Duration: 2022-2025
Collaboration: Nayari Castillo, Hanns Holger Rutz, & Franziska Hederer
Partner Institutions: GMPU Klagenfurt & Institute of Spatial Design, TU Graz. Funding: FWF-PEEK AR714-G
Position in Project: Co-Principal Investigator, Artistic Research, continuous evaluation/observation, co-coordination, co-curation.
Web-page: https://simularr.net
The past decades saw growing entanglement, simultaneity, and proximity within a networked world, announcing spatio-temporal changes. Global instabilities demand new practices of sharing responsibilities. Despite a rich history of collaborative practices, artist-researchers still work mostly in isolation in their core capacities in the arts and through the arts. Transformative practices such as relaying (Isabelle Stengers1) and a singularly plural conception of being (Jean-Luc Nancy2) are interrogated as ways-of-doing in artistic research. The project joins artists using spatial practices (installation, sound, and new media art) with a perceptual exploration of spatiality, questioning it to examine the background from which one arrives in and/or orients within a space (Sara Ahmed3).
The project posits a novel mode of collaborative artistic process based on simultaneity and spatiality. They act as ‘basic’ or ‘boundary’ concepts that complementarily guide artists working together, preserving diversity and individuality among the group, while binding the process as a whole and bridging boundaries between different practices.
The project runs in intervals, the core of each being an in-situ phase, in which artists develop simultaneous ways of working. Using the image of a cloud chamber, we make perceivable the trajectories through two nested phases. The first phase has weekly gatherings, and artists work in a lab or studio setting, where condensation occurs along thought spaces as they bring their practices into contact with the shared concepts. The second phase is intensive work inside a particular architectural space whose affordances become surfaces of condensation.
We are currently working on finalizing the project, focusing on two exhibitions, conference presentations, and the publication of a book in 2025.
