A unique collaboration between Art Museums of Bergen and Bergen Academy of Art and Design forms the new context for the conference: Sensuous Knowledge will take place inside of two exhibitions Material Information curated by Juan Andrés Gaitán and Real Life Stories, curated by Feng Boyi and Bjørn Inge Follevaag which includes Ai Wei Wei.

The exhibitions will strengthen and inspire the sensuous in energetic and powerful ways as is key to Sensuous Knowledge. We will keep the successful format from the previous series 2004 – 2009: Participants present their practice-based research projects and discuss them in small groups of peers within which discussions may snowball throughout the three days.

The new venues have inspired the title Ta(l)king Place. We invite 30-minute presentations of artistic and/or curatorial, practice-based research projects for the groups. We are looking for presentations that appraise, examine, deconstruct, interrogate, or in some alternative manner articulate how places of all kinds are appropriated, created, depicted, experienced, talked about, used, or by other means made subjects for signifying practices in, through, or by way of the arts.

Practitioners from all art disciplines (including design and the performing arts) and from the museum world are welcome to submit proposals for presentations of completed or ongoing artistic or curatorial research projects for the 2013 Sensuous Knowledge conference. Please send us just one page (C.600 words) with a summary of the main points and main artistic, curatorial, discursive, or ethical challenges that your project entails, with a note on what kind of audio or visual material you want to present and thus a description of the format of your presentation. Please include a couple of images in your proposal as appropriate.

The deadline for proposals is 15 July 2012, and you will be informed about the outcome of your proposal by 15 September. A general invitation to participate in the conference, a preliminary program, and details about registration, conference fee, etc. will be published in September.

Submit you proposal to <sensuous.knowledge@khib.no>

Click here to read about the Key Note Speakers

The first bus leaves for the Airport (Flesland) at 14.15.

“Public Art in the City of Zurich” is an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional, and practice-oriented research project dedicated to exploring public art in the City of Zurich. Till 2007 Zurich had neither a public art concept nor a coherent strategy for contemporary art in public space. Moreover, concepts of art and the public sphere have been undergoing fairly dramatic changes in the past 25 years. Analysing the overall situation, the project on the one hand aimed to achieve reorientation and on the other hand tried to position the issues on a local and international stage.

In a first project phase (2004 – 2007) the research group (steared by the “Institute for Contemporary Arts Reseach”) developped and realised ten art pilot projects as well as an innovative strategy (mission statement) for public art in the City of Zurich. The research outcome was published in 2007 by launching the book “Kunst und Öffentlichkeit” by JRP|Ringier Publishers.

Thanks to the broad survey of the Hardau area the “Institute for Contemporary Arts Research” (IFCAR) was given the commission by the City of Zurich to design a competition for new art projects in a new school building and a new public park in the so called area of Hardau. Being in charge of the whole competition, the Institute designed the remit and selected both local (Sabina Baumann, Nic Hess, Zilla Leutenegger, Julika Rudelius, Loredana Sperini) and international artists (Maja Bajevic, Marko Lulic, Adrian Paci, Ayse Erkmen, Sislej Xhafa) of whom we thought could cope with the task of drafting sustainable and meaningful art projects.

In our perspective artworks in public sphere which create reference to relevant urban factors are of growing social importance. In the Hardau area, factors relating to social space and urban development have turned out to be of particular importance.

We provided the invited artists with any background information that could be helpful in order to develop their project entries for the park and the school. Both of them function as places of encounter and exchange, where cultural diversity and the resulting conflict will become manifest. While the park, used by a heterogeneous group of people, will become a place where diverse values (attitudes to life and everyday behaviour) may come together, the secondary school will be a place where the shared individuation of young students takes place as well. Two sets of issues are relevant to the competition: the coming together of culturally diverse values, and the value shifts during this process of individuation. The aspect of cultural identification thus constitutes a type of pivot between the sets of issues described above.

The jury (various members of the City authority, members of the Institute, artists and architects) has recently taken the decision to commission an art work by Zilla Leutenegger in the school building and one by Sislej Xhafa in the park. At the moment the Institute is closely involved in the realisation of these two art projects which also means conveying the ideas and meanings of the projects to the residents of the Hardau area and the public of Zurich.

