Electra Street 04 by Electra Street

ISSUE 04 ART:RESEARCH:ART

A Journal of the Arts and Humanities

ELECTRA STREET A Journal of the Arts and Humanities www.electrastreet.net NYU Abu Dhabi 19 Washington Square North New York, NY 10003 Send inquiries to: Cyrus R. K. Patell Publisher Electra Street NYU Abu Dhabi PO Box 903 New York, NY 10276-0903 nyuad.electrastreet@nyu.edu ISSN 2309-6012 © 2020 Electra Street Cover Image: Mona Gamil in HaRaKa Platform’s In 50 Years Or So.

For additional online content related to this issue, please visit the “Periodicals” section of electrastreet.net.

A Journal of the Arts and Humanities ART:RESEARCH:ART Guest Editor: Linsey Bostwick

PUBLISHER EDITOR MANAGING EDITOR CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Cyrus R. K. Patell Deborah Lindsay Williams Chiran Raj Pandey Joey Bui Asthma Nirmala Dious Gabrielle Flores Nikolaj Nielsen Grega Ulen Katherine Schaap Williams

Design Concept by the Design Collective at NYUAD

Issue 04 | Winter 2020

CONTENTS Mariët Westermann, Foreword: A Curious Case of Art as Research .......... 6 Linsey Bostwick, Introduction .................................................................. 11 Bill Bragin, Bryan Waterman, and Linsey Bostwick,

The Performing Arts in (and of) the University ...................................16

Robert Rowe, with Hatim Benhsain, Iván Budnik Pereira,

and Alia El Kattan, Sonification ......................................................... 32

May Al-Dabbagh, Making Space ............................................................. 40 Davíð Brynjar Franzson, Dead-End(s) ...................................................... 54 Kristy Edmunds, Twenty-One Pieces ...................................................... 60 Sam Livingston, Research Takes the Stage..............................................70 Sarah Bay-Cheng, Critical Arts as Research .......................................... 78 Goffredo Puccetti, Design E.R. ............................................................... 90 Clare Lesser, Performing Ritual in the Works of

Karlheinz Stockhausen ....................................................................... 98

HaRaKa, Staging Research .....................................................................112 Deborah Lindsay Williams, Afterword .....................................................120 Notes on Contributors .............................................................................123 Photo and Image Credits .........................................................................126 Joanna Settle, Making as Research .......................................... Back Cover

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Frontispiece of Museum Wormiani Historia (1655), a catalogue containing detailed descriptions of the items in the natural history cabinet of Ole Worm (1588–1654).

FOREWORD

A Curious Case of Art as Research Mariët Westermann Although I give plenty of speeches at NYU Abu Dhabi, I rarely get to do

so as a scholar in my own realm of inquiry, the history of art. Earlier this

year, I had just this pleasure at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute, and it was a

special privilege at a university that is committed to integrated knowledge production and dissemination, and where studies in art, science, and

society are often brought together. There was a time in European history when the pursuit of knowledge was connected up like that, in the

Renaissance chambers of curiosities that had the ambition to contain all

the knowledge in the world in the form of antiquities, drawings and prints, objects collected from the New World, and natural specimens such as

minerals, fossils, shells, fungi, dried plants, and taxidermed animals. A

classic example of the type was the Museum of Ole Worm (1588–1654),

a scientist and antiquarian in Copenhagen. We have a sense of what his collection was like and how it was organized from the image of it in the catalogue of his museum published in 1655.

Today, it is unusual to have a university dedicate as much mindshare as

NYU Abu Dhabi does to the question of what we can learn across fields of inquiry, even though interdisciplinary research is vital to the potential

of universities to invent and teach solutions to the complex problems of our age. It is also not so common to have scientists, engineers, social scientists, philosophers, literary scholars, and historians pay so much

attention to what they may learn from their colleagues in the visual and

performing arts—from their work with images, sound, and craft practices

that are not in the first place textual or mathematical. Most universities are essentially logocentric and quantitative in orientation. Research in the arts

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can balance those preoccupations in our digital and globalized age, and bring out the human intentionality of our individual and collective works and deeds.

The talk I gave traced the emergence in the seventeenth century of one of the most prominent and yet curious motifs in still-life painting in the Netherlands: the artfully peeled lemon with its sinuous rind winding

across platters and glassware or curling over the edge of a banquet table. In a few short years, the bright fruit became a highly favored motif, and

for the better part of a century it seemed as if no tabletop still life could

succeed in the market without it. Yet its ubiquity seems to have made it

difficult for art historians, including myself, to see how novel and unusual it actually was, and so no one had asked where it came from, how, or

why. More recently, as scholars have become newly focused on global histories of trade and on the integration of art and science as a key to

innovation, I began to wonder if the rise of the lemon in Dutch painting

could have something to do with rapid advances in botany, horticulture,

and global and local trade in the early seventeenth-century Netherlands. As I pursued the origin of the lemon peel in Dutch painting, what at first seemed an arcane art historical inquiry became a topic that rewarded curiosity in its own right and required research across borders of the

disciplines and geography. The story took me from the intense interest of Roman scientists in dissecting citrus to the burgeoning market for lemon trees from Genoa, and from the growth of a Dutch middle class craving

luxury commodities to the development of an early modern, competitive market for painting that encouraged the invention of distinctive themes and motifs.

As I found fabulous paintings with peeled lemons in just about every museum, I realized Dutch seventeenth-century painters must have

8 WESTERMANN | FOREWORD

Pieter Claesz (1597/8–1661), A Still Life with a Roemer, a Crab and a Peeled Lemon (1643). Oil on panel. 49 mm x 66 mm. Art Gallery of South Australia.

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produced thousands of them, and I began to doubt that I would ever be

able identify the moment of invention. But to my surprise—and economic theory of product innovation really helped me—I found that in the rough and tumble art market of the growing Dutch cities, motifs traveled very fast from artist to artist. In a thrilling process of comparing paintings

that would have been much enhanced if I had had access to algorithmic

image analysis, I identified Pieter Claesz (1597–1660) as the painter most

likely to have invented the peeled lemon as a great mark of virtuosity. And I began to see that across the centuries, the Dutch lemon twist ensured

citrus a lasting afterlife in the history of still-life painting, with artists from Chardin and Van Gogh to Matisse and Warhol happily taking up the

lemon—even if they stopped peeling it in the ostentatious manner of the Dutch painters.

My study of the history of the peeled lemon in paint is finished for the time being. Whatever I have accomplished with it I could have done

better, more efficiently, and with greater pleasure if I would have been in a position to collaborate more directly with botanists, conservators, artists, philosophers, computer scientists, and economic and cultural historians. NYU Abu Dhabi affords scholars, students, and the public that power

of differential knowledge brought together in the lab, the library, and the

studio. That is one of the many reasons I am so happy to be back in this community that believes in art as knowledge, and in research artists like Claesz every bit as much as it does in research scientists. WORKS CITED Westermann, Mariët (2019). “The Lemon’s Lure.” In Tributes to David

Freedberg: Image and Insight. Ed. Claudia Swan. London and Turnhout, Harvey Miller Publishers. 115–130.

10 WESTERMANN | FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION Linsey Bostwick

I have had an affinity for research throughout my arts career. As an

undergrad, I was obsessed with libraries (still am) and with investigating the history of artists, as both a reference point and as a way to

understand the field. Early on in my career as an arts practitioner in the

theater world, research was my way into a process. This approach was shared with many of the artists that I collaborated with in the theater

world as well as dance and performance art. In starting a new work, we

would often spend the first weeks or months of a project understanding its landscape: where it situated itself in such disciplines as art history,

film references, performance styles, historical references, pop culture, science, and fashion. This work happened even before we began

rehearsals. We created a shared language as a creative team and used that in the development of the work.

Leading into my work as a creative producer, research became more

functional: marketing research for building audience interest, research

into funding support, approaches to new markets, as well as international presenters and venues. During this time, I earned my Master’s Degree in Performance and Interactive Media Arts and began to see that

performance archives were often disjointed and disorganized: finding archives beyond text-based performances was difficult and often

impossible. Not only was this absence a concern from a scholarly and critical perspective, but also I saw how it inhibited the creation of new forms/ genres and prevented the growth of educated critical voices.

Because of my longtime interest in research, I was especially thrilled to guest edit this issue of Electra Street, which focuses on the reciprocal relationship between “art” and “research,” and grateful to lead editor Deborah Williams and publisher Cyrus Patell for their interest and

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commitment to this theme and their tireless work in finishing this edition. I was specifically curious to explore where creativity lives in relation to to

research and how artists, scholars and professionals in the field might use research as a starting point for creative work and as a collection of data that can help develop the field and mark success. I am also fascinated

with the ways in which a creative process or performance can exist as a form of research rather than merely an appendage to it.

In this issue, we intentionally use a broad and multifaceted definition of “research.” Many of the contributors define research in their own

terms and for their own purposes. These definitions are disparate, but in

conversation with each other, they create a kaleidoscope of access points for where research and the arts meet. As the various journal contributors

point out, research affects all aspects of the arts world, from the moment of inspiration and creation to the ways in which art functions as a

business. This issue primarily focuses on the performing arts, but these performances often incorporate and/or collaborate with the visual arts.

In my current role as the Director of Artistic Planning at The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi, I see the value of situating the arts within the

conversation of research. I have the opportunity to work directly between our visiting artists and our faculty to create new spaces for creative

processes that create bridges for curricular integration. The Arts Center thus becomes one of the anchors for the research that happens in the

university. I also see the artistic “product” as research in itself, the form and creation of knowledge that is expansive and often unquantifiable.

In her foreword, Vice Chancellor Mariët Westermann uses her expertise in Art History as a lens into the complex and dynamic relationships

of art and research; she invites us to consider the complexities that

circulate within seemingly uncontroversial images and thus illustrates the

12 BOSTWICK | INTRODUCTION

centrality of interdisciplinary work in the creation of new knowledge. It is

a sentiment that is shared, in various ways, by all the contributors to this issue of the journal.

In their conversation about the role of the arts in a university setting,

Bill Bragin, Executive Artistic Director for The Arts Center at NYU Abu

Dhabi, and Bryan Waterman, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Academic Development and Associate Professor of Literature at NYU Abu Dhabi, investigate the links between creative process, experimentation, and

performance. Their conversation articulates the ways in which the NYUAD Arts Center is trying to bring together research and art, scholarship and creativity in order to blur the boundaries between these categories.

As Bill mentions in the interview, The Arts Center likes to commission

new work, and one of these commissions, Data Not Found with creator/

musician Kaki King led to a curricular collaboration. During her residency at The Arts Center, King worked with students and faculty across the

university. She also collaborated with students from two courses, “The

Quantified Self” and “Advanced Music Programming,” an experience that is chronicled by Robert Rowe, an NYU music professor, who explains the process of “sonification.”

May Al-Dabbagh, Social Research and Public Policy professor at

NYU Abu Dhabi, looks at the space around research in dialogue with

creative individuals and the vital role that this dialogue can play in the

development of new ideas and the freeing of creativity. Kristy Edmunds, Executive Artistic Director at the Center for the Art of Performance at

UCLA, explores a similar line of thought, but with a deeper examination of the value system that often separates artistic “research” from

that of “hard” research. Edmunds suggests that creating a pathway for interdisciplinarity will create richer findings, both artistically and

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intellectually. Sam Livingston, Director of Operations at the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall in New York, works with some of these same ideas through an exploration of the role of research in the constant

refinement of creative projects that engage directly with communities that might not see themselves as “artistic.” Joanna Settle’s brief piece—the

image on this issue’s back cover—serves as a manifesto of sorts, pushing against the often essentializing and limiting definitions that separate arts practice from research and funding.

Sarah Bay-Cheng, Dean of Arts and Media at York University in Toronto, looks more specifically at the academic studies of performance and the specific divide between practice and scholarship. Where does research fit within that huge gap? Can it live in both spaces? Design Professor

Goffredo Puccetti also looks directly at the framing of design within the larger context of societal norms. Similarly, vocalist and music scholar

Clare Lesser dives into the research, performance preparation, and rituals that are embedded into the work of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. David Franzson’s series of drawings exemplifies the research trials

of the creative process which can often lead to “dead end (s)”. The

internationally based artists of HaRaKa offer an example of how practice and scholarship work together in their group interview, which explores their use of research as both a platform for and methodology of the

creation of new work with their company. Their work often demonstrates the ways in which they quite literally “perform” the results of their scholarly research findings.

I hope that in this issue of Electra Street, readers will have the opportunity to rethink their conception of research and of its relation the performing arts. During the process of working with the contributors of this journal

and following the thread of their ideas, I was struck with how each writer was in conversation with the other, clarifying a subpoint of someone

14 BOSTWICK | INTRODUCTION

else’s work, expanding on conclusions, creating counter viewpoints or expanding an existing line of thinking. The conversation about art and

research that emerges from this journal suggests not only the excitement that rests in the juxtaposition of these practices but also the need to explore the ideas further.

Black Box Theater at The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi.

16 BRAGIN, WATERMAN, AND BOSTWICK

THE PERFORMING ARTS IN (AND OF) THE UNIVERSITY Bill Bragin, Bryan Waterman, and Linsey Bostwick in conversation on December 16th, 2019 at The Arts Center at New York University Abu Dhabi.

BRAGIN: When I’m introducing The Arts Center to new staff and faculty, I talk about it as a laboratory for performance to emphasize the fact that art-making is an investigative process ... it’s an iterative process. Most

artists don’t go into a process of creation with specific outcomes in mind. They know they want to come out with a piece, but they don’t know what the piece is until they’ve made it. And so I think the nature of art-making as research really sits in that investigation.

People in some fields define research as specifically testing a hypothesis. That may be where my metaphor does or doesn’t hold, because I don’t

think a lot of artists are necessarily going with a specific hypothesis that they’re looking to prove or disprove. But I think they’re often going with a set of questions that they want to investigate, questions that might be about a topic or process or form: Can I make work in a way that I

never made work before? What happens if I introduce these elements?

What happens if I work from an existing script or a classical text? What happens if I don’t come in with any script and we create the script in

the room? What if we use language in a certain way? What if we change

the lighting or how we use the body? So I think artists are asking a lot of different questions, but aren’t testing them against a specific goal.

WATERMAN: I see two frames for what you’re saying. In one, art is about asking questions at some fundamental level. So there’s some parity with

other kinds of research. But I’m also thinking about the consumption side,

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not just the questions an artist asks. What happens when an audience encounters art? To me, the best art reorients my conceptual frames. In that way, art’s not just about helping me ask better questions but

about helping me see frameworks that might not have been visible to

me otherwise. Art helps me think about why I am asking that kind of a

question: is it even the right question to ask? To me, the conceptual work that art affords will also really broaden the investigative process.

BRAGIN: I want to go back to just add another point to your idea that you can frame art as research in terms of production: the other role of

research is in the pre-production phase. The art is about something. It’s

about a topic. And so there’s a whole research process that’s going into

the pre-creation period: I’m going to create a piece that’s about this. And I need to learn about it through multiple lenses.

There are a lot of artists who are working very deeply with source material and adaptation or research or different techniques … I think about Vox

Motus’s FLIGHT, for example, and the kind of research that they needed

to do by looking into the migration experiences of young refugees. There were a whole spate of issues including researching the implications

of telling a certain kind of story in a certain kind of way, which entered

the public discourse of politics. The creators were very clear about not wanting to have these stories caught up in the noise of the political

moment around refugee issues that Europe was facing at the time they started making the piece. But there was formal research that had to do

with wanting to tell the story in a different theatrical form. Then they had to research different strategies to lay out all the images in the dioramas

Overleaf: Vox Motus, FLIGHT, models and headphones.

18 BRAGIN, WATERMAN, AND BOSTWICK

and learn how much time it was going to take, and how would they build and fabricate them? And once they had the content and the research

concept, and the script, what are the multiple tactics to translate that into executable show?

