Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Akademin Valand (2012-2019)

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Ecologies of Practices and Thinking
(2015-11-26) Marhöfer, Elke
How does a new materialist film practice look? To approach this question the practice-led material driven research explores dynamic ecological relations and processes of thinking and practicing. It employs an animist methodology which allows it to relate to the nonhuman as an active participant, rather than a passive object of inquiry. The approach intensifies affinities and bonds with the other-than-human, and activates a path into materiality and knowledge production different from humanfocused epistemologies. Forming particular connections with matter and situating oneself within specific and relations, the project mobilizes and is mobilized by affects, percepts and sensations of the more-thanhumans. The first chapter inquires into inherited scientific, technological, social-political and philosophical epistemologies often based on colonial and anthropocentric presumptions and mappings of the world. However, the research does not strive to rewrite or reclaim a certain history, identity or a place, it instead outlines concepts like becoming or lines of flight that pass through these legacies, building more complex and fruitful temporalities, interrelations and geographies. The writing often collaborates with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as their philosophy explicitly acknowledges inhuman forces and ambiguous ontologies. In the second chapter the focus moves towards processes, when individuals become multiplicities, when animals, plants and things are endowed with inhuman force or personhood, when matter is enthusiastic and territories are not just static backgrounds. From here the research literally travels. It travels with specific singularities and their material based practices — an entire ecology of practice often building innumerable interconnections and even landscapes. Situating itself within the ecological relational field, the research project explores methodologies of collaboration and becoming with the more-thanhuman practiced by sorcerers and fabulists from Cuba and South Korea, and by farmers from China, Burkina Faso and Japan.
For every word has its own shadow: Sunsets, Notes From Underground, Waves
(2015-11-26) Tan, Lisa
Liminality permeates this doctoral project's questions: how can an experience of the liminal exist as an artwork? What things and experiences can orient us towards affectivity and states of becoming? Lisa Tan relates such concerns to Clarice Lispector whose writing renders becoming(s) visible. Coupled with Maurice Blanchot and his literary discourse on dispossession and the outside (analogous to becoming), Tan's inquiry is critically engaged inside a moving image practice. A suite of videos: Sunsets, 2012; Notes From Underground 2013; and Waves 2014-15, stand as the primary output of this dissertation. Drifting between day and night, above and below ground, land and sea, they exist as movements towards the fulfillment of the promise of the liminal: transformation. In Sunsets, the sun converses with the force that is Clarice Lispector. The video documents the audio of a casual translation of an interview with Lispector from 1977. This recording forms the video's soundtrack. The visual footage is comprised of scenes that were filmed at 3 o’clock in the morning during the summer or 3 o’clock in the afternoon during the winter in Sweden. Notes from Underground connects the Stockholm metro and Susan Sontag’s sojourn in Sweden with a cavern system 5,000 miles away in New Mexico. The video suggestively links this journey to experiences of liminality, narrating varied intensities of geological time and strata of personal and cultural history. Departing from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, Tan’s video Waves imagines how consciousness forms in relation to society and its technologies, but also to expressions of geological and hydrological processes. Filmed at the threshold of land and sea, a conversation forms between disparate hydro-relations, such as Woolf’s prose, Courbet’s paintings of waves, Google’s data centers cooled by the Baltic Sea, invisible jellyfish, and transoceanic cables. The dissertation includes the videos, a doctoral thesis, and an artist's book, containing: illustrated transcriptions of each video; a documented solo exhibition; texts by Mara Lee, Lauren O’Neill-Butler, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, and Lisa Tan. The artist's book both documents and reflects on the research performed and involves the voices of others, providing a critical, intersubjective understanding of liminality.
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.
