MaHKUscript’s 2020 issue rearticulates the discussion about the situation and position of artistic research. Not only as a critical examination of the findings of the present “Research Decade,” but specifically as a quest for future scenarios and associated parameters and definitions. To give an impetus to such reflection, MaHKUscript will take the conceptualization of a post-research turn as point of departure.

Tiong Ang is developing a work entitled The Second Hands for the 9th Bucharest Biennial 2020–21. This is a collective enterprise. Under the name Tiong Ang & Company, he leads a core team of ±15 people, which for certain parts of the work will be expanded with a group of dancers and extras. In terms of intention, The Second Hands is a philosophical work that draws a sort of parallel line with the events in Bucharest and Timisoara at the end of 1989, leading to the deposition of Nicolai Ceausescu and the end of Communist rule, but in today’s world, 2020–21. At that time, we in the West were able to follow these important events. What was special about the Romanian Revolution was how close the media and reality came together and almost merged. The Romanian State Television broadcasted live images of a dictator who appeased the masses while gunshots, clamour, and chaos in the background wiped out his story.Rebellion, revolution, and the celebration of freedom are imagined as moments of passage in Tiong Ang’s work of art: that is the intention. This is not made explicit, the indicated line is fictitious, but it is palpable and emerges in descriptions of the project. Essentially, The Second Hands is conceived as a large film production, divided into five films under the direction of different makers. The themes of the five films are strongly interconnected: political oppression (Ola Hassanain), mass demonstration (Esther Arribas, Bart van Dam), coming of age in uncertain times (Fey Lehiane), a trip through Europe to Romania filmed as a road movie (Robert Wittendorp) and finally the Congregation, a collective performance in Bucharest (Tiong Ang) as an Ode to Freedom.Because of the corona situation, Ang had to postpone The Second Hands. In March I spoke to him for the first time about his project.* Just before that, he had to stop all the film productions. In June, Ang proposes to talk further. A new momentum has emerged with waiting as a motto, now that the opening of the work in Bucharest has been postponed for a year. Let’s deepen, he suggests, our conversation by juxtaposing the Bucharest plan with another complex work: Universality: Decorum of Thought and Desire (Guangzhou, 2015). Ang wants to use that installation, whose set-up resembled that of The Second Hands – eight different films were made for Universality as part of a fictional evening programme, a full night of television – as a template for his new project. I suggest to also consider a third presentation, that of a young Ang at the Havana Biennale in 1994. His participation in that biennial, at the very start of his career, was a formative experience of a ‘revolutionary’ manifestation in a changing art world. (MK)

When I started writing this article, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic had not yet hit the world as it has now. However, even if there is evidence that by November of 2019, China had already registered cases of the carnivorous virus, the world was barely prepared to tackle the situation. Now nearly every part of the world is affected, without a cure, the only way to prevent the pandemic is by avoiding contact with other people “social distancing” or home quarantine and isolation. Countries have had to lock down, but in the most impoverished environments, how does one social distance or practice a self-imposed quarantine, when 12 people live in a two-roomed house. How does a community social distance when they are hungry, and there are scarce food products. Social distancing or isolation becomes an illusion in these environments with volatile economies. How do we reflect on this magnitude of an apocalyptic nature? How do we respond, what does Art do?

The work consists in a series of instructions which guide the reader’s movement on invisible paths through any given space. It can be any kind of environment, from an art exhibition to a domestic space, public space or another outdoor location. Through the instructions, the experience of that which is present is shaped by that which is not, while the imagination of things not present is confronted with the awareness of the physical space around. Where does one place oneself in relation to what is not there and how precise can this placement be? How can distances be measured if visibility cannot provide support? Through the movements of the participants, the routes drawn through the text become embodied actions, drawing new trajectories in the room. The work is part of the project ‘Preliminary Remarks on the Study of What Is Not There’, grounded in long-term investigations into the idea of a reality not accessible to observation. This reality is increasingly central to current discussions around realism in the philosophy of science, as a result of the growing presence of unobservable objects in scientific research, challenging the empirical foundations of the natural sciences established at the beginning of modernity. Equally, the idea of a supersensible reality, existing in itself, independently from the way it presents itself to sensibility, is returning to the centre of debates in contemporary philosophy, as part of a new realist turn. The project questions art’s relation to these other fields of knowledge in exploring its own metaphysical grounds. The series of instructions ‘Routes to What Is Not There’ can take the form of a text script or an audio guide. It is complemented by the other works in the project: ‘Preliminary Remarks on the Study of What Is Not There’, a performance which takes the form of a guided tour amongst all the things not present in the space where it is presented, ‘All the Things Which Are Not There’, a site-responsive installation which maps the invisible maps or previous locations in which the performance took place, and ‘Methods for the Study of What Is Not There’, a series of medium format photographs which introduces actions of measuring, classifying, dividing, belonging to the process of scientific methodology, but faced with an absence.

