Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Akademin Valand (2012-2019)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://gupea-staging.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/30631

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Glitching the Fabric: Strategies of new media art applied to the codes of knitting and weaving
(2018-09-04) McCallum, David N.G.
The purpose of the research has been to explore the creative possibilities in applying strategies derived from the domain of digital media and glitch art to a range of processes in the domain of textiles—specifically weaving, knitting, bobbin lace—with particular attention to the role of notations and coding in both domains. The enquiry presented in this dissertation is based upon the proposition that there are creative possibilities that arise when approaches and strategies from new-media and glitch art are transferred to some textile processes, and that this is possible because objects of new media and textile objects share features not limited to the grid. The research focuses on strategies from digital media and glitch art in the domain of computing and applies these strategies directly to the code and structures in the domain of textiles. The textile objects share some features of new-media objects: formal representations (making them subject to algorithmic manipulation), a separation of content and interface, objects can be easily scaled, and they are open for hacking, which is a repurposing of the code. Strategies employed in this research include developing algorithms to generate structures and behaviour, deliberately inserting error into autonomous systems and exploring the aesthetic spaces generated by the error systems, exploring the manipulation of coded objects, understanding aesthetic spaces generated by algorithms as navigable spaces. In this research, these transfers have been tested and conducted through an applied process, creating artefacts of the artistic process, such as artworks, tools for creating artworks, and trial pieces to test techniques and strategies. These artefacts have been produced within the digital domain and the textile domain. The practical works realised in this way demonstrate the viability and the generative potentials for artistic and design practice that this transfer of strategies between domains yields. The work presented in this dissertation is thus an initial set of experiments laying the groundwork for future explorations employing this transfer of strategies, based on innovative cross-relations and exchange between the domain of computing and the domain of textile production.
Händelsehorisont || Event Horizon. Distribuerad fotografi
(2016-09-16) Grönberg, Cecilia
In recent decades, photography as a technology has undergone a series of transformative changes, which have, in turn, entailed different renegotiations of the functions of photography – as image or information, as inscription or transmission. Within the framework of such a radical shift, this dissertation in photography insists on probing into and exploring the persisting effects of analogue photographs within digital ecologies. Händelsehorisont || Event Horizon employs the “event horizon” as an image and a concept, as a space for projection, and as an interface through which reflections on the different ways in which we meet and associate with photographic images in a context of digital production, publishing and circulation are enabled. Digital photography is a distributed form. This study, with its subtitle Distributed photography, explores the different visual and artistic implications of a disseminated position, proceeding by taking assistance from the octopus, a “soft intelligence” – which then, in turn, is the starting point for an eight-armed image- and text-based essay. This essay then tentatively follows the tentacular forms of manifestation that octopuses, these very complex molluscs, take on through history and literature – as life-forms and media systems. Händelsehorisont is primarily a photographed book, with photographic practice not coming to a halt with the individual image that is produced, but where practice also takes place in the montage between texts, documents and contexts. In that regard the dissertation is also a book that generates a number of different constellations for reading, at the same time as it gives rise to specific fields of gravity where circulating or floating images can be captured through other images, thereby creating new densities and fields of energy. One of these gravitational fields is an essay that studies forms for what comes to be called montage-based visual historiography. The dissertation is situated in a movement between different images and systems, between different technologies and ways of reading, and between different humans, animals, and software. It dwells at surfaces and spaces that can offer openings for future, not yet defined, photographic shapes and forms of life.
Infrafaces: Essays on the Artistic Interaction
(2013-06-04) Muñoz, Marco
The essays collected in this dissertation introduce a new concept in the field of interactive art: the concept of infrafaces. This thesis shows how a new zone is discovered when two or more elements connect. In the space that arises, a contact area comes into being between the elements involved, and this takes place at the moment of their contact and information exchange – forming an interface. This interface can in turn be manipulated to generate a new space, which forms a contact zone that can be opened even further, thus creating new spaces. The new segments created within the practice of interactivity are named infrafaces. Infrafaces are a series of interrelated interfaces within an interaction that adapt time and/or space to transform connecting elements into new spaces. These spaces act as an interface for the next transformation to take place before a new space is opened. The infraface is an artistic interpretation of the process of interactivity and has the ability to expand the time or the space in between the elements interacting, in order to embed new stories between them. This dissertation explains how, by means of artistic experimentation – through video, installations and the design of interfaces – this new area was uncovered: an area that is an infinite zone, close to the paradoxical, but that offers endless opportunities to develop art, and instead of solving the paradoxes that arise in art or technology, develops a way to use these contradictions to create a different understanding of our relation to the world. This thesis also proposes a new approach to the relationship between art and technology, hereby manifesting the ways in which our senses adapt to technology. Instead of pretending to define and change the world, this project proposes new forms of connectivity that produce different interactive applications and whose aim is to produce new knowledge. This dissertation presents five essays interwoven with artistic exhibitions, and also includes the documentations of these experienced practices, demonstrating the literary and visual potential of the infraface – a new concept within artistic research.
