Process Art

BIOS – CONCEPTS OF LIFE IN CONTEMPORARY SCULPTURE brings international artists together in terms of their involvement with the living, in particular concerning the upheavals in modern life sciences by the progressive developments in microbiology and genetic engineering. As an artistic genre, sculpture is intertwined with concepts of vitality since time immemorial, as expressed in one of its origin myths. Ovid’s story of the sculptor Pygmalion tells the tale of the divine transformation of an ivory statue that he created into a living woman. At the symbolic level, this text refers to the summoning of matter through the sculptural act, marking a peculiar perimeter between the artificial and the living at least since antiquity. In the hands of the sculptor, raw material is transformed to a form that does not claim the place of the living from the outset, but does indeed raise the suspicion of wanting to compete with divine creation. The crossing of this line under the influence of scientific hubris became part of our collective memory, among others, with Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein The understanding of life and the plasticity of the living has fundamentally changed in the last twenty years, due to the ground-breaking discoveries in genetic engineering and microbiology.  In the exhibition, the view is directed at plants and the organic as a field already deformed and scientifically permeated by mankind, which has lost its strangeness and autonomy, but has become all the more puzzling in the process.

Participating artists:
Brandon Ballengée (USA *1974)
Peter Buggenhout (Belgium *1963)
Lee Bul (South Korea *1964)
Mark Dion (USA *1961)
Brad Downey (USA *1980)
Thomas Feuerstein (Austria *1968)
Eli Gur Arie (Israel *1964)
Tue Greenfort (Denmark *1973)
Patricia Piccinini (Australia *1965)
Donato Piccolo (Italy *1976)
Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger (Switzerland *1967, *1964)
Günter Weseler (Germany *1930)
David Zink Yi (Peru *1973)

Steve Reich (1936- ), in his essay “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968), wrote that “a compositional process and a sounding music [...] are one and the same thing.” His aesthetic creed of “perceptible processes,” indicated in these words, is known as the basic idea of minimal music. Although minimal music has been considered a counterpart of minimal art, this essay first appeared in the exhibition catalogue of Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969), an exhibition recognized as a threshold of postminimalism in the plastic arts. In this paper, I would like to clarify a linkage between Reich’s music and postminimal art in view of his involvement in the Anti-Illusion show.
The theme of the Anti-Illusion show was to refocus on the process of making art. By emphasizing the processes and materials of the works, the participating artists tried to deny illusion and expose the reality of art. Among these works, Reich performed his Pendulum Music, in which he made the sounding process visible as microphones’ swinging. This piece clearly demonstrates that Reich’s claim in “Music as a Gradual Process” was propounded in connection with postminimal art as an attempt to disclose musical processes and thereby reveal the real.

Burri’s paintings, with their emphasis upon process, exhibit the effects actions and time have upon matter –the wear and tear of burlap sacks, further stressed in areas by the artist and conspicuously repaired, integrated into the plane in one series of pictures, or the accelerated craquelure of paint in another.  Burri embraces the reality -or materiality- of matter, out of which he builds up a painting.

Article is devoted to the research of art process features in digital painting. The retrospective analysis of art process in digital painting is reviewed. By means of the Venn diagram the basic properties of creative process in digital and non-digital painting are compared. It is shown that the art product of digital painting is coded into the computer. The big advantage of digital painting is that realizing an art plan, the artist can put new strokes, keeping thus each variant as the separate original. Besides, art process is realized, mainly, not on a stretcher but on a virtual plane — the computer monitor. It is established that the modern fine arts and technologies develop in the conditions of interference and interdependence. / Статья посвящена изучению особенностей художественного процесса в цифровой живописи. Приведен ретроспективный анализ проблемы художественного процесса в цифровой живописи. Посредством диаграммы Венна сравнены основные свойства творческого процесса в цифровой и нецифровой живописи. Показано, что арт-продукт цифровой живописи закодирован внутри компьютера. Большим достоинством цифровой живописи является то, что художник, реализуя художественный замысел, может нанести новые штрихи, сохраняя при этом каждый вариант как отдельный оригинал. Кроме того, художественный процесс реализуется, главным образом, не на подрамнике, а на виртуальной плоскости монитора компьютера. Установлено, что современное изобразительное искусство и технологии развиваются в условиях взаимовлияния и взаимозависимости.

Η ιδέα των εικαστικών παιχνιδιών που παρουσιάζονται σε αυτό το βιβλίο, προήλθε μετά από μακροχρόνια έρευνα και πειραματισμό με ομάδες βρεφών και νηπίων, επάνω σε εικαστικές δράσεις που κύριο στόχο είχαν να μην έχουν…στόχο!
Το ενδιαφέρον μου για τη δημιουργία που προέρχεται από το ίδιο το παιδί και την εστίαση στην διαδικασία που πραγματοποιεί στη δράση του και όχι στο αποτέλεσμα, με παρακινούσε συνεχώς να εισάγω καινούργια υλικά προς ανακάλυψη και πειραματισμό σε εικαστικές δράσεις που σχεδίαζα είτε για ομάδες με βρέφη και νήπια, είτε σε ατομικό επίπεδο σε συνεδρίες που είχα μαζί τους.
Χωρίς πρόθεση κατεύθυνσης, με κύριο ενδιαφέρον την παρατήρηση των μεθόδων που το ίδιο το παιδί ανακαλύπτει όταν έρχεται σε επαφή με υλικά διαφορετικής μορφής και υφής, προχώρησα στην καταγραφή παιχνιδιών και εικαστικών δράσεων που θα μπορούσαν να παροτρύνουν και άλλους παιδαγωγούς ή συντονιστές ομάδων βρεφών και νηπίων να μπουν στον κόσμο της Process Art και να δοκιμάσουν να πειραματιστούν με τα παιδιά της ομάδας τους.

