Issue 38 of the Journal for Artistic Research is now Online

JAR is open-access, free to read, and to contribute. 

The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) is an international, online, open-access and peer-reviewed journal that disseminates artistic research from all disciplines. JAR invites the ever-increasing number of artistic researchers to develop what, for the sciences and humanities, are standard academic publication procedures. It serves as a meeting point of diverse practices and methodologies in a field that has become a worldwide movement with many local activities.

Issue 38 contains 5 peer-reviewed contributions:

ECOLOGIES IN ACTION: an emergent framework for thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices, presents research by Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker and Nicole Wendel (and Sabine Zahn during the first phase). They came together in a series of intensive online encounters between 2020 and 2022, to explore how aesthetic research practices might enable and realize a specific form of thinking, which they term ‘aesthetic thinking’. This shared enquiry into practice poses questions about how they can be developed, tested, shared and brought into relations with other practices, while reflecting on under what conditions aesthetic thinking flourishes. [en] [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.3935614]

Artist-researchers Fiona Crisp, Alis Oldfield, Laura Harrington, Luis Guzman, Grace Denton, Jacqueline Donachie, Christine Borland and Louise Mackenzie come together to present Institutional Fieldworking. The exposition proposes the institution as an active site of fieldwork to perform and reveal compelling relationships between interdisciplinary research and the agency of publics. The exposition allows the reader to navigate their own route through and between three ‘scales’ of approach: Scales of Negotiation, Scales of Institution and Scales of Time, Space and Velocity. The group seek to re-vision the relationships between scientific and artistic research, exploring artistic outcomes that can support publics and generate socio-political impact. [en] [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.3566870]

In the exposition Graphic Animism: The Visual Complexity of the Physical World from Emergence to Decay, Johanna Drucker, tracks insights about fundamental principles of the animate world, explored through her own artistic practice over decades. Beginning in the 1970s with studies of minute specimens of organic matter, her approach to drawing and painting images of these objects led to a realisation that animism operates at every scale of the physical world as part of larger systems of relations and forces. The concept of ‘animism’ refers here to active systems in the physical world capable of producing transformation and being agents of change while ‘graphic’ refers to marks made on a surface, an act of bringing something into being, not necessarily as a picture or representation. [en] [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.3420489]

The Aesthetics of Photographic Production, by Andrea Jaeger investigates photographic production as a multisensory, material, and more-than-human field of making. The project’s dissemination strategy is threefold: this exposition, a published monograph and a performance and exhibition of artworks, each calibrated to communicate the research through distinct epistemic affordances. Grounded in sensory field encounters within commercial laboratories and manufacturing facilities — Bayeux London, Make it Easy Lab Nottingham, Fujifilm Tilburg, and Polaroid Enschede — the exposition foregrounds production ecologies where photographic work emerges through distributed relations among technicians, machines, paper, chemistry, protocols, speed, and darkness. [en] [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.603276]

In his Spanish language exposition Hacia el intérprete extendido. Más allá del saxofón: el gesto y la tecnología en P.O.V., Pedro Pablo Cámara Toldos explores the creative possibilities arising from the convergence of music, technology and performance. He presents P.O.V. (‘Point of View’) a project that redefines the concept of the ‘extended performer’ from an interdisciplinary perspective. This approach combines electronic music, virtual reality headsets, video and social media as integral elements of the performance. Through this multimedia interaction, the aim is not only to amplify the sensory impact of the work, but also to encourage critical reflection on how technology and social media shape perception and identity, challenging the traditional conventions of the classical concert and proposing a novel experience for both the performer and the audience. [es] [https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.2914544]

All expositions in this issue can also be viewed in an accessible version. Go to https://jar-online.net/en/issues/38 or switch between versions from within each exposition.