BOSTWICK: So you’re talking about research in both form and content? BRAGIN: Yes …The Arts Center has conversations with our Writing

Program faculty about how a lot of the work that we’ve been presenting is based on classical source material, such as The Iliad, or our theater

students whose productions work with classic texts as a source. Then

you’ve got issues of translation and understanding the implications of the

choice of translation. There needs to be a dramaturgical understanding of why this translation of this text came up at a certain time. This is how it

may be corrected or how it fought against other translations of the same

texts. This is now what it might mean now, if it’s put into a contemporary context. All of those are questions that the artist is potentially looking at. WATERMAN: I wouldn’t want to suggest, though, that the only way

to legitimize art as research is to think about it very literally in terms of

archival investigation or source material or translation. I really think that a lot of it is just about conceptual disposition. If I think about the most

fundamental interventions in art in the 20th century, stuff that deals above all with a shift in perspective: “Oh you thought that was art? No, this is art. Because I’m asking you to look at it that way.” Duchamp taking a

shovel and making it into art, or mounting a urinal on the wall and signing someone else’s name to it and calling it art. Those are gestures that deal fundamentally with perspective and provocation, straddling the artist-

audience divide we raised earlier. Duchamp gives you the opportunity to say “What is art?” And why is it art? Who’s invested in it, and what

are the questions that we’re not asking about it? Art should challenge

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Denis O’Hare in An Iliad at The Red Theater at

The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi, Spring 2017.

our definitions of research as well. If we define research as investigative inquiry, that’s one way to justify spending money on it, but I have a

problem with the academy’s tendency to define research in terms of

money and utility. How much money did you get to work on that project

and what’s it good for? Art-making in the research environment forces us to question why money and utility are taken to be the best measure for something’s value in society? This ability to provoke such fundamental question makes art essential to a research environment or process.

BRAGIN: It’s interesting that the first part of that answer actually frames

a specific hypothesis to be tested in actually a very direct way: Is this art,

yes or no? It’s like that Twitter feed, “Art or not?” Does taking a urinal and putting it on a pedestal and affixing a signature transform it into art? And

then the corollary question is: How are you testing whether it is art? Well, it’s art because someone paid for it, or bought it, or decided to exhibit it.

WATERMAN: Or because someone asked or invited you to consider it as such.

BRAGIN: Yeah. I think that’s the question of John Cage’s 4’33”: “What is music?” Is it just the notes, or is it the silences, too? And how much silence can you have? How much can you strip away to leave just the rests? Can it still be a music composition?

WATERMAN: And is there any such thing as silence? What about the noise the audience makes struggling to sit still?

BRAGIN: Yeah, is all the sound that’s around that you have not previously considered and listened to as music? Can your attention transform that into music and then wasn’t it music to begin with?

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WATERMAN: This relates to how we talk about the value of the Core Curriculum at NYUAD. So much of what we do is about attempting

multiple perspectives on a central problem or question. To me that’s

exactly what Cage was good for. He’s just going to get right in there and

say, ”Listen to this. You never listened to that before.” I love it when Cage says things like “I don’t want sound to be a bucket; it doesn’t have to

have any intrinsic meaning inside of it.” He doesn’t want it to fall in love

with another sound or run for President or something. He just wants you to consider its existence as sound waves. And then you can figure out

whether they provoke feeling or create drowsiness, if you let them exist on their own. That’s fundamentally different than saying you’ve got a

problem and your only avenue to address it is to ask what can you get

out of it, what’s it good for, how can it get funded. But in the meantime it’s sort of asking us to think about why we prioritize the things we do as the key preoccupations for a research agenda.

This train of thought reminds me of a quote from our colleague in

philosophy in New York, Anthony Appiah, who’s taught here at NYUAD.

He suggests that we study science to understand how the universe works and where we fit into it. That should be valuable without ever having to make a buck or win a war off of your discoveries. But how do we learn to recognize non-monetary values? That comes out of art, philosophy,

humanistic inquiry. To me this suggests parts of the same process. When I talk about art as reorienting our perspective or our conceptual frames

I’m hoping we’ll ask better questions that can feed back into more kinds of inquiry. You might see where the frame is off or the question is off or

the assumptions are off in a science project, but one way to get there is

by watching something in the theater or reading a novel. That’s not just to say: okay we’re doing art to make better social scientists or scientists or better engineers. It’s to say: you might just have a better capacity to

22 BRAGIN, WATERMAN, AND BOSTWICK

think about the world around you and where you fit in it because you’ve been forced to establish multiple perspectives, or to imagine yourself somewhere, or to ask questions, or to sit with the unfamiliar and the things that you can’t measure or count.

BRAGIN: “It’s good to study music because people who study music

do better and do better with math …” or “Art creates a greater sense of empathy ...”

WATERMAN: I think it can make you sit in ambiguity. So I don’t think that

that’s necessarily saying it’s going to make you a better mathematician … BRAGIN: Just a better human being! [Laughter] BOSTWICK: Well, what about the idea too that it’s dynamic, that science and art can be related and affect each other. Can we bring that back to the idea of NYUAD as a research university? Let’s look at some of the terms like “innovative” and things like that, how do we fit in there? BRAGIN: When I hear the mission of the university articulated, it

includes a kind of deep commitment to teaching, and to teaching across disciplines, and to making connections. One of the things that you’re talking about, Bryan, is how art creates the ability to find patterns in

otherwise unrelated things. But the other part is knowledge creation … the output of the research university is its contribution to the body of

knowledge of humankind. That’s where I think that the work happens— through artistic creation. From our standpoint, through commissioning and developing of work, both from visiting artists and also from what

students and faculty are developing on campus. That’s what makes up our contribution to the role of artists as creators of knowledge.

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WATERMAN: I mean, I can’t underscore enough the value of The Arts

Center to the entire academic institution … I always say it’s our circulatory system or lifeblood in the way that it flows to Engineering or Science or Social Science as much as it does into Arts and Humanities. It allows students from across the disciplines to engage with work on multiple

levels. First of all, there’s just pure pleasure and joy but it also provokes their imaginations. Thinking about work they might produce, thinking

about how to engage with people who have decided to make art for their vocation. You might be as likely to drag an engineering major into an art

career as a theater major just by the nature of the work that you produce. These are leaps of imagination that don’t just happen in art spaces. They happen in laboratories.

BOSTWICK: I just have one more question to kind of think about. Maybe this concept is quite passé, maybe it’s quite obvious that art is research, but I’m wondering about ways that we can make art more visible,

generally and also specifically across research-oriented campuses like this?

WATERMAN: Well, for one, I think we recognize the creativity and

imagination that has to go into all processes of knowledge production. I

can see it in my students who are scientists and engineers who approach

their work from the point of view of making. The other part of the equation though is that you don’t create forms for faculty research funding that segregate “research” on one side from “creative work” on the other. I

think recognizing arts processes as experimentation is a way to go. We

need to recognize that some arts faculty could sustain a lab just as easily

as a biologist could, with a group of people working together on common problems. So there might be something to rethinking the way that the

institution recognizes research processes and creative processes that could be useful there.

24 BRAGIN, WATERMAN, AND BOSTWICK

BRAGIN: I think part of it is that people don’t typically define theater spaces and concert halls as laboratories. When you talk about a lab

... if you envision a scientist at work, you don’t envision them first and

foremost bringing a product to market. You picture them in a laboratory running tests. And you recognize that there is value is in that period of process, and you also fund that quite well. I think what happens when

people think about the arts is that they think about the end product, they

think about the final result, after it’s gotten into the marketplace, onto the

stage, to performance. And they’ve not thought about all the other steps. So one of the things I think is about is: where are those points where you can open up the process to people so that people understand, in the

same way that you understand when in a film you see a scientist with beakers, and pouring chemicals from one to another ... all this stuff is bubbling up.

But mostly I think people look at artistic creation as a mysterious moment of inspiration, as opposed to hard work labor and training ... and failure, a ton of failure, a ton of experiments that never make it to the stage

because “oh that didn’t work, so we threw that out.” If you only see the

success part and not the failure part in all the steps along the way, then you don’t understand it, you don’t value it, you don’t pay for it.

It seems important, then, that when possible, the process should be open, whether with work-in-progress showings, or people watching

artists at work, and hearing the conversations. Certain artists want that to be private. They don’t want to reveal the process, because some people

do want to show just the finished work. But I do think that it’s important to create access points for people to see work as it’s being made.

It’s also important to understand that the process shouldn’t be subsidized by the artist. I realized when I first started commissioning dance pieces

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that I would get a budget from a dance company and they would

articulate, “We’re going to have a three-week rehearsal period. We’re

going to rehearse eight hours a day and we’re going to pay each dancer $12 an hour …”

BOSTWICK: That’s actually really important, having visibility around the process, putting a frame around it.

BRAGIN: That’s why I think it’s important for us to announce that The Arts Center has commissioned three to five pieces per season. It says that

NYU Abu Dhabi as an institution is valuing the time and resources needed to create the piece, and not just put it on stage; we’re investing in the

earlier steps that are required to get the work to our community and onto our stages.

I think that’s also something that we should continue to articulate as part of the research orientation of the university: the creative process, and in

some commissions, not worrying whether they will result in a final product or not. I think that inviting artists-in-residence so that they have time to

explore—not because at the end of the residency you must have a piece that you’re going to present to an audience—is really critical.

As we build trust with audiences, one of the things that I think about a

lot is how in the first couple of seasons, I was really terrified to present something that I thought might fail because we were still introducing

ourselves. We needed to reach a place where we can present work that

is not “fully successful,” but that is doing certain things really well and in interesting ways ... We’ve been building a relationship with the audience so that they understand our rules of engagement, that they can see

something and say, “All right, the plot didn’t totally make sense at the

end. But the music made me want to cry and laugh, and it was extremely

26 BRAGIN, WATERMAN, AND BOSTWICK

The Black Box at The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi during Gatz by Elevator Repair Service, Fall 2018.

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powerful despite these things that didn’t work.” To engage on that level

means that you can kind of find different value in imperfection, to see in

the attempt the questions that were being asked, and even if it fell short. It moves beyond a question of personal taste. You start to look at: what were the goals, and what worked? What were the questions that were being asked in that piece? And then you can decide if that’s how you want to spend your evening.

WATERMAN: I’ve also seen you guys give notes to artists especially on

multi-night performances. The Arts Center helps shape performance as it

unfolds, not just at the commission stage and then the final version stage but just work that unfolds in your space.

BOSTWICK: There is also something that has to do with also curiosity

that I think, Bill, you emulate really well and I’ve tried to take on. Curiosity cuts across a lot of exciting art centers at universities, and it’s what helps us move beyond the walls of The Arts Center in order to be dynamically connected with the research of faculty, of students, of staff. We have a deep curiosity about what people are doing and how we can open up spaces to have that kind of creative moment. Data Not Found was a

perfect example of that, but we’ve also seen it in lots of other artists that

we’ve brought here; we’re attracted to artists who also create that space, who have that kind of vulnerability, who say “we don’t know what’s going to happen,” that this art piece might be changed.

BRAGIN: There aren’t specific hypotheses that I’m testing as an arts

presenter and curator, but there are questions that I feel like we’re asking when we set up a residency and asking the larger question: What does

it mean for this artist to be in this community for this length of time? And how is that going to affect both the community and the artist? There

28 BRAGIN, WATERMAN, AND BOSTWICK

are lots of great artists all over the world doing lots of great work, and

we’ve got room for about twenty to thirty of them. So who rises to that to the top of this shortlist, and what are the myriad ways that they can

inform the community in terms of building knowledge, in terms of building capacity, building skills, building community?

WATERMAN: I was just thinking again about Kaki King’s Data Not

Found. The two classes that came together were a Core Colloquium on the “Quantified Self,” about how all of this data that we’re volunteering to give away feeds back into our systems and changes the way we

think about the world. And the other course was on advanced musical

computation. When the students from those two classes came together to collaborate on projects, the advanced musical computation students

had to embody the role of a composer using someone else’s data. That’s a form of stepping into somebody else’s shoes for a second and having to experience a different way of thinking. I’m pretty sure that a lot of the conversations that resulted among the couple dozen people who were

intimately involved in that residency wouldn’t have happened otherwise. So again we see The Arts Center as a catalyst for interdisciplinarity and for learning to ask better questions.

BRAGIN: And I think for also finding the commonalities, that things

that are shared in a community where there is not necessarily a lot of

shared history coming in. What happens is that we create their shared

history. But also what happens is that it draws attention to the both the differences and the uniqueness.

WATERMAN: And now you’re echoing something Vice-Chancellor Mariët

Westermann has written about: that this is exactly what art is good for. It’s good for helping us establish our priorities and helping us think through

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things. And she says specifically that it helps us think about what we

have in common and what differentiates us and how we can strive to exist together with both of those things in balance.

BRAGIN: I think that even the process of presenting is both a creative act and a research action. We think about what The Arts Center has

been trying to build over the past five years and what is the role that it

plays within the community, both NYUAD and the UAE community-at-

large. And then that feedback loop, as you know, affects the environment around us. When that environment changes, how does that require us to evolve continually in our own practice and inquiry?

30 BRAGIN, WATERMAN, AND BOSTWICK

Taiwanese choreographer, dancer, and inventor Huang Yi performs an intricately choreographed dance with his robot companion, KUKA, The Arts Center at NYUAD, Spring 2016.

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SONIFICATION Robert Rowe, with Hatim Benhsain, Iván Budnik Pereira, and Alia El Kattan

Students in the “Advanced Musical Programming” class worked on sonifications of data generated by students in Prof. David Wrisley’s

“Quantified Self” Core class. Sonification is the process of using data to control the generation of sound—the simplest case would be an alarm bell that rings when smoke is detected, for example.

The guitarist Kaki King and her team have worked extensively on

sonification (and visualization) and their visit to campus in the Fall of

2019 stimulated this inter-class project to generate and sonify data sets

related to students’ personal experience. Many students used Max/MSP,

a visual programming language, to realize their projects, and images from those “patches” are shown here. In essence they take data — usually in the form of numerical data, though the data sets also included textual information—and use those numbers as parameter values for sound

synthesis or processing algorithms. As the numbers change, the sounds change accordingly.

Students discovered that sonification is easy—at least, changing numbers into sounds is. Meaningful sonification, on the other hand, is exceptionally hard. That is, making the change in sounds correspond or illuminate in some way the meaning of the data being sonified.

That challenge was met in a variety of ways by the student teams, leading to a public presentation during the Open Studio sessions (sponsored by

the NYUAD Arts Programs) and a critique session with Kaki King herself.

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For example, one AMP student had soundfile playback become slower and more distorted as a Quantified Self’s student’s data set reported

fewer and fewer hours of sleep. The resulting sound seemed sleepier, in a way, certainly less focused, much like the student recording the hours of

sleep probably felt. The project offered a close-up and engaging window into a real-world application arising from our increasingly datafied world, leading several students to continue with its challenges into their final projects.

—Robert Rowe

Overleaf: Guitarist and composer Kaki King performing at The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi in 2019.

34 ROWE ET AL. | SONIFICATION

The student whose project I sonified made a dataset about the number

of cameras he saw around him at different times of the day, what he was doing at the time, and his feelings about it. I came up with a scale and

a chord progression, and then I made music patterns going through the scale with a bit of randomness. The patterns change depending on the activity the student was doing; if he was preparing, it’s a build-up. If he was resting, it’s a slowdown. And if he was working, it’s a climax. The

number of synthesized instruments (a church organ, an electric guitar,

taiko drums and a few others) also changes so that there’s more of them playing the more cameras the student notices.

—Hatim Benhsain

Data provided by Dalvin Mwamakula.

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During the different ideation phases of my two patches, I came to realize

how challenging it was to effectively interpret and map data in a way that

attributed meaning to it and that helped the listener further understand it. This challenge was caused by two strongly related issues: what sounds/ effects are assigned to which data field and, once the previous has

been decided, how to properly map those values into parameters that

operate with wildly distinct granularity and ranges. The more abstract the fields I was working with were, the more complex the task of finding an

acoustic representation that properly represents it and that has a domain that is remotely compatible with the available data. Data volume was an important topic, as directly mapping information to audio rate (normally

44.100 data points a second) would require huge amounts of it for just a few seconds of output.

