A Situated Terminology
Terms:
Unlearning
Prompt: "visualize unlearning", made with Ideogram, January 2025
Maj Ørskov: "Since, in the context of the artistic practices that interest me, the practice of unlearning relates directly to the production, circulation and instrumentalization of knowledge, I also find the concept of unlearning to be a key methodological stance to think, write and practice through when interacting analytically with these works." Continue reading
Thinking, writing, practicing in circles
All the steps towards an image generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the prompt "Thinking, writing, practicing in circles", January 2025.
Maj Ørskov: "we, researchers of contemporary art, are forced not just to work progressively in line with the history of art, when composing a problem or object of analysis, but to work in circles across the analytic material that we find of relevance." Continue reading
Reflexive transformation
An image generated with the prompt "The aesthetic is political". The red dots show the zones of the image activated by the word "political" in the prompt. The visualization is created using DAAM, March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "The aesthetic is political precisely because of its ability to differentiate itself from the normally inconspicuous organization of our everyday lifeworld, and, through such differentiation, provoke critical reflection on this organization — which is what makes a certain degree of exhibition of decisive importance.[2]" Continue reading
Maj Ørskov: "I want to ask what consequences this implied precedence of reflexivity over more bodily circumstances has for the analytic potential of the term. In Rebentisch’s and Lund’s writing on the phenomenon, I find a lack of reflections regarding the more “practical” or "material" (in lack of better words) dimensions of reflexive transformation. Under which spatial-temporal conditions can an intense exchange between an interpreting subject and a sensemaking object come to qualify as reflexive transformation?" Continue reading
Reality/virkelighed
Prompt: visualize reality, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "Reality is constituted by what is at work, virker, in the world; by what is in operation, what operates; and by what has effects and informs our perception and understanding of the world. The artistic practices in question here operate in and on reality and demonstrate that the reality of the world, virkeligheden, is negotiable and can be made to work, virke, otherwise." Continue reading
Planetarity
Prompt: visualize planetary entanglement, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "Entering the anthropocene epoch influences our very perception of time. Hence, we are not only dealing with a new epoch replacing an old one, the Holocene, in a process of linear progressive development – which in the case of the Earth spans more than 4,5 billion years, a time scale that is highly abstract to our human perception. The new epoch is also accompanied by an increasing need for us to relate to a planetary scale, according to which we, as inhabitants of the same Earth, globally and across our cultural differences and national histories, share the same historical now, the same present." Continue reading
Ordinary research
A composite of four images generated with the prompt "to understand the different processes and gestures which together constitute ordinary analysis within art research today" by Stable Diffusion. On the left top, the red and yellow zones represent the parts of the image most affected by the term "art". On the top right, the zones affected by the term "and". On the bottom row, the red and yellow zones represent the parts affected by the terms "ordinary" and "research" respectively. March 2025.
Maj Ørskov: "Consequently, I would say that the core practice of humanistic research in general, and particularly the core practice of art research, is analysis. However, I find that we have a relatively poor language to understand the different processes and gestures which together constitute ordinary analysis within art research today." Continue reading
Institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement
Prompt: visualize institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Nicolas Malevé: "Art is not only art and its methods proliferate outside of its traditional remits under the constraint of an external factor. The art school inundates the art world and a majority of trained artists are excluded from the art market (or who refuse to join it or abide by its rules, a combination of all that). This population is not just an army of reserve for the art world or art education. They learn other professions, they are “reconverted”. Continue reading
Historicity
A composite of two images generated with the prompt "a global interconnection of different presents" by Stable Diffusion. On the left, the red zones represent the parts of the image most affected by the term "interconnection". On the right, the zones affected by the term "present". March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "What I find crucial about our present, the present present, is that it is conditioned by con-temporaneity, understood as a global interconnection of differentpresents, with different pre-histories, and of different time-experiences. It is an idea of contemporaneity as a, at least in principle, shared present across divisive cultural and historical differences; of a temporary unity of the present across the planet." Continue reading
Flammability
Prompt: Amateurish photo of the new york modern museum of art in flames contrast between the white building and the flames at night with a crowd of disguised artists demonstrating, generated with Flux Schnell, March 2025.
