November 24th 2023, from 11 am to 11 pm
Academy of Fine Arts in Prague – GAVU, U akademie 4, Prague 7
a 12-hour (performative) reflection on artistic research
The event Half-life — Half-alive aims to show in a performative format how practice-based research may encompass diverse forms of making, dissemination and learning and thus lead to crossfertilization of concepts, methodologies, and approaches.
The title Half-life — Half-alive alludes to the changing condition of research in the age of advanced digital technologies and the hybridisation of knowledge. The event will focus on the ways by which artistic research has the ability to address pressing societal issues and contribute to cultural discourse by combining insights from diverse fields and geographies. A wider understanding of the nature of artistic research can show how this type of research is a process of relation, collaboration, and dissolving the boundaries of practice and theory.
Lectures, performances, and participative acts will be showcased over 12 continuous hours as legitimate means of sharing experiences, insights and knowledge that is generated through practice-based research with students, teachers, researchers and a wider audience.
The event Half-life — Half-alive aims to show in a performative format how practice-based research may encompass diverse forms of making, dissemination and learning and thus lead to crossfertilization of concepts, methodologies, and approaches. The title Half-life — Half-alive alludes to the changing condition of research in the age of advanced digital technologies and the hybridisation of knowledge.
The event will focus on the ways by which artistic research has the ability to address pressing societal issues and contribute to cultural discourse by combining insights from diverse fields and geographies. Emphasis will be put on how computational culture challenges the normative procedures of research, knowledge production and circulation. The event aims to generate shared horizons of understanding the nature of artistic research today and to show how this type of research is a process of relation, collaboration, and dissolving the boundaries of practice and theory.
Lectures, performances, and participative acts will be showcased over 12 continuous hours as legitimate means of sharing experiences, insights and knowledge that is fostered through practice-based research with students, teachers, researchers and a wider audience.
The conference is held in English.
Contributors
Luiza Prado de O. Martins, artist and researcher, Berlin/Rio de Janeiro
Luiza Prado De O. Martins is an artist, activist and researcher. Their work moves between installation and food, using performance and ritual as a way of invitation and activation for audiences. Their practice explores anticolonial strategies in relations and knowledge between food, infrastructures and technology, and questions what structures and process are needed for collective concerns of care. Their current artistic research project, “Un/Earthings and Moon Landings” reimagines past, future, and present histories of silphium — a plant once used as an aphrodisiac, contraceptive, and cooking spice in the Roman Empire. Thought to be extinct for 2,000 years, the plant might have recently been found again. Their body of work spans food, performance, video, text, installation, and sculpture, and has been shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Savvy Contemporary, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Kampnagel, among others. Luiza is one half of the artist duo We Work in the Dark.
Featured work: White
Markéta Dolejšová & Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, designers, researchers, teachers, Aalto University – School of Arts, Design and Architecture
Markéta Dolejšová is a design researcher and curator experimenting with feral ways of knowing and doing, often in multispecies settings. She currently serves as a postdoctoral research fellow at Aalto University – School of Arts, Design and Architecture (FI) where she helps to sprout a practice-based inquiry into more-than-human forest epistemologies and data (Open Forest) and teaches experimental design research. Previously, she worked with the CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures EU project (2020-22) where she led the Laboratory of experimental artistic productions. She has co-founded several art-design research initiatives including the Uroboros festival, the Open Forest Collective, the Feeding Food Futures network, and the Fermentation GutHub.
Jaz Hee-jeong Choi is an Associate Professor in Civic Interaction Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Their transdisciplinary research and practice situate ‘care’ at the core of transformational encounters in different settings ranging from cities as complex cyberphysical networks to forests as moving creatures. They build on this to explore how radical transformation can materialise care-fully through creative-critical engagements. Jaz’s work is often experimental, multisensory, playful, and participatory, and starts from the margins to understand and create just futures. Their current research, practice, and engagement focus of the dynamics of creative practice as feral care: they explore 1) its potential to arouse societal transformation in different cultural and more-than-human contexts, and 2) experimental and co-creative ways to form relational spaces to make sense of indeterminacy, plurality, and entanglements towards change. Prior to joining Civic Interaction Design, Jaz was the Director of the Care-full Design Lab at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, and co-led the EU Horizon 2020 project Creative Practices for Transformational Futures (CreaTures). They also directed the Urban Informatics Lab at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and founded FoodCHI (Food-Computer-Human-Interaction) as a SIGCHI Network and a field of research.