— Iván Budnik Pereira

Data provided by Jaime Andres Fernandez and Jacinta Hu.

36 ROWE ET AL. | SONIFICATION

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38 ROWE ET AL. | SONIFICATION

I decided to map Luisa’s languages spoken to the instruments played,

and her moods to different pitches and playback speeds, but then spent a surprising amount of time trying to figure out how to map each of her 41 mood descriptors to a 2D representation of pitches. After mapping

the emotions to pitch numbers, I used a second-order Markov Chain to learn from them, which means that the software decides what emotion

(represented as a pitch value) to play next based on the probability that

one emotion followed another in Luisa’s experience. For example, if Luisa often felt tired after she was happy, there would be a high chance for the

output to follow a “happy” note with a “tired” one. This meant that Luisa’s finite data could be played as a sonification that can last forever, because the program keeps using the list of probabilities built from her data to

determine the most probable next pitch. I had already heard of Markov

analysis in a Computer Science elective, Natural Language Processing, but had not actually spent time to understand it or its potential applications in the arts till taking this class.

—Alia El Kattan

Data provided by Luisa Milton and Mark Papai.

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MAKING SPACE

May Al-Dabbagh

What would academia look like if academics talked to each other more? Not at each other. Not despite each other. But really to each other?

What happens when we engage in conversation not simply for the sake of producing something but trusting that the exchange itself is worth the dialogue? As a perennial insider-outsider in the academy, I have

found that many of its official avenues meant to help faculty develop

research are often about achieving immediate, and sometimes narrow

and individualistic, outcomes. You speak directly to people’s brains (as if they exist outside of people’s bodies somehow), your main aim is to

construct an air-tight argument (to defend yourself against the barrage of hole-poking disguised as academic Q/A), and if you survive, you submit your draft while simultaneously being consumed with trying to get the

next thing “out” in order for your productivity levels to remain high. This is hardly a process that is conducive to creativity or to genuine exchange. Luckily, I had the opportunity to experiment with a different mode of

exchange through a fellowship aptly named “Critical Collaborations” from the Global Institute for Advanced Study at NYU. As part of this

fellowship, I organized a workshop called “Making Space” which allowed me to experiment with rethinking the creative process for research within a university structure. In the following essay, I first describe the Critical Collaborations fellowship, then describe the Making Space workshop, and conclude with a few reflections on what it means to engage in a dialogical exchange as a creative practice in the academy.

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Critical Collaborations I received a phone call from the Principal Investigator of Critical

Collaborations (CC) project, Pato Hebert, an associate professor in the

department of Art and Public Policy (APP) at the Tisch School of the Arts in NY. Despite a long distance static-filled skype call, he enthusiastically described the three-year fellowship as an opportunity to work with

alumni of the APP department currently working in the creative fields of performance arts, film, visual arts, and curation based in fifteen cities

globally. He wanted me to join four faculty in New York University’s global research and study sites (Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Accra, and Sydney) in order to act as an organizer of one of the “pods” to which a sub-group

of the artists would be assigned in the coming weeks. The goals of the

pod meetings were up to each faculty member and participating artists to decide. There were minimal requirements for “outcomes,” which made it possible for the meetings to occur without the specter of a “deliverable” looming over everyone’s head. The full group of fellows (faculty and

artists) would convene twice: once at the beginning in NY to get to know one another and once at the end in Florence to debrief and address

“meta” questions having to do with creativity, collaboration, and social change.

As the Critical Collaborations program took off, it became apparent

that NYU’s Global Network structure itself produced particular modes

of privilege and exclusion. For example, some invited artists who were

non-US citizens were excluded from participating in the first meeting in

NY because they could not get visas in time. The default language of the

larger meetings would be English, which is not the mother tongue of some of the attendees. But issues like visas or language were obvious and easy to talk about, while other issues—caused by less visible mechanisms— were harder to address. For example, the selection process for

42 AL-DABBAGH | MAKING SPACE

participants meant that, despite their diversity, the majority of the Fellows were also alums of a program that was located in NY. That positionality

created a starting point for shared meanings in terms of how people used language (terms like “critical”, “collaboration”, or even “social change”), while those from different situations were in a constant state of needing to translate their contexts and selves to be legible. This issue raised

the question of how, in a meeting of thirty-two people from all over the

world that was organized through NYU’s Global Network, could we avoid reproducing a center-periphery dynamic? I had thought hard and deep about many of these issues in the past in relation to my own location

as an educator and researcher in the Gulf, but in the context of Critical

Collaborations, I was fortunate to be in conversation with Pato, a deeply reflexive artist in his own right who is sensitive to issues of power and

inequality. We discussed ways in which we might create a “sympioetic”

system of organization: a mode of organizing that has a structural starting point, but can be open-ended and responsive to the needs of people in it. How do we get things done, yet approach the organizational logic of CC with reflexivity and constructive critique? How could we plan for a

“pod” that convenes in Abu Dhabi and would enable participants to form

a “we” that is tenuous, provisional, mostly virtual, contested, and subject to a variety of competing priorities, given the non-contractual nature of a fellowship structure?

A Deep Dive into “Process” I could have designed our meeting in Abu Dhabi in the way that most

academic workshops/research conferences are designed: we meet, we share some work in progress, get feedback from others, and then head to dinner. Instead, after in-depth discussions with pod members at our

New York meeting, we decided to use the opportunity of being together in AD to engage in a reflexive dialogic exchange. This structure would

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mean that we use the time to reflect on where we are situated in our lives, what our current needs are, and engage with one another on issues that

are not always easy to talk about when we are in our individual contexts. Participants agreed to use the time to reflect on the assumptions of our

individual disciplines/industries and the institutional structures that govern our creative processes.

Receiving a fellowship that was explicitly about creativity meant that I

could excavate my own location, both at New York University Abu Dhabi and the broader context of the UAE, for spaces and exchanges that

would generate connections between art and academic social research.1 The UAE has an emergent art scene. It rests on a much longer history

of creative making in a variety of domains (theater, writing, music, and poetry to mention a few). More recent support for the formal “arts”

meant we could explore a variety of locations that form a local art scene here: artists, curators, academics, writers, and others. The arts in this

region have always occupied an in-between space that could generate

modes of social critique and engagement in ways that direct academic social research sometimes does not. Academic social research about

the UAE/Gulf in English has often been by people who engage with this site as “data” but rarely to have a conversation “with.” For academics

who live here and are interested in how to do research “with” and “for,” 1

I use the term social research to encompass the traditional social sciences

(sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, and political science) as well as interdisciplinary academic areas (urban studies, gender studies, social and cultural studies). As a social psychologist who engages closely with sociological and gender theory in my work, I also use the term social research to reflect the reality of social science research in the Arab world, which has included both sociology and anthropology but in ways that do not mirror the differentiation between the two disciplines in the US and Europe.

44 AL-DABBAGH | MAKING SPACE

art is helpful because of its emphasis on process. How did the research get done? What counts as data? What audiences were engaged in the process of producing the work? Is it simply research on “here” for an

audience out “there”? The politics of knowledge production become more obvious when artistic attunement to process is in place. Social scientists, on the other hand, are deeply versed in theories that help us unpack

social inequality and power. Art, like anything else, is also governed by

powerful institutions and actors, which can result in exclusionary spaces, ethnocentric hierarchies, and market-driven modes of production. Therefore, artists, whether engaging with this region or anywhere

else, may find it useful to examine how art, artistic careers, and arts

institutions—even those identified as “social practice”—can be implicated in problematic dynamics and complicit in social inequality. So what might a grounded conversation between artists and social researchers look

like? And what would happen if we centered movement in this dialogical exchange such that the conversations would be partially shaped by the

movement of bodies across the campus, in the city, and between cities? An Un-Recipe for Making Space Ingredients: 3

social researchers at various stages of their careers

Pato (medium size)

4 5

artists from the Critical Collaboration program teaspoons of freshly ground cardamom

15 Members of the academic and artistic community at NYUAD and in the UAE whom you like

Step 1: Prepare three social researchers to join your “pod meeting.”

Marinate them in the idea that this is more of an experiential workshop

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rather than one in which they share a draft of their paper. Add three

notebook journals in which they can take notes. Simmer over low heat

until tender. Tell them that they will engage with artists they don’t know and engage in a variety of conversations on and off campus in artistic

spaces. Watch them smile politely and say ok even though they have no idea what this thing is. Ask them for bios and tell them to add anything they have done that is artistic. Watch some say they have nothing and others admit that they play music for fun or write poetry on the side.

Explain that anything goes. Separately, prepare four artists for inclusion in the pod and refuse to send them a “guide” to the UAE. Explain that this

will be an exploratory process that they will engage in together with some social researchers. Ask them to bring their journals. Marinate separately until they arrive on campus.

Step 2: Bring the two ingredients together and add a Pato. Select a place that does not prime people’s professional identities (like a conference

room). Rather somewhere like the Concrete Tent, an art installation about the refugee experience by the collective Sandi Hilal and Alessandro

46 AL-DABBAGH | MAKING SPACE

Petti that is set outside the university’s buildings, nestled discreetly

between the dining hall and the arts center. Tell your participants, both local and visiting, that, yes, they are in the Gulf, in Abu Dhabi, on an

academic campus, but in a space meant to evoke the permanent state

of one’s temporariness. How can we learn from being in this space that

was produced in response to the experience of temporary lives, waiting to go back home, suspended? How do we dialogue with one another as we reflect on the making of home for ourselves in our academic/

artistic spaces, with our communities, and for our families? Something

happens. Watch closely as the space begins slowly bubbling and opening up. Reduce and simmer. People talk about their vulnerabilities and

challenges. Other people respond by listening closely and affirming. Their questions slowly open up new ways of framing the self for members of the group. You hear the steady tap-tap of the construction work in the buildings next door. A concrete tent has a different connotation in this context. You smell the dust in this open/closed space. You feel the air

brush against your cheek. Someone is speaking and tears up. Someone

else hugs them. You tell them it’s official, we are now a pod. A pod-pod. A podzi pod. People laugh.

Step 3: Invite a few faculty and administrators from NYUAD who are from

the social science and the arts to visit you in the concrete tent. By hosting them in the tent, your pod no longer feels like a “guest” because they

are acting as hosts to others.2 You ask the people to share where home

is for them rather than give data and statistics about their respective

This is a reproduction of Sandi Hilal’s “Living Room” performance during her

time at NYUAD where she invited students to an apartment on campus that she occupied temporarily. By hosting guests, she becomes, by default the host, and the temporary apartment, consequently, a home.

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departments at NYUAD. You hear stories from academics like Hervé Crès, the Dean for the Social Sciences, and David Cook Martin, a sociology professor, and from administrators like Carol Brandt, Vice Provost for

Global Education, and Fatma Abdulla, Senior Vice Provost for Planning, among others. They talk about home being a language (including

mathematics!) that can give comfort, a home being people you feel safe talking to, home being food, home being an object you carry with you across all the different locations you move to. You almost never hear anyone talking about home as a monolithic place.

Step 4: Eat food in Abu Dhabi, off campus. Discuss the “migrant”

experience of home with Deepak Unnikrishnan, a writer, and Bana Kattan, a curator, both of whom grew up in Abu Dhabi. Deconstruct the notion

of migrant and meditate on the term. Discuss the politics of labor of the Louvre Abu Dhabi with Salwa Mikdadi, an art historian. Think about the

politics of representation and East/West binaries. Walk on the beach and find time to talk one-on-one with a pod member. Feel the water on your

48 AL-DABBAGH | MAKING SPACE

feet. Wonder whether your workshop is really “doing” anything. Hear your inner critic who tells you real academics wouldn’t waste their time feeling things. Listen to one of your pod members reflect on a conversation with a taxi driver about what “here” is and how it can mean vastly different things to different people depending on their alternative possibilities.

Step 5: Drive up to Dubai. Notice that the most meaningful conversations happen on the way to things, in-between destinations. Visit a few people who generously take the time to share their stories with you and tell you about the emerging creative scene in Dubai in places like Dubai Design District, the Jameel Arts Center, and Al-Serkal Avenue. Feel tired and full. Notice all the spaces between the official spaces. The bodies in

alley ways on the way to things. The adverts for apartment-shares stuck on walls. Engage in a conversation with artist Hazem Harb in his studio

“Moaqqat,” a temporary studio. Smile as you touch his visual archive of memories: childhood pictures of diasporic families who send him family albums so he can make art with them. Hear him describe his studio as home.

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Step 6: Be prepared for everything that can go wrong to go wrong. One

of your pod members hits his head and needs to go to hospital. You are

on the other end of town. Luckily one of the invited faculty who has lived

here for three years volunteers to take him to a clinic nearby. At the clinic, pod members witness how the operating language on the street is not

English: beyond the official language of the pod and the country are other languages connect people in fundamental ways. Realize that you can

never be prepared for everything, including unplanned injuries. You see that making space requires care and that relational commitment.

50 AL-DABBAGH | MAKING SPACE

Step 7: Add three spoons of ground cardamom. Stir and wait. Step 8: Sit with pod members and their journals and listen to one another reflect on the experience. Realize that your journal looks like a transcript of an interview while most of the artists around the table use the journal to distill their thoughts on paper. Wonder how to use writing to reveal

your inner voice. Hear participants reflect on the official narratives and the critical voices and the embodied experiences they have had here.

Step 9: Two years later, when asked to describe the experience in a

special issue on the relationship between art and research by your friend and guest editor Linsey Bostwick, pull up your journal. Look through

your notes to try to describe Making Space. Write to people who were

in your pod. Hear back from them and read their beautiful messages of

inspiration, gratitude, and care. Realize your pod-pod is still podding. One sociologist rekindled her poetic instincts and contributed to a published anthology. Another sociologist redefined themselves as a legal scholar inspired to think of conversational academia as an alternative way to

produce knowledge. One artist used the opportunity of the workshop to

extend her network in the UAE and transformed her career to engage with the creative community outside her initial home. Another artist used a

social research lens to rethink her connection to the “data” in her creative practice and shifted her work into a different direction.

Step 10: Don’t believe in steps. There is no recipe to making space,

except the cardamom, of course. In the words of Pato: “One of the things that the arts remind and invite us to do is to sit in this uncertainty, the

visceralness of possibility and discovery, to revel in what seems not quite possible but nonetheless already there. Making Space might be called a symposium, gathering, or encounter. It might be called a research

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project. It might be called applied sociology. But it might best be called an artwork”.

Having dialogic exchanges in movement allows us to gain some distance from familiar surroundings and experiment with how we feel differently

in different spaces. This means highlighting the instability of the self and the potential for change, including emancipatory change, in the future.

So, while it may seem initially that making space for reflection is not really “making” anything, the collective deep dive into process meant that

individuals, can for the duration of the fellowship, bend time, engage in a creative re-imagination of the self and its connection to critical praxis. Dialogical Exchange in Movement As a social researcher reflecting on this experience, I think the outcome

of a dialogical exchange in movement did produce something important even though (or perhaps precisely because) it was not beholden to

specific deliverables. The outcome can be described as occurring at three distinct levels: The individual, the social network, and the organization. At

the level of the individual, dialogical exchange in movement gives one the opportunity to zoom out and name the categories that one struggles with on both a professional and personal level. It helps the individual name

the oppressive aspects of the institutional contexts we belong to while

simultaneously engaging in a dialogical process with others to rename,

rework, and reimagine how one can change them through movement. At the level of social networks, the intermediary between the micro and the macro, dialogue in movement gives us new nodes in our networks that, by definition, are transformative. Finally, at the organizational level, this approach helps show how NYU (and other educational organizations) can think about their responsibility to decolonize dominant modes

of knowledge production. In this sense, the global network can help

52 AL-DABBAGH | MAKING SPACE

facilitate new ways of seeing and knowing, through creating spaces for both thinking and feeling, in a grounded way. If the evaluation of social research is not simply related to productivity according to traditional

academic benchmarks but also to embracing sympoietic processes as an

important organizational feature, this can be a unique opportunity to make space for the humanizing conversations that truly matter.

