The Society for Artistic Research (SAR) was established in March 2010 as an independent, non-profit organisation for the purpose of publishing the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR). It is a dynamic, international group that is encouraging discussion and activity dedicated to artistic research. SAR is comprised of both individual and institutional members from around the globe, who support SAR through the payment of a membership fee, sponsorship, and the gifting of their time and expertise.
At its Annual Meeting, SAR elects members to the Executive Board for a two-year term of office. A function of the Executive Board is to appoint the Editor-in-Chief of JAR for a five-year term.
In this way, SAR 'owns' and is responsible for the Journal of Artistic Research.
Here you can find the legal documents:
Articles of Association
By-Laws
Minutes of the Foundation 2010
Editor in Chief:
Michael Schwab
Editors:
Annette Arlander, Henk Borgdorff, Barnaby Drabble, Mika Elo, Nicola Foster and
Julian Klein.
Associate Editors:
Adam Broinowski, Michel van Dartel, Ana Garcia-Lopez, Raimi Gbadamosi, Rachel Mader, Siobhan Murphy, Joey Orr, Peter Peters, Sofie van Loo and Johan Verbeke.
Michael Schwab (Editor in Chief) is an artist and artistic researcher who interrogates post-conceptual uses of technology in a variety of media including photography, drawing, printmaking and installation art. He is tutor at the Royal College of Art, London, research associate at the University of the Arts, Berne and research fellow at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent.
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Annette Arlander (Editor) is an artist, researcher and a pedagogue. She is one of the pioneers of Finnish performance art (in the 80s) and belongs to the trail blazers of artistic research (in the 90s).
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Henk Borgdorff (Editorial Board, Review Editor) studied music theory in The Hague and sociology and philosophy in Leiden. He has lectured music theory and aesthetics at the conservatoires of Hilversum, The Hague and Amsterdam. In 2002 he was appointed professor of Art Theory and Research at the Amsterdam School of the Arts and in 2008 research fellow at the Royal Academy of Fine Art, Design, Music and Dance in The Hague.
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Barnaby Drabble (Editorial Board, Managing Editor) is a freelance curator, writer, editor and teacher. His work focuses on social and political aspects of contemporary art in the broader context of visual culture. Projects have addressed issues of public space, urbanism, migration, intellectual property and civil disobedience.
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Mika Elo (Editor) is a researcher and lecturer in visual culture at Aalto University, Department of Media. He has participated in discussions on photography, artistic research and philosophy in the capacity of curator, visual artist as well as researcher.
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Nicola Foster (Editorial Board, Communications Editor) works in the interdisciplinary area between art history, philosophy and art practice and has recently been elected to the Executive Board of the Association of Art Historians.
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Julian Klein (Editor) is director of the Institute for Artistic Research in Berlin, Germany, and lecturer in direction at the University of Arts Berlin and in performance art and artistic interdisciplinarity at the University of Music and Performing Arts Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Currently he is also research fellow at the Institute for Biology at the Freie Universität Berlin.
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Adam Broinowski (Associate Editor) has recently submitted his PhD at the Centre for Ideas and the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne on the Japanese aesthetic history of the body from the post-war to the present.
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Michel van Dartel (Associate Editor) is curator and project manager at V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media.
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Ana Garcia-Lopez (Associate Editor) is Vice-Dean for Institutional Relationships and Exchange Programs at the Fine Arts Faculty at the University of Granada (Spain) and also professor for Art and Audiovisual Media at the same institution.
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Raimi Gbadamosi (Associate Editor) is an artist, writer and curator. He received his Doctorate in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, with the thesis The use of Black People in British Advertising, or A Man Should Be judged By the Colour Of His Shirt which probed social politics and cultural differences in British society.
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Sofie Van Loo (Associate Editor) studied art history at KU Leuven and was curator at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp from 2001 to 2007.
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Rachel Mader (Associate Editor) is an art researcher, since 2009 project manager of Organising innovation: artistic practice and cultural policy since 1980; in 2008-9 she was research assistant at the Institute for Contemporary Arts Research (IFCAR) at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). From 2002 to 2008, she was research assistant specialising in Contemporary Art History at the universities of Bern and Zurich.
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Siobhan Murphy (Associate Editor) makes intimate live performance works and dance for screen, often combining the two genres.
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Joey Orr (Associate Editor) is a writer, editor, curator and current Arts and Sciences Fellow at Emory University's Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts.
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Peter Peters (Associate Editor) studied Sociology in Groningen, the Netherlands, with a minor in Musicology. He is senior lecturer at the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. Currently, he is teaching in the Arts & Sciences program and in the European Studies program of the Faculty.
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Johan Verbeke (Associate Editor) obtained his PhD in 1990 and joined the School of Architecture Sint-Lucas (W&K) in 1991 where he was appointed professor in research design.
