Is it possible to respond to the challenge of a philosopher with artistic means, rather than on the one hand by attempting to philosophize, or on the other hand by resorting to illustration or application? Perhaps it is not. This text is nevertheless an attempt at responding to the challenge posed to artists by Michael Marder who, in volume 1 of this journal, challenged philosophers and artists ‘to include the spatiality, movement, and perspective of the vegetal in their work’ (Marder 2015, 192). The artistic research project ‘Performing with plants’ could be understood as a response to this challenge. In this text I will briefly outline the plan for the project, relate it to the current interest in plant thinking, plant theory and new materialist feminist theory and then focus on some works loosely related to the project, which seem to resonate with Marder’s challenge in some sense. The variations of Resting with Pines performed in September 2017 in Nida Art Colony on the Curonian spit in Lithuania will serve as attempts to include and even emulate the vegetal, and as an example of a characteristic common to many performance practices, namely the tendency to go on, to ‘keep growing’.

Teatr Weimar is a performing arts collective founded in 2003 and located in Malmö, Sweden. The group brings together playwrights, directors, actors, musicians and other artists to explore the boundaries and expressive potential of contemporary performing arts. The works of the collective are syntheses of traditional and experimental theatre, new music theatre, concert music, radiophonic art, video art and sound installations. The approach and practice of integrating different art forms and genres are vastly diverse. This article will discuss a number of terms, concepts and methods that have emerged out of the body of works as essential tools for the collaborative artistic processes.

The art of circus is a vibrant and competitive culture that embraces new tools and technology. In this paper, a series of exploratory design processes resulting in proofs of concepts are presented, showing strategies for effective use of three different modes of sonic interaction in contemporary circus. Each design process is based on participatory studio work, involving professional circus artists. All of the proofs of concepts have been evaluated, both with studio studies and public circus performances, taking the work beyond theoretical laboratory projects and properly engaging the practice and culture of contemporary circus.The first exploration uses a contortionist’s extreme bodily manipulation as inspiration for sonic manipulations in an accompanying piece of music. The second exploration uses electric amplification of acoustic sounds as a transformative enhancement of existing elements of circus performance. Finally, a sensor based system of real-time sonification of body gestures is explored and ideas from the sonification of dance are translated into the realm of circus.

The new audio technologies available today are forces in the evolution of sound and music in contemporary performing arts. New sonic practices for sound designers, composers and performers emerge, which in turn change the creative processes for productions, as well as the aesthetics of performances. This article focuses on how a creative rethinking of work with immersive sound, virtual room acoustics and sonic spatialization can be a dramaturgical, compositional and scenographic tool for performing arts. It is a new sonic practice that offers interactive and immersive elements that interplay with performers, transforms spaces and shapes evocative experiences for the audience. The article particularly considers the creative perspectives of the composer and the sound designer in how new ideas and possibilities may unfold with such an approach. This may ultimately merge the often-separated practices of musical composition and sound design and further expand them towards scenography and dramaturgy.

The idea of resonances and responses as a fundamental compositional principle is found in many of my compositions. I have used it in instrumental pieces both with and without electronics, in theatre contexts, in conceptual works and in intertextual and intermusical referential structures. In Terpsichord, a piece for percussion and pre-recorded sounds, the resonances from the acoustic instruments form sonic bridges to the pre-recorded electronic sounds, that, in turn, prolong the resonances, re-shaping them into new sonic gestures. A dialogue of actions and reactions is created that drives the trajectory of the music. The term resonance has its origins in acoustics and describes how a vibrating object creates sympathetic vibrations in other objects. It can also be used metaphorically to describe how something we hear or see can be set in motion within us, evoking associations or strong emotions, and how works of art are reinforced and reflected in other works with similar features. In this article I present examples from my own works discussing how resonances and responses are used in solo instrumental pieces with electronics, concerto works, as well as in theatre music works.

In classical music performance, if the only tool to sustain the great tradition may be seen to be perfectionism, it may hijack artistic expression and freedom. Possibly it will also limit the expressive potential of the performer. Taken together, the vast repertoire, the pressure to compete, and the institutional demands levied in order to make a career leave very little room for exploring new and radical parameters in performance or interpretation. ‘Potential space’ was Donald Winnicott’s term for an inviting and safe interpersonal field in which one can be spontaneously playful while at the same time connected to others. This audio paper by Kent Olofsson and Francisca Skoogh is a sound composition focusing on portraying performance as a potential space, with interpretation as play material. In it, we hear Skoogh, a pianist with many years of experience performing Western classical music, express her performance values, i.e. how she manages emotions connected to expected behaviour on stage and to the repertoire. The authors proceed to transcribe Winnicott’s potential space into artistic practice in order to challenge both the relations between score and performer, and expected concert traditions. It explores one of the great sonatas of the piano repertoire, the Piano Sonata Op. 11 by Robert Schumann.