During the projects duration the research team had to address various problems in the field of the politics as well as in the communication toward the public. We became aware that the communication with various stakeholers has became crutial for success the whole project. Therefore we developed a customised strategy for the artist‘s needs, as well as for the need of the University and the City of Zurich.

The presentation will include the following parts:

- explain the pilot projects in the Hardau area
- discuss the context of the art in public space with focus on Zurich todays practice
- show the used interdisciplinary research methodologies to gather a dense knowledge about the site and the various contextes
- discuss the competition program and the remit
- show the two selected projects and discuss the decision of the jury
- explain the communication strategy

The discussion will focus on the following questions:

- How can research results be applied to a practical question?
- How can art in public space been supported by a research framework?
- How can artists been involved in a research oriented process in order to develop a) a pilot project and b) to design a significant work of art in a given context (which may be unfamiliar to the artist)?
- How can different research processes been syncronised and the gathered knowledge been bundled towards an artistic outcome?
- How can researchers advise authorities in the process of commissioning art works (competition, communication, public relations, planing processes, documentation etc.)?
- How can the research outcome be transfered to a pragmatic knowledge which can be used further on for similar problems?

Download the presentation

SK6 presentation – Christoph Lang

Christoph Lang
Research associate at the Institute for Contemporary Arts Research.
Zurich University of the Arts, Institute for Contemporary Arts Research

Artistic research as ‘boudary work’ between the art world and academia articulates in its own way who we are and where we stand. This gives the lie to the idea of art as an autonomous sphere and opens the possibility of a ‘metaphysics of art’ – after its fall.

Henk Borgdorff is a professor of Art Theory and Research at the Amsterdam School of the Arts, and research fellow at the Royal Academy of Art and the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague.

Borgdorff is the author of two of the Sensuous Knowledge editions:

• The Debate on Research in the Arts
• Artistic Research within the Fields of Science

There are two basic different perspectives on artistic research; on one hand the development of foundations and methodologies of art and design itself and on the other hand artistic work as research methodology. In the latter case we so to speak introduce artistic, i.e. non scientific, methods in various more or less well established areas of research, typically we use artistic ways of working to introduce forms of critical reflection.

The development of foundations and methodologies of art and design itself builds on a long and well-established tradition of improving and changing the techniques and methods of art as well as the programmatic foundations of art practice. The way we address and engage with what we see around us is indirect in this case.

The idea of artistic research as research methodology clearly answers in a more direct sense to the challenge as to how we as artistic researchers, through critical reflection, address and engage with what we see around us. The very idea is somehow to use artistic ways of working to engage in areas outside art itself.

How can artistic research make a meaningful and relevant contribution outside of itself? Is this a question on how to reach outside research itself?

All forms of research have to answer to this challenge by results that make a difference. Physics gave us the atom bomb, but also efficient systems for electrical power distribution. Seemingly esoteric mathematics, highly abstract and immensely difficult to understand, makes a difference everywhere in our lives. Art and design make a difference in our lives.

But where is the borderline between art, artistic work and research in artistic research?

-    If we focus on research is this in any meaningful sense anything else than what has always being going on in research, where critical aesthetics and artistic insight always have played a central role?

I would, for instance, argue that foundational work in science in a certain sense is a form of artistic research and that this is artistic critical reflection that address and engage with what we see around us. Foundational work depends on abilities to express foundational insights.

-    If we, on the other hand, focus on artistic expression is this in any meaningful way anything else than just artistic work?

There is a basic dilemma here:

-    If artistic research means development of the foundations for artistic work, then we leave the outside world to dwell on art itself,
-    If artistic research means using artistic ways of working in research, then we leave art for the outside world, i.e. for other areas of investigations.

Starting with the main conference questions

-    How do we as artistic researchers, through critical reflection, address and engage with what we see around us?
-    How can artistic research make a meaningful and relevant contribution outside of itself? And how can it acknowledge the responsibility of art and research towards the world outside the academy?