In this essay am focusing on “defining”, in a non-traditional way, the idea of artistic research, starting from a “hunting game” metaphor which lays at the Indo-European etymological foundation of the words we use today to designate the process of research in various modern languages. But this way of understanding the process of artistic research leaves open the question about the “object” of artistic research. What is that which artists in general and DJs, in particular, “hunt” for? To answer this question, I will analize the multi-layered structure of research in DJing, thought as a form of art born at the intersection of visual, musical and performative arts with technology. This analysis leads me to the idea of “vibe”, “vibration” or “affective resonance”, which was briefly mentioned in the history of philosophy by thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

The inner body, the Mythological Machine and the collective body The body politic is conceived through the interaction of a body natural and mysticum body. Why do we need an invisible dimension to explain power? What is the difference between the individual and the community? What do we meant by body, identity, government, narrative or myth? Through two epistemological devises, Furio Jesi’s Mythological Machine and Aby Warburg’s Bildwanderung (migration of images), we attempt visualize mythologies and images as the evidence of a body collective that moves, speaks and takes infinite forms beyond ourselves. This exo body with no time or space, do not only determines our approach to concepts like truth but the very appearance of the real.

Laura Gustafsson and Terike Haapoja’s three channel video installation Becoming (Gustafsson&Haapoja 2020) explores emergent ways of relating to ourselves, others and the world. In the video 37 interviewees chart the current state of the world and its people. They contemplate phenomena that are in bud at this very moment, and which should be nurtured. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication Bud Book – A Manual for Earthly Living that makes suggestions for how to live as a human being in a world endangered by the old way of being human. In her essay How to Become Human Terike Haapoja discusses the problematic universalism of the anthropocene discourse and what art can contribute to the task of becoming human otherwise.

In this research essay, sections will be displaced narratives, each specific to their context, place, and historical reference, but within this writing will be juxtaposed through experiences of discomfort. The survey of stories enacts the author’s navigation of instances of multiplicity, and other autoethnographic musings through fragments. This essay is submitted as part of the publication for the 9th Bucharest Biennale.

Our Artistic Research is realized through a set of performative practices: an-archiving, dis-placing and re-scaling. The paper explores how these practices would install temporary spaces for collaborative speculation and how through those spaces qualities of future institutions could be imagined or even provisionally set in practice. We therefore unfold three performative experimental set-ups: an encounter of two random spectators with a dystopian cross-media fabulation in two wooden boxes as theatrical set-up (1); a staged encounter of a states theatre’s colleagues and guests imagining the future of their institution against the background of historical and contemporary model villages (2); the encounter of two festival infrastructures: one actually existing, performatively and architecturally crossed with its alternative drafts (3). What kind of knowledge is activated? How to grasp and disseminate it? What novel modes of instituting do we need to welcome in order to enable those collaborative and performative practices? Or are they necessarily acting beyond institutions, continuously crossing borderlines between institutional frameworks, multiplying institutional affiliations and installing sufficient intersectional practices between institutions and other contexts? The research paper summarizes the three initial experiments of the collaborative PhD-Project ‘Institution as Art – Art as Institution. Artistic Research Projects and Performative Transformations‘ by Melanie Mohren and Bernhard Herbordt, analyses the results of an interview-series with hosts, performers and guests of those experimental set-ups and envisions an upcoming step of the research.

In order to investigate asynchronic experiences, the doctoral research project Face No Dial of a Clock explores life situations where contradictory rhythms, incommensurable temporalities, and unpredictable timings occur. Asynchronicities open up between subjective perceptions, affects, and collective time conventions. To observe states of asynchronicity, I have chosen several concrete “cases” where a personal account of time does not correspond necessarily with social chrononormative time concepts. The collected materials in these quests did mainly take form by filmic means such as documentary footage, staged displays, montage techniques and voice-over narration. The present text draws on thinking processes which occur in the (re-)assemblages and (re-)configurations of the collected materials in my filmic practice. I relate my method to the Zettelkasten (slip box),1 by which I tempt to evince, in a figurative sense, how this dealing with textual and filmic material provokes thinking processes. In seven motifs emerging from the filmic footage and montage effects, relations and reflections about the theoretical discourse on the present sense of time within acceleration, simultaneity and hyper-fragmentation are introduced. These seven motifs serve as prisms shedding light on the filmic thinking which evolves in the back and forth between participant observation, shooting decisions, editing and non-linear voice-over development. The kind of filmic thinking I develop through moving images and language has as its aim that embodied thinking contributes to new forms of knowledge about asynchronic experiences.