Featured work: Feral Data Drift
This lectorial drift by Markéta Dolejšová and Jaz Hee-jeong Choi from the Open Forest Collective invites participants to consider feral data in the context of contemporary artistic research. We begin by introducing some of the key related concepts in the broader area of creative practice-based research and discuss different forms of knowledge and data that can be produced through it, as a way of worlds-making. We share examples of our Open Forest Collective inquiry and focus on the practice of drifting, through which we have been exploring feral data as one kind of research data co-created by and in relation to local more-than-human ecologies. Following the lecture and a group discussion, participants will be invited to drift – conceptually, physically, and otherwise – with and through the AVU symposium and collect feral data that can help render AVU’s diverse and changing artistic research ecologies. The collected fragments of feral data will be shared at the end of the symposium to open further possibilities for reflection and co-/re-creation.
Florian Dombois, artist, researcher, teacher, Zurich University of the Arts
Florian Dombois (*1966, Berlin) works on and with wind, time, lability and tectonics. His artistic practice articulates in diverse media, often in happenings and sound installations. He has been a professor for transdisciplinarity at the Zurich University of the Arts since 2011. In 2010, the received the German Sound Art Award.
http://floriandombois.net
http://worldwidewind.org
http://www.zhdk.ch/en/fspt/
Featured work: Thinking in the Wind
For twenty years Florian Dombois has been navigating the field of artistic research as an artist. How can expectations be transformed, the visible made invisible and research freed from science? Based on his own artistic projects, a.o. with sound kites, the lecture will present research as a playground and space for movement.
Milena Dopitova and The Intermedia I studio, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague
Martin Kámen, PhD candidate, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague
Štepán Kleník, PhD candidate, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague
Štěpán Kleník studied Aesthetics at Charles University and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague. As a PhD candidate at AVU, he explores technological democratization within cultural institutions and the impact of emerging technologies on visitor experiences. Central to his research is the exploration of how technology fosters inclusivity, accessibility, and democratic presentation of art, while concurrently mediating critical knowledge.
Featured work: Artificial Wisdom
Vytautas Michelkevičius, curator, media critic, researcher, teacher, Vilnius Academy of Arts
Prof. Dr. Vytautas Michelkevičius (Vilnius, LT) is a curator, writer and researcher whose focus was gradually shifting from photography in expanded field to media art & theory and lately to artistic research in academia and beyond. He is teaching art practice & research and theory for BA, MA and DA/PhD students in the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VDA) and internationally. He served as artistic director of the Nida Art Colony (2010–2019). Since 2019 he is the Head of the Photography, Animation and Media Art Department as well as the Doctoral Programme in the Arts in VDA. Since 2016 he has been actively working internationally with DA/PhD students: supervising, running courses, curating expositions and conducting interdisciplinary inquiry on artistic research. He published the first book on artistic research from the Central and Eastern European perspective Mapping Artistic Research. Towards Diagrammatic Knowledge (2016 LT, 2018 ENG). Among recent publications are Atlas of Diagrammatic Imagination (together with Lina Michelkevičė, 2019); Impact of Artistic Research on Humanities and Contemporary Art (together with Aldis Gedutis, forthcoming 2024). He has curated numerous artistic research symposia and exhibitions, among them Lithuanian Pavilion in the Venice Biennale (Dainius Liškevičius project “Museum”, 2015), Ars Electronica Vilnius Garden 2020, and Campus exhibition at Ars Electronica, Linz, 2022. He has edited, authored and contributed to more than 15 books on art, media, artistic research and residencies. https://vilnius.academia.edu/VytautasMichelkevicius
Featured work: WTF & DIY: Is this (my) (artistic) research?
Participatory & demo walk (50 min)
Initiated & facilitated by Vytautas Michelkevičius
Who has a right to conduct research? Do artists create knowledge? Does society recognize the value of artists’ knowledge and work? Do we only decorate the world or do we construct the world and create knowledge? Do we make or do we also think? Why do we need to defend our practice in front of scientists? Do we have artistic (research) freedom or do we fulfill needs of a king, a queen and bureaucrats?
Everybody is invited to join a participatory walk and fight for the rights of artists and artistic research. Drawing inspiration from Fluxus, we will collectively establish a temporary autonomous zone (Hakim Bey) for artistic research in the public space of Prague. This intervention and happening will help us to unite and claim for conditions we have deserved.
Please bring 1 slogan/anecdote/phrase (1 sentence) for and against (the right to) artistic research and join us for a short banners/flags workshop followed by a walk to save and condemn artistic research in front of the public.
Anne-Helen Mydland, visual artists, teacher, The Art Academy, University of Bergen
Anne Helen Mydland (1971 Norway)
Professor of Clay and Ceramics, The Art Academy- Department of Contemporary Art, Faculty of Fina Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen.
Mydland has worked as an artist, researcher and educator for many years. She has a longstanding engagement with the development and positioning of artistic research through national and international research projects, positions and affiliations.