Melankoliska fragment: om essäfilm och tänkande
(2019-08-29) Eriksson, Patrik
This artistic doctoral dissertation comprises the essay film Melancholy Fragments (73 min.) and the book Melancholy Fragments: On Essay Film and Thinking. In making the film I wanted to explore if and how an artistic filmmaking practice works as thinking. What does it mean that I, with the help of and through the film production process, try to generate a kind of thinking? And how does it influence the form and expression of the film? The film itself can be seen as an answer to these questions. The film stages a kind of thinking within and through an artistic process. The other part of the dissertation, the written portion, deals with the creation of the film and my work on it, and with my study of film as thinking. The writing can be seen as a work story. By thinking I mean the activity of reflecting and evaluating and thereby generating ideas, questions, and temporary answers. It’s about a desire to figure something out. One way of getting at cinematic thinking is to see film shooting and editing as a thinking process instead of an execution of something that’s already been developed. Essay film as a form and method is particularly suited to a cinematic way of thinking because it relies on an exploratory perspective, an explicit subjectivity, and a metacritical approach, which is expressed in the film itself. Together, the dissertation film and book study, describe, and discuss in various ways the essay filmmaking process from the inside. The texts in the book, which were written after the completion of the film, focus on the type of thinking that emanated from my work on the film—what it led to and what it means for me. I can conclude that I have been surprised by how my thinking has changed and ended up in a very different place than it was when I started. I see this fact in particular as the clearest and most important “proof” that the process of making essay films works as a kind of thinking.
Minnesrörelser
(2015-04-01) Krook, Helga
The starting point of the doctoral project Minnesrörelser (Movements of Memory) is a documentary material, based on interviews, archival documents, letters, diaries and more, from Germany and Sweden from the 1930’s to present time focusing on childhood, upbringing, eugenics, bilingualism. The family as a place for historical writing, family stories inevitably connected with political history, and how they can be passed on or kept secret makes up the main subject matter, where questions of memory and postmemory, heritage and transgenerational consequences of oppression and guilt, as well as the role of silence, speaking and translation, are investigated. The project is considered a very practice-based one but also a historical one, as a link in the life of stories in the material interwoven with the history of Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s and of Sweden in the period of Folkhemmet. The way the project has developed and come to a preliminary end, that is, this dissertation, is in itself a story, an open end narrative, where the roles of the author and the reader are focused on. The famous statement by Roland Barthes that the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author is used as an impulse, along with Novalis’ view on reading and writing as an ever continuing literary dissemination process. Different perspectives and opposites like family album/reference book, memory/ history, ruin/reconstruction, daughter/daughter are reflected upon through the reasonings of, among others, Aleida Assmann, Harald Welzer, Marianne Hirsch and Pierre Nora as well as through different works of art, literature and historical documentation, for example by Victor Klemperer, Irina Liebmann, Susan Hiller, David Chipperfield. The dissertation is an artistic way of focusing a complex of problems of narration, which remain, naturally, unsolved.
Queer Community through Photographic Acts. Three Entrances to an Artistic Research Project Approaching LGBTQIA Russia
(2016-07-05) Karlsson Rixon, Annica
This compilation thesis is made within the field of fotografisk gestaltning (photography) and is a study of the potential for queer community to emerge through photographic acts. It consists of two artworks that have been presented in a series of exhibitions, published texts, workshops, and lectures. The artworks are the photography-, video-, and sound-based installation State of Mind, and the photographic series At the Time of the Third Reading/Vid tiden för den tredje läsningen/Во время третьего чтения, which is presented as framed images as well as in book form. The publication Queer Community through Photographic Acts introduces the research through three entry points: photography, queer, and artworks. The first two entries highlight how these concepts are used in the research as practices and theories. The latter is a written visit to the artworks that takes place from different temporal and situational positions, and reflects on the work with LGBTQIA issues and community over borders. The focus is on the emergence of community within, and through, the artworks, and how this may produce recognition of certain identities. At the same time, the artworks may destabilize what is taken for norms. How community emerges in the process of making art, as well as when activating the finalized works through exhibitions, workshops, and other presentations, is also explored. The subject of the artworks is lesbian living in St. Petersburg, a Russian women’s camp, and how one may navigate through society as queer identities. Group portraits and community form the overall foundation for the gestaltning of the artworks. The conditions for making art with the Russian LGBTQIA community as an artist from abroad are taken into consideration, as well as other shared embodied positions such as queerness and whiteness. This is performed through notions of positions and movement, as well as paying attention to an in-between – Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept which opens for a space of change and resistance to fixed positioning.

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Browsing Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Akademin Valand (2012-2019) by Subject "artistic research"