Nicolas Malevé: "Indeed the consequences of the perilous exercise of pleasing collectors and donors whilst decolonizing the collection offers the perfect fetish to the alt right that never tires to denounce the hypocrisy of the left and their secret alliance to the elite. Whilst museums are in a perfect trap, the institutions that sought to give structural room of manoeuvre to progressive projects, such as the recent documenta, are not in a better place." Continue reading
Exhibition
Image: On the left, an image generated with Stable Diffusion 1.4 and the prompt "a certain openness in regard to sense". On the right, a visualization of the parts of the image (in yellow and red pixels) which correspond to the zones activated by the word "regard" in the prompt. March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "The act of showing, displaying, exhibiting and demonstrating something, is an indispensable part of the manifestation of any work of art – contemporary as well as modern – and hence a condition for its being perceived and experienced. This is not yet, however, what makes the thing being shown art or an aesthetic object, be it physical or not. What makes it artistic, or at least aesthetic, is a certain openness with regard to the sense or signification of the thing that appears, which ignites a process of reflexivity that, ultimately, is a negotiation of the world and how we live in it." Continue reading
Diagramming
Prompt: visualize diagramming, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Nicolas Malevé: "The practice of diagramming requires the unlearning of expected positions, working against my initial assumptions. To undo a certain image of the controversy that I have in mind when I encounter a situation." Continue reading
Critical assemblage
Prompt: visualize critical assemblage, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Nicolas Malevé: "Critical assemblage presumes that to critique is not simply to formulate an argument against something or someone. It is to assemble the conditions for a critique to be formulated and be listened to as much as to formulate an argument. These conditions are not determined by the subject who formulates the critique alone. This means that the locus of the critique is distributed." Continue reading
Contemporary conditions
All the steps towards an image generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the prompt "an aesthetics that includes more-than-human agents", March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "We are in need of developing an aesthetics that includes more-than-human agents and recognises that we are bound to Earth and inescapably entangled in its dynamic being, but without letting go of human responsibility and political agency." Continue reading
Composition
Prompt: visualize composition, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Maj Ørskov: "I am aware that the practice of composition as laid out here contributes to further expose the fundamental fragility and unprovability of our knowledge production systems, but I say: wonderful!" Continue reading
Nicolas Malevé: "To compose an object then requires to move across all the layers of this problem. To strategically contribute to the general economy of attention, to work on the conditions of discernibility. And be reflexive about the implications of making visible and discernible." Continue reading
Autonomy
Prompt: visualize artistic autonomy, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "My assumption is that we, if we are to talk about artistic autonomy today, should talk about the autonomy of a particular form of practice and the experiential process that is related to this practice, rather than the autonomy of a given object-based work or the subject position of the artist as autonomous." Continue reading
Aesthetic/Artistic practice
Prompt: visualize what aesthetic practice is, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "Thus, artistic aesthetic practice is not only a particular way of engaging with the sensuous world, but also involves the production of aesthetic reflective perception. In artistic practice the production of aesthetic perception is addressed to a public. In this sense, an artistic aesthetic practice proper involves the invitation of an audience, a public, to take part in the process of sensing and sense-making." Continue reading
Unlearning
Prompt: "visualize unlearning", made with Ideogram, January 2025
Maj Ørskov: "Since, in the context of the artistic practices that interest me, the practice of unlearning relates directly to the production, circulation and instrumentalization of knowledge, I also find the concept of unlearning to be a key methodological stance to think, write and practice through when interacting analytically with these works." Continue reading
Thinking, writing, practicing in circles
All the steps towards an image generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the prompt "Thinking, writing, practicing in circles", January 2025.
