Issue 1

A response to the cartographic practice of chorèmes, Sohin Hwang’s cover page is a bibliographic research centered on subjective mapping. Doubling as the entrance into a website tracing her personal exploration of the chorème, this cognitive work seeks to establish an alternative relationship between acts of research and their publication sites.

An introduction to this publication's sites of research, written by Jessyca Hutchens, Anita Paz, Naomi Vogt and Nina Wakeford.

Exploring an (ex)council estate in East London, Patrick Goddard’s Looking for the Ocean Estate is an alternative documentary/mockumentary that spirals off from an aural history project to question the ethnographic assumptions of the filmmaker, weaving together thoughts on gentrification, class antagonism, and the enigmatic notion of authenticity.

Joey Bryniarska and Martin Westwood seek infrathin divisions to relate different fields of research and artistic practice. Oscillating between stratigraphy and peripherality, they propose the residue and noise of a cross-disciplinary encounter: a gothic cathedral, a contaminated spoil heap, and a decapitation are sketched as sites of research.

How does one engage with predominant knowledge systems when the blind spots of archival sources are rendered invisible? Exploring the French National Archives within their urban and suburban surrounding in Saint-Denis, Avner Ofrath’s text reflects on ways to re-contextualise the archive.

This experimental and interactive account addresses Lads of Aran: a work that touches on performances of masculinity, performance writing, and the democratisation of forms and sources of information. Focusing on methodologies of parataxis and bricolage, Claire Potter further questions the academy’s ability to receive performance writing.

Introducing Oxford University’s Immigration Detention Archive, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Mary Bosworth discuss belonging, exile and citizenship in detention centres. Through the art rooms of these deeply contested sites, they address the growing body of artistic responses to border control and challenges faced by incarceration scholarship.

Peter Bo Rappmund’s film serves as an ontological portrait of the U.S.-Mexico boundary, working as both a physical and metaphysical exploration of of this demarcation. Deconstructing the socio-psychological image of the border in American society, it exposes that, although anyone can have a view of the frontier, its reality remains unseen.

In producing an essay constructed from field recordings, found audio material, and personal reflections on travelling in and around the United States, Europe and the Middle East, Steph Kretowicz interrogates the role of her identity in their interpretation, and the privileges implied in this practice.

Written in the context of a sensibility research department and artist residency operating in a Beijing actuator manufacturing plant, Zandie Brockett and Alessandro Rolandi’s paper presents a lexical toolkit, providing a new language towards understanding the mechanisms guiding the poetic suspension and subtle transformation of employee habits.

An Intervention into OAR’s Issue 1 on Sites of Research: Website Background by Daniel Lichtman.

Amalia Ulman recently achieved international fame for her elaborate Instagram scenarios, which attracted massive and often credulous audiences. Giulia Smith’s article suggests that the artist’s performances are as site-specific to online circuits as they are rooted in the mythologies surrounding Los Angeles and its versions of the American dream.

In taking two compositing techniques and giving them a presence on a 2D set in the form of nettings, whose behavior makes a convincing composite absurd, Robert Rapoport’s video questions the poetics of performing with or against these processes, asking how might behavior under such conditions be a microcosm of larger epistemological questions.

This article addresses the ability of site specific performance to contribute to Australian cultural politics. Campbell Drake’s project, in collaboration with the Culpra Milli Aboriginal Corporation, used salvaged pianos – a colonial instrument – to question the negotiation and the re-appropriation of iconic and contested Aboriginal sites.

In her essay, Farniyaz Zaker suggests the expansion of the definition of dwelling from architecture to the wider sphere of art. Conceptualising certain artworks as dwelling spaces, she argues that, like familiar places, such works can transform the way one inhabits, remembers and thinks in the world.

Caitlin Yardley’s work is an encounter with the surface of her site of research: Alvar Aalto’s Maison Louis Carré. Working with video as a methodology, visual and audio material evidences the moment of physical exclusion from content, visualising the initial resistance of research to reveal itself at the point of encounter.

Addressing bio-art, Vid Simoniti explores relations between artistic research and other disciplines. Outlining ‘the problem of absorption’, he claims that, in attempting to incorporate methods of bioengineering, bio-art does not secure critical distance, but assimilates back into another field. How do bio-artists negotiate this problem?

This is a site of indiscipline by Malcolm Bull.

This film was made during the firing of an Anagama Kiln in Wytham Woods, Oxford. Fritha Jenkins initially approached the site not knowing where the experience might lead, with an interest in the handling of materials and the performative qualities within and around the kiln. The work reveals the finding of a gendered site.

Through the case of an art exhibition, Mischa Twitchin reflects on transpositions between the time and place of a site visit, and those of its virtual revisits through film and text. How might traditional ethnographic claims for knowledge based on ‘seeing for oneself’ problematise any attempt at an exploration through different media?

Following John Moriarty, Connell Vaughan considers the anthem a dynamic ‘site of research’ as opposed to a static symbol, arguing that a challenge of our time is to consider and rework the collective singing of anthems. The site of the anthem is not a routine occasion to be ritually performed, but an everyday concern to be reworked and re-sung.

Robin Bale’s work is an occult audio travelogue that utilises spoken word, field recordings, and composed music in response to a site: a wooded piece of ‘waste ground’ and unofficial rubbish dump in East London. Delay, or echo, is central to the piece, both as literal audio effect and poetic trope; it interrupts itself.

Tamarin Norwood’s text examines a line, drawn from paper to mouth. Connections are made between gaps in the line and notional gaps introduced as it moved from one site to another: from writing to drawing, from private to public. The line is considered within and outside a Heideggerian framework of metaphysical separation between words and things.