In this project I have explored how I can relate to my environment through my daily practices of teaching, eating, animating etc. I began the project by improvising lectures for various audiences I wanted to have input from. I have lectured toall possible entities in the ecosystem I am a part of,from blueberries to colleagues to films. In the process I further explored how power structures are contested or confirmed in different kinds of imagemaking. How the relationship between human and environment is transformed and how animation practices offer me a wide variety when exploring and expanding that relationship.

Livscykelanalys (LCA) av Lina Perssons konstnärliga praktik utförd av Karin Lagercrantz. I denna LCA har sex projekt som Persson skapat inom ramen för Climate-Just Worldings (C-J W) mellan 2019-2020 utvärderats. Syftet med denna LCA är att mäta och beräkna vilket klimatavtryck Perssons forskningsprojekt C-J W har.

A fan-fiction essay on the artistic and ecological possibilities in animation practices, from the mushroomcloud in Barefoot gen via the animation-stand to the ecosexual relationships in Asparagus.

A presentation of Elsa, the new climate calculator for the Swedish film industry that is used by filmmakers to make better decisions in their creative process. Through the climate calculator, the user can overview and report how much CO2 the film production emits.

Elsa is part of Lina Persson’s artistic research project and a collaboration between Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH) and KTH.

En workshop om att gå i ide och hitta andra förhällningssätt till var klimatpåverkan. Vad händer i kroppen när vi sänker tempot? Hur kan en värld där alla resurskrävande handlingar balanseras och kompenseras se ut? I den här workshopen fär du ligga ner, slappna av och transporteras in i dvala.Meditationen ramas in av den fiktiva berättelsevärlden New Reactive Earth.

A report on the life cycle assessment (LCA) of Lina Persson’s artistic practice by Karin Lagercrantz. In this LCA six projects that Persson created within the framework of Climate-Just Worldings (C-J W) between 2019-2020 has been assessed. The purpose of this LCA is to measure and calculate what climate footprint Persson’s research project C-J W has.

The prompting of this quantitative method stems from the performative story-world that drives the C-J W project. The function of the LCA correlates with the basic mechanisms of the story-world’s time machine & cyborg-Gaia character. The results from the LCA will be fed back into the story-world as part of a continuous feedback between story development and everyday life interventions.

The quantitative methods in Persson’s artistic practice play a role in breaking with internalized and normalized outdated structures or unjust privileges. When you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Therefore, it can be necessary to measure our behaviour in order to render our privileges visible as such. With this quantitative analysis we aim to bring forth a discussion of climate-justice in relation to artistic practices and productions. One concrete purpose with the LCA is to guide Persson in what she can do to reduce her emissions in future projects. It will support her in creating climate budgets and it will be the basis for templates for calculating emissions in her future practices.

Inför förslaget att genomföra ett strömavbrott, som ett led i Lina Perssons konstnärliga forskning vid Stockholms konstnärliga högskola, sammanställde fastighetschefen en konsekvensanalys från samtliga av högskolans avdelningar. Här är en sammanställning av den dessa konsekvensanalyser.

Redigerad fredag! Fem kvällar om undersökande publicering i OEI #79: redigera/publicera/distribuera!

Andra publiceringsvägar, andra publiceringsvärldar En kväll med undersökande svenska förlag och publiceringsstrukturer.

Utifrån skilda perspektiv och praktiker kommer gästerna att belysa och diskutera redaktionella strategier samt publiceringens kritiska potentialer, innovativa former och produktiva gemenskaper.

Redigerad fredag! lyfter fram en ekologi av konstnärliga publiceringsalternativ i Danmark, Sverige, Portugal och Frankrike för att lyssna till några av de samtida initiativ som alstrar ny energi inom redigering, publicering och distribuering.

