Join us for this spring's Open Window—a series of online public talks aimed at giving the outside world a moment to connect with the institute’s internal, topic-based intensive sessions.
January 31, 1–2pm UTC
Life Outside the Academy: Reflections on life as an independent researcher, a talk by Jo Scott
In this talk Jo Scott reflects on her move from engaging with artistic research as a full-time academic within a university framework to her current positioning as an independent artist-researcher, collaborating with academics, practitioners, third sector and industry. Jo will reflect on what changes when artistic research is pursued outside university supports and frameworks, raising questions about knowledge production and hierarchies of knowledge as well as practical considerations.
Dr Jo Scott (she/her) is an artist-researcher and educator. Jo’s research is conducted through a variety of creative practices including performance, installation, sound walks and sonic experiences. She holds a practice-based PhD in intermedial performance-making and has worked on more than 20 artistic research projects. More recently, Jo has focused her artistic research on explorations of our relationships with landscapes, wildness and the more-than-human world. She has taught in UK Higher Education for the past 12 years and is a scholar of digital performance, a field in which she has published widely. A particular focus for this research is ‘anthropogenic’ landscapes, which are shaped and disturbed by human actions and those that are changing due to the effects of the climate crisis, in the form of a warming planet, more extreme weather events, biodiversity and habitat loss. Read more.
February 28, 1–2pm UTC
Prosperity in Failure within the Process of Creation, a talk by Ang Bartram
The focus of this contextualized talk is on the artist's durational practice, how research underpins decision making and intent, and how failure and mishap are often by-products of the process when it is a central methodology. Angela Bartram, PhD, is an artist and artistic researcher working with objects, sound, video, drawing, print, performance events, curating, and published text. The subject concerns thresholds of the human body, gallery or museum, definitions of the human and animal as companion species and appropriate strategies for documenting the ephemeral. She is also currently engaged in several interdisciplinary research projects concerning empathy: with people; with companion animals, with process and materials, and with the environment. She is Professor of Contemporary Art and Co-Lead for the Creative and Cultural Industries Academic Theme and Research Centre at the University of Derby and has a PhD in Fine Art from Middlesex University, UK. Read more.
March 1, 3:30–4:30pm UTC
AI x Fascism, a talk with Geoff Cox
The title employs a popular and deliberately ambiguous connective ‘x’, at once a substitute for ‘and’, ‘loves’, ‘multiplies’, and a reference to the much-maligned social media platform owned by a big-tech billionaire. It signals the complexities involved when seemingly divergent entities are brought together in this way. By pairing AI and fascism, the talk traces historical connections between aesthetics and politics; from Walter Benjamin’s artwork essay, written amid rising fascism in Europe to alt-right meme cultures of the present. When it comes to AI, we might broadly claim that it reproduces fascist-like tendencies as it concentrates power in centralised infrastructures, is founded on extractive logic, and is owned by powerful elites who believe that access to power is their divine right. But AI isn’t inherently fascist, and can it be imagined differently?
With a background in photography, Geoff's interests have evolved into image politics more broadly, and particularly concerning developments in image-based and generative AI. This includes engaging with new ways of seeing and the wider considerations of infrastructures through which images are produced and circulated, how the networked image can be understood as a relational assemblage to address wider ecologies. Furthermore, he is interested in publishing as an artistic medium, and experimental approaches that exploit the creative and political potential of computation. Geoff Cox is Professor of Art and Computational Culture at London South Bank University (UK), where he is co-Director of Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI). Read more.
About Transart
Since 2004 Transart Institute for Creative Research has been offering low-residency, interdisciplinary, international doctoral and graduate programs. Designed and run entirely by artists, the Institute offers a practice-based PhD, generating space for creativity, experimentation and radical thinking in every form. We champion self-directed, curious, flexible and socially engaged creative researchers working independently or collectively.
Details
Find dates, times and further info here. To attend an Open Window Session, please sign up here. Find this year's full program here.
Admissions
To stay tuned about hear when our next admissions window will open, please join our bi-annual newsletter here.