Maj Ørskov: "we, researchers of contemporary art, are forced not just to work progressively in line with the history of art, when composing a problem or object of analysis, but to work in circles across the analytic material that we find of relevance." Continue reading
Reflexive transformation
An image generated with the prompt "The aesthetic is political". The red dots show the zones of the image activated by the word "political" in the prompt. The visualization is created using DAAM, March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "The aesthetic is political precisely because of its ability to differentiate itself from the normally inconspicuous organization of our everyday lifeworld, and, through such differentiation, provoke critical reflection on this organization — which is what makes a certain degree of exhibition of decisive importance.[2]" Continue reading
Maj Ørskov: "I want to ask what consequences this implied precedence of reflexivity over more bodily circumstances has for the analytic potential of the term. In Rebentisch’s and Lund’s writing on the phenomenon, I find a lack of reflections regarding the more “practical” or "material" (in lack of better words) dimensions of reflexive transformation. Under which spatial-temporal conditions can an intense exchange between an interpreting subject and a sensemaking object come to qualify as reflexive transformation?" Continue reading
Reality/virkelighed
Prompt: visualize reality, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "Reality is constituted by what is at work, virker, in the world; by what is in operation, what operates; and by what has effects and informs our perception and understanding of the world. The artistic practices in question here operate in and on reality and demonstrate that the reality of the world, virkeligheden, is negotiable and can be made to work, virke, otherwise." Continue reading
Planetarity
Prompt: visualize planetary entanglement, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "Entering the anthropocene epoch influences our very perception of time. Hence, we are not only dealing with a new epoch replacing an old one, the Holocene, in a process of linear progressive development – which in the case of the Earth spans more than 4,5 billion years, a time scale that is highly abstract to our human perception. The new epoch is also accompanied by an increasing need for us to relate to a planetary scale, according to which we, as inhabitants of the same Earth, globally and across our cultural differences and national histories, share the same historical now, the same present." Continue reading
Ordinary research
A composite of four images generated with the prompt "to understand the different processes and gestures which together constitute ordinary analysis within art research today" by Stable Diffusion. On the left top, the red and yellow zones represent the parts of the image most affected by the term "art". On the top right, the zones affected by the term "and". On the bottom row, the red and yellow zones represent the parts affected by the terms "ordinary" and "research" respectively. March 2025.
Maj Ørskov: "Consequently, I would say that the core practice of humanistic research in general, and particularly the core practice of art research, is analysis. However, I find that we have a relatively poor language to understand the different processes and gestures which together constitute ordinary analysis within art research today." Continue reading
Institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement
Prompt: visualize institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Nicolas Malevé: "Art is not only art and its methods proliferate outside of its traditional remits under the constraint of an external factor. The art school inundates the art world and a majority of trained artists are excluded from the art market (or who refuse to join it or abide by its rules, a combination of all that). This population is not just an army of reserve for the art world or art education. They learn other professions, they are “reconverted”. Continue reading
Historicity
A composite of two images generated with the prompt "a global interconnection of different presents" by Stable Diffusion. On the left, the red zones represent the parts of the image most affected by the term "interconnection". On the right, the zones affected by the term "present". March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "What I find crucial about our present, the present present, is that it is conditioned by con-temporaneity, understood as a global interconnection of differentpresents, with different pre-histories, and of different time-experiences. It is an idea of contemporaneity as a, at least in principle, shared present across divisive cultural and historical differences; of a temporary unity of the present across the planet." Continue reading
Flammability
Prompt: Amateurish photo of the new york modern museum of art in flames contrast between the white building and the flames at night with a crowd of disguised artists demonstrating, generated with Flux Schnell, March 2025.
Nicolas Malevé: "Indeed the consequences of the perilous exercise of pleasing collectors and donors whilst decolonizing the collection offers the perfect fetish to the alt right that never tires to denounce the hypocrisy of the left and their secret alliance to the elite. Whilst museums are in a perfect trap, the institutions that sought to give structural room of manoeuvre to progressive projects, such as the recent documenta, are not in a better place." Continue reading
Exhibition
Image: On the left, an image generated with Stable Diffusion 1.4 and the prompt "a certain openness in regard to sense". On the right, a visualization of the parts of the image (in yellow and red pixels) which correspond to the zones activated by the word "regard" in the prompt. March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "The act of showing, displaying, exhibiting and demonstrating something, is an indispensable part of the manifestation of any work of art – contemporary as well as modern – and hence a condition for its being perceived and experienced. This is not yet, however, what makes the thing being shown art or an aesthetic object, be it physical or not. What makes it artistic, or at least aesthetic, is a certain openness with regard to the sense or signification of the thing that appears, which ignites a process of reflexivity that, ultimately, is a negotiation of the world and how we live in it." Continue reading