Programmet gräver sig också bakåt i den alternativa publiceringens historier. Där finns bland annat Ernesto de Sousas genreutmanande arbete som kritiker, konstnär, filmare och curator under de portugisiska 1960-, 70- och 80-talen, och det svenska Kulturmagasinet Vargen (1974–1975) med dess egensinniga mix av dada, pop och anarkism.''

En kväll med ett fyrverkeri av 7 undersökande svenska förlag och publiceringsstrukturer: Art Distribution (Percival), BILAGA (Mari Lagerquist och Lina Persson), Chateaux (Beata Berggren, Martin Högström och Peter Thörneby), Firework Edition (Leif Elggren och Thomas Liljenberg), Mount Analogue (Diana Kaur och Tris Vonna-Michell), tillexempel förlag (Kristian Carlsson) och Rönnells förlag (Pekka Särkiniemi).

Presentationer, performancer, releaser, samtal, möten.

Programserien ingår i nummer 79 av tidskriften OEI som publiceras som en rumslig presentation på museet.

OEI #79: Redigera/publicera/distribuera! 

This panel will present different ways of conceptualizing multispecies and storytelling. It aims at investigating the rhetoric of nonhuman subjectivity and thereby highlighting a specific form of interaction that takes place while detecting organic multitude. We hold that through assenting a nonhuman subjectivity, we are able to identify, recognize and reify multitude. While human subjectivity is created through inter-human actions, such as communication, narration and storytelling, we cannot assume that nonhuman subjectivity is formed in the same way. In order not to see only our human-selves in nonhuman interaction, we will propose an investigative, dialectic and inclusive platform for perceiving nonhuman subjectivity. Understanding any form of discourse as a process of dialectics, we can only reach an understanding for nonhuman subjectivity by merging different artistic as well as academic practices. We believe this process to be interdisciplinary, reaching over into activism, politics and ideology, and thus forcing a future-orientated discourse into being that includes nonhuman subjecthoods. Our theoretical base is founded on thinkers such as Judith Butler, Louis Althusser and Donna Haraway, while our practices include fine art, still photography, digital video and computer games. The presentation will be performed as one organic body comprised of three researching organs producing a two limbs and appendage creature.   

Livscykelanalys (LCA) av Lina Perssons konstnärliga praktik utförd av Karin Lagercrantz. I denna LCA har sex projekt som Persson skapat inom ramen för Climate-Just Worldings (C-J W) mellan 2019-2020 utvärderats. Syftet med denna LCA är att mäta och beräkna vilket klimatavtryck Perssons forskningsprojekt C-J W har.  

Return of the silurians – en improvisation mellan en ljudpraktik och en rörlig bildpraktik av Lina Persson, Forskare i film och Jenny Sunesson, Lektor i audiell mediaV

I installationen Return of the Silurians gestaltas olika steg av återupplivande, re-animation. Under en fem timmar lång improvisation experimenterar Persson och Sunesson med en berättelsevärld med höjda havsnivåer och ökade temperaturer, där människa och natur är en odelbar helhet. Genom att tillsammans analysera lager av ljud och lager avsediment/berggrund improviserar de fram en gestaltning.

text after cccover

This article is discussing and presenting insights gained through the research project To let things unfold (by catching the centre) conducted by Jan Burkhardt and Cecilia Roos between 2016-2018 and financed by Stockholm University of the Arts. The research started with the pilot study Gestures of exchange from a shared interest in how performers exchange methods during an artisticprocess and our aim was to explore different ways of articulating that. During that study we realized that our interest was rather in howwe can experience each other’s methods through sensation. That brought us into To let things unfold (by catching the centre),where we have been working on expanding the notions of sensation and practicing different ways that experiences of sensation can be used as a material in choreographic processes. The questions we have asked ourselves are: What is the role of sensation inchoreographic processes? In what ways are sensations exchanged, transformed and transacted between performers in a creativeprocess? What kind of possibilities can emerge out of purposelessness? The act of sharing became our primary research practice supported by sensation as one of the fundaments for sharing.

By appropriating the concept of site from the discourses of site-specific art and the concept of field from sound art, and applying them to the moving image, the project Image as Site explore the potential of video art for enabling certain elements of performance that appear in these discourses. The research originates from an understanding of video as a particular mode of inquiry that activates relationships between bodies, images, and places. The project expands this understanding and engages it to create meetings between visual arts and film and media practices. The practice of visual artist and professor in Film and Media Ellen J Røed is at the centre of the project, which is developed in an interdisciplinary research environment at Stockholm University of Arts and funded by the Swedish Research Council. 

