INTRA-Projects

How to Hack Medical Product Engineering for Artistic Research and User Benefit

This research project integrates artistic and philosophical practices with design strategies as a novel paradigm for the development of medical products—in particular arm prostheses. We propose a framework for medical engineering that considers performance art practices as a means to get a better understanding of the needs of traumatized and damaged bodies.

We raise attention to marginalized bodies in medical design processes and question the foundations upon which aesthetics itself, as a theory of feeling, is based on. Not only do we envision its idealist limits by asking how much further the damaged body can feel, and whether the medically imposed task to un-feel one’s body in prosthetics wearers can be a commonly shared experience, but we recognize parallels in the promises of the industrialized fabrication of objects that virtually touch the body (as they are worn directly on the skin and are incorporated in body movement), and today’s commercial production of evocative art objects. In both, we see a need to exorcize an aesthetics that has lost touch with the ‘pathological’.

Project Team:

BARBIS RUDER (*1984, Heidelberg) lives and works in Vienna. As a performance artist, Barbis Ruder uses her body as well as artificial corporate bodies to tackle and fuse issues such as the value of labor, bodily limits and intimacy with humor and foresight. Unlike the richness of these topics and their associations, her performances for two or more participants, her installation works, videos and sculptures articulate in a rather subtle rhetoric. Barbis develops performances for exhibition spaces and stage pieces for theater. https://barbisruder.com/

LONA GAIKIS (*1982, Toronto) is a philosopher and curator in media and fine arts. She gives lectures on current debates in philosophy, society and the arts, and holds a doctoral degree (Dr. Phil.) in Philosophy, Art and Cultural Studies from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (2017). Her research focuses on the “new key” in the American philosopher Susanne K. Langer. In light of recent discourses on the ‘affective turn’ and new materialist encounters between politics, bodies and the arts, Langer’s idea of art as a ‘carnal rhetoric’ is mobilized and further excavated for this discussion on the division of the pathological from aesthetics and prosthesis design. http://lonagaikis.info/

WALTER LUNZER (*1980, Graz) is a designer and textile engineer. His expertise rests on more than 10 years of training as a fashion designer and lecturer at Die Angewandte (since 2006). As an entrepreneur, he has experience with projects in the fields of fashion and technology, custom design, corporate fashion, functional clothing and functional textiles. As a textile engineer and designer, he supports various companies and is involved in several research projects in the industry. He works for Ottobock Healthcare Products, the world market leader in the field of prosthetics and orthotics, since 2011. www.walterlunzer.com

https://phantom-lab.uni-ak.ac.at

Keywords: Performance Art, Experimental Aesthetics, Medical Design, Pathology Idea, Hand Prosthetics

Pilot phase for new media of a Translocal Performative Academy of space related artistic practices

This work in artistic research hopes to create conditions for a critical, open-ended, digital and interdisciplinary dialogue among space-related performance artists.

• Which kinds of displays and media environments create low-threshold accessibility so as to enable a multi-faceted digital dialogue about translocal artistic practices between artists from various social, economic and geographical backgrounds? How can virtual discourses and media interactions deal with writing assignments, everyday observations and the implementation of local, space-related work processes?

• How can we learn from each other translocally? What kinds of new artistic ecologies, sustainable translocal artistic organisms, can emerge from our mutual exchange?
• Within the Translocal Performative Academy we will examine exchange processes between organisms and their environments. The insights we gain will be applied to the building of new artistic ecologies as connected life cells of society, embedded in artistic, cultural, resistant and interrelated structures.

Based on a concept developed by Claudia Bosse for a Translocal Performative Academy, the foundations for its media grammar are to be created in a pilot phase at the Angewandte in dialogue with an international group of space-related performance artists from Europe and Southeast Asia. Starting in 2022, this grammar will be applied in a four-year academy initiated by theatercombinat.

Project Team:

Claudia Bosse (Artistic Direction and overall Concept) / Lucie Strecker (INTRA research moderation and Media Concept) / Wolfgang Fiel  (Media Concept) / Sylvius Lack (Game Design) / Shahab Nedaei (Digital Development) / Laurus Edelbacher (Digital Development) /  Akbar Yumni (Research partner in Dialogue)

Keywords: Translocality, Discourse, Media Environments, Organisms

performative research on emergent subjectivities in trans-urban space

At a time when social media tempt us to keep diaries disclosed on a global scale, the question arises anew: how to share the intimate quotidian life that unpredictably unfolds day by day? How to find our way into the landscape of days? At the same time, we experience strange days in which all our relationships to our diverse environments change, and must change. We are already used to calling this change ‘climate change’. But have we yet understood what it really means? The experimental project Passenger Diaries is a testing ground for a journey into another life in the close neighbourhood that is as personal as it is oriented towards the environment, urban and suburban spaces. To enter this close range is itself the passage we seek and attempt.

