Archives

  • Artist Pedagogy
    No. 24 (2025)

    How does an artist teach and do research? How does artistic thinking work as a starting point for pedagogy, and how is it realized in practice? How does making art feed into teaching, and correspondingly, how does pedagogical philosophy serve as inspiration for teaching practices? How is artist pedagogy related to social and ecological issues?
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  • Re-Imagining
    No. 23 (2025)

    This issue addresses the various gestures of going back, returning to take another look, or starting anew. It suggests that research in the context of artistic and creative practice could have a special relation to time; simultaneously attaching itself to a prior moment in time and, from there, propelling imagination to unforeseen futures. The theme "Re-imagining" proposes reassessments where the evaluation of past events, integral to research, is in unison with the anticipation potential, integral to the arts. It wonders about new conceptions of an idea, place, space, object, and ways of doing and making that emerge from a reverse glance — the challenges, updates, and improvements.

     

  • Indigeneities
    No. 22 (2025)

    The focus in artistic research has shifted from outlining the relation between art and research to multidisciplinary collaboration (Elo 2022). Through sustainability transformation, we have become aware of the need to find new kinds of relations between groups of people, species, environments, and forces of nature. In artistic research, and in art more widely, the art of Indigenous peoples is currently topical, as Western artists and researchers are challenged to think in a more holistic and responsible way by Indigenous peoples' practices in perceiving themselves as part of the environment.

  • Performing Artistic Research in Music – Performing Music in Artistic Research
    No. 21 (2024)

    This issue of Ruukku explores the relationship between artistic research and the performance and presentation of music, asking what kind of music performance practices artistic research produces or enables. Artistic research as an experimental, avant-garde art form opens up a wide range of possibilities for how music can be practiced, presented or heard.

  • Artivism
    No. 20 (2023)

    Our Artivism issue is inspired by dismantling the contemporary conception of art and by a space where working methods, contents, and ideals produced by art have changed. This also enables negotiations and struggles between various conceptions of art. The art-historical contexts of activist art are rooted in 20th century avant-garde, German expressionism, and feminist art and in the anti-war and anti-racist civil rights movements of the 1960s.

  • Making Artistic Research Public
    No. 19 (2022)

    Making something public is intrinsic to both art making and artistic research. This issue of RUUKKU focuses on the variety of ways artistic research is made public and on the effect of published artworks and research on their immediate surroundings, neighborhoods or environments. The call was opened for researchers and artists to ponder artistic research’s relation to its publicity in its diversity, and the relevance of changes and traces that published artworks and artistic research leave in public space and vice versa.

  • Responsibility
    No. 18 (2022)

    Responsibility intertwines with the essential questions of power, historicities, control, freedom, availability and care, which accompany the acknowledgement that we inhabit this planet with other people, species and materials. Responsibility has often been discussed as part of politics, justice, ethics and judgement, linking it with power and human agency. When we think of someone being responsible for something, we assume that that person takes ownership of their decisions and their consequences.

  • Everyday Utopias
    No. 17 (2021)

    What kinds of perspectives can artistic research offer in seeking to cultivate political imagination and utopian thought? What kinds of tools and methods does it suggest for social action and thought? How do spaces, materiality and embodiment shape the practices of imagination? How can artistic research contribute to creating more ecologically and socially sustainable societies?

  • Working with the Vegetal
    No. 16 (2021)

    In the call we invited artists and researchers with an experience of working with plants and vegetation in different ways to contribute to this issue with expositions or articles, accounts of work in progress, and artistic experiments. The title, Working with the Vegetal, came from four one-day seminars at Stockholm University of the Arts in 2018–2019, organized by the project Performing with Plants. While continuing the play with alliterations, from P–P to W–W, the idea was also to expand the notion beyond performing and to ensure that diverse ways of working with vegetation would feel invited.

  • Slowness and Silence, Inertia and Tranquility
    No. 15 (2021)

    The themes of this issue discuss the methodical, conceptual and practical connections of artistic research to slowness and silence, inertia and tranquility. What kinds of dimensions can silence or slowness open up and catalyse in artistic research? What might silence challenge, and what slowness? Depending on the perspective, slowness can either be worth pursuing or it can clearly refer to "retardation" or a lack (e.g. bureaucracy). Silence, in turn, can be a value to be sought for: we often long for the quiet of nature or wish for the traffic noise to muffle down.

  • Ecologies of Practice
    No. 14 (2020)

    This issue of RUUKKU has its starting point in the Research Pavilion #3 project that brought together more than fifty artist-researchers from twenty countries over a period of twenty months. The project started with an open call for "Research Cells" in April 2018 and evolved through a series of Research Cell Assemblies organised in Helsinki to an intensive period of activity in the context of the Venice Biennale. In Venice the home base of the project was Sala del Camino, the dormitory of a former monastery situated on Giudecca at a negotiable mental distance from the main venues of the Biennale.

  • Sonic Art, Sonic Practice, and Sonic Thought: Artistic Research and Music Today
    No. 13 (2020)

    Sound is omnipresent, and we live, think, feel, and experience in and through sound every day. Sound studies have developed mainly in the disciplines of acoustics and music. The former defines sound as mechanical waves while the latter considers it as discrete sounds organised in time. Artistic Research offers us opportunities to study sound from a different perspective. How do we live, think, feel, and experience in and through sound as artistic practitioners? What constitutes such knowledge production, and how does this search for knowledge relate to the other modes of knowledge and experience often associated with ‘music'?