By appropriating the concept of site from the discourses of site-specific art and the concept of field from sound art, and applying them to the moving image, the project Image as Site explore the potential of video art for enabling certain elements of performance that appear in these discourses. The research originates from an understanding of video as a particular mode of inquiry that activates relationships between bodies, images, and places. The project expands this understanding and engages it to create meetings between visual arts and film and media practices. The practice of visual artist and professor in Film and Media Ellen J Røed is at the centre of the project, which is developed in an interdisciplinary research environment at Stockholm University of Arts and funded by the Swedish Research Council. 

By appropriating the concept of site from the discourses of site-specific art and the concept of field from sound art, and applying them to the moving image, the project Image as Site explore the potential of video art for enabling certain elements of performance that appear in these discourses. The research originates from an understanding of video as a particular mode of inquiry that activates relationships between bodies, images, and places. The project expands this understanding and engages it to create meetings between visual arts and film and media practices. The practice of visual artist and professor in Film and Media Ellen J Røed is at the centre of the project, which is developed in an interdisciplinary research environment at Stockholm University of Arts and funded by the Swedish Research Council.

This artistic research project considers the potential of the moving image as a tool for developing situated knowledge and of its material conditions in terms of experience. It takes as its starting point how devices that produce images, such as cameras and microphones, invite their users to engage with their surroundings by enabling a network of relationships (Røed, 2014). I develop that idea and explore the capacity of video based art for enabling audio-visual ecologies through movement, transience and body, in other words elements of performance characteristic to site (Kwon 2004, Kaye 2000).

By considering how the moving image might be engaged as a form of listening, specific environments are explored in order to create artworks that might operate across any dialectic opposition between experience, mediation and representation as a form of ecology of particular sensitivities, presence and place-making. By combining certain practices of site-specific art (performance), sound art (field recording, transposing the field), early video art (performance, materiality, inquiry), and cinematography (movement, gesture), I experiment with the conditions of field recording as methods of inquiry, and approach the recording situation as gestures of listening and tuning, transient temporalities, and relationships between sound, image, body, (custom made) devices, and ethics.

By appropriating the concept of site from the discourses of site-specific art and the concept of field from sound art, and applying them to the moving image, the project Image as Site explore the potential of video art for enabling certain elements of performance that appear in these discourses. The research originates from an understanding of video as a particular mode of inquiry that activates relationships between bodies, images, and places. The project expands this understanding and engages it to create meetings between visual arts and film and media practices. 

Over a period of four years these aspects of the moving image has been approached through artistic processes, means and methods involving fieldwork, studio work, discursive activities as well as the development and dissemination of artworks and reflection. At the centre of the project, has been the continuous development of a camera rig, extended and developed through the artistic practice of visual artist and professor in Film and Media Ellen J Røed and in close dialogue and collaboration with research assistant and cinematographer Ashley Briggs and co-researcher and artist Signe Lidén. This rig is presented, and its development traced, through this publication. 

Listening to the forest is a streamed video essay in which you are invited to pay attention to audiovisual relations between human, landscape and moving image. Moving images are explored through a camera-based field recording practice that emphasises them as part of an ecological materiality, inseparable from what they depict and how they are seen.

Rendering a forest as a visual site, a landscape, while collaborating with it in developing sounds and images, the essay explores how human management is inseparable from the conditions of the forest itself. It engages with Swedish forestry and its ecological consequences, and with the precariousness of relations between human and non-human through practices of attention (Ingold, 2015) and listening (Voegelin, 2012). Nature appears as compromised through plantation and its consequences, and at the same time as a cinematic collaborator, enabling the relationships that produce the images, relations between the life of the forest, bodies, and devices.

In a similar gesture the images are also treated as a site, not separate from the relations of the world it is depicting, but part of its ongoing processes and emerging in a network of interactions (Røed, 2014). Drawing upon the long history of framing in cinema (Gunning, 1994), the video plays with stillness and movement, panoramic motion, algorithmic automation, topographical thinking as well as structural strategies such as juxtaposition. For example, a split between juxtaposed images breaks the spatiality of the image as well as the verticality of the forest’s tree trunks while expanding the visual field, allowing the trunks to stretch further up, out of one visual field and into the next.

