| 1. |
- Nyman, Annika
(author)
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Handlingarnas sken : om litterär slitning i det dramatiska
- 2023
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The subject of this thesis is what I call a literary friction in the dramatic. In my research project, my aim has been to deepen the understanding of this friction and to make it productive in transforming my own dramatic writing. This has resulted in two dramatic works, which are presented in the thesis. I distinguish two different qualities in my writing – the dramatic and the literary – that I am trying to merge. A dilemma thus arises, which I contextualize against a historical background of drama in crisis (Szondi) and the new literary tendency of postdramatic theatre (Lehmann). As a first step towards an understanding of the friction I take a point of departure in the question of narration, which I define mainly through Ricoeur’s temporal explorations of narration, and extend through Ryan’s concept of storyworlds. Aiming at distinguishing the dramatic quality I go from a more general theory (Szondi, Ricoeur, Aristotle) to a personal understanding and use of ‘the dramatic’ as a concept. Making use of Malochevskaja’s action analysis, I then turn to a reading of Chekov’s The Seagull, and further into my own practice.‘The literary’ I primarily specify through a reading of Jelinek’s Death and the Maiden I, and argue that Jelinek induces an organic breakdown of narrative structures. I connect this to the habit of reading and the experience of the text as speaking to an inner room within the reader – and I extend this experience to include the act of writing. I deepen my understanding of the friction between ‘the dramatic’ and ‘the literary’ by connecting text to performativity, which I understand as different layers that are both housed in and surrounding a text, and ‘the dramatic’ and ‘the literary’ are then understood as different movements. I also identify the friction itself as performative, and specify my use of narrative games. Going into an analysis of my work Sysslolösa unga män med tillgång till vapen (Idle Young Men with Access to Weapons) I focus on the way I transform what I call narrative fragments – understood as fragments of storyworlds – into dramatic action, dealing with the dilemma of a non-dramatic way of thinking, combined with the attempt to create a coherent, dramatic whole. Discussing my monologue Jag är Jago (I am Iago) I focus on what I call a polyphonic tendency of the work, which I initiate by a collaborative working process and specific strategies of thought.
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| 2. |
- Holmstedt, Janna, 1972-
(author)
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Are you ready for a wet live-in? : explorations into listening
- 2017
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Listen. If I ask you to listen, what is it that I ask of you—that you will understand, or perhaps obey? Or is it some sort of readiness that is requested? What occurs with a body in the act of listening? How do sound and voice structure audio-visual-spatial relations in concrete situations?This doctoral thesis in fine arts consists of six artworks and an essay that documents the research process, or rather, acts as a travelogue as it stages and narrates a series of journeys into a predominantly sonic ecology. One entry into this field is offered by the animal “voice” and attempts to teach animals to speak human language. The first journey concerns a specific case where humanoid sounds were found to emanate from an unlikely source—the blowhole of a dolphin. Another point of entry is offered by the acousmatic voice, a voice split from its body, and more specifically, my encounter with the disembodied voice of Steve Buscemi in a prison in Philadelphia. This listening experience triggered a fascination with, and an inquiry into, the voices that exist alongside us, the parasitic relation that audio technology makes possible, and the way an accompanying voice changes one’s perceptions and even one’s behavior. In the case of both the animal and the acousmatic, the seemingly trivial act of attending to a voice quickly opens up a complex space of embodied entanglements with the potential to challenge much of what we take for granted. At the heart of my inquiry is a series of artworks made between 2012 and 2016, which constitute a third journey: the performance Limit-Cruisers (#1 Sphere), the praxis session Limit-Cruisers (#2 Crowd), the installations Therapy in Junkspace, Fluorescent You, and “Then, ere the bark above their shoulders grew,” and the lecture performance Articulations from the Orifice (The Dry and the Wet).The relationship between what is seen and heard is being explored and renegotiated in the arts and beyond. We are increasingly addressed by prerecorded and synthetic voices in both public and private spaces. Simultaneously, our notions of human communication are challenged and complicated by recent research in animal communication. My work attempts to address the shifts and complexities embodied in these developments. The three journeys are deeply entwined with theoretical inquiries into human-animal relationships, technology, and the philosophy of sound. In the essay, I consider as well how other artistic practices are exploring this same complex space. What I put forward is a materialist and concrete approach to listening understood as a situated practice. Listening is both a form of co-habitation and an ecology. In and through listening, I claim, one could be said to perform in concert with the things heard while at the same time being changed by them.