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DEAD-END(S)

Davíð Brynjar Franzson

Dead–End(s) • a position, situation, or course of action that leads to nothing further • lacking opportunities especially for advancement • lacking an exit

Sketches representing leftovers, dead-ends and aborted processes from the development of “voice, fragments.”

Each iteration accomplishing a goal, a step forward in the wrong direction.

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56 FRANZSON | DEAD-END(S)

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58 FRANZSON | DEAD-END(S)

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TWENTY-ONE PIECES Kristy Edmunds

Broadly speaking, if scientific research is the effort to explain observed phenomena, art can be considered as the effort to express existential

phenomena. Both are grounded in the pursuit of knowable truths. Both

involve inquiry, deep observation, a refinement of methods and tools to get at the core of the “thing” being obsessively toiled over from some

discipline-specific corner or another, and both advance the creation of

new knowledge. How societies value that knowledge is of course another matter altogether.

In the thirty-plus years of my work in the arts—as an artist myself, as a

curator and artistic director charged with exhibiting and contextualizing

the works of art that a public will engage in, and as an executive director

entrusted with the leadership of an institutional framework that effectively “publishes” the cultural practices of artists in multiple disciplines and

genres—there is seemingly no end to the public mystery of what art is, let alone what goes into its creation.

The question of how art is research invariably provokes a re-hashing of arts validity along a particular research spectrum. The well-established silos of academic credentials for research sit on one end, and rigid

requirements for accessing research investment sits at the other. The

validation processes for advancing knowledge and their accepted modes of conveyance are already exceptionally difficult. Mentioning art as a

contributing force to research-based knowledge is to watch eyebrows

raise, muscles tense, and the clearing of throats echo around the room.

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It is as if a vital fence line is about to be permanently breached. Thus I have come to recognize that it is far preferred to have Art funded

and credentialed by its professional tenants, academics through the

academy’s particular methods, and scientific research by its own rigor and compliance standards. Attempts at blurring these boundaries for

the possible purpose of inclusion invites all sorts of impassioned handwringing.

The financial investment and credentialing systems that are well

established for research endeavors simply do not seek to include artistic contribution—which unfortunately leaves a great deal of knowledge

capacity underexplored. Established academic systems do not take a proactive stance within the evaluative processes for artistic research in order to include the contribution of art either. Artists whose work is fundamentally based in generating expansive knowledge (that

includes research findings and public access to it) are hindered on both fronts. Perhaps scientists would be as hindered in getting a

symphony performed, or a painting into the collection of an art museum. Nonetheless, Art as a way of knowing is as substantive as science as a way of knowing, however differently applied.

Artistic research practices are initiated from a question that entangles the artist in experimentation within aesthetic knowledge, theory,

precedents and primary experience—those that surround form, the

further interrogation and refinement of form, and manifesting the overall effort as a work of art. All phases of art-making involve research. Of

equal significance is the practice of artists who generate research-based

Overleaf: “Sky” by Kristy Edmunds.

62 EDMUNDS | TWENTY-ONE PIECES

art. These artists tend to involve and draw from social, cultural, and

environmental discipline areas to manifest art AS a form of research unto

itself. Both processes and practices add to a broader field of knowledge. Let me conjure a hypothetical scenario for exploring an artist’s creative

practice and how the resulting art might be considered research. Below is a fabrication intended to stimulate consideration.

A Native American painter has observed for the past decade that there are fewer birds in the sky than there were during her childhood. She

has been sketching a particular tree on the same landscape horizon every year for over twenty years. This seasonal practice has been a

longstanding creative habit. Looking through her sketchbooks she notices that the birds once prevalent in her early drawings have diminished

almost entirely over time. She shows her drawings to the tribal elders who affirm her observation. They are already aware of this existential truth, and they share their perspectives on why this phenomena has

happened along with their wisdom about what it will mean in the future.

The artist’s sketches are not yet art as research, they are a form of unique documentation.

Concurrently, North American bird watchers have documented that

annual migratory numbers have disappeared from the skies by what

appears to be in the order of millions. They are perplexed, and begin to share their notebooks and materials with other bird-watching clubs. In

doing so, they affirm that this impressive absence has been observed by avid bird watchers for some time. While their methods of documentation are the material samples of hobbyists, they do validate one another’s observations across a wide swath of North America. Collectively

experienced, it seems that bird migration has diminished at a staggering rate. They turn to the scientific community to seek their engagement

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and to find an explanation for this unsettling trend. By sharing their

aggregated materials, they set off a research effort within the scientific

community. The effort requires resources and credentialed involvement. An esteemed researcher receives a grant to undertakes analytic

comparison of annual bird migration by poring through the data collected in 1999 with that of 2019. By applying quantitative research methods the researcher determines that indeed millions of birds have disappeared

from the North American sky over the past twenty years. Another group of researchers seek to ascertain which species are absent and which remain consistent —what is the growth in migration by species (if any), and what is the diminishment by species? These researchers (through sound and

definitive means) find that Starlings are vanishing at a breathtaking rate, yet for some reason Crows remain plentiful (this is a random statement

conjured by me for the exercise of writing this thing). The artist’s notebook sketches reveal precisely the same: Starlings have all but vanished in her drawings, but crows remain plentiful on the horizon.

Fast forward. The stunning drop-off in bird migrations are wholly proven as undisputed fact by multiple research teams through refined and valid methods. The numbers in decline are awesome, the skies are growing

increasingly quiet each season, and the momentum for further research

is expanding. More researchers engage in order to identify the underlying causes; others to examine impact. Others are enlisted to ascertain

the economic potential for innovation. All is deemed as valid research pursuits.

The broadening effort requires segmentation to examine specific factors of cause by analyzing environmental changes within the

geographic regions along the migratory path of Starlings over a twentyyear period. Other researchers branch out to examine the possible

64 EDMUNDS | TWENTY-ONE PIECES

impact the escalating bird disappearance is having or might have on

numerous inter-related interests. Researchers have sub-divided while

maintaining communication across the broad research areas to explain

the phenomena of a mass reduction in bird migration as it relates to our human condition.

Regardless of which niche of research is being pursued, the scientific community is both inspired and obligated to bring their acute

methodologies to bear —their systems of assessment, criteria, and

validation also intensify to parcel out the limited resources available for

research projects. Supply is reducing, demand is heightening. Objectivity is going to become microscopically scrutinized, and credentials will matter greatly.

The artist is experiencing her own version of an over-arching drive for accumulating more knowledge, and a professional obligation to do

so by virtue of her role as a professional artist. Like the scientists, she expands her inquiry through segmentation and comparative analysis.

She compares her drawings to other tribal art forms across her region by date to ascertain if there is an anomaly or a trend. She examines

the beadwork from her region at annual increments, and weavings of

other tribal communities. Indeed, twenty years ago there were intricate symbols of migrating Starlings in evidence, which successively and

consistently disappear, and like her drawings there is a preponderance of

the representation of Crows. This is repeated in the available artifacts, and so too in their narrative stories, ceremonial dress, music and dances writ large. Across the board and over a wide geography, a dramatic decline of bird migration is in evidence in every other tribal data set she has

researched. In one of the most current weavings from a neighboring tribe not a single bird is represented, and particularly striking is the weaver’s title: “Now all of the birds are on-line.”

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The artist’s extensive research efforts illuminate and reinforce that a

phenomena has occurred, is consistent across tribes and regions, and all of her evidence to date points to a massive reduction in bird migration.

She seeks resources in order to share her findings and to enlist others in the effort, but she does not fit the formal criteria for valid research. Her

aggregated data has all been generated by art/artifacts which reside well outside of measurable standards. Further, she does not carry the title of

scientist, nor is she a credentialed PhD. She is however, one of the most respected artists of her generation, with ample awards and citations to demonstrate her nationally recognized status as an artist. In the time it

would take her to become “validated” for her research capability, the birds could vanish entirely. She, like the bird-watching enthusiasts, will have to find some form of conveyance for what is now known and affirmed.

The artist undertakes her singular and uniquely situated contribution— the only one at her disposal—to make works of art that will effectively “publish” her research effort.

Aesthetically, her art will have to arrive at an effective determination of form, and rely on the available tools and methods of aesthetic

conveyance—all of which are associated with her renowned art-making practice. The sole avenue available for support is an Arts Grant. It will be bestowed not for her “research findings,” but instead from criteria

that assesses the “excellence of her creative process” and her ability to successfully execute the body of work as proposed.

This is where the silos adhere to the boundary lines of what can be

“judged” and by whom, and where ideas and pursuits can be awarded resources according to each distinct profession. Her research will now

take the form of a body of art that embeds her research within a museum exhibition.

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At this point, her task becomes exploring how best to manifest the

works of art as informed by her research. Her studio (her lab) enables experimentation within each painting, and she prototypes all of the

material envisaged for the museum exhibition. With what form can the artist express the observed phenomena of the quieting of the skies

through the disappearing migratory birds? To whom is this expression

addressed, and how much can be effectively/legitimately conveyed? ALL are points of substantive inquiry for conveying artistic research. To get

even more granular, there are explorations for scale, material, and palette

(i.e. what color spectrum to convey the gradation from plentiful to absent; the known implications of blue vs. ochre and umber vs green? What

sounds, in frequency and pitch aligns to the recorded audio samples

she found in the Natural History Museum archives that “demonstrate” a

dramatic reduction of Starling migration by season against the amplified evidence of Crows increasing through their calls and wing-beats? Is this detail necessary or distracting? What is the musical equivalence of this

sonic absence?). These possibilities in form, duration, and in materials are all art as research within the domain of aesthetics.

Her formal artistic research procedures are developed in service to positing discoverable answers, and further interrogation. Like

the scientists, she believes that her research contribution can aid

in advancing knowledge through proven methods. Her process is

necessarily constrained by a theoretical purpose and expressed through her research findings.

She is expressing the observed existential phenomena of the quieting of the skies through the disappearing bird migrations in her paintings. This is not about furthering her professional advancement as an artist, but

rather to convey through material and form, her research. Included in the exhibition are photographs of the other tribal artifacts she documented

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during her comparative research; where possible she has included the

objects themselves. She plays a sound-score from archival recordings that sonically convey the diminishing bird populations at annual

increments with a narrative voice-over that repeats the annual statistical data of bird migration for every year between 1999 and 2019. She is manifesting her substantial research as art, and in doing so she has contributed new contours of evolving knowledge.

I would predict that if the scientists saw the exhibition and met with the artist, it would not be to discuss her paintings as a powerful addition to

the collective body of research on the plummeting bird migration of North America, but rather to ascertain if her art could be included in the soon to be published research findings. Her paintings would be incredibly useful “illustration.”

Certain research is privileged in the process of determining what will be advanced and what will not, and thus we impose limitations on

discovering new ways of knowing. When we block off the intelligent

research effort of artists from the resourcing intersections with science

and academia, our systems of inquiry and/or credentialing leave out a lot of unique and pertinent knowledge.

I have still to encounter a creative act, or a work of art that holds zero

research within it. The form it takes is singular, and that very singularity

is the principal issue. What enables artistic inquiry to be so enduring and powerful is what seems to diminish its ease of entry into the domains

of research. Expressing existential phenomena is not as straightforward or measurable as explaining it. Yet expanding our engagement with art would be to move the needle towards a recognition of knowledge as

having contours of relevant interdependence. That movement towards heightened inclusivity may serve our collective betterment.

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RESEARCH TAKES THE STAGE

Research in Practice at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute Sam Livingston

For many, Carnegie Hall represents the highest pinnacle of aspiration

and excellence in music. An incredible roster of artists, speakers, and

performers have graced our three stages since 1891, and this tradition continues today with artists as varied as Youssou NDOUR, the Berlin Philharmonic, and Rhiannon Giddens sharing a single season. In the

past 15 years, the hall has also redefined what a 21st century concert

hall can be, broadening the scope and reach of its programs. One major

area of growth has been in the work of the Weill Music Institute, the hall’s

education and social impact arm. This area now reaches close to 800,000 people annually in NYC, across the country, and around the world. The programs range from the National Youth Ensembles for the USA, to

deep partnerships with schools and teachers, to a commitment to using the arts to catalyze human development the justice system, in early

childhood, and many more settings. These projects aim to deepen the

quality of music education, train the artists and leaders of tomorrow, and break down the barriers that prevent us from connecting to one another. All the programs share a simple inquiry: how can music best serve

individuals, amplifying their voices, leading to further opportunities, and building community?

There is that famous, groan-inducing joke: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice …” Jokes aside, practice is such a

powerful concept. Whether in front of a piano or on a yoga mat, practice is a process of continually refining, reflecting, and honing skills. Practice

centers on the journey rather than the destination, the process rather than

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the final product. For us, designing programs is a responsive and iterative task. Because of this ongoing evolution, our research is less a probe we

use to examine the work from the outside. Instead, we use research and

evaluation to design, deepen, and sharpen our programs. In this way, it’s integral to our day-to-day work.

Our programs are rooted in education and a spirit of inquiry drives what

we do every day. In working with teachers, teaching artists, and leaders of all kinds, we’ve built a culture of research through informal Collaborative Action Research projects, in which evidence from the classroom goes

right back into programs. We ask simple questions: “Who’s coming to

our events and from which neighborhoods?” “What are the acceptance rates for our middle schoolers to performing arts high schools?” “How

are teachers utilizing our tools in their classrooms?” The answers to these question get invested right back into the work and it evolves as a result.

We also invest in more summative and rigorous research and evaluation projects, partnering with professional researchers in order to generate new knowledge for the field as a whole. We see this as a core

responsibility for us as an international organization. Here are three

brief synopses of recent research projects, all led by our partners at WolfBrown. •

No years are more important in a child’s development than ages 0–3

and we are beginning to understand that music can play a substantial role in that growth. For example, our Lullaby Project invites new

mothers and caregivers to write a personal lullaby for their child.

Overleaf: New York City’s Carnegie Hall. Page: 69: The Red Theater at The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi during Barzakh 2018 with Alsarah and the Nubatones.

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WolfBrown studied ten of our NYC Lullaby sites to learn about the impact of the Lullaby Project experience on the mothers and their families. The study found that participating in the Lullaby Project

builds community; promotes communication within the family, and fosters feelings of well-being, personal meaning, and hopes for

the future that extend beyond the project. There are now over 500 lullabies written around the world every year through the Lullaby

Project as it spreads internationally. (Read more in Lullaby: Being Together, Being Well by WolfBrown, 2017.)

Lullaby Project

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Early Childhood Concerts

•

At Carnegie Hall we believe that music and the arts have a

unique potential to serve people involved in the justice system

and to provide tools and for individuals to grow and seek further opportunities, especially when they return to their communities. Through deep partnerships with Sing Sing Correctional Facility, the NYC Department of Probation, the NYC Administration for

Children’s Services, and the NY State Department of Corrections

and Community Supervision, we serve hundreds of young people and adults during justice involvement or incarceration and after

they return home. In addition to building individuals’ skills as artists, the arts amplify participant’s voices and connect them with future

74 LIVINGSTON | CARNEGIE HALL

opportunities. In a similar spirit, we evaluated whether a two-week choral project with young people in a city detention facility could

create a more positive environment and lead to positive outcomes

for the young people, including stronger social relations, constructive behavior, and a changed sense of self. While the study focused only on those two weeks, participants did display increased positive

behavior, a surprising dedication to music-making in their free time outside of the program, and an increased sense of well-being.

