Landscape sculpture, polen annalysis and knowing from the inside

Some research and art projects happening in Aberdeen.


http://www.naturalbennachie.org  - see also events
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/research/kfi/research-projects/

In the shadow of the breast, Exhibition @Seventeen_AB, Opens 6.30pm Friday 4 April 2014 Participants performing The Colour of Red as part of the site-specific installation on Bennachie. A View from the Averon Knap - Moss Grieve area. 18th June 2013. View from Craigshannock, Bennachie Play Pause

Next Event: In the shadow of the breast Exhibition at Seventeen, Aberdeen
Opening 6.30pm, Friday 4 April 2014

The book of the scientist, Vinzavod Art Centre, Moscow

THE BOOK OF THE SCIENTIST, LIVRE DU SCIENTIFIQUE
MARI.RESEARCH CHUVACHI.RESEARCH

VINZAVOD ART CENTRE, MOSCOW
10 FEBRUARY - 8 MARCH 2015

http://www.winzavod.ru/events/?id=1528


This exhibition is a programmatic one in the new sphere that we call “social science art”. It examines and displays research practices of social sciences as both the subject and context of artistic reflection. ..Its goal is an experiment in the area that Bruno Latour named “flat ontology.” On the one hand, the exhibition includes ethnographic photographs from two regions along the Volga River; on the other, these photographs are accompanied by commentary by different social scientists. Latour’s notion of flat ontology implies non-hierarchical relationship of scientific knowledge and its subject as is explored in the anthropology of science. In the context of this art project, the same non-hierarchical relationship exists between the photographs and the commentary.

Groups of researchers were invited to participate in the exhibition. They were given a series of photographs to comment on. We also enclosed some leading questions: “Who is in front of you? What do you think about the person or group of people in the picture, their material wealth, the character of the landscape or the situation captured by the photo?” The aim of the commentator was to create a format for the display of their commentary that was compatible with “artists’ books" (livre d’artiste) and the well-known genre of artists’ manuscripts, in which an artist creates illustrations for verses or a poem, and also, in some cases, writes out the text by hand. Each comment by a researcher, no matter how short, is an artifact of this “scientists’ book" (livre du scientifique).

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Many of our colleagues who decided to participate in this experiment asked whether they got it right and whether they correctly understood what was depicted in the photographs. We replied that there were no right answers and that the commentary from the scientists was going to be in the exhibition on an equal footing with the photographs: as artifacts, as works of art that are the textual equivalent of a photograph, that is, an incomplete and somewhat arbitrary “snap-shots.” Here, in the last instance, the view of the photographer and the scientist is not the truth, an objective representation of reality, but an instrument of art. It is possible, however, to say the reverse. The result of the view of the scientist and the view of the photographer is a mini-ethnographic or mini-sociological sketch, quite accurate in its capacity as a photographic or sociological miniature.

From the point of view of this symmetry, this project is close to conceptual art, which introduces textual commentary into the framework of an image, as the conceptual artist Terry Atkinson, in his introduction to the first issue of Art-Language (1969), a journal for conceptual art, rhetorically asked: “Can this editorial … [as] an attempt to evince some outlines as to what ‘conceptual art’ is … count as a work of conceptual art?” Furthermore, as the photographer’s view and the social scientist’s view, taken together, pose new questions about both the optics of knowledge and about the composition and structure of the audience of the exhibition, this project is close to “ethnographic conceptualism,” an artistic and anthropological movement that uses methods of conceptual art in ethnography on the one hand, and conceptual art as a method of ethnographic research on the other. If we add that this experiment is also conducted with new aesthetics, and subject-matter that does not place science outside the picture’s frame, and make it a part of aesthetic reflection and artistic creation, then this is exactly what we are trying to do, creating a community that we call “the Department of Research Art.” The aim of this community is to create a space for experimentation in a flat ontology of the work of artists and scientists, a non-hierarchical atmosphere of cooperation not restricted to their professional boundaries.

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov
Kristina Romanova
Sofia Gavrilova

From slippers to flip-flops, researching the Global banal

Few years ago - in 2003-2004 I wrote my MA thesis on how people use slippers in a block of flats in Bucharest, Romania: a kind of trail, in-between private flats, and public corridors and shops around the corner, from where to buy fresh bread early in the morning (see Cristea, Gabriela. 2004. 'Slippers as Visual Marks of Class Formation: Anthropological Study of Everyday Politics in a Block of Flats in Bucharest, Romania' [unpublished thesis], Departament of Social Anthropology, Central European University.) What I can say is that I have enjoyed that fieldwork terribly and that I saw in it the potential to be developed into a visual project. I almost visualised the trails of those slippers...







Last year I came across this book + project. Similar, but at a different scale: globalization, many oriental places, colourful to look at.
http://www.flipfloptrail.com/
I like how stories are attached to images and how the idea of trail makes one look differently at the world. It makes you feel that our small gestures and things, are not so small - that they belong to bigger flows and longer chains. With what implications? Everybody can look at this web-site and decide for him/herself. Flip Flop Trails...