I would like to present the dilemma of artistic research, as I see it, by discussing four typical example categories of artistic research. As a starting point, and provocation, for the discussion I will argue that a strong focus on the systematics of the research result is the only reasonable way out of the dilemma.

The examples I will discuss are:

-    Artistic interventions. When is this art and when is it a form of action research?
-    Reflections on artistic processes. When is this art theory and when is it artistic development work?
-    Critical design. When is this artistic research and when is it cultural studies research?
-    The research-studies-art-projects. When is this art and when is it research?

Lars Hallnäs, Professor

The Swedish School of Textiles
University of Borås

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Division Interaction Design
Chalmers University of Technology

Using the pilot-project as an example, the presentation will focus on the nature of reflection. The presentation will propose different possible angles depending on the understanding of the relevance for the intended audience. Since the limited time for the presentation not all angles will be touched in depth, rather raised as proposed phenomenological viewpoints, discussing their possible content.
Some possible viewpoints of relevance for reflections on the pilot-project:

Counting, Memory and Interrogation

• as a staged event(polymediality, doxality/paradoxality, how to create meaning?)
• as a concert (piece or process? Quality? Wholeness or uniqueness)
• as a technological experiment (notions of simultaneity, real time issues, structure, sound diffusion issues)
• as a contextual critique (music as a concert, phenomenological versus dramaturgical listening)

The meta-reflection will try to differentiate reflection into a number of interrelated stages or ‘situations’. Notions discussed: what is description, interpretation, contextualisation, (critical?) reflection and meta-reflection. How do these situations relate to the above-mentioned viewpoints?

Ivar Frounberg, Professor
The Norwegian Academy of Music

How do artists reflect on their art, when the art can not be reproduced? How relevant is artistic research, when there is no physically present artefact? Are actors responsible for the act?

The actors gone, there’s only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they’ll
use up what we used to be.
(Peter Gabriel, Here comes the Flood)

The Swiss Institute for the Performing Arts and Film (ipf) conceives, initiates, and supervises research projects that enquire into both basic and applied research issues and establish a dialogue between art and science. Research topics include research on art, research through art, and research with art. Performative and cinematographic means are analysed not only as cultural strategies but also tested as research techniques and are directly linked with the Master of Arts courses (MA in Theatre and MA in Film).

An aim and major difficulty in the research programmes are the sometimes ‘un-academic’ outcomes of research results in form of performances or films. I would like, after a short introduction on the history and outcomes of the ipf, present two examples and as outcome from these discuss the three topics mentioned above:

Cinémémoire – An Oral History of Swiss Film. This research project aims at establishing a more comprehensive view of filmmaking in Switzerland during the 1960s and 70s. It focuses on the developments and contexts that either substantiate or refute the notion of a break between “old” and “new” Swiss cinema, and which shed light on the permeability between the various areas of production, creative scenes, and language regions. Based on the methods of oral history, the Cinémémoire research team is conducting interviews with thirty contemporary witnesses in Switzerland to record their individual and institutional experiences with film technology, acting, etc. Using a semi-standardised questionnaire, these filmed qualitative interviews are designed to elucidate the concrete social, ideational, and material conditions under which films were produced, distributed, and screened.

Authenticity of Emotion. Are emotions produced during an actor’s performance that render it authentic or does acting rather involve calling up a seemingly authentic behavioural sequence? Konstantin Sergejewitsch Stanislawski and Lee Strassberg succeeded in establishing the use of emotional memory as a core element of actor training. But are their assumptions about the significance of emotional memory also valid in scientific terms? Using modern procedures capable of imaging brain activity, a joint Swiss Epilepsy Centre and the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film research team is examining whether top-class actors use emotions in their performances. Magnetic resonance imaging research conducted to date reveals that whereas actors familiar with the techniques of Method Acting activate key structures of emotional processing during their imagined acting out of emotions, this does not occur with mere text recall. Does this evidence also substantiate Strassberg’s and Stanislawski’s theoretical assumptions? Since actors have now scientifically been proved to be experts of their emotions, is it time to find out how they get in control of ours?

Anton Rey,  Professor, Institute for the Performing Arts and Film, University of the Arts Zurich

Read more about Duncan Higgins’ Unload.