The first twenty years of the 21st century have witnessed important changes in many fields, including art. New social phenomena were born, new theoretical attitudes were announced, and new forms of artistic practice appeared. However, the academic models of artistic research seem to remain conservatively unchanged. The “paradigm paralysis” of artistic research has revealed numerous limitations in examining, analyzing, interpreting and expressing new realities. The attachment of artistic research to other sciences has framed artistic research within rigid concepts and methods, while inhibiting the creativity of artist-researchers. Moreover, the division between art practice and artistic research has reduced the opportunities of their sublimation. Therefore the break of the arts’ ideological anchorage should be considered, artistic research encouraging creativity should be initiated, and directions of the research-based artistic practice should become a widely applied methodology. In order to contribute to these necessary changes, this article formulates a group of statements and proposes an example of a possible artistic strategy. Not surprisingly, the format of this publication is a significant example of reform as well.

The socio-ecological challenges of recent times questioned the roles and responsibilities of artists and cultural practitioners. Several artists approached current issues by imagining new ways of living for a more sustainable form of future, attempting to trigger social transformation, a shift in values, changes in environmental issues, or a crucial system change. Is art truly capable of making a difference? The case studies examine the work of individual artists, artist collectives and cross-sectoral collaborations operating in Indonesia, India and Hungary, and through their work explore the potential of art as a catalyst.

In this brief article, the author reflects on the academic requirements of doctoral studies in art and indicates that it is split between what he calls the “voice” of self-comprehension and the “noise” of materiality. To overcome this inherent dichotomy, the suggestion is being made to use critically artistic arguments which are complex assemblages of semantics and non-semantics rather than logical, linear, and summarisable formal arguments. The role of noise in artistic arguments—and by extension in artistic research—is exposed as destabilising but necessary. Towards the end of the article, the reader/viewer is invited to revisit photographically, a diagrammatic story titled “Spaces and Surfaces” which introduces and exposes research through diagrams and image atlases rather than through conventional written text alone. The author believes that the artistic contribution may reflect on the raised issues.

The spatial installation Manuport, prepared for a group exhibition Unplugged at Gallery Rudolfinum in Prague, consists of four fragments – material residues found in a specific location of Prague’s Holešovice district. Main elements of the installation are physical objects that were moved from places of their original occurrence. Shortly afterwards, sites of their origin underwent a complete transformation as a result of development construction activities. The title refers to an anthropological term Manuport – in its exact meaning a natural object, displaced from its original location by human activity, while the transport is initiated on the basis of the aesthetic relationship to the object, that has not been further modified.

The material presented here in the form of excerpts was taken from the book “A History of Violence” by Kai Ziegner. It represents the artefact of a PhD in artistic research that is soon to be finished at Linz University of Art and Design (UfG) and Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). The main focus of my PhD thesis lays on the artistic examination of my own personal experience of violence. Being born and raised in GDR I wanted to investigate the effects of the political turnaround in my home country more profoundly. I have therefore chosen the time frame from 1986 to 2016 and 21 specific events that are related to different acts of violence as the subject matter of my work. The research methodology that I have developed is hybrid – it encompasses archival research, documentary and conceptual photography and experimental writing. Central topics of my research work are guilt, pointless violence, misleading role patterns, dysfunctional father-son relationship, placelessness, disorientation and various entanglements into historic and contemporary Nazism. I travelled to all 21 places to photograph each site on color and b/w medium format film. Later I reviewed these photographs and started to write about it in different textual forms (i.e. short stories, fictive dialogues, aperçus, metareflexive journal). Eventually I transformed all the material into one experimental book. I consider it to be a means of communication and labour, that enables deeper understanding of severe social change. It is a polyvocal composition intended to be used as study material in teaching or as a template for further artistic processing (e.g. screenplay, playbook, piece of music, dance piece etc.). I have shown excerpts from the book at different international events mostly in the form of performative lectures and/or close readings, in which I actively involve the audience.

MaHKUscript’s 2019 issue Whatever Speculation will focus on a key-concept in the history of artistic thinking, i.e. speculation. Nowadays speculation has been devalued to a mere one-dimensional, economic meaning. It seems that speculative thought about both future forms of knowledge and solutions to problems surrounding existence and social viability has made way for an almost self-evident resignation in the present moment and the status quo, producing a blurred view of complex issues that characterize the here and now. For that reason it is extremely urgent to reconsider different and alternative connotations of speculation and bring them up to date.

