- It has been most interesting and challenging – and we are already discussing potential refinements for next year, rector Nina Malterud of KHiB remarks. She is pleased with both the key notes and the group workshops.

- Our experience, referring back to the first conference, is that the critical quality in the conference’s discourse gradually is advancing to become more precise. The group discussions and meeting between motivated professionals are important aspects of this working conference, Malterud points out.

The conference took place at Solstrand hotel, just south of Bergen. During the three days, the rugged Norwegian weather displayed all from autumn hail storms to the first snow of winter. Time was spent in four parallel groups, dealing with the ways artistic research present itself through various project presentations by participants.

Three key note speakers contributed with artistic as well as theoretical perspectives:

Entertaining Otherness

Sally Jane Norman, Director of Cultural Lab at Newcastle University, UK, started out on Wednesday. “Sensuous Knowledge is enhanced when shared” was one of her many statements highlighted in her presentation – which will now be developed to be published in the Sensuous Knowledge series.

Learning from a Potato Perspective

Thursday commenced with a key note by Åsa Sonjasdotter, visual artist and Professor of Contemporary Fine Art at the newly founded Academy of Fine Art at Tromsø University College, Norway.

Artistic Research within the Fields of Science

The last key note speech was held on Friday by Henk Borgdorff, Professor in Art Theory & Research at Amsterdam School of the Arts, Netherlands – following up on the issues from his previous Sensuous Knowledge publication: The Debate on Research in the Arts.

From one of the four group presentations: Eva Nässén has just finished her presentation in Group D and the discussions can begin. Photo: Peter Klasson

 Here we have collected the Programme, Call for Presentations and Call for Participation in PDF format:

Context, Concept, Creativity

The general aim of the conference is twofold: to develop ways of talking about, analyzing and evaluating various forms of artistic R & D, and to consider the special nature of cognition related to artistic creativity. Using the subtitle of last year’s conference, the ambition is to “develop a discourse” by focussing on – and maybe experimenting with – various ways of presenting, debating and reflecting on examples of artistic R & D.

Key note speaker Sally Jane Norman in discussion with Søren Kjørup
at the fourth SK conference. Photo: Peter Klasson

This ambition is underlined again by the two last words of the subtitle of this year’s conference, “concept” and “creativity”: The formation of a concept is both a creative and cognitive act in itself, but what kinds of concept can we use when talking about creativity? The first word of the subtitle, however, points to the fact that both art, design and research always take place within a broader context, one which may, for instance, give rise to ethical questions.

SK4 programme 2007

SK4 call for presentations 2007

SK4 call for participation 2007

Professor of Fine Art, Newcastle University, UK.

Making Sculptures in a place of Bricks and Termites. Working with the resources of a small landscape in India.

My main research interest over the last three years has been in developing a body of sculpture that works with, and through a particular landscape in Northern India. This has been a collaborative project, working with the artisans who populate this area, and with the materials that physically constitute the landscape. It’s an area characterised by many micro-brick factories, and by termite mounds. Many of the crafts people I worked with are facing intense pressure as India transforms itself, and the project explored their current situation.

The presentation will look at the development of the project, identifying and working with collaborations, and the final outcomes: a permanent sculpture and an exhibition in New Delhi. It will look briefly at where the project led afterwards. It will be based around visual material.

This presentation was later reworked into a manuscript and published as “Unloud” in the SK edition series.

What is unloud?

I am currently exploring how physical and emotional spaces within visual culture might be a test site for the exploration of both personal and shared imaginative alternatives. What critical approaches might be useful in order to understand what needs to be done in trying to re-imagine particular preconceptions about our relationship to people, ideas and cultures?

The workshop would be broken down into short sections:
Ideas of negotiation, reception and dialogue as conditions of critical practice

The workshop would use inter-related video and still images as a means to explore these ideas, speculative questions and critical methods. I will run all these images from dvd.