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The exposition opens up the artist’s investigations into the historical figure Ellen Gates Starr, co-founder of the Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago, Midwest United States. Reflecting on the life and work of Gates Starr and on the artist’s own works inspired by these, a particular focus of the exposition is the link between artistic mark making and political practice. By way of close reading and research, the artist excavates Starr’s artistic practice and writing, to explore how artistic mark making informed by Starr’s praxis might come to shed some light on our contemporary situation. The exposition also reconsiders some of the politics at stake for the Arts and Craft movement.
The exposition introduces the artist’s research into the concept of ‘place’. To do this, the weave has been conceived of as a place in itself and as a space for mapping some fundamental considerations implicit in the artist’s own practice. Layering image, moving image and text, the exposition seeks to avoid illustration, denying an explanatory relationship between the text and image or vice versa. Rather, in form and tone it seeks to make sense in a sort of delayed time — over time — little by little, as a collage of the different ideas, which form practice. The exposition is brought together as a momentary presentation, as part of an ongoing reflection, as fragments of a particular train of thought that expand, like a drawing, over time.
The exposition functions as a critical reflection on A Work on Progress, a practice-as-research performance/installation. Aiming to provide an alternative to the commodification of theatre, the project explores the possibility of moving beyond postmodern strategies of cultural resistance, such as the self-reflexivity of ‘postdramatic’ theatre. Drawing on Nicholas Bourriaud’s models of ‘relational aesthetics’ and ‘postproduction’, A Work on Progress aims to develop a ‘relational theatre practice’, which operates through strategies of use and reconfiguration. The work consisted of a room filled with ‘tools’ of theatrical production, which were available for visitors to the space to use in a variety of ways. The exposition documents and analyses the unrehearsed performances that took place when the work was staged in Glasgow in 2010, suggesting that through the continual changes and reconfigurations that took place throughout the event, a progressive politics might be located, which aspires to an alternative form of theatre production.
The exposition of practice-based research is focused on using moving image installation to reflect upon our relationship to architecture. Through a site-specific practice, existing architectural elements are re-framed, re-focused and projected back onto themselves — either through the content of the moving image, or the construction of the installation. The exposition considers what this series of works have revealed about the use of moving image installation to reflect upon our relationship to architecture; particularly the possibility of creating tension between the architecture and the image, as well as the self in space.
Starting from the knowledge that the perception, experience and creation of music is always a bodily activity, the exposition explores the influential and intrusive power of musical ‘groove’. Whereas the concept of groove has been extensively discussed both as a general phenomenon and from the perspective of the listener, the exposition looks at the ways in which groove can specifically affect and influence the performers during a musical performance. Interested in testing whether groove can constitute an infringement of the performers’ bodily autonomy, and thereby influence their interaction, the exposition introduces the composition Moving to Become Better, a piece of practice-based research designed to explore the connections between the mutual influences of groove and the performance of musicians.
The exposition focuses on Oorwonde, a specific practical experiment within the research project Sounding sound art. The work, which falls somewhere between a sound installation and an interactive performance, consists of specially constructed stainless steel operating table upon which visitors, or ‘patients’ are invited to undergo ‘aural surgery’. Next to the concept and construction of Oorwonde, related practices are discussed in terms of their use of subsonic sound in interactive works or installations. The exposition introduces contextual information in regard to the artist’s broader work on the question of what constitutes ‘sound art’, while it’s main purpose remains the description and analysis of this new sound work, as a piece of artistic research.
Interactive video art is increasingly woven into urban public places around the world. A dominant argument about this growing form of public art is that it offers potential for new social, political and physical engagement with public space. However, there is little consensus or even analysis of just how such engagement is taking place. The exposition is an attempt to specify what drives the ‘physical engagement’ in this genre of work. It develops the argument that movement-centric and body-centric visualizations provide multi-modal movement representations, and that these can direct spatial attention through immersive and particularized experience. With reference to examples, the exposition concludes that interactive video art can offer a chronotopic experience in which space is understood through the time it takes to move the body.
Using the research project eMotion – mapping museum experience as a working example, the exposition examines the advantages and risks, challenges and hurdles, methods and management of projects based on transdisciplinary art research. On the one hand, analysis shows that the participating researchers’ embedded character, in their respective disciplines, requires a specific management in order to increase the formation of group identity and to get used to collective authorship. On the other, it underlines that transdisciplinary research does more than simply shed light on the investigated object from several perspectives. Rather, the integration of the arts can lead to a new epistemology via different forms of data displays such as sonification and image-producing processes, which in turn create a new aesthetic dimension.
The Research Catalogue (RC) is a searchable, documentary database of artistic research work and its exposition. The RC is an inclusive, open-ended, bottom-up research tool that supports the journal's academic contributions.