The Laboratory for Art Research

Honey Biba Beckerlees practice based PhD Digital Matters situates itself in the paradox between, on the one hand, the culturally wide spread assumption that cyberspace is bodyless and the internet is immaterial, while on the other hand the overconsumption of energy and the extraction, distribution and transformation of massive land masses in the consumption of raw materials in digital technologies, which end up as great amounts of toxic electronic waste and recently has given us an outlook to the depletion of several chemical elements.

The project seeks to find new understandings of - and ways of relating to the digital, by drawing on post-human and more-than-human perspectives on the technology. Inspired by feminist versions of quantum mechanics and (new) materialism, that question classic distinctions between mind/body, immaterial/physical and ultimately what can be considered living and not living, this practice-based research project seeks to make art works that take the body and the plastic resources back into the center of an understanding of the technology.

Through a method of intra-action inspired by Karen Barad, the project aims to make artistic experiments that facilitate new materials, forms of expression and processes with digital raw materials. From a notion of distributed agency the project asks: What new ways of cognitive comprehension lies in taking into consideration the entanglements between people and technology by tracing how chemical elements travel from nature into computers and humans? How is our understanding of an extremely temporary technology if we consider it in a perspective of deep time through the journey of minerals over thousands of years? Can one develop a new sensibility towards digital technology through art, that takes finitude into consideration?

My PhD project Sky Studies: Cosmic Code, Images, and Imaginaries focuses on explorations of space across astronomical, computational, aesthetic, and futurological realms, in order to rethink well-known (hi)stories of space research, and nurture attentiveness to more complex historical textures.

The aim of the project is to examine the following research questions:
- Can we, by studying the work of women and other groups omitted in traditional histories of astronomy and space sciences, reach more attentive conceptions of how history happens, and how the future is made?
- Can we through studies of their work conceive of new ways of thinking about relationships between art, craft, and science; between analogue and digital technologies?
- Can we conceptualize histories of space which does not just add to earlier histories, but which makes us sensitive not just to who, but to how people (and things) are included and presented?
- And can such a broadened understanding allow us to imagine different futures?

I will examine these questions through research and a series of artistic experiments that interweave historical references and new scientific studies. Sky Studies will materialize as photographs, films, weavings, installations, writings, and artist’s books.
 
The project will be developed at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Copenhagen University, with a planned stay at Comparative Media Studies/Writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts + ARKEN Museum of Modern Art Research project “The Museum in a Fragile Ecology”  
--
Dehlia Hannah is a philosopher and curator. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, where her Ny Carlsberg funded project Rewilding the Museum examines the art museum’s status within the fragile ecologies of the Anthropocene. She received her PhD in Philosophy and Certificate in Feminist Inquiry from Columbia University, with specializations in aesthetics, philosophy of science and philosophy of nature.
--
Rewilding the Museum

Anthropocene discourse collapses the distinction between nature and culture. Under its sign, the artistic gaze ranges beyond the gallery to treat the dominant planetary condition as authored or impacted by human activities. From rock strata to ice cores, wastelands to wilderness, we have come to understand the earth itself as an archive of inscriptions—as a collection to be studied, inventoried, conserved, or restored; to be acquired, exhibited, and perhaps de-accessioned. This perspective posits an expanded curatorial mandate beyond the walls of the museum: the earth as a total exhibition. The stakes of this mandate are high.

Environmental imaginaries have material consequences, as images of ‘nature’ structure how we inhabit the world. In a moment where our environmental imaginaries are increasingly contested, this project examines how contemporary artistic practices occupy fraught conceptual and material territory. If the ancient concept of the museum as the ‘home of the muses’ is to be updated to our present times, we must follow the muses in their wandering beyond the gallery space, off-site, and into difficult terrain, as they inspire artists working with the detritus of modernity, in the great plastic garbage patches in the ocean, urban sewage treatment plants, burning forests, and oil palm plantations.

Conversely, such an expanded curatorial mandate casts a critical gaze upon other forms of technê that seek to transform the earth—works of infrastructure, geoengineering, exclusion zones, shutdowns, blackouts and projects of rewilding. Rewilding, as a practice of environmental restoration, seeks to restore the functioning of ecosystems to a wild or natural state. The practice involves complex retrospective and prospective constructions of nature, involving varying degrees of human involvement.

Without distinguishing between modes of artifice practiced by the arts and sciences, Rewilding the Museum examines how ‘environments’ are represented, mediated, and produced within and beyond the gallery today.
--
Portrait above by ICI Berlin

New Connections: Queering the Radio Voice

In my artistic practice, the research I conduct aims to generate new knowledge, insights, and works of art in the intersectional field of synthetic voices, queer studies, performance theory, technology studies, and anti-racism theory. Contemporary art is continually transforming, and to follow that development, I think the methods and theories flexibly must change as well. I engage both artistically and academically with podcasts, DJing, sound art, and art radio as cultural practices that provide a starting point for this research. Webcasting is both a way of presenting and documenting sound pieces. This function was traditionally taken care of by state-organized radio. Today, however, the documentation and broadcasting of experimental sound artworks is largely reliant on independent channels.

I want to research this dynamic by analyzing some of the online radio stations that serve this societal function today. As a practice-based and artistic research project, artistic activities such as participating in exhibitions, performing curations, lectures and artist talks are considered part of the PhD-project on equal terms with, for instance, publishing a peer reviewed article or attending a conference within academia.

The PhD project is a direct continuation of my prior research, which has mainly revolved around sound and performance art. I will establish an online radio station at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, which will serve the double function of documenting and communicating the artistic research to a wider public. The radio station will also be a useful resource in the production of artistic knowledge. I envisage a four-fold output for the PhD: an exhibition, a concluding broadcast, an article-based PhD thesis and a zine with contributions from the collaborators that have partaken in the radio programs. I want the radio station to be an open site for knowledge sharing, that can flexibly adapt to events in the art world that makes new ways of understanding things possible.

It is important to me, in making it as open a format as possible, and I see it as a way of ensuring a curious approach to running the radio channel, that the premise of the radio station is very clearly defined and communicated already at the launch of the radio. For one thing, I want the radio station to have a publicly communicated zero-tolerance for any type of discrimination. In a contemporary visual arts context, sound can be considered an in-between medium, which activates and interacts with many other research areas. With the radio show New Connections, I hope to build a network of listeners on the art scene.

--

Artist Kristoffer Raasted is educated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Visual Arts in 2018 with a supplementary MFA in art theory from the Institute of Artistic Research and exchange semesters at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and Faculdade de Belas-Artes Ulisboa, and a three-month internship period at Issue Project Room in New York. Raasted conducts artistic research in the intersectional field between sound, performance and installations and will commence the practice-based ph.d. project at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in september 2020. The PhD stipend is granted by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and is organized in a collaboration between the University of Copenhagen and The Academy of Fine Arts.
 

The practice-based PhD project Exhibition as Psycho-Aesthetic Form will examine the art exhibition as form in itself. Through curatorial research, it will investigate how certain time-based, backdrop including, conceptually complex international contemporary art exhibitions manage to be experienced as formal aesthetic entities in an aesthetic philosophical sense.

The PhD will explore the curatorial sensibility as a co-producer of the work experience and ask the questions:
- How can one curatorial create tensions that vitalize the exhibition as a whole in the visitor’s consciousness?
- What aesthetic experiences of the world of life around us unfold in these curatorial practices?
- Does it make sense to talk about a work as isolated from the total installation experience it is part of?