Northern Russia has been described as being shrouded in a rare serene stillness and beauty undermined by the decaying presence of evil. As I stepped off the plane on SolovkiIsland in North Russia in December 2004 I experienced a sudden and significant shift in understanding about my cultural place in the world. Solovki is a remote archipelago in North Russia . It is a UNESCO world heritage site, a founding centre for Russian Orthodoxy and the site of Stalin’s first and largest gulag complex made famous by Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”. Since then I have made 6 visits in winter and summer and have been developing a body of work collectively titled Unloud. I see this as an interrelated set of activities consisting of painting, drawing, texts and video. These elements are further explored through events: exhibition, talks, workshops, teaching and publication. I see this as part love story, part ghost story, part fact, part fiction, part narrative, part reportage and almost a painted film, something that might be linking fact or the imaginary, creating conditions that perhaps temporarily suspends us between those two poles.

The whole activity is lead by 3 prosaic questions: What is painting? What is a painting? What do I need in order to make a painting? I see painting as my most relevant language of creative invention, a marriage of craft and imagination, thought and action, an activity of imaginative possibilities inscribed with the autobiographical. The current series of 1600 paintings form a collective sequence, each painting measuring 10 x 7 cm . The use of video acts as both information for the paintings and also as potential time based reportage. I see drawing as a testing ground and activity of accumulated touches, currently informed by archival material from Solovki. Finally I see the use of text as an exploration of ideas and narratives of the gaps between the paintings, drawings and video.

For me the Solovki islands are a compelling and unique place of concentrated social and political history that touch not just my own but wider shared histories. It is for me a place of limits or an extreme situation incorporating the climate extremes, geographical extremes, extremes of faith, punishment, beauty and fantasy. In particular I am concerned with exploring ideas of testimony and social memory and to try and find the means to visualise how the personal and the historical meet.

If we value art in terms of it creating both possibility and free thought in the viewer, then what becomes vital to me is access to the work or to the physical and emotional sites that might realise this potential. It is also important for me to understand the notion of possibility not as a fixed condition but a slippery and changeable state made up of spatial, temporal and relational elements. By “possibility” I simply mean the space to think about the world differently. The format of Unloud is being constructed in such a way as to address and accommodate what I feel needs to be done in this respect. How far can the field of visual culture or art be a test site for the exploration of critical and imaginative alternatives and to try to re-imagine preconceptions about people, ideas and cultures? In doing so I want to create the circumstances in which people could question or explore their own relationship to such extreme conditions, histories and narratives. The possibility to have a small part to play in the emerging narrative speculations, regarding our current time are a major critical motivation for unloud.

” The mosaic-like walls of multiple images come across as convincing as documentary fact and as haunting as imaginative fiction.” Robert Clark, Unloud preview, The Guardian Newspaper. 11.11.06

I have lived and worked as an artist in Sheffield , UK since 1990. Since 1989 I have been exhibiting in an on-going programme of individual, group and curated exhibitions nationally and internationally.

Currently undertaking a 3year NESTA fellowship and on sabbatical leave from Nottingham Trent University School of Art and Design , UK , where I was joint course leader of the BA Hons Fine Art programme.

Professor in textiles, 50% position at Subject Area Textiles, Dept of Specialised Art at KHiB. Research Area; Patterns and Computerloom – Threadcontroller

Only Pattern

Professor, artist/musician/Director of MIRIAD (Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design), Art and Design research and practice, ManchesterMetropolitanUniversity, art.

Art and Science: The Creative Spiral

The paper discusses work that I have made in the past year using a ‘double spiral’ form. These will be oil paintings, watercolours and sound. The works explore the use of the spiral as a root form in human cultures throughout history and across the world. I will touch upon developments in fluid dynamics and quantum theory and suggest that the spiral is one of the most important forms in relation to life.

'I Walk the Path', oils, 1m x 1m, 2007

Underpainting for 'I Walk the Path', oils, 1m x 1m, 2007

Professor of Fine Art, artistic practice/research in Performance, Theatre, Photography, Video. Bergen National Academy of the Arts

Floating Characters – Theatrical Objects between Screen and Scene.

Topics, questions or discourses Kipphoff will be addressing: Sculpture, virtual, real, live art, object, theatre, time lines in video and theatre, polyphonie, non-linear and absurd narration, Alexandr Vvedenskij and the OBERIU.

