Understanding the Creation of Abstract Concepts beyond the Intangible and Tangible Materials of Land Art

Background and objective: Understanding abstract art as an art form requires depth of thought. Moreover, understanding land art as abstract art is challenging, given its focus on the minimalism and abstract concepts. Much focus, research, and work were actively conducted in the 1970s, as it represented an abstract expression of minimalism. The characteristics of minimalism connote abstract meanings in the use of materials. Nevertheless, the original research of works or artists has often been mentioned, but few studies have analyzed the abstract language of land art materials. The aim of this study is to thus determine the abstract meanings of materials in land art from the 1970s to the 2010s.Methods: Art-based research was employed to address the aim. This study classified the land art materials into intangible and tangible materials, where intangible materials focused on lines, circles, and labyrinths, and tangible materials focused on the earth, stones, wood, and snow.Results: Intangible and tangible materials of land art conveyed various abstract meanings. Intangible materials were reflective of connection and symbiosis with nature, delivering abstract languages of ‘take-nothing,’ ‘reflection’ and ‘opportunity.’ Tangible materials reflected the abstract concepts of ‘intervention,’ ‘resistance,’ ‘unliving,’ and ‘change,’ and conveyed caveats. In other words, taken together, intangible and tangible materials were presented in symbiosis–and with caveats–and delivered messages for the present and the future. Interestingly, intangible materials inherently reflect symbiosis and communicate caveats in works based on a non-contextualized present and future.Conclusion: Interpretation of the abstract languages derived from intangible and tangible materials could imply a symbiosis between humans and nature, while conveying the message that caveats, to humans, are still ongoing. This relationship plays a significant role in an artist’s selection of a medium, which is reflective of abstract beliefs reflected in contemporary, nature-based works created on Earth.

The Renewal of Arts, Lives, and a Community through Social Enterprise: The Case of Oficina de Agosto

The present work investigates, with a cultural approach, the emergence of an art-based social enterprise and an art-entrepreneurial ecosystem in Southeastern semi-rural Brazil, shedding light on how local private initiatives may build stronger communities and vice-versa, in a mutually transformative relationship. The focus lies on Oficina de Agosto, a folk-art studio, school, and shop. Fieldwork design combined ethnography and art-based research. The thick description of the phenomenon is organized under the acronym P.L.A.C.E., a conceptual framework describing five principles of community development. The contributions of this study are three-fold: (1) it illustrates how social enterprise may work as an alternative market model that could support community building; (2) it raises awareness to the possibility that social enterprises’ initial social focus may not be perennial or unshakeable, in an undesirable change that might require a both/and mindset and a patient management of paradoxes; and (3) it offers practical managerial recommendations to the SE under focus, which might be extended to other local businesses, or to SEs in other semi-rural Brazilian towns, or even in international settings that might bear economic and social resemblance to our researched context.

Masak, Macak, Manak Nowadays through Challenge-Based Research on Nol Dance Creation

Patriarchy in Javanese culture gives birth to gender stratification between women and men. This attitude has an impact on the work delegated to women. This stigma requires women to fulfill cultural values that include 3M, namely masak, macak, manak. This study aims to find out the existence and relevance of the values of masak, macak, and manak, in the form of dance works, and to find out how these values must be maintained. The method used is the method of creation based on the concept of art-based research. This research on the creation of dance works is based on challenges, namely through the process of creating challenges. The study was conducted by challenging ten participants to communicate and do several things intensely, both personally and communally, for seven days online through the "7 days cooking" challenge. The results of this study are in the form of dance performances containing messages of masak, macak, and manak which are displayed live streaming on the Youtube social media channel.

Whine and dust: Coping during the pandemic using companioning autoethnographic art-based research

As collaborators from different nationalities, genders, cultural backgrounds, occupations and age cohorts, in this article we present an account of our art-based research during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project employed art practice as a way to deal with the noxious effects of isolation on our mental health and well-being during the many prolonged lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia. With reference to Warren Lett’s concept of companioning, in our ongoing companioning dialogue through poetry and paintings, together with a final song, we explore our psychological struggles. This contribution can be read in several ways: as an example of our research into art practice, as an artistic companioning dialogue between two writers and friends trying to make sense of and survive isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic and finally, as an offer, an invitation to explore art as a cathartic and coping process in a companioning process, which we have termed companioning autoethnography.

Depth of the field. Bystanders’ art, forensic art practice and non-sites of memory

Abandoned sites of trauma often become objects of art-based research. The forensic turn offered artists the requisite tools to approach uncommemorated post-violence sites to interact with their human and non-human actors. The usage of artistic methods allows us to inspect nondiscursive archives and retrieve information otherwise unavailable. The new wave of “forensic art” joins the efforts of post-war artists to respond to sites of mass killings. In the post-war era, sites of trauma were presented as (implicated) landscapes, or unhospitable terrains. The tendency to narrow space to the site and to contract the perspective is continued today by visual artists entering difficult memory grounds, looking down, inspecting the ground with a “forensic gaze”. A set of examples of such artistic endeavors, following the research project Uncommemorated Genocide Sites and Their Impact on Collective Memory, Cultural Identity, Ethical Attitudes and Intercultural Relations in Contemporary Poland (2016–2020) is discussed as “bystanders’ art.”

Cybernetic Performance Ecosystems: The Im-Medea Cycle

This article presents a series of experimental music theatre performances that took place between 2015 and 2017. This art-based research investigates how qualities of the posthuman condition could manifest in experimental music theatre, by applying cybernetic and system theory principles at different levels (i.e. compositionally, aesthetically, dramaturgically) in the creative process. The aim of this article is to present these creative processes and to introduce this type of performance practice, namely cybernetic performance ecosystem.

Groove Fields. Understanding the Dance Floor from an Art-Based Research Perspective

This contribution examines groove dynamics across various spatial contexts such as the dance club and the artistic performance space. As groove dynamics do not occur in a spatial vacuum but are embedded in affective environments, they need to be approached from an interdisciplinary perspective that ties together findings from experimental field studies, performance studies, musicology, cognitive hermeneutics etc. and places them in the physical, anatomic and acoustic contexts of concrete dance situations. In that way, the dance floor can be understood as a space of entanglements where acoustic, movement and kinaesthetic grooves mark and create a fluid territory of improvisational interaction and communication.

Metaphysics of The Machines: From Human-Robot-Robot Interaction to AI Philoso-phers Abstraction

In this paper, we introduce the artwork «Syntropic Counterpoints: Metaphysics of The Machines» which is part of the ongoing art-based research project «Syntropic Counterpoints». We aim to investigate the potentials of using artificial intelligence as an interdisciplinary creative medium. Moreover, to raise fundamental questions related to the artificial agents' role in raising human-AI society throughout the continuous period of reaching its emancipation. We are proposing the conceptual approach and methods in creating the audio-visual AI automated content through philosophical discussions between the four AI philosopher clones of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Machiavelli, and Sun Tzu. Special attention is given to the hybrid usage of technologies that led us toward transforming artificial intelligence into a co-existing artistic entity and novel creative framework for art and design practitioners. Therefore, we discuss some of the crucial questions related to our research and further directions in exploring AI abstraction in the context of robot creativity and its potential future forms. Our approach toward the liberation of machine creativity is through the use of words and grammar as a creative tool humans developed to express worlds «beyond» the world. The interaction between the audience and the installation is antagonistic as the process of further AI emancipation seems inevitable.