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| 3. |
- Ault, Julie
(author)
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Remembering and Forgetting in the Archive : Instituting ‘Group Material’ (1979–1996)
- 2011
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- My PhD submission is made up of a constellation of three elements that form a body of textual material / theory and practice event / exhibition. (1) A dimension of critical writing or dissertation that has two parts: (a) Retrospective / Prospective: Activating the Archive, September 1, 2010, and (b) an accretion of further analysis, Archive, Archived, Archiving, September 1, 2011. (2) A testing of both archiving practice and its historical representation is carried out in the arms of the larger investigation, the book, Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (London: Four Corners, 2010 ISBN: 978-0956192813). Show and Tell demonstrates a primary analytic situation for the problematics of my research. (3) An exhibition Ever Ephemeral: Remembering and Forgetting in the Archive (Signal – Center för samtidskonst, September 23, 2011 – November 13, 2011, and the Inter Arts Center, September 30, 2011 – October 30, 2011). Ever Ephemeral encompasses the triple functions of producing, presenting, and testing research. It will bring together reference points, in the forms of artworks, artifacts, publications, and writings, which are evocative of key concerns imbedded in the subject terrain. These include the plasticity of history, archiving and unarchiving, ways art can give history form, and chronology and counter-chronology. The inclusions lay open specific dialogues, which have contoured the research arena. Appendix A The following textual components are part of the exhibition, Ever Ephemeral: Remembering and Forgetting in the Archive. Alejandro Cesarco, Present Memory, 2010, text compiled by Cesarco, produced as booklet in exhibition. Timeframes: A Conversation, 2011, dialogue between Ault and Andrea Rosen about their decision to disperse Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s collection of clocks rather than archive them when he died. The clocks have been gathered from their respective owners for the occasion of this exhibition. The conversation is a take-away booklet in the exhibition. Julie Ault, 4195.6 feet: Geography of Time, 2010, text on James Benning (dir) casting a glance, 2007, produced as handout in exhibition. Julie Ault, Historical Inquiry as Subject and Object, 2010, essay on Group Material archive and book project, a take-away in exhibition. Doug Ashford, Julie Ault: Group Material. AIDS Timeline (Hatje Cantz, dOCUMENTA (13), 2011, ISBN 978-3-7757-2881-2) Rasmus Röhling, Self-Titled, 2009, text by Röhling imbedded in his work and a take-away in the exhibition. Julie Ault, Roni Horn, a compilation, 2010 [ongoing], text that derives from researching Horn’s journals to compose a personal chronology of the artist; exhibited in relation to a set of artists books by Horn. Extract produced for exhibition. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Julie Ault), 1991, the loan form for the work includes the text, materialization specifications, and terms of agreement. Appendix B A digital version of Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (London: Four Corners, 2010 ISBN: 978-0956192813). Show and Tell is data and evidence of a major test site for the problematics of my research. This body of research aims to illuminate the retrospective and prospective dimensions of archiving in practice. It investigates the consequences of registering previously unhistoricized art field events and practices into enduring public records. Additionally the research tests particular methods of historical representation that draw on the archive. Imbedded in this investigation is consideration of “exhibition” and “publication” as presentational forms for historical research. The liberties and limitations of each format are evaluated in the inquiry.
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| 4. |
- Barba, Rosa
(author)
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On the Anarchic Organisation of Cinematic Spaces : Evoking Spaces beyond Cinema
- 2018. - 22
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This research engages with the space beyond cinema and comprises a futuristic vision about the condition of cinema.My work takes a conceptual approach that considers cinema in an architectural sense and as an instrument, where the environment, the screen, and the projection can be combined or pushed forward to create another spatiotemporal dimension that is concurrent with and beyond the context of interior or exterior space. Uncertainty and speculation exist within that expanded space. It is an anarchic dimension and offers a new foundation for thinking and acting through destabilising the old hierarchy of the components of cinema, by freeing them up from their original uses and letting them interact in new and unforeseen ways.I am questioning the assumption that cinematic visuality is an established and monolithic thing that is given to us.Something else can happen when reconfiguring and loosening up the status quo and working with different methodologies as tools of embarkation—an idea explained throughout the thesis as different modes of flickering states. The result is that the mind is able to encounter new knowledges—in a space beyond—through these new openings.In this research, I propose four different modes of enquiry into how this “space beyond” can be achieved:•Through speculating on astronomy and cinema.•Through the immaterial medium that articulates a new space or auditorium. •Through collective performances as embarkation. •Through the fragmentation of material and machine.These four modes create anarchic organisations of cinematic spaces.