By appropriating the concept of field from certain discourses of sound art (Voegelin, 2014; Benson & Montgomery, 2018) and applying it to the moving image, this research explores the capacity of video-based art for enabling movement, transience, and body; in other words, elements of performance characteristic to site (Kwon 2004, Kaye 2000). By considering how the moving image might be seen as a form of site in itself, it explores how the moving image can manifest as place on its own terms rather than as a mode of representing reality.

In a context of artistic practice, I ask how activities of listening and paying attention occurring through the moving image can be applied as a specific methodology to explore specific surroundings and to create artworks that operate across any dialectic opposition between experience, mediation, and representation, as a form of placemaking? Leaving behind phenomenological appreciation of being immersed in a natural world andbreaking with the aesthetics of the avant-garde, where the materiality of the medium is in a separate position disconnected from the relations of the world, the essayseeks to share a methodology where research occurs in a thick materiality through the situated practice of video art as it developed as a form of inquiry. (Bijvoet, 1997)

Imagining a sustainable future -  moving images as a research 

This session focuses on the moving image as a mode of research which is particularly relevant in a contemporary situation through its capacity for visual, performative and speculative modes of engagement. It will explore how moving images can be employed to generate understanding through imagination and ethics through two research projects based at the department of Film and Media at Stockholm University of the Art, activating video art and documentary film making through interdisciplinary and collaborative practices. 

The Future through the Present, coordinated by professor Erik Gandini explores a documentary narrative that manages to create a projection into the future and to develop a cinematic documentary aesthetic that releases documentary film from the constraints of it's traditional role of dealing either with the present or the past. We also want to experiment with an aesthetics that reflects existential issues that are connected our near future. The project's thematic point of departure is our relation to wage labour in a time when Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and algorithms outweigh our physical and cognitive properties and automation is expected to replace us on a large scale within most professional fields. From an existential perspective this poses the question: what will we do when we don’t have to work? And challenges us to formulate a new idea about work. Beyond the role it had so far, especially in a Western context, as one of the most central activity in our lives. Can documentary film contribute with material that offers a canvas for reflection about the meaning of labour in the near future?

Image as Site, coordinated by professor Ellen Røed, is an exploration of the epistemological foundations of video as a particular mode of inquiry that activates relations between bodies, images, and places. Devices that produce images, such as cameras and microphones, invite their users to engage with the world by enabling a network of relationships. By appropriating the concept of field from certain discourses of sound art and applying it to the moving image, the project explores the capacity of video based art for enabling movement, transience, and body, in other words elements of performance characteristic to site. By considering how the moving image might be seen as a form of site in itself, the moving image manifests as a form of place on its own terms rather than as a mode of representing reality. 

Projektet KOMPASS är sprunget ur det konstnärliga forskningsprojektet Image as Site vid Stockholms konstnärliga högskola, där Ellen Røed och Signe Lidén har utvecklat en metod för fältupptak som förenar ljud och bild i en särpräglad form av uppmärksamhets(est)etik. I detta forskningsprojekt undersöker Røed och Lidén hur instrument, tid och rörelse ingår i och påverkar relationerna mellan kroppar, bilder och platser, mellan erfarenhet och representation, i olika former av kamerabaserade fältinspelningar. 

Undersökningarna presenteras nu på Trafo Kunsthall, där de har utvecklat en installation med ljud, video och skulpturala element.

With Apartment Portraits contemporary music ensemble Lemur and artist Ellen J Røed investigates the rooms we live in through a series of sound and video works for living environments, musicians, microphones, cameras and videographer. 

Through a form of field work - or an ethnographic investigation, they explored three apartments in Oslo: The oldest of them is a 1970s apartment at Hovseter, the other two are more recent. One is located on Teaterplassen in Grønland, and was built in the early 2000s, while the last one is in Sørenga, built in 2016.

In the resulting portraits of apartments, Røed’s subtle and slow panoramic strokes through the apartments portrays the relationship between performed sound and living environments. It tells the story both of the rooms, their owners, the performers’ actions as well the videographer.  As a combination of image, sound, action and concept, Leilighetsportretter is part concert, part video art, part site specific intervention and part ethnographic field trip in Oslo apartments.

The project is one of four elements in Samtaler om rom – Spatial conversations, where Lemur works in and around the at The National Museum – Architecture´s exhibitions on Norwegian housing architecture. As such the work is  part of an interdisciplinary effort to explore new strategies for the presentation of architecture.  It is developed within the overlapping research framework Image as Site at Stockholm University of the Arts. Project is supported by The Swedish Research Council, Stockholm University of the Arts, and Norwegian Art Council.

