KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Barbara Lüneburg   www.barbara-lueneburg.com

Benjamin Lignel   artjewelryforum.org/authors/benjamin-lignel

Falk Hübner   hubnerfalk.com/

Pascal Gielen   www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/pascal-gielen/

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ABSTRACTS

Barbara Lüneburg

TransCoding – from "highbrow art" to participatory culture

K-Pop artist PSY and gender theorist Judith Butler, contemporary art music and pop culture – how can these possibly be considered together? The artistic research project TransCoding – From "Highbrow Art" to Participatory Culture (PEEK AR 259-G21), funded by the Austrian Science Fund, attempted to find an answer. TransCoding engaged with the topic of participatory culture by using social media in the context of artistic practice. My team and I encouraged participation and shared discourse in the new arts by actively involving an online audience in the making of a multimedia artwork. We hoped thus to make "highbrow" art, that is, contemporary classical music and multimedia art, more accessible to a broader public.

Through our social media channels we invited to speak out, share discourse and take influence on the creation of our artwork, thus empowering our followers to express their own identities and participate in the creative process. We afforded our community members authority in shaping our work and offered them a platform to meet and make their interest clear. As we invited contributors to exercise influence in the joint artwork, we looked at change as viewed through the power relationship between artist and community. The (commonly) hierarchic relationship between the artist and audience/followers was changed into one of permeability and mutual influence. http://transcoding.info

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Benjamin Lignel

With a little help from my friends: a conversation about learning environments & seeking practices

 

What exactly do we expect, when we ask students to “do” a thesis? The shape of that questions, and the assumptions it makes about preparedness, research methods and delivery formats has left this educator a little worried. WTF. Drawing from a motley group of thinkers and teachers (john-Ann-Judith-Namita-Caroline-Irit) I’d love to have a chat with fellow researchers, educators and artists to better understand the specificity of craft-informed research: can we unlearn the hand-mind divide? Can we re-think the student-educator relationship? Can we begin from experience but envisage the collective? 

And: will bookclubs save the world?

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Falk Hübner

In search of common ground: on designing and sharing research methods

 

How do we as artist researchers, and as teachers of artistic research, actually design such research, while taking aspects such as ephemerality, collective processes and emergence into account?

 

This lecture proposes a model of research design, which is part of an ongoing postdoctoral research on artistic research methodology. The model is developed on the basis of practice as researcher, educator and supervisor at various arts universities in The Netherlands. Departing from Borgdorff's notion of "methodological pluralism" (2017), the model contains three layers, which interact in a flexible, fluid and ephemeral structure of a network: Collection, Structure and Time. All three are permeated by the additional force and influence of Emergence. The design of a research strategy is consequently regarded as a creative process, with a strong emphasis on how emergence can "do its work” - in both the design process as well as while carrying out the research - while still being sufficiently and thoroughly designed. 

 

An essential argument of the lecture will be made around the dissemination and sharing of methods and methodology, in order to make the often very particular and sometimes singular methods of artistic research accessible to others. A recent participatory performance and experimental workshop around “touch” will be used as a case study to offer some "speculative food for thought."

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Pascal Gielen

Sensuous science: aesthesis as method

 

Not only do aesthetics form the foundation on which the house of scientific truth is built, but our aesthetic capacity offers the building blocks for a methodology that could lead us to a different kind of knowledge. A whole other species of knowledge, indeed one that stands alone alongside other kinds of (scientific) knowledge. As such it would encompass a form and capacity of knowing that would not only complement but also reinforce pre-accumulated knowledge. Whereas dancers, for example, sense their bodies and after much training know what they are capable of, biologists, via a completely different methodological path, may arrive at the same knowledge. Likewise, sculptors understand the stone they hew differently from geologists, who reduce the stone to its smallest particles for observation. While artists become familiar with their material through aesthesis, scientists use their gaze primarily to detachedly understand the same thing. While the former try to grasp their world from within, the latter do so from the outside. The first touches, smells, listens, feels and resonates with the subject, while the latter looks, fixates and categorizes. Aesthetics are in this way a visceral science. In his lecture, Gielen will explore the possibilities of aesthetics/ aesthesis as a methodology.

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BIOGRAPHIES

Barbara Lüneburg holds a professorship for Artistic Research at Anton Bruckner Private University, Austria where she is also head of the doctoral programmes. She has given workshops, talks and seminars at major European, Asian and American universities and has been invited for master courses at the European Orchestra Academy, the Chiffren ensemble Schleswig Holstein (Germany) and the International Summer Academy of the Music University Vienna, Austria.

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In 1992, Barbara has founded ensemble Intégrales (1992-2012), which has gained an international reputation as one of the foremost ensembles for non-conducted chamber music and awarded the annual prize of the Oscar and Vera Ritter Stiftung, Hamburg (2008). Barbara was awarded a doctoral degree for her research "A holistic view of the creative potential of performance practice in contemporary music", a theoretical and practical work on creativity and collaboration, programming, and concert aura. For this research alone (2008-2010) she commissioned almost 30 new solo and chamber music works for violin, viola and electric violin. Her latest research project TransCoding | what if? (funded by the Austrian Science Fund) explores social media and their potential to interest and engage a young audience for the new arts.

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Benjamin Lignel is an educator, writer, curator and artist. He was the editor of Art Jewelry Forum between January 2013 and December 2016, and edited three books under AJF’s imprint, including the first book-length study of jewelry exhibition-making. He co-curated also Known as Jewellery (2008), MirrorMirror 

(2011), Difference and Repetition (2013), Exposé (2017), Medusa, Jewellery and Taboos (2017) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and most recently collaborated on Tableau Vivant (2018) at the Pinakothek der Moderne/the Design Museum, Munich. Benjamin has lectured extensively on craft, and regularly contributes essays to magazines, artists’ books and museum publications. He teaches at HDK (Göteborg), Alchimia (Florence), the Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam), Warren Wilson College (Swannanoa) and is currently working with co-editor Namita Wiggers towards a publication on jewelry and gender. Ben is on the editorial advisory board of Norwegians Crafts and of the Journal of Jewellery Research. His work is represented in several public collections. He lives in Montreuil (France).

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Falk Hübner, PhD, is a composer, music theatre maker and researcher. He creates experimental stage work which falls between concert, installation and performance. Everyday happenings are a major inspiration in his work. Fascinated by (non-) communication phenomena of the individual, isolated human being in our technological age, he uses everyday experiences as inspiration for his artistic work. His PhD research  focuses on the impact of “reduction” (central elements of performance – such as the musical instrument – are taken away from the musician) on the professional identity of the musician. Shifting Identities has been published in December 2014 at International Film & Theatre Books Amsterdam. He is currently conducting a two-year postdoctoral project "Common Ground" as part of the research group Research practice, Philosophy and Ethics at HKU Utrechts Conservatorium to explore the different types of research methodology in existing research at HKU.

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Falk is core teacher for research at HKU and is head of the research group music and performativity at the Professorship Performative Processes of Nirav Christophe, also at HKU. Falk is a Creative Director of the Innovative Conservatoire (ICON) and member of the board of Forum+, journal for research and the arts, based in Antwerp.

Pascal Gielen is full professor of sociology of art and politics at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (Antwerp University, Belgium) where he leads the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO). Gielen is editor in-chief of the international book series Arts in Society. In 2016 he became laureate of the Odysseus grant for excellent international scientific research of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders in Belgium. His research focuses on creative labour, the institutional context of the arts and on cultural politics. Gielen has published many books which are translated in English, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

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