The Passenger, inspired by Iggy Pop’s mythical song, is understood as a ‘cloud’, a ‘state’ that can be adopted by going on a micro-trip, a state one can ‘host’ for the duration of this trip.  

Guests are invited to share those trips with The Passenger. The trace of this process, again partly travelling in social media, we call the diary of this passenger, manifesting as a public blog.

In three Salons de Passages social situations will be created for sharing and exchanging around the micro-trippings together with guests who are active in the fields of urban planning, care economy, historical research, media, the arts, performance and other fields of expertise.

Key Researcher:

Mariella Greil (Art and Communication Practices)

Lucie Strecker (Angewandte Performance Laboratory)

KT Zakravsky (Social Design)

About

Keywords: emergence / trans-subjectivity / passage performance / urban space

Testing, phrasing and transforming an artistic research method on the basis of Audio Papers

How can we understand sound both as a force creating the world around us and as a medium that reflects knowledge about the world we live in?

This artistic research project intends to explore how an acoustic listening approach to the world can lead to a multidirectional form of social experience. This form is perpetuated by as many subjects & actors as it is by different objects & contexts. For example a form arising from movement and interaction, from the exchange with, the linking of, the delineation from and the permeability between various artistic disciplines, and to see how this artistic form enables a critical and caring world creating.

The work in this specific field must be seen as much as an artistic process as a form of teaching art; a process to which we can add our experience with the linking quality of sound, through situated listening and by acoustic thinking and acting; as a form to refer to interlinked narratives and to link them to what comes to mind of each and every single one.

We will apply our interest to a spatial, non-linear, multi-perspective narrative as part of a performative artistic research, deepen it and focus on understanding both learning and teaching as a sonic act, as the correlation of different sensual experiences and thus as trans-disciplinary.

The research platform shall bring together contributions by participating partners and contributors such as the radio artist and researcher Karen Werner and the writer and artist Brandon LaBelle, to collaboratively rethink sounding research practice as an experimental experience and to integrate their heterogeneous voices.

For publications during the research process we will resort to the performative format of the “Audio Paper”. The intention is to prepare by way of experiment, design and an action-oriented approach to the method of Artistic Research as Situated Listening – Art Education as Sonic Act using Audio Papers giving a broader research framework: to test the research method, to phrase and to transform it.

Key Researcher:

Ricarda Denzer (Kunst und Kommunikative Praxis)

Karen Werner  (Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen)

Brandon LaBelle (Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen)

https://soundingresearch.net

Keywords: performative research methods, audio paper, situated listening, interlinked narratives

WITHDRAWING THE PERFORMER is conceptualized and conducted collaboratively by Charlotta Ruth and Jasmin Schaitl. The starting point are the project leaders’ two artistic practices; Performances for the Mind and Choreographic Clues. Based on methods of mindfulness and game/play and accompanied by neuroscientist and performer Imani Rameses the research asks:

• How does immaterial material perform within participatory situations?
• What role does participatory setting play and how does participation differ if situations are communicated as a workshop, a treatment, a practice or a performance? 
• How can neuroscience support how immaterial and participatory art practices are developed and described? 
• What relation exists beyond involvement and how can a participant become the performance rather than being part of a performance? What has to occur in the mind and body for this to happen?

Through practice exchange conducted with experts in the fields of contemplative sciences, sound art, choreography, game art and somatics, the research explores how input from participants (e.g. memory, thought, emotion) can be placed at the centre of a flexible yet framed performance situation.

Key researchers: 

Charlotta Ruth (Choreographer and Game-Designer, PEEK researcher, researcher, Neuromatic Game Art – Ar 581, Center Research Focus)

Jasmin Schaitl (Visual and Performance Artist, PEEK researcher, DEMEDARTS dementia.empathy. education.arts – A 609, Center for Didactics of Art and Interdisciplinary Education)

Imani Rameses (Neuroscience and performance)

Collaborating practitioners:

Philipp Ehmann, Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Margarete Jahrmann, Dennis Johnson, Anne Juren, Krõõt Juurak, Christian Schröder, Lucie Strecker, and the Center for Didactics of Art and Interdisciplinary Education.

Keywords: immaterial material, choreographic clues, performances for the mind