Diagramming
Prompt: visualize diagramming, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Nicolas Malevé: "The practice of diagramming requires the unlearning of expected positions, working against my initial assumptions. To undo a certain image of the controversy that I have in mind when I encounter a situation." Continue reading
Critical assemblage
Prompt: visualize critical assemblage, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Nicolas Malevé: "Critical assemblage presumes that to critique is not simply to formulate an argument against something or someone. It is to assemble the conditions for a critique to be formulated and be listened to as much as to formulate an argument. These conditions are not determined by the subject who formulates the critique alone. This means that the locus of the critique is distributed." Continue reading
Contemporary conditions
All the steps towards an image generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the prompt "an aesthetics that includes more-than-human agents", March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "We are in need of developing an aesthetics that includes more-than-human agents and recognises that we are bound to Earth and inescapably entangled in its dynamic being, but without letting go of human responsibility and political agency." Continue reading
Composition
Prompt: visualize composition, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Maj Ørskov: "I am aware that the practice of composition as laid out here contributes to further expose the fundamental fragility and unprovability of our knowledge production systems, but I say: wonderful!" Continue reading
Nicolas Malevé: "To compose an object then requires to move across all the layers of this problem. To strategically contribute to the general economy of attention, to work on the conditions of discernibility. And be reflexive about the implications of making visible and discernible." Continue reading
Autonomy
Prompt: visualize artistic autonomy, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "My assumption is that we, if we are to talk about artistic autonomy today, should talk about the autonomy of a particular form of practice and the experiential process that is related to this practice, rather than the autonomy of a given object-based work or the subject position of the artist as autonomous." Continue reading
Aesthetic/Artistic practice
Prompt: visualize what aesthetic practice is, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "Thus, artistic aesthetic practice is not only a particular way of engaging with the sensuous world, but also involves the production of aesthetic reflective perception. In artistic practice the production of aesthetic perception is addressed to a public. In this sense, an artistic aesthetic practice proper involves the invitation of an audience, a public, to take part in the process of sensing and sense-making." Continue reading
Aesthetic/artistic practice
Autonomy
Composition
Composition
Contemporary conditions
Critical assemblage
Diagramming
Exhibition
Flammability
Historicity
Institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement
Ordinary research
Planetarity
Reality/ virkelighed
Reflexive transformation
Reflexive transformation/ destabilization
Thinking, writing, practicing in circles
Unlearning
Thinking, writing, practicing in circles
I find that due to developments both within contemporary art (see Contemporary conditions and Aesthetic/ artistic practice) and within the field of art analysis (see Composition) we, researchers of contemporary art, are forced not just to work progressively in line with the history of art, when composing a problem or object of analysis, but to work in circles across the analytic material that we find of relevance. Several of the artistic practices that interest me in my current research share an apparent absence of a natural beginning or end, of both entrance and exit, of linear progressivity in an analytic sense. This complicates the process of composing them as singular problems or delimited objects of analysis at first glance, which also explains why I have been spending quite a significant amount of time working my way into each of these practices. Consequently, and more or less by coincidence, I have begun to think across these practices, in a kind of circular movement, to activate the kind of research (thinking, writing, practicing) that I am convinced they invite me to unfold.
To give an example:
The experimental feature film Ouroboros (2017) is made by Basma Al-Sharif. Setting off from the Gaza Strip, the film is a visually intoxicating journey alongside a male character travelling through different landscapes marked by destruction, erasure, and gradual decay. The title “ouroboros” points to an ancient Egyptian symbol depicting a serpent eating its own tail. And really, the film is cyclic, it marks its end as its beginning, as the main character searches for his lost lover while leaving and reuniting with her in an apparently endless loop. Therefore, I feel tempted to argue that the work explicitly contemplates on the idea of “returning” which is so central to Palestinian thought, imaginary, and history of suffering. It seems perfectly plausible to conclude that the film discusses the necessity of practicing a sort of defamiliarization with – or an unlearning of – linear, teleological orderings of time and experience to move forward from loss, trauma, refugeehood. Yet somehow this conclusion is frictionless. It eludes a certain situated sensitivity and places me, the analyst, outside of Al-Sharif’s work. This plausible reading offers an analytic key to Al-Sharif’s work (“oh, that’s what it’s all about”) which inherently claims to transcend the analytic situation that fosters it. Is that fulfilling? Or: for whom is that kind of analytic key fulfilling? For me, the researcher? For you, the reader? For Al-Sharif, the originator? Ouroboros as a cinematic experience do not beg of me as an analyst to solve or order or master it. And really, I do not wish to solve anything, I do not wish to stabilize the fundamentally destabilizing force generated by the film.