Additional study would be needed to look at a longitudinal impact of such experiences over time, but these outcomes point to the

potential positive impact of the arts on young people and a new

strengths-based approach for young people in our justice system. (Read more in Our Voices Count by WolfBrown, 2014.) •

Carnegie Hall runs the three national youth ensembles for the USA, which bring together 200+ young musicians every summer to train

with an all-star faculty, perform at Carnegie Hall, and tour to perform

across the US and internationally. We aim for these three groups—the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America (NYO-USA), NYO2, and NYO Jazz—to represent the diversity of young people in the United States. This mission counters the well-known reality that

access to high quality music education is inequitably distributed. As

a result, many selective youth orchestras, and eventually professional symphony orchestras disproportionately feature more players from

major urban centers, and those who are White or Asian and male. In order to provide more access to aspirational opportunities such as

the national youth ensembles, Carnegie Hall launched NYO2, which has a particular focus on recruiting musicians from communities currently underrepresented in classical music. This program is

already affecting the composition of NYO-USA, the senior ensemble.

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As of 2020, 26 players have followed a pathway from NY02 to NYOUSA. Wolfbrown is currently working with Carnegie Hall on a study

of how the recruitment, values, and practices of the program signal

“Yes, if you have the passion, this is for you” to all young musicians across the USA.

Explore this and more research by Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute: https://www.carnegiehall.org/Education/Social-Impact/Resources.

Above: Musical Connections Opposite: NYO2 Musicians

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CRITICAL ARTS AS RESEARCH Sarah Bay-Cheng

Depending on which corner of the academy you’re visiting, one hears

the work of academics described as either REE-search or Reh-SEARCH. The former intonation suggests that one is repeating a previous action. I

search, then I search again. Re-search. The latter pronunciation conveys a slightly different meaning; that one is finding something new through discovery. The first syllable is almost negligible in comparison to the

search itself. I have yet to determine a consistent pattern of usage for

either, although the former pronunciation seems more common among the humanities, while the latter appears to be more in favor with the

quantitative-data types in the hard and social sciences. To be honest, I’ve heard both from colleagues of all disciplines. Since writing this, I’ve been aware that I tend to go back and forth between them.

Thinking about the arts and research, it’s not clear which area best

describes a critically engaged arts practice. Would it be the former, in which the arts revisit and challenge existing assumptions, reassess

familiar tropes, and seek to upend commonly received wisdom? Or, is

it the latter connotation, which suggests that the arts uncover or create something new? Of course, many will recognize this as a false binary, but to the extent that the distinctions between discovery and critique hold meaning in certain fields, they may be especially problematic

when applied to the fine and performing arts. This division has proven

surprisingly difficult to change. We find the “practice-theory divide” to be

a perpetual problem no matter how many academic panels, publications, and lectures have attempted to dismantle it.

At least in some areas, the distinction between research in the arts as

either critique or creation is a relatively recent problem and perhaps one

of our own making. In his 2011 essay on theatre in higher education,

theatre historian Marvin Carlson argued that the emergence of the MFA

and the uptick in theaters on university campuses in the 1970s and 1980s professionalized theatre training with a number of perhaps unintended

consequences, including inconsistent approaches to actor training and the production of more graduates than could find jobs. The growth of

such programs, according to Carlson also drove “a wedge more deeply between the “academic” and “producing” wings of the program, a

division that not infrequently, at these schools and elsewhere, led to

misunderstandings and, all too frequently, outright antagonism between faculty and staff members who found themselves trapped in opposing camps” (Carlson, 120). Thus, an attempt to legitimize both theatre

studies and theatre practice within the academy appears to have split

those seemingly most aligned. Competing for resources and recognition, scholars and artists found themselves at odds within academic systems and the evidence of such antagonisms are still with us today. While the boundaries have tended to erode at the individual level, institutional

divisions remain. It is only within the last few years that Harvard created

a recognized theatre program from among its English Department faculty, and the Yale School of Drama, which grants doctoral students the

D.F.A. (doctorate of fine arts) remains institutionally separate from Yale

University, which grants the Ph.D. Although such divisions have endured since at least the 1980s, scholars and artists consistently have designed

programs to reverse this trend, including repeated panels and discussions on breaking down the practice-theory divide and the development of practice-based research programs and studio art doctorates.

When I entered my doctoral program at the University of Michigan

in 1997, for instance, the aim of that program was explicitly to break

down the division between practitioners and scholars. Indeed, at the

time, it was officially titled a Ph.D. in “Theatre Practice.” Courses in the

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program included both M.F.A. and Ph.D. students within seminars, and

doctoral students were required to take a studio course every semester of coursework. Although the studios exposed the limitations of my own

training and talent, I loved it. We were encouraged to direct, design, and perform throughout the year, and all theatre students could collaborate with artists in not only in theatre, but also in dance, opera, film (and

video at the time) and performance art. Most of us were deeply engaged in the critical theory boom of the 1990s, and these readings and ideas found expression in performance works, just as we brought various

arts practices and examples to our classmates in literature and history

seminars across the campus. Many of our performances were not very

good, of course, but the sense of experimentation and exploration in the rehearsal halls animated our scholarly discussions and vice versa. The

blend of theory and practice emerged organically and has continued to serve me well as a teacher, researcher, and collaborator in a variety of

colleges and universities. Perhaps most unusually for graduate school, it was a lot of fun.

It is perhaps revealing that my beloved Michigan program didn’t last

very long. As a resource-intensive project, the Ph.D. Theatre program

graduated very few students and to my knowledge lasted for less than a

decade, although I’m still not sure exactly why it ended. The Department of Theatre & Drama has not offered a Ph.D. since, although students in other disciplines—English, Comparative Literature, Art History, among others—frequently intersect with Theatre and Performance Studies,

and the Department has hired some excellent theatre and performance

studies researchers in recent years. Nevertheless, the current structures at Michigan and other universities continue to maintain academic

programs that are relatively separate from arts practice, even as students and faculty members themselves work across the practice-theory divide.

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Indeed, this seems to be the dominant model in the US today: programs

primarily dedicated to academic training, but which encourage or support practice-based student work on the side. Carlson’s home program at The Graduate Centre at the City University of New York (CUNY), is described thus:

The Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Performance offers students a solid grounding in the theory, history, and criticism of theatre studies, while encouraging interdisciplinary thinking. The

program takes advantage of the rich resources of New York

City, with its professional theatre specialists, institutions, and

myriad productions, as well as its library and museum facilities and its archives and private collections. Although the program

emphasizes academic studies, attempts are made to form alliances of understanding between scholars and practitioners whenever possible. (“CUNY Graduate Centre, Theatre and Performance Ph.D. Program,” 2019; my emphasis)

The “whenever possible” and the emphasis on New York City as the site of such alliances suggest that the responsibility for establishing such connections in practice-based work outside the university will fall to

students. More encouraging than the previous sentence would suggest, this statement acknowledges that doctoral students in theatre want

performance outlets for their work. We see this desire also in practice-

based or practice-led research programs in the UK, Australia, and Europe. Monash University in Australia, for example, offers practice-based Ph.D.

programs in Translation Studies, Creative Writing, Theatre & Performance, and Music. Ph.D. programs in Studio Art emerged in the early 2000s and the initially small number of early programs have grown rapidly. James

Elkins’s first edition of Artists with PhDs (2009) noted a handful of existing

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programs, but by the time of his revised edition in 2013, he lists five such programs in Canada, seven in the US, 26 in Australia and New Zealand, 26 in Japan, 31 in the EU, 42 in the UK, as well as growing lists in Latin

America (8), China (3), and Africa (5). Elkins argues that these programs will continue to expand (2009; 2019). According to the SHARE (Step-

Change for Higher Arts Research and Education) Handbook for Artistic

Research Education, in 2013 there were 280 institutions globally that offer an arts-based doctorates, including practice-based Ph.D. programs as well as the D.Phil. and D.C.A. (Doctorate of Creative Arts) (Wilson and

van Ruiten, 14). In the United States, Yale’s School of Drama continues to offer the doctorate of fine arts (D.F.A.) in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism. At the University at Buffalo (State University of New York),

Ph.D. students in Theatre & Performance are required to enroll in a studio course for every semester of coursework. In my current School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University, masters and

doctoral students in Theatre and Performance Studies integrate critical and creative practice, including approaches to sustainability “through critical and artistic inquiry.” Our Department of Visual Arts and Art

History offers a Ph.D. in Visual Arts. Over the last 20 years or more, the

emergence of practice-based research programs, also known as “practice as research” programs have explicitly challenged the perceived divisions

between conservatory training and academic research, instead taking up sustained arguments for the arts as its own form of research.

These programs highlight the central question here: is an arts practice

research? What is arts research? Or, rather, what do we gain or lose by considering the arts as a form of research within the academy? Within

the existing structures of higher education, some benefits are clear. With so many resources directed toward acknowledged research processes and outcomes in universities, arts programs might be better supported

when their work is acknowledged as a mode of inquiry that produces new

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knowledge alongside other disciplines. For example, in response to the

dominant rhetoric regarding the centrality of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) in preparing students for their future careers, arts

research speaks to the role that STEAM (STEM, plus “Art”) might play in expanding the role for arts and artists in such arguments. In his

book, Practice as Research in the Arts, Robin Nelson contends that arts research and a practice-as-research methodology, “not only enhances

the academy but also has particular relevance to a wide-spread political concern on the part of governments for research to be seen to be of broader social benefit” (21).

While I’m inclined to agree with Nelson, his formulation of arts research

seems to risk the creation of another binary, that of pure research versus applied. I readily admit that part of me resists this formulation as it

threatens to turn research in the arts toward largely utilitarian functions. Is artistic research only valuable when placed in the service of other,

ostensibly more useful, more productive social aims? For example, does dance only matter when it demonstrably improves mental health, or

painting when it builds community engagement? Does theatrical research need to remind us of social problems or prove its financial impact on

GDP? Of course, art has always had value as a social good, offering not

only aesthetics but also social reflection, awareness, and economic gains. Nevertheless, such arguments can quickly become utilitarian justifications that demand arts research justify itself in the context of its service to

other areas. In advancing more holistic recognition of the arts as research, we would need to establish a conceptual framework of “pure” artistic

research, analogous to theoretical physics or pure mathematics. That is, what articulation of artistic research would recognize the value in

artistic creation, both for itself (a return, perhaps, to art for art’s sake)

and in its application in other fields, be they political critique or social advancements.

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Such debates are not new. After all, Charles Snow critiqued the problem of “two cultures” in his Cambridge University Rede Lecture in 1959.

French sociology Jacques Ellul similarly feared the atomization of culture

in what he called the technological society. In this division, he bemoaned the move of psychology and sociology toward quantitative methods of study. “Technology,” Ellul wrote, “cannot put up with institutions and

“literature.” It must necessarily don mathematical vestments” (431). More recently, Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson have lamented the lack of

progress in these debates in their Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts (2010). Reviewing the field, they wrote, “We both felt a certain

frustration at the lack of progress on the fundamental nature of research

in the arts following about 20 years of international discussion” (xiv). What might shift this narrative? Ironically (especially for Ellul), the answer might be found in the very technologies he feared.

In notes for a 2012 public discussion on media archaeology as

method, Wolfgang Ernst offered a media studies response to questions regarding the problem of “research” in media art. Juxtaposing media art and academic research, Ernst cites examples of various media

in performance: Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape; Jan-Peter Sonntag’s public dismantling of Friedrich Kittler’s electronic music

synthesizer; Jean-Luc Godard’s film Histoire(s) du Cinema, among

others. He described a project “SlaMera Obscura” (July 9/10, 2011)

by then-masters student Christian Schliebs. “SlaMera Obscura” was a three-dimensional camera obscura installed in a gallery space in

Berlin. For Ernst, the effect of the installation was to translate academic knowledge into experiential ones: “the actual art installation leads to insights which are not primarily based on academic speech and the

printed text but on the physical experience—true ‘mediatheatre’” (2). For Ernst, this installation was key to understanding media archaeology as a research method that encompasses both artistic creation and analysis,

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and is co-created by artists, scholars, and audiences. His emphasis

on the experience might further remind us of arguments regarding the

importance of “co-presence” in theatre. Ernst’s formulation de-centres the researcher as a singular or privileged presence, but rather situates research itself as an embodied, collaborative, and artistic process: Academic media theory brings out the epistemological surplus

which is dormant within media technologies; knowledge needs to become explicit in order to become reflective, and this primarily takes place in the medium of verbal text—the classical cultural technology as practiced in universities. Different from that

logocentristic explication of knowledge, there is implicit knowledge (Polyani) which stays in a kind of latency (very archaeological)

within the media; artistic practice can evoke this implicit epistemé to create affective forms of insight. But both academics and

artists must be “tuned” in the right way (frequencies) to be able to “resonante” [sic] with that knowledge. (Ernst, 2)

Ernst’s argument in favor of “affective forms of insight” bridges the

perceived gap between not only theory and practice, but also positions

arts research as creation, critique, and discovery. In media archaeology, objects of study hold intrinsic as well as cultural knowledge that can only be fully activated at the intersection of artists, audiences and technologies.

Reading this description—particularly his reference to epistemological surplus—I’m struck by its similarity not only to theatre, but also to

indigenous knowledge. For example, in her essay, “Traveling Soles:

Tracing the Footprints of Our Stolen Sisters,” Julie Nagam demonstrates

how “performed visual narratives can (re)map space and place,” produce “objects that performatively confront the legacies and continued projects

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of colonialism,” and offer “a space in which to rearticulate Indigenous

memories, histories, and stories through embodied practices.” Together, these create what she calls a “living archive,” a formulation very similar to Ernst’s mediatheatre as a site of “dormant” knowledge (119). Both the living archive and the latent, implicit “epistemé” are activated by

performances that resonate between performer and space, and space and audiences through mutual affective and embodied experience.

Like Ernst, Nagam notes the problems in a logocentric documentary

system, although for very different reasons. The archive in indigenous

history, she writes, “is the particular written form through which the settler state preserves cultural and collective memory.” In her description of the exhibit Walking with Our Sisters (2019) by Métis artist Christi Belcourt, Nagam focuses on ceremony “as a means of transmitting collective

memory” that bears witness not only to the lives of indigenous women, but also “to the politics of the land and the complex relationship the

missing and murdered women share with the space” (2017, 118). The intersection of media archaeology and indigenous histories may be

found in the work of many contemporary artists. Indeed, as I write this, the ImagineNative Film and Media Arts Festival has just concluded its 20th season in Toronto. Earlier this year, HASTAC’s 2019 conference

was “Decolonizing Technologies, Reprogramming Education” on the

unceded Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) Territory in Vancouver, BC. Nagam’s analysis of Belcourt’s project expands the range of Ernst’s media

theatre and offers us a powerful example of the potential for media and

performance arts to serve as sites of embodied research—both critique and discovery—for their audiences.

Nagam’s essay appears in the collection, Performance Studies in Canada, co-edited by my colleagues, Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer, both

in the Department of Theatre at York University. Although I have been

reading Ernst regularly for the past several years in relation to other work,

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I was reminded of this specific reading by David Han in relation to his

VR project, “After Dan Graham,” presented as part of the “Mixed Reality Performance Symposium,” also at York in Toronto. Han is an alumnus of the MFA Film program at York and I attended his talk among an

audience of fellow faculty and students from different departments and universities in Toronto. Listening to Han in this context, I was struck by

the parallel to Ernst and his example of media archaeology in a masters student’s performance project. Ernst’s example not only illustrates arts

research in practice, but also captures an ideal experience of university

education: a collaborative space in which hierarchies dissolve, or are at

least suspended, and where the disciplinary boundaries stretch perhaps

(hopefully!) permanently. Ernst defines this encounter as “mediatheatre”: the experience of a methodology grounded in the intersection of media

and performance and reliant on the resonance of not only the artist and

media, but the embodied participation of the audience as well. Listening

to Han on Ernst, and reading Nagam in Levin and Schweitzer’s anthology reminds me of my very fortunate position within a school of the arts, to be surrounded by engaged colleagues thinking through the pressing questions of today and engaging the arts as living laboratories for

themselves and our community. Reflecting on their work, artistic practice

and research seem all the more aligned, even indistinguishable. Perhaps, in a final consideration, the division between them is only academic.