Karen Kipphoff
BIT Teatergarasjen

Visiting professor in artistic research, The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts

An Artist’s Text Book

I will present and discuss a book due to be published at the end of the year. For a readership of visual artists with different levels of writing skills, I aim to provide an analytical framework for understanding the special character of artists’ texts in the context of artists’ research, as well as in a general sense.

Associate lecturer, Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway

Thoughts for future beginnings (a beginning for future thoughts).

Heidi Nikolaisen will be doing a joint presentation with Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek.

Heidi Nikolaisen and Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek are both practicing international visual artists and teach at Subject Area Photography at the Dept of Spesialised Art, Bergen National Academy of the Arts. Nikolaisen (Norwegian) is based in Bergen, while Schmidt-Bleek (German/American) lives and works primarily in Berlin, Germany. They are currently in the first stages of researching their individual projects, both generated from a mutual vantage point.

Funding stone at Svalbard / Photo: Lene Krøl Christensen

Their interest lies in the ambitious mission of the Norwegian government to compile and establish the world’s largest archive of crop seeds, housed in the depths of the arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Spitzbergen. Nikolaisen and Schmidt-Bleek aim to generate larger-scale long-term projects, involving interdisciplinary approaches.

The Svalbard seed vault as a Noah’s ark for seeds – doomsday vault

The medias approach to the seed vault has been to call it a “doomsday vault” and Norway’s Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen has called the vault a “Noah’s Ark on Svalbard.” Heidi Nikolaisen found the media’s immediate approach interesting. Inspired by the Svalbard seed vault, global environmental problems and the concept of the apocalypse, Nikolaisen intends to create a “vault” or “place of preservation” as a contemporary zeitgeist.

Nikolaisen is interested in what thoughts or ideas are created in people’s minds when told about the Svalbard seed vault. What is awoken when presented with the implications of a fatalistic ending? If you had one thought you could give to a future generation, what would it be?

The ICARDA Genebank

“The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is being constructed as a cave excavated into the permafrost just outside Longyearbyen. The SGS is intended to ensure genetic variety for the world’s food plants by storing duplicates of seed collections from gene banks all over the world, and will have storage capacity for over four million different seeds. If a seed is lost somewhere in the world due to natural disasters, war or resource shortages, it can be re-established with seeds from Svalbard.”

Source: Norwegian ministry of agriculture and food

Illustration: NASA

Norway to House Seeds in Doomsday Vault…-a doomsday vault carved into a frozen mountainside on a secluded Arctic island is ready to serve as a Noah’s Ark for seeds in case of a global catastrophe. Its purpose is to ensure the survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change, and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out. The seeds, packaged in foil, would be stored at such cold temperatures that they could last hundreds, even thousands, of years, according to the independent Global Crop Diversity Trust.

Source: Article by Doug Mellgren, Associated Press

Storytelling at Grand Royal arts installation “would you trust a Norwegian” in 2002

One part of Nikolaisens research is to make a journey to Svalbard to attend the opening of the seed vault the 26 of February 2008. Another part is to invite people to contribute their thoughts for “preservation”. This work follow up strategies Nikolaisen has utilized in the past, such as storytelling – the communication in the act of two or more people sharing something – a story/a topic/a place/a thesis or history. She will present the idea of the “mental seed vault” orally to different groups of people and interview them. One group she is interested in talking to, are the archeologists who have started excavating a huge dinosaur, located in Svalbard in 2007

Other groups of interest could be evolution theorists, mathematicians, scientists, different religious groups, fortune tellers.

In the presentation Nikolaisen will draw lines to her earlier work. A part of the artistic research is also to find out what happens to the project during this process and meetings, and how it may change it. The information and the results from these encounters will be gathered as sound/text and photography.

Note: The project is in the starting phase

From the excavation of the pliosaurus 2007, pictures by the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, Norway

Possible topic of discussion

Earlier Nikolaisen has worked with oral history and the past. This project in turn presents the question of the future. Will the result consequently be something that can be defined as an “oral future”?

More information about the Svalbard seed vault
Heidi Nikolaisen
Flaggfabrikken