The project was presented at The National Museum – Architecture, Oslo as an installation and as a concert in the framework of Ultima festival of contemporary music and Kulturnatt Oslo. 

It was also presented at Bomuldsfabrikken Kunsthall and at SKH Research Week 2021.

With Apartment Portraits contemporary music ensemble Lemur and artist Ellen J Røed investigate the rooms we live in through a series of sound and video works for living environments, musicians, microphones, cameras and videographer.

Through a form of field work - based on video art and contemporary music -  they explored three apartments in Oslo: This one is the oldest of them, a 1970s apartment at Hovseter. The other two are more recent. One is located on Teaterplassen in Grønland, and was built in the early 2000s, while the last one is in Sørenga, built in 2016.

In the resulting portraits of apartments, subtle and slow panoramic camera strokes through the apartments portrays the relationship between performed sound and living environments. It tells the story both of the rooms, their owners, the performers’ actions as well the videographer.  As a combination of image, sound, action and concept, Leilighetsportretter is part concert, part video art, part site specific intervention and part ethnographic field trip in Oslo apartments.

Apartment Portraits is one of four elements in Samtaler om rom – Spatial conversations, where Lemur works in and around the at The National Museum – Architecture´s exhibitions on Norwegian housing architecture. As such the work is  part of an interdisciplinary effort to explore new strategies for the presentation of architecture. It is developed within the research project Image as Site at Stockholm University of the Arts. 

With Apartment Portraits contemporary music ensemble Lemur and artist Ellen J Røed investigate the rooms we live in through a series of sound and video works for living environments, musicians, microphones, cameras and videographer.

Through a form of field work - based om video art and contemporary music, they explored three apartments in Oslo: This one is located on Teaterplassen in Grønland, in Mandallsgata 16 and was built in the early 2000s.

In the resulting portraits of apartments, subtle and slow panoramic camera strokes through the apartments portrays the relationship between performed sound and living environments. It tells the story both of the rooms, their owners, the performers’ actions as well the videographer.  As a combination of image, sound, action and concept, Leilighetsportretter is part concert, part video art, part site specific intervention and part ethnographic field trip in Oslo apartments.

Apartment Portraits is one of four elements in Samtaler om rom – Spatial conversations, where Lemur works in and around the at The National Museum – Architecture´s exhibitions on Norwegian housing architecture. As such the work is part of an interdisciplinary effort to explore new strategies for the presentation of architecture.

It is developed within the research project Image as Site at Stockholm University of the Arts. 

With Apartment Portraits contemporary music ensemble Lemur and artist Ellen J Røed investigate the rooms we live in through a series of sound and video works for living environments, musicians, microphones, cameras and videographer.

Through a form of field work - based on video art and contemporary music, they explored three apartments in Oslo: This one is located in Sørenga, at Sørengkaia 61 and was built in 2016. The oldest of them is a1970s apartment at Hovseter, the other is more recent and is located on Teaterplassen in Grønland, and was built in the early 2000s.

In the resulting portraits of apartments, subtle and slow panoramic camera strokes through the apartments portrays the relationship between performed sound and living environments. It tells the story both of the rooms, their owners, the performers’ actions as well the videographer.  As a combination of image, sound, action and concept, Leilighetsportretter is part concert, part video art, part site specific intervention and part ethnographic field trip in Oslo apartments.

Apartment Portraits is one of four elements in Samtaler om rom – Spatial conversations, where Lemur works in and around the at The National Museum – Architecture´s exhibitions on Norwegian housing architecture. As such the work is  part of an interdisciplinary effort to explore new strategies for the presentation of architecture. It is developed within the research project Image as Site at Stockholm University of the Arts. 

Dramatiska Institutet (2020) portrays a TV studio using a camera crane (scanner) that is standard equipment in TV productions. The crane, which has a motorized tripod head that can rotate around its own axis, forms the basis for a visual language we know well, namely TV studio productions. 

When applied as a scanner and used to scan the appearance of the room that surrounds it, the system’s capacity for registration is explored as an alternative to its more dramaturgical affordances. A different sense of space arises and we move into a different experience, perhaps one in which the human body's relation to gravity is no longer the norm. The work results from a series of artistic investigations of camera movement and of how different mechanisms for camera movement affords different experiences of space and place, conducted by artist Ellen Røed and cinematographer and research assistant Ashley Briggs as part of artistic research project Image as Site. 

