
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Towards a Pedagogy of the Utopian Image
- 2021
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This practice-based PhD project investigates the conditions for a pedagogy of the utopian image in contemporary art and film. It starts from the premise that there is a need for new political and social visions and scenarios. The project asks what role art and artist film, both as a medium and as a social activity, can play in experimenting with and sketching such visions and scenarios – a process described as a pedagogy of the “utopian image”. Rather than starting from established concepts in contemporary art theory and practice, this project seeks out fertile notions and methodologies from theoretical traditions in Marxist history that are lesser known in the field of art and artistic research, in order to reassess assumptions and dichotomies around thinking and feeling, mind and body, the social and the individual. By doing so, it seeks to find new ways of understanding and relating the political and psychological in artist film, pedagogy and drama. The project draws on a wide range of sources, from psychologist Lev Vygotsky, Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov and theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski to revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon and science fiction writer Octavia Butler.The PhD submission consists of the three films, Talking Hands/Говорящие руки, 2016, The Nth Degree, 2018, and Acorn, 2021, along with the exhibition Bildningar at Mint in Stockholm, which ran from 2 to 25 September 2021. Links to these films and documentation of the exhibition are included in the PDF submission, which also includes a written component with theoretical considerations and reflections on method.
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| 2. |
- Džokić, Ana, 1970-, et al.
(författare)
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Upscaling, Training, Commoning
- 2017
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- When on September 15, 2008 the financial conglomerate Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy – and with that ‘officially’ sparks the international financial crisis – still few would anticipate the invasive effect this crisis would come to have on the professional and personal life of many across the world. Today, it’s implosion remains a mere ‘blip’ in the universe of events that followed.On closer observation, this financial turmoil started out as a ‘mortgage crisis’, largely fuelled by unsustainable or speculative investments in real-estate in cities across the world. In the run-up to the boom-and-bust of 2008, some – among them architects, urban designers, spatial practitioners, artists, activists, but also economists and others – started preparing for what they understood as (the necessity) of a different world to come, beyond the broken neo-liberal dogma. Today, fragments of such a different reality are unfolding in front of us. Modest, but for real.STEALTH.unlimited (practice of Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen) is one of the protagonists in this field, pointing to the responsibilities and capacities of architecture in contemporary societies, and acts between the fields of architecture, art and activism. With “Upscaling, Training, Commoning”, in 2011 they set on an expedition of sorts, to transform their practice. Following a decade of research addressing urgent cultural and urban issues ahead (resulting in publications, exhibitions, spatial interventions), now they use questions, doubts or limitations of such a practice as a lead towards direct long-term engagements with specific spatial process and/or communities.The resulting practice based exploration has been far away from a distant or objective research condition. It is subject to volatile political and economic situations, to conflicting interests or the engagements with(in) local communities encountered in the work. In this, three lines of exploration have been followed; that of the practice assuming new responsibilities, of the economies of engagement and disengagement, and that of the urban commons. The title “Upscaling, Training, Commoning” relates to the awareness that the relevant activities and approaches need to be nurtured, and that the imperfect contexts in which this take place can be seen as ‘training grounds’ to arrive to practices of commoning. Hence, upscaling, training, commoning describes a trajectory (to be) taken.The artistic research (PhD) “Upscaling, Training, Commoning” concludes with a set of six books, and includes comments on the trajectory taken since 2008 by: the writer Dougald Hine, the economist Martijn Jeroen van der Linden, architects Ana Méndez de Andés and Iva Marčetić. The concluding book, set to words by the writer Paul Currion, features a fictional narrative, looking what the future could possibly hold, in which collective action might enable citizens to navigate through difficult times to create a new political economy.