WORKS CITED Biggs, Michael, and Henrik Karlsson (2010). The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts. New York: Routledge.

Carlson, Marvin (2011). “Inheriting the Wind: A Personal View of the

Current Crisis in Theatre Higher Education in New York.” Theatre Survey 52 (1): 117–23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557411000093.

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“CUNY Graduate Centre, Theatre and Performance Ph.D. Program” (n.d). Theatre and Performance. Accessed November 4, 2019. https://www.

gc.cuny.edu/Page-Elements/Academics-Research-Centers-Initiatives/ Doctoral-Programs/Theatre-and-Performance.

Elkins, James (2019). “3 List of PhD Programs Around the World |

Artists with PhDs.” 2019. http://www.jameselkins.com/yy/2-list-of-phdprograms-around-the-world/.

Elkins, James, ed. (2009). Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art. 1st edition. Washington, D.C: New Academia Publishing/ The Spring.

Ellul, Jacques (1964). The Technological Society. Trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Vintage Books.

Ernst, Wolfgang (2012). “Media Archaeology as Method of Re/Search in

Parallel Lines (Media Art, Academic Media Theory).” Berlin. https://www. musikundmedien.hu-berlin.de/de/medienwissenschaft/medientheorien/ ernst-in-english/pdfs/transmedial12kurz.pdf.

Nagam, Julie (2017). “Traveling Soles: Tracing the Footprints of Our

Stolen Sisters.” In Performance Studies in Canada: Mapping Genealogies and Geographies of Performance Culture. Ed. Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 115–34. Nelson, Robin (2013). Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles,

Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Wilson, Mick, and Schelte van Ruiten, eds. (2013). SHARE Handbook for Artistic Research Education. Amsterdam: Elia. https://www.academia. edu/19400374/SHARE_Handbook_for_Artistic_Research_Education.

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DESIGN E.R.

Goffredo Puccetti

The never ending debate on what can be considered art, what constitutes research and so on, takes a special place in the heart of the designers, by which I mean those who claim to be like scientists, using the tools of the artists and whose practice is nothing but research.

Yes, the designer! That peculiar, despicable professional figure, equally abhorred by the artist and the researcher, by the humanists and the

scientists. We are silly artists preoccupied with cosmetics in the eye of the scientists, and frigid soulless carpenters to the eye of the artists.

But you know what most people don’t see? Design is complicated.

There is no theory of Design, no theory of Type Design, no theory of

Environmental Graphic Design; there is no algorithm for the perfect logo– need I go on? We can only know that, for example, when designing a

logo there should be a strong artistic element at play. On the other hand, when designing a way-finding system for a hospital emergency room

there should be no artistic element at all: designers should just use all the research available to make the perfect emergency exit, the most intuitive user path, and so on.

To make matters even more complicated, designers are required by our

profession to steer clear from specialization, the cornerstone of each and every ivory tower of academia. If I dig out of my files the lists of clients I used to work with before I started teaching, here is what I get: Monday:

car tires producer; Tuesday: stove-top manufacturer; Wednesday: energy provider; Thursday: famous Museum (yes, that one); Friday: a snack bar

(yes, that one). How do you cater to all these different audiences? You do

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it by being a researcher all the time while you are producing art: how are tires manufactured, what is the history of the stove-top, where do I find

museum-user demographics, can ingredients for snack bars really do all they promise?

Wanna flip that? Ok: you try and be an artist who does research. It is complicated. And people just don’t get it; our profession is belittled

constantly. An example: The Italian Airforce has launched an official

national competition to design the logo for their Centennial Celebration in 2023. The winner of the competition gets ... one iPad. That’s it.

Actually, what really–REALLY–bothers me is that if people don’t

understand why design is important in our society, if everyone from the layman to the sophisticated scholar, fail to appreciate the fascinating complexity of our work… Well, that’s our fault.

Yes, I do believe that the appreciation of the role of designers–especially graphic designers–in our society will not change until we change certain

principles of our practice. One of the main reasons why there is so much

bad design (horrid design, actually) in the world, comes from the process and procedures that graphic designers have created for themselves. The niche in which visual designers operate is dangerously comfortable. But

this comfort has a cost: graphic designers have been abdicating their role as intellectually active actors of change and become skilled executants, needed by clients only because of speciﬁc technical skills, such as the capability of operating certain software.

Overleaf: Attilio Rigotti (left) and Goffredo Puccetti performing in a staged reading of the sketch “Design E.R.”

92 PUCCETTI | DESIGN E.R.

Designers should actually be the whistle-blowers of visual communication and policy making, telling the public about the misconduct occurring at every level in corporations and institutions—outcomes that affect us all

profoundly. Sometimes, when I think about designer-client conversations, I imagine the same conversation in a different context, like between a

patient and a doctor. That conversation, between let’s say Mr. Smith and Dr. Pleasing, might look like this: Doctor: Enter! Patient: Good morning, Doctor Pleasing. Doctor: Ha! Good morning, Mr. Smith. P: So, doctor: what are the test results? D: Please take a seat, Mr. Smith. Let’s see … you came here a few weeks ago, lamenting an unspecific illness that was affecting your life at work and in your family. We performed a series of tests and exams, and we think we have the solution that’s right for you ...

P: Please doctor, tell me what my condition is and what I have to do to get better ...

D: Well, it is very serious, Mr. Smith. Allow me to be straightforward:

You have cancer. It is serious but it can be healed. Actually, there is an

extremely good chance of complete rehabilitation. Of course, the situation calls for drastic measures: the ﬁrst measure will be a chemotherapy

treatment. We recommend three cycles in a 15 week period of treatment. Starting immediately. There is no time to waste, Mr. Smith. Oh, and of

course, you will quit smoking immediately and your diet will undergo a profound change.

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You have smoked your last cigarette and eaten your last piece of

Camembert cheese, Mr. Smith. And, mmm ... Yes, there is the cost issue: we are talking about some serious money, Mr. Smith. Yes, you will be cured, but that will cost you no less than $250,000.

P: Oh my goodness, Doctor, I—I am ... This is terrible ... I—I—I mean, are you sure?

D: Well, let me ﬁnish, Mr. Smith! This is just one diagnosis! Let’s call it

Diagnosis Number 1! I have another one for you: you don’t have cancer after all: false-positive results are common with cancer screening and

frankly, who wants to spend all that money on cures and medicine? So for Diagnosis Number 2, we think that you might have an inflammatory disorder. It is not a nice thing, Mr. Smith, but it can be ﬁxed pretty

easily. And it won’t cost you a fortune, either! I will prescribe you some anti-inflammatory drugs and the entire treatment will be approximately $15,000. Physical activity does a lot of good in decreasing markers of

inflammation, so maybe join the gym this month and cut down with the cigarettes?

P: What? Doctor, I am confused, you were saying that ... D: Please, Mr. Smith, allow me to ﬁnish with my third diagnosis and ... P: A third what??? D: Yes, of course! Ha, we did not want to come to you with less than

three diagnoses! For the third one, we wanted to impress you: we took the liberty of thinking a little bit out of the box! We started from your

symptoms and then we called in our expert in geomancy, who noticed

that all your symptoms—if looked at from the perspective of alternative

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medicine—indicate that you have a broken chakra path! And your aura needs to be restored as well. That’s our Diagnosis Number three: a

broken Chakra Path! We prescribe long walks on the beach. Make sure

you wear honeydew yellow or pale earth-related colors when walking—at

sunrise, of course. And one of our Mayan crystal necklaces might also be useful. The whole treatment won’t cost more than $2,000.

P: What? I don’t understand, doctor! Just tell me what I have exactly!

What I must do to get better! What do I have and how much time and money will it cost me to get cured!

D: Well, I just told you. You have cancer. And we can cure it for $250,000

in three months. But I also think you have an inflammation: one month of

rest and around 15,000 USD in drugs. Or consider having a broken chakra path instead, ﬁxable in one day, with very little expense! Our hospital will be delighted to treat you on the disorder of your choice.

P: What??? Choice? I—I—I don’t want to choose my disorder! I want you to tell me ...

D: It is your body, Mr. Smith, it is your life! You surely don’t want me,

a medical doctor, to impose decisions on your life! My job is to please you, but the choice of illness is yours. Of course you want to choose,

Mr. Smith! But please, by all means, take your time. Just consider our

proposed diagnoses and see which one you favor the most. Of course,

you might want to share them with your family, so that they can also give

their valuable opinions too. I should tell you: This year, broken chakras are very popular with the teens ... I won’t be surprised if your offspring insists that you go that route!

P: Doctor, this is insane! You said cancer, then inflammation, then a third

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one, what is going on? How can I choose? I don’t want to choose! I want

your expert opinion! ONE opinion! I cannot choose whether I have cancer or something else!

D: Mr. Smith, we are here to help. We are health professionals and we

want you to be happy. When you are happy, we are happy. All our three

diagnoses are equivalent for us: cancer, inflammation or broken chakra. It is your choice! We wanted to make sure that you understand and

appreciate how creative we can be in our diagnoses! And whatever your preference is, we will be delighted to consider you as our patient for the treatment of your choice. And Mr. Smith: please, please do not hesitate

for a moment to contact me again, day or night, if you need a change in

our diagnosis proposals! We have a team of amazing junior doctors and

they have tons of highly creative diagnoses ready for you to choose from: I said cancer but, if you prefer, say, malaria, that can be easily adapted

to your symptoms. Yes, we can do it! We diagnosed malaria for a client

in Alaska once: nothing is impossible to us when it is about pleasing the patient! Mr. Smith! If you feel that getting rid of cancer is too expensive or that chakras are passé, we might propose a rare bipolar disorder

diagnosis, at an extremely convenient price! Not to mention a vast range of self-immune pathologies. Trust me: you will not find them with your competitors, Mr Smith! Above all, we understand that you want your

illness to be memorable and unique and we are capable of ﬁne-tuning

our diagnoses on your wishes. But of course, it is your life and your body, Mr. Smith, so if for example you’d feel more comfortable with a more

classic, time-tested approach, we have a vast array of alcohol-related pathologies, always very popular ... A wasted liver never goes out of fashion, does it, Mr. Smith? How about that?

P: Doctor, my head hurts ... Please stop ... I just want to be okay ... I need to know …

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D: All our diagnoses will make you feel better! You know what is good for your body and when you have made your choice, my contact number is

in the folder. Thank you for the opportunity, Mr. Smith: we really hope that you will choose us and we look forward to having you in our clinic!

Our story ends here, with the doctor awaiting for Mr. Smith’s decision. I hope you will think about it next time that you ask advice on design matters. Think about it ... I hope you will think about it next time you

ask advice on design matters. Think about it ... do you choose to hire designers because they are accommodating or because they have a

body of knowledge and experience that can diagnose the best possible solutions for a given problem?

Spoiler alert: Mr. Smith died happily in his sleep, a few weeks after having chosen the chakra path restoration.

Portions of “Design E.R.” have appeared with the title “The Doctor is In-Design” on the website www.mangrovia-collective.org and will be featured, with modifications, in the upcoming book by Goffredo Puccetti and Roberto Casati, Design Errands.

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PERFORMING RITUAL IN THE WORKS OF KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN Clare Lesser

There was a low buzz in the room, shuffling chairs, rustling loose sheets of music, and a general air of expectancy. At last, a large figure loomed

into view, dressed all in white, with slightly wild hair and the most piercing eyes since Bela Bartók. For the next week we entered into an intense

and exhausting rehearsal process, a rehearsal process I would come to

know well in future years, but the final performance was a revelation and suddenly the tantrums, long hours and bad food were all forgotten.

That was in 1992 for a performance of Sternklang (Starsound, 1971) given in Birmingham’s Cannon Hill Park.

With the benefit of historical vision, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s (1928–2007)

evolution of a highly ritualised musico-dramatic praxis from the late 1960s onwards, through the increasingly “staged” works of the early 1970s, such as Trans (1971), Ylem (1972), Musik im Bauch (1975) and Sirius

(1975–77), to the fully fledged Gemsamptkunstwerk of the Licht cycle of

operas (1977–2003) may come to seem smoothly inevitable. However, it is worth reflecting that this evolution would have seemed remarkable, if not downright eccentric, even a decade before.

Like his near contemporaries Pierre Boulez (1925–2016) and Luigi Nono (1924–90), Stockhausen achieved a position of precocious eminence in the immediate post-war period as one of the most aesthetically radical

and theoretically rigorous European composers, intent on creating a new musical language and aesthetic in the wake of the perceived bankruptcy

of much prewar music. Developing from the examples of Schönberg and Webern’s prewar dodecaphonic work, Stockhausen and his colleagues

systematically extended the control of serial structuring throughout all

the parameters of pitch, duration (and therefore rhythm), dynamic and

timbre to bring about a style that is often referred to as “total” serialism. The highpoint of this development occurred in the mid-1950s, when

works such as Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître (1953–57), Nono’s Il canto sospeso (1955–56) and Stockhausen’s own Kontra-punkte (1952–53) and Gruppen (1955–57) offered works of remarkable technical virtuosity and searing aesthetic quality to audiences.

If this wasn’t enough, Stockhausen also spent considerable amounts of time during this period contributing to the development of electro-

acoustic composition in the studio. The composer’s fascination with this completely new medium reflecting both his need for greater accuracy in realization, away from the “slips” and “errors” inevitable in the live

performance of new and very complex music, and also a deep need for order and control that was to be a constant factor in his personality.

The two major pieces created in the studio during the 1950s—Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56) and Kontakte (1959–60)—both reflect Stockhausen’s theoretical concerns of the period and reveal the first public

manifestations of his “spiritual” or “metaphysical” sensibility, which was

to become one of the strongest aspects of his creative personality during the subsequent decades. Gesang der Jünglinge uses recordings of a

boy’s voice speaking and singing the Song of the Youths from the Bible’s Book of Daniel to fashion a “technological” hymn of praise to God the

creator (it is to be remembered that Stockhausen was a practicing Roman Catholic during this period), while Kontakte includes sounds created in

the studio counterpointed against those of “live” piano and percussion. Here the metaphysic is more scientific; Stockhausen’s fascination with

the ways that sounds can mimic one another, transform themselves into others, and form an almost utopian continuum between opposites gives

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the music an extraordinary aural finesse and an atmosphere of deeply

serious contemplation within a rigorously defined context that is surely still one of the greatest achievements of post-war music.

From the high point of late 1950s European Modernism, when many

of Stockhausen’s earlier concerns seemed to have been triumphantly

accomplished, the composer’s work moves into a new phase. In works such as Zyklus (1959) and Mikrophonie 1 (1964), Stockhausen begins to explore the creation of metapieces, work in which the formal and

transformational elements are prescribed but the actual sound material to be transformed is unpredictable or open to the performer’s choice.

Thus in Zyklus, written for one percussionist playing a large number of instruments, the ring-bound score may be begun from any page, and each page can be read either way up, the performer may also start

with any instrument he/she wishes, so that the composer is specifying the work’s macrostructure without the burden of determining and

notating every micro-event in the score. This trend towards notational

abstraction was to continue throughout the 1960s. With works such as Prozession (1967), Kurzwellen (1968) and Spiral (1968), Stockhausen

developed and perfected a form of plus/minus notation where simple mathematical symbols (+, -, =, etc.) indicate changes to individual

parameters of a sound, louder, quieter, quicker slower, etc. or control

moments of synchronization between performers who develop music

from sounds heard in real time via shortwave radio. Many of these works were originally written for members of Stockhausen’s touring ensemble, and were originally intended to be performed under the composer’s

direct scrutiny; they thus offer a balance between performer agency and the composer’s always strongly defined aesthetic preconceptions and preferences.