  • Peripheries
    No. 12 (2019)

    RUUKKU #12 considers the conceptual, methodical, concrete and practical peripheries in the arts. This thematic issue ponders questions concerning what kinds of roles margins, peripheries or fringes have in the arts and artistic research? Can artistic research itself be conceived as a peripheral zone on the edge of the rationalistic scientific world? In the context of artistic research and the periphery theme it is interesting to ruminate upon what consequences can be expected when established ontological and epistemic questions are challenged. Also central to the thematic issue is how can periphery or peripherality be understood in artistic research in the field of the discursive-material, sensable and experiential.

  • How to Do Things with Performance
    No. 11 (2019)

    Welcome to this 11th issue of Ruukku - studies in artistic research devoted to performance and performance as research, and the question how to do things with performance. Not only what should be done, but how it should be done is today a question as relevant as ever. And some argue we should actually do less, and think a bit more, for example how we do what we do. In the research project How to do things with performance, we have been asking what can be or could be done with performance and how.

  • Catalyses
    No. 10 (2019)

    The prefix cata- (Gr. 'down') has an ominous ring to it, of things going badly wrong, catastrophes, cataclysms, of things catapulting us towards destruction. The suffix -lysis (Gr. 'loosening') does not seem much brighter, alluding to disintegration and rupture and to things falling apart. What good and productive could then be said of artistic research in the name of catalysis? Maybe the use of 'catalysis' here as something descriptive of artistic research processes can amount to no more than a case of catachresis the use of a word in the wrong context, a severely misplaced figure of speech?

  • Aesthetic Intra-Actions
    No. 9 (2018)

    This special issue addresses this question at fresh intersections of new materialist thinking, artistic research, and art studies. For the emerging area of research initiatives labelled as new materialisms, intra-action has proved an attractive concept, because it helps to highlight the constitutive significance of technological, human bodily, and diverse non-human materialities in cultural, social and environmental realities without positing them as a self-contained sphere.

  • Conditions of Sharing
    No. 8 (2018)

    RUUKKU – Studies in Artistic Research issue 8 has been collated under the theme of Conditions of Sharing to supplement the Please Specify! conference organized by Uniarts Helsinki together with the Society for Artistic Research in April 2017. The issue explores new perspectives on conditions of sharing research in the artistic field and thus offers a peer reviewed platform related to the conference theme. In line with the conference, the call for expositions asked, among other things, how specific interests, methods, discourses, positions and ways of knowing can be disseminated more widely and more adequately.

  • Practicing and the Practice of Art
    No. 7 (2017)

    When planning our first RUUKKU theme volume, we – the two musician editors – chose practicing as our topic. It was quite easy, since the topic was so close to us: for a musician, practicing is an everyday activity. It is hard and genuine work, which requires a lot of time. But each art genre has its own praxis. The way people practice a specific genre of art tells something essential about the genre and about the artists themselves. A performance, an exhibition, or an artwork is a kind of outcome, but with this RUUKKU issue, we peer inside the making of art, where nothing is yet finished and where the direction is not yet settled. Or is there a specific direction in the first place?

  • Change and Artistic Research
    No. 6 (2016)

    The present issue, titled Change and Artistic Research, shows how artistic research and the ways in which art is made can contribute to not only societal debate but also to methodologies in other disciplines. Indeed, this focus has prompted artist-researchers to take bold steps forward in the worlds of content and form. In the process, they have borrowed and augmented techniques, not only going beyond the conventional boundaries of research but also forging into new areas of modern art, such as media art blogs and the occupation of urban space.

  • Research Gestures
    No. 5 (2016)

    The gesture can be a very concrete action or feature within the artistic research project or the research project itself can become understood as a gesture through its particular alignment or discord with other research orientations. Sometimes these two overlap, like in the courtroom situation the gesture can relate to the act of passing over of the object just as much as to the contextual differences of the two worlds. In effect the gesture becomes a sort of revelatory negotiation, one that highlights its own conditions of existence.

  • Process in Artistic Research
    No. 4 (2015)

    Processes can be examined in relation to a starting point or a destination. Here we might as well begin from the call to this fourth issue of Ruukku. In the call we noted that articulating and opening up artistic processes has been considered one of the main aims of artistic research. Since the 1960s "process" has been one of the magic words of contemporary art, with works of art that transform and evolve through time.

  • Materiality in Artistic Research II
    No. 3 (2015)

    Like any empty vessel, RUUKKU is potentially useful for storing a variety of materials, whether solid or in a state of flow. Are we now beginning to see the real uses of this hollow container or are we still merely testing how much it can hold before cracking?

  • Materiality in Artistic Research
    No. 2 (2014)

    The theme of the second issue of RUUKKU came from expositions proposed for the first issue, many of which were connected to the idea of materiality. The ideas were presented both at a conceptual level and as explorations of the characteristics and artistic expression of specific materials. In this issue, we approach materiality as a loose term that encompasses different approaches to art, research, materiality and their intersections.

  • Experience and experimentality in artistic research
    No. 1 (2013)

    RUUKKU, a long-prepared, peer-reviewed online publication of artistic research, is now finally starting its publishing activities. RUUKKU's editorial board has worked behind the scenes for RUUKKU, for two years already. Our central motive has been to create a publication, which would further interdisciplinary discussions and cross connections in the Finnish artistic research context.