Η “τέχνη της διεργασίας” λοιπόν (process art), με βοηθό αντικείμενα και υλικά που το ίδιο το παιδί γνωρίζει καλά ή ανακαλύπτει στη συνέχεια ως μια πρόταση προς χρήση για βρεφικές ομάδες και παιδικούς σταθμούς.

By following and reproducing the cultural turn, the rhetoric of cultural mix and hybridism is disseminated today primarily in its crossing of trade barriers. Cultures reduced to their exchange value function as capital - an accumulative, speculative and, ultimately, financial affair. In some of its media and site-(un)specific manifestations, process art - which aims to encompass both old and new media art - seems to resist this pressure, despite, nonetheless, not being protected from regulations and incorporations. In the present collection of his recent essays, Slavko Kacunko discusses the process art by crossing the disciplines of art history and comparative media-, visual- and -cultural studies.

As a first approximation, several historiographical remarks on closed-circuit video installations underline their importance as a core category of process art. In the second part, the problems of process art, seen as a threshold of art history, are further examined in another retroanalytical step, in which concepts and objects related to `mirror', `frame' and `immediacy' are analyzed as the triple delimitation of visual culture studies. In the third part, previously outlined manifestations of what is termed the `post-visual condition' are summarized and projected to the `coreless core' of the emerging art and research related to the coreless beings par excellence, the bacteria.

Work as an element in a work-of-art can entail more in its investigation than celebrating the latter, as the pure, fine art object. Jill Townsley's approach to making art emphasizes the crux of making something, reminiscent of industrial manufacture and craft, and manifests a principle of reproduction that goes largely unnoticed in precious fine art artifacts. Her installations, videos, and sculptures express a fact of process, at times marked but always evident of the more discrete performative activity of creation and play. By exposing repetition in process, down to the simplest elementary building block, Townsley arguably enables viewers to gain more understanding into what creates an artwork than through art alone. Where her approach deserves considerable merit is with how she ventures to identify with craft and production, and the disparate inchoate phases that act as supplements to the artwork. To open my short meditation on Townsley's work and labour I will coin Glenn Adamson's description of craft as supplement: To say that craft is supplemental, then, is to say that it is always essential to the end in view, but in the process of achieving that end, it disappears. [1] If Townsley's material strategies incorporate a play with the supplement she does so in order to indicate the point in the evolution of a work of art, before it becomes anything, where it is still vulnerable to aimless production. When the predicament of process arises it is a moment in which the materials and actions reveal a constitutive property of having no end or beginning. I will try and elaborate how Townsley approaches these moments, when the act of labour approaches a level of failure, and the work resides with a disintegration of the capacity of the material, along with levels of cognitive concentration. In March, 2010, the Nunnery Gallery (London, UK) presented 'Moments of Repetition', an exhibition solely housing a series of Townsley's artworks. A variety of approaches, ranging from sculpture, installation, video, drawing, and photography, represented a culmination of five years of her intensive investigation into repetition and process. This period coincided with the time with her involvement in and completion of a practice-lead PhD, whilst registered at Liverpool University, with a Gladstone Fellowship from The University of Chester. Through in-depth experimentations in the studio, a series of exhibitions-notably 'Second Lives' – Remixing the Ordinary', the inaugural show in the new galleries at the Museum of Art and Design, New York (2008-2009)-and whilst with the university she rigorously explored the fundamentals of labour inherent in simple actions of repeating. I will examine some of these pieces and projects, which fall under her series 'Labourworks', and see how they identify ways of brining an experiential account of process in its logic.

Tarihte ekolojik dusunce, tipki dogrudan sanat yapma eyleminde bulunmayan fakat onun nüvesini olusturan primitif komun topluluklarinin, dogayla birlikte uyumlu bicimde yasamasindan gelmektedir. Ancak dogaya yapilan yikici mudahaleler, Sanayi Devrimi’nin gerceklesmesi ve endustri cagiyla birlikte bu dusunce tekrar gun yuzune cikmistir. Yine bu donemlerde evrenin mekaniktistik gorus sekliyle algilanmasi ve dogaya olan yikim boyutunun artmasindan oturu ekoloji biyolojiden bagimsiz bir bilim olarak adlandirilmistir. Bilim alaninda gerceklesen bu farkindalik, kendisini farkli alanlarda da gostermistir. Plastik sanat alaninin da etkilendigi bu hareket sonrasi bir grup Amerikali sanatcinin Land Art hareketiyle doga, teknik malzeme olarak tekrar kullanilmis ve ekolojik sanat hareketiyle de dogaya tekrar bir geri donus yasanmistir. Calismanin amaci, Whitehead’in surec kavramiyla ekolojik dusunce kavramlarinin tek bir kesisim noktasi altinda sanatsal calismalara uygulanmasidir. Yasamin bizzat...