Diverse as these works are, both aurally and aesthetically, a number of underlying trends are apparent throughout the 1960s and early 1970s;

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1) a clear move away from extremely highly elaborated micro-structures; 2) a re-thinking of the nature of musical form, from the summative to a more immediate and sensual awareness of musical “moments”; 3) a greater awareness of the value of spontaneous and unpredictable

musical events; 4) a greater trust in performers’ abilities to help to create these, which Stockhausen often referred to as “feeding-back” (a telling

use of technological language); and 5) a greater awareness of the role of

staging and performance mise-en-scène in creating a specific, ritualised performance “atmosphere.” From this period onwards, Stockhausen’s

always highly detailed instructions now include notes on color schemes, lighting, clothes/costumes, movement styles, etc.

These trends first come together most clearly in Momente for soprano

solo, four choral groups, brass, percussion and keyboards (1961–72), one of Stockhausen’s most re-worked and oft-extended scores, a work of

“romantic” autobiography begun during the break-up of the composer’s first marriage, with a text that includes quotations from William Blake together with extracts from the composer’s letters and diaries and

phonetic texts. Two of the texts from Blake—“He who catches the joy as it flies, lives forever in eternity’s sunrise” from The Songs of Innocence

and “To see the world in a grain of sand” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—act as both recurring mottoes throughout the work and as Stockhausen’s informal artistic credo.

Thinking back to my first experience of working with Stockhausen

(Sternklang 1992), it was striking how he always chose to wear white. No matter what the weather was like, or what season it was, white was de

rigueur. At the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival performance of Momente (1994), after a particularly fraught afternoon rehearsal, he could be seen disappearing into the fog and drizzle of a gloomy wet November evening, dressed all in white. Despite Sternklang’s taking place in July, the rain poured down for day after day. We rehearsed outside most of

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the time (as it is an open air piece to be performed at night), and as we nervously poked our tarps to move the collecting water (it also uses a

very substantial electronics and lighting rig), he could be seen striding

around, barking orders, wearing white wellingtons, white trousers, white shirt, white raincoat, surrounded by a sea of mud quite worthy of the Glastonbury festival. So what was the point of all that white?

As a color it is both neutral, almost negative in fact, and yet also

combines all the other colors of the spectrum in its composite form. So, a dichotomy, or maybe more accurately, a “pharmakon” (something that is

“undecidable”), all and nothing simultaneously and here is where we can

see a connection with Stockhausen’s music, particularly the works where

the concept of ritual begins to enter into the performance arena. The color white can be seen as an all-encompassing super-color, full of potential,

and yet fixed and self-referential, like a snowflake or fractal. True, Licht, his cycle of seven operas is each assigned a specific color (which he

would wear at the mixing desk in the form of a cardigan on top of his all

white ensemble during performances), but again, combine them and you get the colors of the rainbow—back to white light.

By using white as a key color in many of the works from the 1960s and 1970s (such as Stimmung, Sternklang, Inori, and “Am Himmel wandre

ich ...”), Stockhausen is simply reinforcing the use and development of

musical formulae in these works—for example Stimmung (Tunings, 1968), is an hour’s worth of transcendental music for six singers, based on a single chord of pure sine waves using the following frequencies: 57 –

114 – 171 – 228 – 285 – 399 and 513Hz. In musical terms, this equates to a chord of the overtone spectrum—that is (roughly) B flat, D, F, A

flat, and C, in various octave voicings. This produces an intensely pure

aural landscape, especially when it is combined with the extensive use

of overtone singing throughout the work, phonetically notated for every

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one of the 51 sections or melodic models of the piece. The performers dress in white, sit in a circle (again the sense of infinity and enclosure),

surrounded by the audience, and gradually tune in to the initial “chord,” and then begin to make various alterations to the given models in the

score, either with pitch, rhythm, timbre, or intensity. Magic names taken from different cultures and religions (e.g. Greek, Egyptian, Roman,

Mayan, Polynesian, Persian etc.,) are called by individual performers

throughout Stimmung, which further emphasize the ritual, not to say,

onto-theological, nature of the work. The chanting of magic names over a backdrop of evolving, circling, overtones, lends the work a spiritual, ritualistic, almost religious frisson.

We find a different facet of the application of ritual to performance in Aus den Sieben Tagen (From the Seven Days) of 1968 and Für Kommende

Zeiten (For Times to Come) written between 1968 and 1970. Stockhausen describes these works as “intuitive music,” by which he means music

which “expresses the spiritual accord among musicians, channelled by

means of short texts… I mean to stress that it comes virtually unhindered from the intuition …” (Texte III, pp.123–4).

Aus den Sieben Tagen and Für Kommende Zeiten are collections of short text pieces—in other words, sets of instructions to initiate the circumstances whereby a single musician or group of musicians or

singers can tap into a more spiritual, ritual means of music making.

There are no notes, or dynamics, no explicit commands—just enigmatic Haiku-like texts, designed to fire the imagination after a period of ritual

preparation of the body and mind. Stockhausen himself had gone through such a period of withdrawal and abnegation before composing Aus den

Sieben Tagen, which were written during 5 days of retreat during a period of increasing creative and identity crisis for the composer. The result is a

combination of his usual creative play with language (an important strand

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of much of his entire output), and a shift towards the “cosmic music” that

would come to dominate works such as Sirius, Sternklang and Licht in the next decades.

What sort of ritual preparation and performance was Stockhausen

envisaging when he composed these texts? The two collections differ

slightly in emotional tone, the first set being somewhat more tentative and hesitant, whereas Für Kommende Zeiten has a much more confident feel throughout, even to the point of the playful humour we see in Über die Grenze (Across the Boundary), which I’ll quote here in full: Über die Grenze Versetze Dich in ein Höheres Wesen das von einem anderen Stern kommt die Möglichkeiten Deines Instrumentes entdeckt und Deinen Mitspielern beweist daβ es in seiner Heimat Humoristischer Mesiterinterpret ist Die kürzeren Stücke seines Repertoires dauern circa eine Erdstunde

(Across the Boundary – Imagine you are a higher being which comes from another star, discovers the possibilities of your instrument and

proves to your co-players that in its homeland it is a “Humorous MasterInterpreter.” The shorter pieces in its repertoire last roughly one earth hour.)

So, here we find an explicit reference to the music of the cosmos,

travelers from other worlds bringing their music to earth, and the rigors of interpreting and receiving such music. Heady stuff indeed, and concepts

which will form the entire basis of Sirius and Sternklang—two more works

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that introduce the delivery of cosmic musics through ritual performance, and the giving and taking of new melodic material through time and

space. And yes, everybody still gets to wear white, although there is a little more color in Sirius.

But what of bodily purification as ritual? This is much more explicit in Aus den Sieben Tagen, where the physical extremes imposed by some of the

texts are more akin to what we would now consider as performance art as embodied by practitioners such as Marina Abramavić.

Take Es (It) for example. Here, Stockhausen asks his players to attain a state of extreme meditative calm and detachment, prior to the

spontaneous playing of sounds when the perfect moment has been

reached. A demanding mental exercise with more than a trace of Zen Buddhism in its overview.

Es Denke NICHTS Warte bis es absolut still in Dir ist Wenn Du das erreicht hast beginne zu spielen Sobald Du zu denken anfängst, höre auf und versuche den Zustand des NICHTDENKENS wieder zu erreichen Dann spiele weiter.

(It – Think NOTHING, wait until it is absolutely still within you, when you have attained this begin to play. As soon as you start to think, stop and try to reattain the state of NON-THINKING then continue playing).

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And finally we come to Goldstaub (Gold Dust), a work notorious among

musicians for pushing the mind and body to its physical and mental limits, through a form of ritual purification rarely seen in classical music. Goldstaub Lebe vier Tage ganz allein ohne Speise In gröβter Stille ohne viel Bewegung Schlafe so wenig wie nötig Denke so wenig wie möglich Spiele nach vier Tagen spät abends ohne Gespräch vorher einzelne Töne OHNE ZU DENKEN welche Du spielst Schlieβe die Augen Horche nur.

(Gold Dust—Live completely alone for four days without food in complete silence, without much movement, sleep as little as necessary, think as little as possible—after four days, late at night, without conversation beforehand play single sounds WITHOUT THINKING what you are playing—close your eyes, just listen.)

We can see from this that Stockhausen’s “intuitive music” is so much

more than just group improvisation, whereby transmitting music using ritual, purification and denial, becomes a process of intense, spiritual preparation for another plane of existence. It’s also worth noting that Stockhausen was always very aware of the natural desire for visual stimulus in both audience and performer in light of the instructions

for Goldstaub. One of his favorite remarks was “the eyes are greedy,” so the denial of the visual equation is significant here. Nevertheless,

Stockhausen did recognize that sometimes musicians needed a way

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“into” his music, and for Goldstaub, he suggested using the patterns of the stars visible during performance as a form of cosmic musical “notation.”

Stockhausen’s scores are nearly always obsessively detailed, from

the specific metronome, rhythmic and dynamic markings demanded

of every performer, to costume, movement and gesture, and detailed phonetically notated texts, whether for vocalists or instrumentalists.

There is some room for maneuvering or for performer agency in there

though, and sometimes it’s good to begin to expand the visual and spatial interpretation of a work to offer a new perspective to both performer and audience, especially in the ritual works.

“Am Himmel wandre ich …” (“In the sky I am walking”) written during 1972, originally formed one of the parts of a much larger work called Alphabet für Liège—a four-hour work comprising thirteen musical

“situations,” performed simultaneously throughout an empty building,

where the public is free to move around the space as they wish, creating a similar aural ambiance to that found in Kontakte. “Am Himmel,”

although one of the said “situations,” has always existed as a piece in its own right too. It is a duet for either two male or female voices, or one of

each, and sets twelve North and Central American Indian texts, each one having its own “song.” It is what Stockhausen calls a “musical-scenic

unity” and mixes tight control of the visual and theatrical elements—such as the color of costume (white, of course), and specified rhythmic eyelid

batting, dancing and swaying, with a certain freedom of choice over some of the musical elements, such as repeats, dynamics, magic names (as in Stimmung) and so on, to be chosen by the performers.

The songs set a mixture of Chippewa, Pawnee, Nootka, Teton Sioux,

Ayacuchco and Aztec texts, covering spiritual and ritual/religious themes. Starting with one note, the work progresses by adding another note of

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the chromatic scale for each song until the whole octave has been utilized (in expansion) in the following order: C, F sharp, G, E, D sharp, G sharp, C sharp, B, D, A, B flat and ending with F, although this is in no way a

classically “serial” piece. So the first song (Dream Song) uses a C, the

second (Love Song) uses C and F, and so on, until the last song (Song of a Man Who Received a Vision) uses all 12. Again, the totality of the

color white as “super-color” is reinforced by the use of all 12 tones of the chromatic scale—the ultimate ouroboros.

“Am Himmel” is one of Stockhausen’s most explicitly ritual pieces, with all aspects of the mise–en-scène emphasizing this, as well as the texts

themselves. The singers wear white, howl to the gods, meditate in total stillness, or perform ecstatic dances, which make for a very effective interpretation and satisfying visual and musical spectacle.

Having performed the work this way on several occasions, it seemed

time for a change. A 2014 performance that I both directed and sang in, involving film and sound art, also made extensive use of a specifically

created temenos (a sacred space, cut off from everyday life, reserved for

the worship of the gods in ancient Greece) to perform within and without. Backdrops were oversized white canvases painted with constellations and maps, the floor was strewn with thousands of bay leaves in the

shape of a circle within a circle, and three large metal wire sculptures

were created in the shape of spheres to represent both the cosmos and the infinite, and also the negative space inherent in a sculpture made of wire. We moved freely around the space, with the audience around us,

and moved in front of and behind the hanging back cloths (fig. 3). It made for a very different performing experience from the originally specified

one, in some ways more immediate and intense, which was an interesting discovery.

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Clare Lesser (right) performing in Stockhausen’s “Am Himmel wandre ich...” in Dubai in 2014. Lesser also served as the director for the performance.

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Music as a way of life, ritual as a way of life: maybe the most appropriate summation of Stockhausen’s spiritualized understanding of composition and music making can be found in the text of the sixth song of “Am Himmel.”

Opening Prayer of the Sun Dance Grandfather! A voice I am going to send Hear me! All over the universe A voice I am going to send, Hear me, Grandfather! I will live! I have said it!

FURTHER READING Cott, Jonathan (1974). Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer. New York: Picador, 1974.

Kurtz, Michael (1992). Stockhausen: A Biography. Trans. Richard

Toop, London: Faber & Faber.

Stockhausen, Karlheinz (1971). Texte zur Musik, DuMont Buchverlag. Stockhausen, Karlheinz (1989a). Stockhausen on Music. Ed. Robin Maconie. London: Marion Boyars.

Stockausen, Karlheinz (1989b). Towards a Cosmic Music. Trans. Tim Neville. London: Element Books,

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Stockausen, Karlheinz (2005). Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Ed. Robin Maconie. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Tannenbaum, Mya (1987). Conversations with Stockhausen. Trans. David Butchart. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.

Wörner, K (1973). Stockhausen: Life and Work, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. WEBSITE www.karlheinzstockhausen.org.

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STAGING RESEARCH The members of HaRaKa Platform discuss the interconnectedness of art and research in their performance practice.

HaRaKa Platform is a collective of artists, practitioners, scholars and

theorists working with performance, image, sound, text and choreography as methods of researching political, environmental, cultural and urban questions. It is the first platform to be established in Egypt looking at

performance and choreography theory. Since fifteen years, the platform

has created work for the stage, screen, galleries and concert halls. While based in Cairo, the platform operates internationally, and has presented its work at Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Hebbel Am Ufer Theatre in Berlin, Damascus Opera House, Impulstanz in Vienna, the American

University in Cairo, the German Dance Congress in Dusseldorf, La Mama Theatre in New York, among other world stages. Most recently the

company has been developing work about the climate crisis, as well as revisiting colonial histories and positioning them within a contemporary reality. This round-table is a conversation between four of the core members at HaRaKa: artistic director and founder Adham Hafez;

researcher, translator, performer, and dramaturge Lamia Gouda; dancer, writer, and visual artist Mona Gamil; and urbanist and performer Adam Kucharski.

How do you see art as research? Lamia Gouda: All work at HaRaKa is based on detailed research. And

it almost becomes an obsession once we start a project. We revisit the historical contexts, and then we are met by secrets revealed, which

certainly makes us begin each artistic production from a very unique

angle. I cannot speak for art in general. Within our platform, everything

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is research based because of the nature of our practice. Perhaps it is because we all come from research backgrounds as well as artistic training.

Mona Gamil: I think at HaRaKa we make art as an excuse to do research. Any given piece we make stems from a question, curiosity, or concern we share. We dive into the subject through readings, brainstorming sessions, and we attempt to translate those conversations into embodied scenes. In this way, we slowly build the piece.

For example, while working on our latest piece In 50 Years or So,

which is about the history of the Suez Canal, its colonialist roots, and

aftereffects, our priority was to make a forgotten history visible, from the

perspective of the colonized. It was part pedagogy, part pathos. And the subject drummed up a host of mixed feelings for everyone working on

it. The question of “What tone should we use?” arose repeatedly, so we

decided we needed a balance of talking heads. A somber storyteller, who presented the historical facts, figures, and images, like a kind of Iliad.

And a black comedy, with one foot in farce, and the other in children’s literature. Children’s literature offered the perfect web of fantasy, pedagogy, and humor which the subject demanded.

Adham Hafez: The aesthetic framework is our shared platform of

interaction as humans, even when addressing issues such as politics,

climate, or migration. Performance is an act that unites us all as human beings: we perform our race, our gender, social status or cultural

background. We perform off and on stages, in protests and in social

performances. HaRaKa platform started as a collective of people who

Overleaf: Lamia Gouda performing In 50 Years Or So by HaRaKa.