Hur låter dikten? Att bli ved II
(2013-04-30) Nyberg, Fredrik
This project revolves around the question raised by its title. The dissertation consists of an investigation of the culture of poetry-reading and how it has established itself in modern times, and what characterises this practice. The second half of the first chapter revolves around a number of poetry readings given by me some years ago. This chapter concludes by the concept of poetry reading being defined as something essentially different from other types of sonic poetic practices which goes under the name “poetry performance”. In the second chapter of the dissertation the focus shifts over to this kind of performative acts that became an important part of art and literary life during the 20th century. A movement is identified through which for example Ilmar Laaban and Sten Hanson abandons conventional modes of literary expression in order to seek out and stage various sound poetry and performance activities. In the concluding chapter, two of my own works are in focus. The first part is a discussion of the CD ADSR that just like the compositions on the record seeks to embrace a great many aspects. As it progresses, this essay also changes character and becomes more narrative in its mode. Since storytelling has always been something foreign to me as a writer, it is possible to regard this fragment of prose as yet another laboratory study of the significance of ways of writing in a practice aimed at producing knowledge. The last section of the dissertation discusses the collection of poems Att bli ved, where a number of key concepts such as: sound similarities; loops, metre and rhythm; and a line of poetry, act as a point of departure. All these elements constitute important contributions in the different attempts to produce the poems.
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.
När andra skriver: skrivande som motstånd, ansvar och tid
(2014-11-05) Lee Gerdén, Mara
How would a writer describe responsibility in writing, and in what ways could writing be conceived as resistance? One of the fundamental convictions in The writing of Others: writing conceived as resistance, responsibility and time, is that words do things, and that the definition of the performative qualities of literary and poetic language can not be confined to the mere act, but to an act that is also an event with the force to transform our relation the other. This dissertation is committed to doing theory, poetically, by engaging in the empirical experience of writing, and emphasizing the significance of bodily and sensory knowledge. The French literary tradition of écriture feminine with precursors Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva constitutes a crucial reference as this tradition stresses the importance of poetic language in knowledge production. But writing écriture feminine for the third millenium entails further thinking within this very tradition, as Other times are now prevailing. Others and times are precisely the keys to this elaboration of the tradition of écriture feminine, inscribing postcolonial thinking into the writing experience and focusing on the question of temporality. The writers Trinh T Minh-ha and Gloria Anzaldúa are both of vital importance for the articulation of a feminist point of view combined with postcolonial criticism that is steadily anchored in literary and linguistic grounds. Regarding the focus on temporality this study aims at two things: on the one hand displacing and analyzing “old” theoretical concepts as for instance das Unheimliche and mimicry, and on the other hand creating and coining new temporal figurations. These new figurations – the last hour, the tearing moment, the shared Schmertzpunkt and the arrested time – provide embodied theoretical concepts and point towards the intersection of resistance, responsibility and time. The question of responsibility is explored throughout this study – the question if and how the writing of Others might be a specific way of being responsible in writing.
Performing History: Fotografi i Sverige 1970–2014
(2014-05-14) Östlind, Niclas
Using curatorial practice as a method, this thesis maps and investigates photography in Sweden 1970–2014. The study deepens the knowledge of photography mainly exhibited in institutions and/or having been organised by actors that define themselves as photographic. It also contributes to producing new knowledge of the relationship between photography and art, and of the ways in which various social, economic and political spaces (in a broad sense), where the audience has encountered photography, have affected the production, display and reception of photography. It is an investigation of photography, with photography and through photography, where the exhibition practice functions as an optics that defines and sharpens the perspective, and partly as a method with which the results are tested and visualized. The exhibitions contain an active display of the material. They form spatial and temporal narratives, which show a distinctly self-reflective perspective explicitly stating that the history put forward is one of several possible narratives. The thesis gives answers to questions regarding the type of photography that has been exhibited, where and how it has been shown, who have been the driving forces behind photography exhibitions and how these aspects have changed or remained the same over time. It also examines and answers questions about the institutional and sociological conditions for photographic exhibition practices, and thereby also about a central aspect of the photographic field. The structure of the study is made up of different coordinated parts, which are devoted to different perspectives. The theoretical narration as a point of departure and the narrative interviews – that constitute an important part of the study – give space to include and to accentuate, the different actors and their historical stories. It also points to the various ways in which history, seen through the categories of history theory, has been used and what kind of historical narrative the thesis itself is an example of.
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.