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| 5. |
- Boonnimitra, Sopawan
(author)
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Lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd : Contemporary urban conditions with special reference to thai homosexuality
- 2006
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Major Asian cities like Hong Kong, Taipei and Bangkok have been constantly on the verge of rapid transformation, whether politically, socially, and particularly sexually, due to the process of capitalisation, modernisation, and globalisation over the last decade. In response to the impact of the transformation on the historical and traditional space of the city, the region's unique cultural and historical background has produced certain conditions of urban arrangements that may have put into disarray the traditional relationship between binary oppositions, whether tradition/modernity, old/new, global/local, heterosexual/homosexual, and the like. It is a kind of in-between condition that manifests itself through different scales and different levels, physically and metaphorically, of space. It is when the old meaning of spaces has been unfixed and the new one has not yet emerged fully that it leads to a multiplicity of meanings and functions that at times derive from contradictory ideologies. Although much research has been undertaken on the new urban landscapes in Asia by urbanists and social geographers, there is still an area that needs to be further explored, particularly how these new urban landscapes and their conditions anticipate the process of generating creativity and alternative ways of living and thinking resulting from destabilised boundaries, in particular the sexual one. It is therefore the aim of this thesis to attempt to grasp, explain and interpret the contemporary urban conditions. In my effort to understand this rather unorthodox and complex condition that cannot be simply explained by the dominant mode of thinking based on binary opposition, I am aided by the Thai term lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd, literally meaning "sometimes closed-sometimes open", inspired by Thai ideology regarding space that is less fixated on physical boundaries, as well as a few influential ideas concerned with the nature of "otherness", particularly Michel Foucault's "heterotopia". Nevertheless, it is not the intention of this project to establish another term to describe the contemporary urban conditions. The term is used as an initial attempt to open up an alternative way of thinking beyond the binary opposition. It also signifies the unsettling process of arranging oneself or a subject on any particular side of the binary. My use of the term will continue to question: what is left beyond if the relationship between spaces that has been set up by the fixed dualism of centre/periphery has been disrupted and possibly broken up? How can we build identity around such conditions? How can the various forces of power and their complex relationships be revealed and broken down through the understanding of the conditions? I use lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd as both a means to explore and a terminology for these conditions manifesting themselves through different kinds of spaces, including the spaces of the city of Bangkok, the katoey body of the transvestite boxer, a group of queer Asian cinema, as well other related spaces within urban landscapes. I adopt different theories and methods in order to create a new paradigm of understanding, including artistic and non-artistic approaches, such as writing, photographing, mapping, video-making, curating, etc. In a sense, they will make of this thesis a metaphorical space, a platform for expressing, testing and reflecting ideas that are constantly shifting when new elements are added, as in the case of the new urban conditions.
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| 6. |
- Cesarco, Alejandro
(author)
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Under The Sign of Regret
- 2019
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Under the Sign of Regret focuses on aesthetically mediated responses to regret. It interrogates the qualities of the feeling of regret as well as what is produced under its influence (as objects and as experiences). These two aims—considering regret as a mode and as a tool—hinge between two complementary definitions of aesthetics: on the one hand, the quality of feelings or the “distribution of the sensible”; and on the other hand the specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts.My research looks at regret as an aesthetic mode and as a methodological tool. It recuperates the positive qualities of regret without overvaluing it as a great gain. This hovering between loss and gain sets up the research as a tactic against the achievement driven and production principled art-field.The hypothesis is to consider regret as a generative force (one that seeds and propels forward), as a bittersweet drama of adjustments (between who we are and who we aspired to be, or between what we make and our shortcomings), and ultimately, as a way of questioning perspective itself (distance, visibility, point of view, and, most importantly, time).After setting up a conceptual map of regret in the introductory chapter I turn my attention away from the psychological and sociological origins of regret towards its effects in the world, namely the effects it has as a creative force in the arts. I am arguing, on the one hand, that regret, as a sub-category of depression, is at the core of how the contemporary individual operates socially. And, on the other hand, I am making a distinction between feeling regret and using regret as a methodological drive. Reading artistic forms and experiences through a lens of regret does not mean that the works analysed are about regret, or narrate a story of regret, but rather that they embody and thus help exemplify some of the traits, characteristics, and modes that emerge from considering regret conceptually. I have identified two particular characteristics of producing under the sign of regret: suspended agency and ghostly haunting. Each of these characteristics are taken up in individual chapters that define and ground these modalities of production (principally through the methodologies and tropes employed in my own artistic practice as well as other selected examples), while continuing to mull over the different shades of meaning of regret as a generative force.