“Phantoms of Form” takes as it’s centre point the idea of the fictional “other” woman. The protagonist is a female figure, that has been devised to enable a distance. She is a ghost, a shadow, She is there but not present. The female form currently exists (but is not limited to) a composite of the architect Eileen Grey (1878-1976), the artist Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) as well as myself. The life and designs of both women are used in collaboration with my own work, as an auto-fiction. In some essence, the female figure may be seen as a form of fan fiction, an extended imagined version of a real persona and her practice. The project exists as a series of chapters, 1–6, and shape shifts from print to sculptural forms, as well as spoken word. This text is taken from Chapter 6; A Phantom Limb.

Over the past years of critically engaged participation in the sphere of activity that has until recently been neutrally known as ‘contemporary art’1 from the perspective of a theorist, writer and teacher, I have been developing a constellation of ideas which both speak about (as an observer) and ‘speak nearby’ (as a participant) the imbrication of art with political and economic forces in the disaster capitalism of our era from the standpoint of the production of subjectivity and labour. I’ve come to call this constellation speculation as a mode of production. This research essay will provide an introduction to what is intended with this designation, and hopefully be able to frame some tangents of inquiry not yet pursued under this imprimatur but which are nonetheless relevant.

Speculation is an artist’s capital, enabling the emergence of the new. This is art’s capacity to bring about new frames of reference—new kinds of questions, experiences, events or encounters— to leverage difference in order to open onto an indeterminate future. As Elizabeth Grosz (2014: 123) notes, ‘(i)f art reads as other than an artistic expression, it is always about the summoning up of a new future, and as such it’s always a kind of political gesture’. Brian Massumi (2018: 25) regards this gesture as a means of reclaiming value from its reduction to the economic logic of the market, in order to emphasise the intensities of experiences that have value in and of themselves, such as the singular vivacity of an experience of colour. Excess is at the core of this theory of value, the unselected that forms the virtual background, a world of surplus. However, Massumi argues that capitalism produces an impoverished version of surplus value, dependent on a continual accumulation of increasing quantity to the detriment of the singular quality appearing as such. Artists’ social, affective and material speculations, their attempts to create something new, produce a processual surplus value as an affective excess that differs in kind from the surpluses of capital accumulation. We will argue that these speculative practices ought to be understood primarily in terms of an ethos actualised in an artist’s practice and not, as is so often the case, only in terms of the speculative financial returns the products of such practices may yield in the global art markets. The paper will explore the affective aspects of speculation through an investigation of the practice of Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx. Her associative mode of working produces a web of processual thinking that forms connections as well as leaving loose ends open, often reactivating forgotten or abandoned objects, in a manner that produces a different order of value. Grosz, Elizabeth and Esther Wolfe (2014). ‘Bodies of Philosophy: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz’, Stance 7, April, pp 115–126 Massumi, Brian (2017). ‘Virtual Ecology and the Question of Value’, in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, Erich Hörl with James Burton (eds.), London: Bloomsbury, pp 345–373.

‘Between the Visible and the Invisible’ is based on a constellation of some of the most thought-provoking contemporary works developed through artistic research, inquiring into collective notions of memory, time and space – a moment when nothing is certain, concrete or stable; and how artistic practice could capture this sense of being ‘in-between’. The paper refers to Fatehrad’s recent curatorial project (Sharjah, UAE 2018) with the same title organised around three themes: disappearance, suspension and becoming. ‘Disappearance’ focuses on the ephemerality of recorded memory via sound or image; ‘suspension’ expresses a presence that is invisible yet substantive, thinkable through feelings; and ‘becoming’ concerns the mediation between bodily drawings and the cohabitation in holding a certain space through limited time. The concepts of diaspora and politics of location together offer a conceptual framework for a historicised analysis of contemporary (trans)national movements of people, information, culture, artistic practices, commodities and capital. ‘Between the Visible and the Invisible’ reflects on a rupture in time that is the exposure to a new mode of temporality based upon the continual mutability of all form. Referencing the context of ‘plasticity’ by Catherine Malabou (2010), this paper explores new modes of temporality through a series of multimedia installations, in particular, (i) the Psychoréographies – a performative inquiry for inner and outer spaces (15’, 2015) by Nikolaus Gansterer and (ii) Anubumin (18’, 2017) by Oliver Ressler, to expand on the notion of speculation within contemporary art and spatial politics.