Featured work: Why Dig? – ongoing performative event
Kateřina Olivová, artist, teacher, Academy of Fine Arts in Prague
Kateřina Olivová je umělkyně, performerka, pedagožka. Ve své tvorbě se zabývá především tělesností, sexualitou, ale také lidskými emocemi. Vystudovala Ateliér tělového designu na Fakultě výtvarného umění Vysokého učení technického v Brně, v rámci svého doktorského studia se zabývala mateřstvím, jeho vlivem na tvorbu rodičů a jejich fungováním ve světě umění, z toho výzkumu vyšla kniha Milk and Honey (2021) vydaná NAVU a nakladatelstvím wo-men. Založila aktivistickou skupinu Kojící guerilla a společně s Darinou Alster podpůrnou skupinu Mothers Artlovers. V roce 2018 byla finalistkou Ceny Jindřicha Chalupeckého. V současné době vede spolu s Darinou Alster Ateliér nových médií II na Akademii výtvarných umění v Praze.
Featured work: Hojivý sliz / Healing Slime
Franz Thalmair, curator, writer, researcher and teacher, University of Applied Arts Vienna / mumok Vienna
Franz Thalmair | Curator for contemporary art, mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (since 2019) | Artistic co-director, Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt (since 2018) | Visiting professor and lecturer, University of Applied Arts Vienna, TransArts – Transdisciplinary Art (since 2013) | Curatorial director of the research project “originalcopy – Post-digital Strategies of Appropriation”, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Media Theory (2016–2019) | Managing curator, Secession, Vienna (2010–2014) | Head of the culture department and editor for visual arts, derStandard.at (2007–2010) | Since 2007 comprehensive writing for media such as Artforum / Artforum.com, springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, KUNSTFORUM International
Featured work: From Surface to Universe – for example
Possible Content for 18 Pages
“Research is not only that which comes before realisation but also that which is realised throughout actualisation.” (Simon Sheikh)
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
A Set Of Lines, A Stack Of Paper
Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet
I Am Here Because You Are Here
originalcopy
Periphrasis (for a ditto, ditto device)
A ditto, ditto device.
‘‘,‘‘,‘‘, — Footnotes
Marcus Boon, In Praise Of Copying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1–285.
VIE 02/01/17—03/31/17 TYO
Collaborations
mixed up with others before we even begin
« alors les vieux démons de la pureté » (Édouard Glissant)
let fungi guru wisdom meet minds turn us new
András Cséfalvay, artist and teacher, Academy of Fine Arts and Design Bratislava
András Cséfalvay, assoc. prof., MFA, ArtD
www.andrascsefalvay.com
Digital Arts Platform,
Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava
Featured work: Shape of Future Earth
Mythopoesis in an era of despair. How is it possible to provide alternatives for survival with the help of world-building? New cosmologic imagination enables us to revise our location within colonial discourses, especially when it comes to the possibility of Eastern European Space exploration, and the place of humanity for the eras to come. The future to come will firstly be imagined, foretold, and self-fulfilled. First, we must learn to make room, and a relationship between fiction and reality must be defined. Our partial and indirect access to reality leads us to think about knowledge as collections of models. Successful models dominate our era, yet there are voices that partial modelling of the world silence. To test these faint models, dominant models are to be put aside, and tests of consistency and applicability are to be carried out. New agents propose to bring us other, new knowledge. Worlds populated with creatures from deep time, creatures of planetary sizes, actors made of pure matter become messengers of unattainable knowledge. A mythology of flight that uncovers longing deeper than any mammal would remember, flight as a hacking technology, not mere adaptation but imaginary use of protein (or other) technologies. And finally, the possibility of ethics, balance in a culture of nonillion lives (10^30), were humanity to become a galactic civilization. The world-building ethos provides us pathways to reimagining the preservation of life, in lieu of letting the fire take over our house.
Alice Koubová/Vladimír Turner/Magdaléna Trusinová, philosopher-artists research team, Academy of Performing Arts in Prague
Vladimír Turner(*1986) is a multidisciplinary artist oscillating between film and fine art. A long line of of films, committed interventions in public space, performances and object installations provide a consistent testimony to the power of the themes reflected. Vladimír Turner has for many for many years in various places around the world, he has been a persistent reminder of the problematic, and often strongly cautionary moments of Anthropocene civilization.
The enchanted mechanism of consumption-production, mendacity of marketing strategies, the extraction of non-renewable resources, the brutal devastation of the landscape, mass tourism, gentrification, homelessness, inhumane methods of political systems. Only actually reminds us again and again of the nature of pure humanity, personal and social responsibility to the landscape, to nature, a sustainable way of life based on local self-sufficiency.
Featured work: Let’s Connect Yesterday
Let’s Connect Yesterday depicts the performance of the same name, which combines a dance performance by the Tantehorse company with a lecture by philosopher Alice Koubová. It deals with the crisis, adaptation to it, transformation of one’s own attitude and the forms of care that are related to such a change. She presents the crisis – be it energy, economic, climatic or social reconciliation crisis, loss of security, disorientation and others – not only as a threatening condition, but also as a starting point in which, if certain conditions are met, one can find energy and resources for one’s own transformation, which is necessary for further continuation.