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| 7. |
- Einarsson, Anna
(author)
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Singing the body electric : Understanding the role of embodiment in performing and composing interactive music
- 2017
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Almost since the birth of electronic music, composers have been fascinated by the prospect of integrating the human voice with its expressiveness and complexity into electronic musical works. This thesis addresses how performing with responsive technologies in mixed works, i.e. works that combine an acoustic sound source with a digital one, is experienced by participating singers, adopting an approach of seamlessness, of zero – or invisible – interface, between singer and computer technology. It demonstrates how the practice of composing and the practice of singing both are embodied activities, where the many-layered situation in all its complexity is of great importance for a deepened understanding. The overall perspective put forward in this thesis is that of music as a sounding body to resonate with, where the resonance, a process of embodying, of feeling and emotion, guides the decision-making. The core of the investigation is the lived experiences through the process of composing and performing three musical works. One result emerging from this process is the suggested method of calibration, according to which a bodily rooted attention forms a kind of joint attention towards the work in the making. Experiences from these three musical works arrive in the formulation of an over-arching framework entailing a view of musical composition as a process of construction – and embodied mental simulation – of situations, whose dynamics unfold to engage musicians and audience through shifting fields of affordances, based on a shared landscape of affordances.
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| 8. |
- Faria, Bruno
(author)
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Exercising musicianship anew through soundpainting : Speaking music through sound gestures
- 2016
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In this thesis I focus on soundpainting-mediated musical experiences. Proposed in the mid seventies by the American musician Walter Thompson (b. 1952), soundpainting is a conventionalized artistic practice designed to create artistic works in real time. Thompson’s definition of soundpainting as a sign language is central to the present artistic inquiry, based on different moments of artistic practice and on interviews with students and professional artists, and informed by an existentialist hermeneutic and yet pragmatic perspective. What does it mean to have an experience in soundpainting? Considering soundpainting as an artistic language, what does it mean to know and speak it? How is meaning mediated in soundpainting? What does a knowledge of soundpainting bring to classically trained musicians? Classically trained orchestral flutist as I am, my starting point has been the similarities and differences between the production and interpretation of signs as they occur in soundpainting-mediated practices and in personal experience of playing from scores and relating to conductors’ gestures.The artistic, hermeneutic circle turns on transpositions across horizons of understanding, since in soundpainting one’s own practices are extended, and one frequently acts as instrumentalist, composer, and conductor. This is formulated as an example of artistic transaction, in the sense of acting across borders that usually separate roles. In addition to critical reflections on the indeterminacy of soundpainting as a practice and on the two performative perspectives possible in soundpainting (performance leader and performer), I explore soundpainting as an individual instrumental practice too. Although a particularization of soundpainting, this transposition from moments of qualitative transaction between two or more artists to an individual practice retains the significant aspects of standard practice in a soundpainting-mediated musical experience. In the process, significant opportunities were found to exercise different forms of embodying musical knowledge, wherein aspects of ownership and responsibility could be re-contextualized as different intentionalities (in the phenomenological sense) came to play. Through the exploration of such strategies for a systematic development of an improvisational mindset, it was also possible to nurture an empathic understanding of the activities of one’s fellow musicians (performers, conductors, composer, improvisers). All these findings speak to the all-important sense of presence in the moment of performance and can be extended to other forms of music-making, disclosing potential directions for further research on both artistic and educational grounds.