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see performance and choreography as essential vectors of negotiations

and information transmission, and research as a crucial practice within a

given artistic process. Over the years, the shared practice of art research became more complex, and the previously clear lines between practice

and theory were blurred. We have created performances where research and art were one thing. In 2018 we created a work called To Catch

A Terrorist, together with Adam Kucharski, Irene Hultman and Manar

Abdelmaaboud. The idea was to look through data science and visual

representations on the history of Muslim immigration and naturalization in the US. While doing so, we realized that the research itself was a

performance. Seeing seven decades of American jurisprudence passing through data analysis programs, and seeing which words emerge, was

in itself an act of performing the research, and eventually we decided to

stage this research itself. The data analysis was performed live by Adam Kucharski, while Manar Abdelmaaboud created live paintings, as Irene Hultman investigated choreographic stereotypes and racial profiling

methods. All research coming to life, at the Ellen Stewart Hall of La Mama Theatre in New York.

Adam Kucharski: To Catch a Terrorist represented a different way of

reading a corpus of texts. By running a body of court transcripts through language parsing and analysis scripts—the same technology that

parses bodies of text as inputs to machine learning and AI—it becomes possible to visualize and extract quantitative dynamics of the text that

may be hidden in a traditional reading. This proved, from a performance perspective, quite generative.

Is your work itself research or is it created through research ? Adam Kucharski: I worry about the conflation of art and research.

Research, if it is to be something more than just idle browsing, requires

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certain methodological rigor. How representative of a phenomenon

or time period are your archival findings? Have possible biases in the research process been identified and mitigated? Are your findings

replicable? Of course, no research agenda is apolitical, but has a good faith effort been made to tackle confirmation bias? Art has no such

methodological constraints, and neither operates on the presumption of objectivity nor aspires to replicability; on the contrary, such constraints are anathema to art. And so it seems to me that the two spheres of

activity—research and art—run the risk of polluting each other when put in close proximity. In particular, I’m wary of research being used to give a particular work of art a veneer of objectivity and rigor that it hasn’t

earned; conversely, I also worry about the inherent subjectivity of art

creation being used to excuse poor research methodologies. But despite

my various concerns, I’m interested in the ways that each field of practice may problematize and unsettle the assumptions of the other. Art should

take the researcher to task and question whether objectivity is attainable at all. And research should pressure the artist to be, from time to time, proven wrong.

Adham Hafez: I can give an example here of this relation of art to

research, and the question of methodologies. Most recently we created a work called In 50 Years Or So, which uses the history of the Suez Canal as a lens to study the Anthropocene. The project was commissioned

on the 150th anniversary of the canal’s inauguration, which allows us to

think of what this historical distance means. The project required multiple site visits to archives, research centers and cities that we investigated.

The process included interviewing historians and academics; translating and editing philosophic and academic texts; creating an immersive multimedia installation that showcases for the first time historical

documents expanding the history of the Suez Canal and of colonialism;

as well as excavating disappearing choreographies and music scores. As

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we approached the opening, it was evident that we could not separate

the research from the stage. Eventually, we did not stage a work inspired by academic texts we read during the research, but actually staged the

academic texts! What would happen if we read Roland Barthes, Valeska

Huber, Mona Abaza, Bruno Latour, or Adrian Forty on stage, in costume, within the immersive multimedia installation we created? To see the first

map created of the Suez area next to the disappearing dances from that region, performed to the colonialist music score that was commissioned for the opening 150 years ago, all while an academic text about this history is recited.

Then we had another question: what would happen if we opened the

score even further more, and allowed other academics to step on stage and lecture during the performance? We created a dramaturgy that can be interrupted at given moments, and invited to the stage, amidst the show, lectures by architect Andrew Todd, dramaturge Ismail Fayed, environmentalist Shady Khalil, among others. What this creates is

collapsing distances between theory and practice. Everything happened on the same platform, at the same time. If there’s a theory about

architecture and performance, then we read it, dance it, stage it, and have someone lecture about it, simultaneously, creating enough critical density for the audience to experience a more nuanced gaze unto the subject investigated, from objective and subjective perspectives. As a performer, how do you perform research? Lamia Gouda: I have conducted research for In 50 Years Or So at the

National Archives in London and through interviews series with scholars including Dr. Valeska Huber, while for 2065BC, it was conducted within several African cities and by reviewing historical primary documents.

Each project requires different methods, which then change my role as a

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performer: reenacting, performing original material, singing, dancing or reciting academic texts on stage within lecture performance settings.

Adham Hafez: Most recently, we have been working with reenactment as a method of investigating a historical document, and of bringing it closer to a lived embodied reality. When we were commissioned in Germany

to investigate the history of colonialism by revisiting the infamous Berlin

Conference (Congo Conference of 1884) and to create our performance 2065BC, we were shocked by the violence of the original documents used by colonizing powers to divide Africa and the Arabic speaking

region. But such violence is experienced more when these documents

are embodied and are read out loud to an audience, listening to the most atrocious colonialist orders and legal clauses. It is with the presence of a

body, or bodies, within a shared space and time that we can revisit history through empathy and corporeality, which is why performance as a tool

for research both allows us to explore the experiential side of history and

politics, but also allows us to come closer to our own sets of politics and frameworks of reference.

This conversation took place on February 1, 2020. For their upcoming productions, HaRaKa platform will join with Kuchar&Co to explore the

history of cosmopolitan cabaret culture in Cairo, Berlin, and New York,

through a research process that moves among urbanism, performance studies, and political and economic historical narratives conducted at multiple archival sites and clubs. HaRaKa will also be conducting

a second research project on the notion of health among medical, environmental, spiritual, and performative practices within unique

lifeworlds and chronicles of the anthropocene, creating a new installation and performance series.

For further information on previous and upcoming projects, please visit www.harakaplatform.com and www.kuchar.co.

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Irene Hultman performing with Adam Kucharski and HaRaKa Platform in To Catch A Terrorist. Photo by Carlos Cardona.

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AFTERWORD

Deborah Lindsay Williams When I started working with guest editor Linsey Bostwick on this issue of Electra Street, I was fairly certain about my own definitions for “art” and “research,” and about the relationship between the two. But the

contributors to this issue have helped me to see that this relationship is deeper—more complex and varied—than I had imagined.

I think of the work in this issue as a “chamber of curiosities,” similar to

what Mariët Westermann writes about in the forward to this issue: we can see how people involved in art and the art world use research of all sorts in order to pursue new knowledge. What our chamber of curiosities also

reveals is that art is research, in some contexts; it’s not simply a question of one being in the service of the other.

When we think about “research,” as it is conventionally defined, we often think about the scientist in the lab working through a process of trial

and error towards some aha! discovery. That process of trial and error,

however, also has its place in the world of art-making. Articulated in these pages are many different iterations of artistic process, cycles of attempt and revision. It is one of the ironies of the arts that their end result often renders invisible the efforts through which that result was achieved: we

hear the music, not the cacophony of rehearsal; we watch the play and

don’t see the painstakingly revised staging; we marvel at the painting and don’t think about the multiple sketches that preceded it.

In a recent article in Review of Middle East Studies, the Executive Director of the NYUAD Art Gallery, Maya Allison, points out that the “frame of reference truly changes what one sees, in effect changing the work

itself.” Shifting frames of reference are, at least in part, why “art can

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mean so much more than any single audience can understand. Art is

just that complicated and multivalent.” Allison’s essay reflects her deep

knowledge of the art world and art history, and as a result she has frames

of reference that allow her to see and think about art in ways that many of the rest of us cannot.

In much the same way, some of the work in this issue of Electra Street may seem unfamiliar to the general reader. We might ask ourselves

how to understand the images in David Franzson’s “Dead-End(s),” for example: how can they be “research?” And yet his text tells us that

“each iteration [is] accomplishing a goal, a step forward in the wrong

direction.” The drawings are the research: they show us the process of moving towards an idea that has not yet emerged. In a different frame of reference, we might call these drawings the working through of a hypothesis.

Here is another image:

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It is not a collection of colorful ribbons, but a “chainbow” used in biology to highlight the order of structural elements. This image is research. Franzson’s images, of course, are just sketches. And yet, both are illustrations of a set of thoughts that move us

towards new iterations of knowledge, new expressions of thought and imagination; they move us towards (and eventually beyond) the limits of what we thought possible. Franzson’s images are in conversation

with the other work in this issue of the journal—a conversation about

process, about creation, about challenging conventional definitions. It is a conversation that extends far beyond these pages: Linsey Bostwick and I see this issue as only an initial foray into a much larger discussion.

Contributor Sarah Bay-Cheng writes that “artistic practice and research seem all the more aligned” the closer you look and we might take her

words to heart. What we see, in myriad ways throughout this issue, is that while art and research are not the same, they may not be as different as you think.

WORK CITED Allison, Maya (2019). “Is There An Art Scene in Abu Dhabi?” Review of Middle East Studies 53.2: 294–299.

For additional online content related to this issue, please visit the “Periodicals” section of electrastreet.net.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS May Al-Dabbagh is Assistant Professor of Social Research and Public

Policy at NYUAD. She frequently teaches in the Concrete Tent. For more information on her research and teaching see: www.mayaldabbagh.org.

Sarah Bay-Cheng is Dean of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her current book

project is a collaboration with Debra Caplan on digital historiography and performance.

Linsey Bostwick is the Director of Artistic Planning for The Arts Center at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her career has encompassed the creation of new work, creative producing and now as a university

presenter working with artists and students across the university and community of Abu Dhabi.

As its first Executive Artistic Director, Bill Bragin has overseen the

development of The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi as a contributor to

the educational and knowledge development missions of the university through the presentation and development of diverse performing arts. Kristy Edmunds is the Executive Artistic Director for the Center for

the Art of Performace at UCLA. She is the recipient of the inaugural Berresford Prize (2019), by United States Artists.

Davíð Brynjar Franzson works with sounds and the effect their interaction has on the experience of the listener.

Mona Gamil is a performer, writer, choreographer, and visual artist, who is a member of HaRaKa Platform. She studied visual arts and dance in Cairo and in Dublin. Her work, which experiments with the connection

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of multimedia to live performance, and the poetic to the mundane, has been presented in Berlin, Dublin, Cairo, New York among others.

Lamia Gouda is performer, translator, researcher, and dramaturge, who is a member of HaRaKa Platform. Her work investigates the position

of women in artistic and social practice, and combines research with performance. She has shown work in Germany, the US, and Tunisia, among other contexts. She works in the fields of social and cultural

research, translation and policy, as well as performance and activism. Adham Hafez, choreographer, performer, composer and theorist. Founder of HaRaKa Platform, the Cairography Publication and

the TransDance Festival series. He earned his Master’s degree in choreography at the Amsterdam Theatre School, and his second Master’s degree in political science and art at SciencePo Paris.

Currently, a PhD candidate at the Performance Studies department of

NYU. His work focuses on collective practice, colonial history, climate crisis and ritual performances.

HaRaKa Platform is an Egyptian and international collective focusing on performance and choreography theory and practice. It gathers artists,

intellectuals, and practitioners from different fields to use research as a

tool of investigating aesthetic frameworks, and to use performance as a tool for research.

Adam Kucharski, urbanist and performer, is a member of HaRaKa

Platform and also the founder of Kuchar&Co, a platform dedicated to innovative urban solutions connecting practice, research, policy and

culture. Trained as an anthropologist, Kucharski studied at the University of Chicago and MIT, and holds his MBA from MIT Sloan School of

Management. He is an expert in cultural policy, urban planning, heritage and revival, performance and research.

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Clare Lesser is an award-winning performer of contemporary and experimental music and has given more than seventy-five world premieres. Her research focuses on the intersections between

philosophical deconstruction, indeterminacy, graphic notation and open form composition. She is a lecturer of music at NYUAD.

Sam Livingston is Director of Operations for the Weill Music Institute

(WMI) at Carnegie Hall in New York. Sam is originally a percussionist and now manages event production, administration, and communications for WMI’s wide portfolio of education and social impact programs.

Goffredo Puccetti is a graphic designer and visual communications

consultant. His area of expertise is in corporate identity and branding.

His main interests are in the interactions of visual communications with policy and decision-making processes. He is Assistant Professor of Practice at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Robert Rowe is a Professor of Music Technology at NYU and an affiliate of the music program at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Joanna Settle is a director who works in and between Theater, Opera, and Performance Art. She is an Associate Arts Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. Bryan Waterman is Vice Provost for Undergraduate Academic

Development at NYU Abu Dhabi, where he directs the Core Curriculum. Find him at @_waterman on Twitter.

Mariët Westermann is the Vice Chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi and a Professor of Arts and Humanities.

Deborah Lindsay Williams is the editor of Electra Street. She is Clinical Professor of Literature at New York University and NYU Abu Dhabi.

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PHOTO AND IMAGE CREDITS Cover: Mona Gamil in HaRaKa Platform’s In 50 Years Or So. Courtesy of HaRaKa Platform.

Page 6: Frontispiece of Museum Wormiani Historia (1655). Photograph by Didier Descouens. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Didier Descouens.

Page 9: Pieter Claesz, A Still Life with a Roemer, a Crab

Page 15: Black Box Theater. Courtesy of The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Page 20: Dennis O’Hare, An Illiad. Photo by Christopher Pike. Page 27: The Black Box at The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi during Gatz by Elevator Repair Service, Fall 2018. Photo by Waleed Shah.

Page 31: Huang Yi and KUKA, The Black Box, The Arts Center at NYUAD, Spring 2016. Photo by Christopher Pike.

Page 32: Kaki King. Photo by Waleed Shah. Page 35: Max Patch Creation Credit: Hatim Benhsain.

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Page 37: Max Patch Creation Credits: Iván Budnik Pereira. Page 38: Max Patch Creation Credits: Alia El Kattan. Page 40: Paper. Photo courtesy of May Al-Dabbagh. Page 46: Concrete Tent. Photo courtesy of May Al-Dabbagh. Page 48: Sea. Photo courtesy of May Al-Dabbagh. Page 49: Hazem Harb. Photo courtesy of May Al-Dabbagh. Page 50: Krumpled Kleenex. Photo courtesy of May Al-Dabbagh. Page 54: Detail from Figure #1. Photo courtesy of David Franzson. Pages 56–59: Figure #1, Figure #2, Figure #3, and Figure #1. Photos courtesy of David Franzson.

Page 60. Sky. Image courtesy of Kristy Edmunds. Page 69: The Red Theater at The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi during Barzakh 2018 with Alsarah and the Nubatones. Photo by Waleed Shah. Page 70: Carnegie Hall. Photo by Ajay Suresh, courtesy of the photographer and WikiMedia Commons.

Page 73: Lullaby Project. Photo by Stefan Cohen. Page 74: Early Childhood Concerts. Photo by Richard Termine.

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Page 76: Musical Connections. Photo by Stephanie Berger. Page 77: NYO2 Musicians. Photo by Chris Lee. Page 90: Detail of a screenshot from a filmed performance of the sketch

“Design E.R.” The video featured Attilio Rigotti, Yannick Trapman-O’Brien, and Goffredo Puccetti (actors) and Emily Wang (camera). Image courtesy of Goffredo Puccetti.

Page 109: “Am Himmel wandre ich...” Photo courtesy of Clare Lesser. Page 112: Lamia Gouda performing In 50 Years Or So. Costume by

Monzlapur. Photograph courtesy of Sharjah Architecture Triennial and HaRaKa Platform.

Page 119: Irene Hultman and Adam Kucharski. Photo by Carlos Cardona. Courtesy of HaRaKa Platform.

Page 121: Image of the chainbow by Thomas Shafee—Own work, CC BYSA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30164916

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Making as Research Google:: Publication (n) the act of making publicly known Google Research (n)

the systematic investigation into

and study of materials and sources

in order to establish facts and

reach new conclusions

Performance is the moment of publication for my research. With the audience, discoveries – refined through collaboration, experimentation and revision – meet peer review and the general public. Creative practice has led to laws being written, institutions of lasting value and great influence being founded, libraries full of journals, magazines, books … creative practice isn’t “also” research. The Arts drive discovery on the nature and purpose of the human condition. Even beyond content, we create – where none existed – pathways for communication and shared experiences. Our work creates a way to gather. Once gathered, there is no limit to what people can achieve. – Joanna Settle 130 LESSER | STOCKHAUSEN