A speculative story-world that drives transformation of stories and future realities. Through existing technologies and research, it proposes how future generations could hypothetically confront the present with its overdraft of resources and push back this current colonisation of the future and open up for possible transformations of the present. In this story-world, future generations has, thanks to Mallets time technology, hacked the present so that the earth system updated herself into a New Reactive Earth, a cyborg gaia.

A conscious reactive earth that monitors and regulate how all inhabitants use resources & life-space. The motivation behind this fiction story-world came out of a general longing for a more sustainable life and art practice and was concreticized through the collaboration with professor in physics Ronald Mallet. It was then further developed through methods of speculation, embodied worldbuilding and rule based frameworks limiting access to energy and resources. The project crosses genre with documentary in how it experiments with ways for acting out the story-world premises in real life situations, drafting sustainable transitions in all kinds of situations and contexts.

In relation to specific contexts, Elsa - The new reactive Earth, register specific amounts of outlets of carbon dioxide equivalents. (according to calculations by www.elsa.com). To balance this account participants are guided to go into hibernation for a specific time period.

By appropriating the concept of site from the discourses of site-specific art and the concept of field from sound art, and applying them to the moving image, the project Image as Site explores the potential of video art for enabling certain elements of performance that appear in these discourses. The project aims creating artworks that present themselves as specific realities rather than mere representations of place. The research originates from an understanding of video as a particular mode of inquiry that activates relationships between bodies, images, and places. The project expands this understanding and engages it to create meetings between visual arts and film and media practices where new questions are triggered.

Over a period of four years this aspect of the moving image is approached through artistic processes, means and methods involving fieldwork, studio work, discursive activities as well as the development and dissemination of artworks and reflection. The practice of visual artist and professor in Film and Media Ellen J Røed is at the centre of the project, which is developed in an interdisciplinary research environment at Stockholm University of Arts.

By appropriating the concept of site from the discourses of site-specific art and the concept of field from sound art, and applying them to the moving image, the project Image as Site explore the potential of video art for enabling certain elements of performance that appear in these discourses. The research originates from an understanding of video as a particular mode of inquiry that activates relationships between bodies, images, and places. The project expands this understanding and engages it to create meetings between visual arts and film and media practices. The practice of visual artist and professor in Film and Media Ellen J Røed is at the centre of the project, which is developed in an interdisciplinary research environment at Stockholm University of Arts and funded by the Swedish Research Council. At AR@K20: Artistic Research at Kristiania, the project is presented as an exhibition as well as an ordinary conference talk. 

By appropriating the concept of site from the discourses of site-specific art and the concept of field from sound art, and applying them to the moving image, the project Image as Site explores the potential of video art for enabling certain elements of performance that appear in these discourses. The project aims at creating artworks that present themselves as specific realities rather than mere representations of place. The research originates from an understanding of video as a particular mode of inquiry that activates relationships between bodies, images, and places. The project expands this understanding and engages it to create meetings between visual arts and film and media practices where new questions are be triggered.

As part of Image as Site, Ellen Røed collaborated in 2021 with researchers Hans Knut Sveen and Jostein Gundersen in an audiovisual exploration, through video, flutes and keyboards in which moving images were treated as a form of site, a place that informed musical improvisation and response. The collaboration culminated in a concert at Kulturhuset WRAP in Bergen in November 2021. 

Custom made carbon calculator for the artistic practice of Lina Persson. The calculator is based on the life cycle assessment of six artistic projects carried out between 2019-2021, as part of the artistic research project Climate-Just Worldings.

Projektet KOMPASS är sprunget ur det konstnärliga forskningsprojektet Image as Site vid Stockholms konstnärliga högskola, där Ellen Røed och Signe Lidén har utvecklat en metod för fältupptak som förenar ljud och bild i en särpräglad form av uppmärksamhets(est)etik. I detta forskningsprojekt undersöker Røed och Lidén hur instrument, tid och rörelse ingår i och påverkar relationerna mellan kroppar, bilder och platser, mellan erfarenhet och representation, i olika former av kamerabaserade fältinspelningar. 

Undersökningarna presenteras nu på Trafo Kunsthall, där de har utvecklat en installation med ljud, video och skulpturala element.