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| 9. |
- Fransson, Petra
(author)
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Omförhandlingar : Kropp, replik, etik
- 2018
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Renegotiations: Body, Line, Ethics departs from questions concerning authorship and agency for actors in institutionalised settings and moves towards a discussion on ethics, responsibility and possibilities in the body – text relationship. The question of how bodies can be renegotiated in and by the theatrical line is central to the work. Against a backdrop of previous and other stage productions in theatre institutions and independent constellations the staging of three texts by Elfriede Jelinek: Rosamunde, The Wall and Winterreise becomes the method for investigating and articulating the authorship of the actor. An investigation of the possible renegotiation of the (female) body from social objectivity to existential subjectivity has unfolded through the three works, partly in dialogue with the thematic content of the texts but mainly through the process of reflection and action spurred by the actor's translation of the dramatic line into bodily and oral specificity, in the labour of making poetry concrete. The ethics of ambivalence proposed by Simone de Beauvoir has emerged as an important artistic method in these processes, as her ethics not only suggests a conceptual and political framing of the work and authorship of the actor as inherently ambivalent and transcendent, but also offers a range of methodological approaches to agency coupled with rather than opposed to doubt and self-criticism, for a simultaneous construction and questioning of subjectivity. Photos and videos from the three performances are part of the final presentation of the dissertation, as are three freely articulated responses from Christina Ouzounidis, Annika Nyman and Hanna Hallgren, who each expose critical, methodological and thematic aspects in one of the works. Part of the presentation is also an essay in four chapters. Departures and conflicts in the project is discussed, in a topology extending from institutional critique to methodology and feminist theory. The work and position of the actor is articulated in relation to thinkers as Hannah Arendt and Virginia Woolf, together with a feminist reading of a dialectical theatre tradition and the historical and philosophical understanding of "the woman" as proposed by Simone de Beauvoir. With Beauvoir the essay moves into a discussion of the theatrical situation as constituted by body and time rather than by social circumstances. This discussion is further deepened by the psychoanalytical approach offered by Julia Kristeva's understanding of the relationship between language and the speaking subject, and then moves into a description of the methods used, using the staging of Rosamunde as example. Finally, an attempt at articulating the actor's work as an ethical practice is presented, as a consequence of the previous discussion but also informed by the postcolonial analysis of feminism and translation of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology and Judith Butler's approach to what constitutes "the possible." Rather than understanding the practice of the performing actor as a work aiming at communicating themes or ideas and bringing narratives to life, this dissertation suggests understanding it as a social and political becoming, where the performing body can create the possibility of observing itself and the possibility of renegotiating the creation of subjectivity; all in the moment of the performance. Thus the work concludes with an insisting on the body – text relationship as performative and potentially radically transformative: a becoming with the other and others where the body is exposed to the risk and possibility of change, a change in which desire, grief and insecurity are embraced as ethical resources.
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| 10. |
- Frisk, Henrik
(author)
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Improvisation, Computers, and Interaction : Rethinking Human-Computer Interaction Through Music
- 2008
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Interaction is an integral part of all music. Interaction is part of listening, of playing, of composing and even of thinking about music. In this thesis the multiplicity of modes in which one may engage interactively in, through and with music is the starting point for rethinking Human-Computer Interaction in general and Interactive Music in particular. I propose that in Human-Computer interaction the methodology of control, interaction-as-control, in certain cases should be given up in favor for a more dynamic and reciprocal mode of interaction, interaction-as-difference: Interaction as an activity concerned with inducing differences that make a difference. Interaction-as-difference suggests a kind of parallelity rather than click-and-response. In essence, the movement from control to difference was a result of rediscovering the power of improvisation as a method for organizing and constructing musical content and is not to be understood as an opposition: It is rather a broadening of the more common paradigm of direct manipulation in Human-Computer Interaction. Improvisation is at the heart of all the sub-projects included in this thesis, also, in fact, in those that are not immediately related to music but more geared towards computation. Trusting the self-organizing aspect of musical improvisation, and allowing it to diffuse into other areas of my practice, constitutes the pivotal change that has radically influenced my artistic practice. Furthermore, is the work-in-movement (re-)introduced as a work kind that encompasses radically open works. The work-in-movement, presented and exemplified by a piece for guitar and computer, requires different modes of representation as the traditional musical score is too restrictive and is not able to communicate that which is the most central aspect: the collaboration, negotiation and interaction. The Integra framework and the relational database model with its corresponding XML representation is proposed as a means to produce annotated scores that carry past performances and version with it. The common nominator, the prerequisite, for interaction-as-difference and a improvisatory and self-organizing attitude towards musical practice it the notion of giving up of the Self. Only if the Self is able and willing to accept the loss the priority of interpretation (as for the composer) or the faithfulness to ideology or idiomatics (performer). Only is one is willing to forget is interaction-as-difference made possible. Among the artistic works that have been produced as part of this inquiry are some experimental tools in the form of computer software to support the proposed concepts of interactivity. These, along with the more traditional musical work make up both the object and the method in this PhD project. These sub-projects contained within the frame of the thesis, some (most) of which are still works-in-progress, are used to make inquiries into the larger question of the significance of interaction in the context of artistic practice involving computers.
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