Det svarta blocket i världen. Läsningar, samtal, transkript
(2018-08-23) Nordenhök, Hanna
This dissertation in literary composition examines contemporary poetry and the writing of poetry understood as events of reading and relationality – as interpretative comprehension processes where relational subjectivities are conceived and set in motion. In an ”ebb and flow” between theory and practice, as well as between the situated experience of being a writing body and that body´s inscription in the performative and explorative process, it approaches core literary questions from the standpoint of a writer in practice. With a concept borrowed from Marguerite Duras – the ”black block” – the act of writing throughout the dissertation´s texts is contextualized as a process of unknowing and ”reading”, in an instant of alliance with the strange and unexpected. The examination is realized through readings of, and dialogues with, three contemporary poets – Gloria Gervitz (Mexico), Anja Utler (Germany) and Ann Jäderlund (Sweden) – as well as through a reflexive discussion on the artistic research methods the dissertation claims to develop. In dialogue with the three other writers poetry writing is examined as a situated and lived practice, where the dialogical and collaborative format enables an exploration of the both lived and dreamed, both factually situated and fantasmagorically mobile, ”I” that a writer can be said to harbor and at the same time fabricate. With an epistemological starting point in feminist methodology, where concepts such as écriture féminine and situated knowledge are reflected upon and taken into practice, the dissertation carries out its explorative process through three stylistically and methodologically different text formats: 1) the literary essay, 2) the ”lyrical transcript” and 3) the experimental and metareflexive method discussion. Within the composition the lyrical transcript is given a decisive role, implemented and theorized as a writing genre and poetic research format with influences from experimental ethnography, post/academic writing and feminist methodologies – that is, as a writing format applied and understood as an interdisciplinary textuality that generate wickers and weaves of readings, interpretations and orchestrations of the worlds, the narrations, the performative universes, that the transcript itself manufactures.
Tvärsöver otysta tider: Att skriva genom Västerbottens och New Englands historier och språk tillsammans med texter av Susan Howe / Across Unquiet Times: Writing Through the Histories and Languages of Västerbotten and New England in the Company of Works by Susan Howe
(2019-04-09) Sandström, Imri
Tvärsöver otysta tider / Across Unquiet Times is a dissertation within the field of literary composition. It is an investigation of the histories and languages of Västerbotten, in the north of Sweden, and New England, in the northeastern United States, with and through the writing of the poet and literary scholar Susan Howe. With a focus on reading’s generative aspects—the writing of reading; its pluralistic sources as well as trajectories—the research asks which aspects of historical and literary Västerbotten and New England arise when read through each other, by way of Howe’s writings. A key concern is whether these aspects can be written, not separately, nor as a comparative study, but as concerted resonances. If so, then what are the characteristics of those resonances, and what might mediating and performing them add, or change? Through diffractive thinking and writing, performance writing, translational writing, punning, and listening, some of the more ubiquitous and problematic words, concepts, and phenomena of the cross-resonating textualities of the regions are dealt with. This work is done first and foremost by drawing on works by Susan Howe, the new materialist and feminist theoretical physicist Karen Barad, and the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant. Aspects of colonialism and settler-colonialism, Protestant ideas and related language, and forests and word-forests are diffractively written through in a variety of forms of writing. Poetry plays an important role, as does the concept of unsettling, which formulates a specifically literary response to the ever-ongoing workings of settler-colonialism. The concept of hegemonic listening is put forth as an addition to the composer and educator Michel Chion’s three listening modes. It is formulated by way of historical silences and noises, and in turn, enables listening to, elaborating on, and writing across the unquiet.
When Art Is Put Into Play: A Practice-based Research Project on Game Art
(2017-10-05) Vikhagen, Arne Kjell
When Art Is Put Into Play: A Practice-based Research Project on Game Art is a practice-based research project that aims to contribute to the understanding of the relation between play and art from the specific perspective of computer-based Game Art. This is done firstly through the production of nine works of art that through their means of production all relate to Game Art as it has come to be known in the last twenty years or so. Secondly, the relation between games, play and art is discussed from a Game Art perspective. This project as a whole aims to map and exemplify cases where Game Art successfully inherits rule-systems, aesthetics, spatial and temporal aspects from computer games. This work has in turn resulted in a provisional response to the question of the possibility for Game Art to successfully create a state of play, whilst still maintain agency as a work of art. The claim is that the friction between art and play makes it doubtful that art can maintain its agency as art through play. This claim is made as a result of the artistic process leading up to the works of art that were made as a part of the thesis. It has been strengthened through the study of the concept of play and how it relates to artistic practice.

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