Synopsis:
Resilience as the ability to cope with crises and unexpected disruptions is portrayed in this film by movement performance and scientific lecture. The viewer is is offered the opportunity to understand the situational sequences that simulate principles such as homeostasis, finding supports and resources for adaptation and transformation on two levels. Firstly, on an abstract emotional level, then through the concrete philosophical interpretation. The acceptance of ambiguity is a condition not only for the perception of a work of art, but also essential for the development and maintenance of resilience. Loss of certainty, disorientation and liminal states are understood here not only as threat, but also as states of high potentiality.
However, a prerequisite for such a perception is to ensure a minimum of margin of safety and trust. This visual film by Vladimir Turner is based on the scientific research of philosopher Alice Koubova and a theatrical performance by the Tantehorse ensemble directed by Miřenka Čechová and Markéta Vacovská.
Schedule
11:00–14:00 BLOCK I 180 min
OPENING/WELCOME
(10 min.)
Florian Dombois (Zurich University of the Arts)
– Thinking in the Wind (How to do Artistic Research?)
performative lecture (50 min.)
Markéta Dolejšová & Jaz Hee-jeong Choi (Aalto University – School of Arts, Design and Architecture)
– Feral Data Drift
feral lecture (50 min.)
Anne-Helen Mydland (The Art Academy, University of Bergen)
– Why Dig?
(ongoing) performative event (40 min.)
Luiza Prado de O. Martins (artist and researcher, Berlin/Rio de Janeiro)
– White
performance/lecture (20 min.)
14:00 soup and coffee break
15:00–17:00 BLOCK II 120 min.
Martin Kámen (Academy of Fine Arts Prague)
– Queer Collective Memorial
performance (15 min.)
Alice Koubová, Vladimír Turner, Magdaléna Trusinová (Academy of Performing Arts Prague)
– Let’s connect yesterday (2023)
discussion and screening (50 min.)
Vytautas Michelkevičius (Vilnius Academy of Arts)
– WTF & DIY: Is this (my) (artistic) research?
participatory & demo walk ( (50 min.)
17:00 Apéro
17:30–19:40 BLOCK III 130 min.
Franz Thalmair (University of Applied Arts Vienna / mumok Vienna)
– From Surface to Universe – for example
lecture (50 min.)
– Computational culture and the challenges of research and knowledge production
Florian Dombois, Anne-Helen Mydland, Franz Thalmair, Vytautas Michelkevičius, Dusan Zahoransky, Marketa Dolejsova, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi
Moderated by: Vít Havránek
panel discussion (80 min.)
20:00 Dinner time
dinner/installation prepared by Milena Dopitová & The Intermedia I studio Academy of Fine Arts in Prague
21:00 – 23:00 BLOCK IV 120 min.
András Cséfalvay (Academy of Fine Arts and Design Bratislava)
– Shape of Future Earth
lecture (50 min.)
Štepán Kleník (Academy of Fine Arts Prague)
– Artificial Wisdom
performative lecture (25 min.)
Kateřina Olivová (Academy of Fine Arts Prague)
– Healing Slime
performance (15 min.)
Closing session / Feral drift outcomes
Music and background screening
Live stream
About LARGE
LARGE is a project that aims to represent and support art and research activities at the AVU. The research concept of AVU is thus expanded to include a platform that will promote and support the importance of practice-led research in the visual arts, but also in other areas of academia and in the broader social context, both locally and internationally.
The project LARGE is an effort to enrich the conditions and contexts for art-led researchers at AVU through education and open exchange, student activities at doctoral as well as master’s levels, tutorials, conferences, publications, workshops and symposia. LARGE will facilitate discussion and dialogue on issues related to artistic research between artistic research communities, higher education institutions, public and private competence centres. LARGE will be launched in 2024, and its broader concept and program will be developed under the direction of an artist-researcher. Over time it should become one of the main research centers at AVU.
LARGE will promote research that:
– is based on artistic practice;
– is rooted in the unique character of art;
– seeks to achieve both disciplinary depth and interdisciplinary breadth;
– puts research at the centre of education;
– contributes significantly to professional artistic practice.
LARGE pursues the following goals:
– to improve the academic standing of artistic research at AVU (training, grants, networking)
– to integrate research into practice and practice into research
– to promote artistic doctorates and their supervision within practical doctoral programmes
– to support research groups alongside or within existing departments we have at AVU
– to adapt the structures for evaluating artistic research both within AVU and at the levels of academic and governmental bodies
– to provide a competent point of contact for the public, the artistic community and the academic community in relation to the subject of artistic research
– to inform about projects, publications and discourses in the field of artistic research and education
– to promote and implement the Research Catalogue platform