Why is it, I ask myself, that the strive within the work itself towards an unlearning of linear teleological orderings of time and experience is somehow closely associated with the continuous return of images of the sea? Both the film’s first and last sequences show aerial views of the sea. Turquoise blue and deep-green waves roll back and forth close to a shoreline, repeatedly. The white-toned foam arises over the sea’s endless surface and, experienced horizontally from above, the waves seem to roll both forward and backwards. The sound of the waves is constant, buzzing like a large metallic bee. Why is that? What do these waves want from me, from us? Why is the sea – which in the case of Ouroboros is not just any sea, but the Mediterranean Sea – so central here? What is the significance of it as a problem, a motif, a rhythmic figure, a referent that returns indefinitely (or so it seems) in Al-Sharif’s film?
As I begin to follow this line of thought, I recall this sea elsewhere in my material. What is for example the significance of the Mediterranean Sea in Heba Amin’s lecture performance and exhibition Operation Sunken Sea from 2018? Is the Mediterranean Sea not a sort of epistemic container from which the work begins and ends? And then, I am reminded of something else, something close to heart, like a beloved ghost whispering from behind the computer screen. Razan Al-Salah’s experimental short film your father was born 100 years old, and so was the Nakba (2018) unfolds the narrative of Al-Salah’s grandmother’s imaginary return to her Palestinian hometown, Jaffa. Living in Lebanon as a refugee, the grandmother is unable to return to Jaffa due to Israeli border restrictions. In the film, she revisits her lost home through the momentarily frozen, strangely disembodied images of present-day Jaffa produced by Google Street View. Returning to Jaffa through these images some 50 years after her forced displacement – along with the forced displacement of around 700.000 other Palestinians in the wake of al-Nakba, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 – the city is no longer recognizable to the aged woman. Her ghostly echo wanders in vain through cyberspace as she becomes more and more desperate due to the futile search for her son Ameen and for streets, shops, and buildings in Jaffa matching those of her memory. Finally, towards the end of the film, the grandmother reaches Jaffa’s seaside on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. She overlooks a panoramic view with dramatic clouds covering both shore and sea. As she stands there glancing at the sea, she realizes that the line of the horizon is somehow fractured in the representation produced by Google. It seems to be reconstructed by two separate images that have been inaccurately edited together. “Even the sea is broken,” Al-Salah’s grandmother regretfully concludes just before the image screen turns black.
Even the sea is broken. Seeing the film again, her statement attracts me with such power. It is direct and abstract, it's enormously sad and impossible, yet it's right there, in the images. Most importantly, in an analytic context, her statement remotely suggests or expresses a potential analytic approach to Al-Sharif’s and Amin’s works that do not promise to solve them, but to complicate them. The Mediterranean Sea as it appears across this body of artistic practices is of analytic relevance, not only as an object of analysis, but as a method for analyzing artistic practices under contemporary conditions. It is something to think through, not to know it, but to think, write, practice it, in circles. As Philip Steinberg and Kimberly Peters writes:
“[…] one is continually faced by the paradox that any attempt to ‘know’ the sea by separating it into its constituent parts serves only to reveal its unknowability as an idealized stable and singular object” [1].
To engage analytically with contemporary artistic practices, which are, among many other things, characterized by their tendency not to be delimitable within a certain space or time is first and foremost to accept the unknowability of these practices as idealized, stable objects and, secondly, to think, write, practice research on, of, about these practices in circles. Maybe Ocean studies could even be supplemented by Contemporary Art studies in this quote by Alice Te Punga Somerville:
“I want to ask whether Ocean Studies might be better understood as if it were itself an ocean: without a singular starting point or origin; endlessly circulating. Not beyond genealogy, because nothing is, but possessed of a genealogy that is impossibly and beautifully wide" [2].
________
1
Steinberg, Philip and Peters, Kimberly: "Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking," in: Environment and Planning: Society and Space, 2015, vol. 33. p. 247-264, p. 251.
2
Somerville, Te Punga: "Where Oceans Come from," in: Comparative Literature, 2017, vol. 69 (1), p. 25-31, p. 28.