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| 3. |
- Gilligan, Melanie, 1979-
(författare)
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Treating the Abstract of Capital Concretely: Films Against Capitalism
- 2022
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This practice-based PhD, Treating the Abstract of Capital Concretely: Films Against Capitalism, looks at how film can oppose the prevailing ideasof capitalist systems.The research asks: What qualities do films have that can be used as strategies against capitalism and what knowledge do these films produce? In an understanding that capitalism projects concepts onto the world, and that mainstream film can frame people’s lives through a reductive capitalist understanding, the research suggests that more politically powerful moving images need to be the focus to create societal change.Treating the Abstract of Capitalism Concretely: Films Against Capitalism, includes six aesthetic, political and conceptual video works, and an accompanying written handbook, that together consider capital as the relation between abstract laws of accumulation and concrete lived situations.Making moving image works against the capitalist system necessarily involves knowledge about capitalism, however, the research charts how the knowledge most central in filmmaking is often associative, affective and combines knowledge with practice. A variety of methodological approaches are pursued through practical and theoretical research about how films can oppose capitalism. This investigation is explored materially, through video projects that interrogate capitalist abstraction from inside social processes,in realities that people live. The video works present a critique of racial and patriarchal capitalism, while the written component presents a contextual discussion about films against capitalism.The PhD submission consists of six video projects: The Common Sense, The Bay Area Protests, Parts-wholes 2, Crowds, Home Together, and Health as Individual vs. Health as Social and a PDF handbook, Treating the Abstractof Capital Concretely: Films Against Capitalism. The written text puts forth theoretical and practical proposals for films against capitalism as well as a 3 script. Connections are here made between different understandings of abstraction, while bringing in ideas from political theory, as well as demonstrating allegory as a technique against capitalism in film.The video works and handbook are accessed via: https://www.films-against-capitalism.com
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| 4. |
- Goldin, Simon
(författare)
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Zero magic : Shifting the Valuation Convention
- 2016
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Zero Magic is a trick for the financial markets, which has the capacity to undermine the perceived value of a publicly traded company and profit from this. Short selling is a way of profiting from loss: Making money if and when a target company loses in value. It is a fundamental market activity that goes as far back as the first stock, yet to this day little is publicly known about the strategies employed by short sellers. On the US exchanges there is no requirement for hedge funds to disclose short positions, and in other jurisdictions such requirements are very limited. Zero Magic was developed by covertly infiltrating a secretive hedge fund specializing in short selling, and reverse engineering its methods. In brief, the hedge fund’s trading strategy is based on identifying suitable short selling targets through analyzing networks of corruption, and then framing critical newsworthy stories about these target companies that can be anonymously distributed among journalists. Profit is gained when a target company loses in value. Rigorous measures are taken by the fund never to be identified as the source of a negative campaign.Access to the hedge fund was gained through the art world. The founder and co-director routinely supports artists and art institutions and is said to have gotten the idea for his fund when looking at a Mark Lombardi drawing (an artist known for mapping networks of power and corruption). It is hard to tell whether the founder’s engagement with art merely entertains personal vanity, or if it functions more strategically as a means of “secret publicity” for the fund; giving access to investors, while staying under the radar of more mainstream public relations. Covert techniques such as hidden recordings and proxy researchers were used to uncover the fund’s methods. With the assistance of Théo Bourgeron, sociologist of finance, Zero Magic not only reconstructs the workings of the trading strategy, but offers a fully operational magic gimmick. The magic gimmick is a computer program providing non-expert users the means to identify relevant short selling targets (companies with weak “valuation conventions”), and a step-by-step guide to undermining their perceived value. With this gimmick one can execute a successful short sale without any previous contacts in the investor community or access to insider information. A US patent application for the trick was filed in January 2016.The artistic PhD “Zero Magic: Shifting the Valuation Convention” concludes with a stage performance and a magic box:The stage performance, “On a Long Enough Timeline the Survival Rate for Everyone Drops to Zero” with magician Malin Nilsson, performed on May 11 and 12, 2016, at Cirkus Cirkör, Stockholm. Through the ticket sales, audience members are drawn into the Zero Magic trick, buying into the predicted future loss of a target company. The magic box, prepared for public archives, contains the Zero Magic computer software, a US patent application for a “Computer Assisted Magic Trick Executed in the Financial Markets” and four historical examples of magic tricks played out beyond the stage, in the world at large.
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| 5. |
- Husberg, Hanna
(författare)
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Troubled Atmosphere – On Noticing Air
- 2021
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Through the lense of four different art projects, Troubled Atmosphere – On Noticing Air looks at hybrid, layered, inconsistent, muddled, unruly, contaminated gatherings of air, inquiring how air has been conceptualised and perceived, and how the construction of aerial imaginaries enables specific ways of engaging with the world and excludes others. Paying attention to the materiality, relationality and performativity of air, noticing air is explored as a methodology to consider how air, approached as a naturalcultural and technoecological phenomenon, is made perceptible and knowable under historically specific circumstances, perceptual systems, and politics of representation. For this, air is addressed through the artworks Being With (2015), The World Indoors (2015), In the Vast Ocean of Air (2016), and Often People Ask How Birds Are Affected by the Air (2017), and through corresponding texts structured around specific material-semiotic figures – the body, plants, clouds, PM2.5 (minute airborne particulate matter) – which substantiate air, and its technoscientific assemblages, and propose diversified ways of noticing air. Subject to chemical, biological, geological, technological and cultural processes and transformations, air is modified, structured, and compartmentalised, rendered inherently political with effects, consequences, and health impacts distributed unevenly and unjustly. Considering how noticing air can be expanded to reconsider relations and relatings with air that may contribute to the long-term collective feminist undertaking of reimagining liveable and breathable worlds for the many, the dissertation reflects upon the transformative role of environmental concepts and imaginaries. More specifically, it poses the author's interdisciplinary collaboration with researcher in ecology Agata Marzecova as an example of how to bring theory, criticism, and scientific research together with art and poetics, and how meaningful experimentation with formats, languages, and different ways of knowing may allow for thicker, more layered and nuanced approaches for noticing air.
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