ÖZET Bu çalışma heykel sanatında anlam sorununu dil felsefesi bağlamında ele almayı amaçlamaktadır. Anlam sorunu heykelin yer aldığı mekâna ve heykelin yapım sürecine ilişkin iki ayrı düzlemde ele alınabilmektedir. Heykel sanatında mekânın anlam oluşturması üzerine pek çok araştırma yapılmış ancak yapım sürecinin heykelin anlamlandırılmasında nasıl bir etkisi olduğuna çok az değinilmiştir. Bu araştırma Richard Serra'nın heykelleri ile yapım süreçleri arasında kurulan anlamsal ilişkiye odaklanmaktadır. Process Art (Süreç Sanatı) akımına dahil edilen, hatta belki de bu akımın en önemli sanatçısı olduğu ileri sürülebilecek olan Serra, özellikle ilk dönem yapıtlarında heykelin yapım sürecinin onun anlamı konusunda büyük bir önem arz ettiğini açıkça gözler önüne sermektedir. Heykel sanatında neyin yapıldığından nasıl yapıldığına doğru yaşanan dönüşüme odaklanarak, Serra tarafından vurgulanan anlamının sadece bir eyleme indirgenmesinin anlamsal karşılığı sorgulanmaya çalışılacaktır. Bu bağlamda, 20. Yy'ın en önemli felsefecilerinden olan Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin ve özellikle de California Üniversitesi Felsefe Profesörü John R. Searle'ün 50'li yılların ortalarından 70'li yılların sonuna dek sürdürdüğü dil felsefesi çalışmaları Serra'nın heykellerinin anlamlandırılmasında yol gösterici olmaktadır.

This paper introduces compost as a rich site for creative exploration and expression via the medium of sonification art in the context of Composing [De]Composition, a large-scale audiovisual installation/performance work to be presented at University of California Riverside’s Culver Center for the Arts from June-October 2015.
Here, the author non-reductively describes the multi-agential and poly-temporal nature of compost through detailing the evolution of an artistic praxis involving: the observation, audification, and sonification of compost temperatures; the development new sensing methods for data collection; and sound mapping strategies. The main observable driving the project is incalescence—the heat generated by the composting process. Audification of this biological processbrings a perceivably silent activity into the tangible reach of human hearing. The collection and real-time audification of temperature data using a custom interface to route sensor data to MAX/MSP enables listeners to better understand the complex ecology of a heterogeneous mass that is simultaneously decomposing,
supporting a myriad of life forms while also enabling the bioavailability of macronutrients to the soil. In addition, the recontexualization of temporally based temperature data into sound creates fertile ground for exploration in the compositional realm, as the collection of data
over time depicts inherent patterns occurring in the systems analyzed, while the basis of music also builds upon the use of patterns (pitch based, rhythmic) through time. Sonification of these patterns enables the composer/sound artist to create compositions in partnership with her subject/phenomenon of study.

Anthony Opal's series of unrhymed (or off-rhymed) sonnets begins with a prayer to everything or anything - from a lower case god to a "compassionate sloth" and a "homeless zoo keeper." In these poems reverence and rebellion, desperation and control joust. Then they dance. Opal's lines are consistently surprising (if that's possible) and, more important, they make me believe them.

-RAE ARMANTROUT, author of Just Saying and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize

***

If you’ve ever opened the hood of a car and found a motor of flowers or opened a closet and out flew a flock of waxwings, monarchs and philosophers, you’ll be prepared for these poems. Otherwise, reader, get ready for the brilliant onslaught of these prayerful evocations, these rollercoaster sonnets, these radiant affirmations of life and art.

-DEAN YOUNG, author of Bender: New and Selected Poems

***

“I write sonnets empty of everything yet containing all things…” goes a visual and philosophical echo of the unutterable “G–d” ACTION interrogates, prods. Such slippery refrains drive this lively book’s composition and arguments. Birds fall throughout, echoing the rough descent of haloed, winged things; the speaker wrestles an angel by a river and, in a later poem, a father by a sink; prophets stumble about stripped of epic context, conscripted to a world of Doritos bags, iPhones, and prescription meds. Indeed, religion and the sacred’s place in the contemporary are on Opal’s mind. For as much as, say, “Out of the Whirlwind” might aver otherwise, these adroit and contemplative poems don’t only fuck with “ideas of the holy,” they seek them out.

-DOUGLAS KEARNEY, author of Patter and The Black Automaton

***

Opal’s eye mocks its own seeing. With a "strange mercy that pulls us inward," these poems glint from the threads tethering private myth to a larger one. Taut with hope and balancing a heavy humor, this is language carved of a voice that wants to shout lullabies: “I want to sing / a song to myself in the silence of / myself.”

-EMILY KENDAL FREY, author of Sorrow Arrow and The Grief Performance

***

Anthony Opal’s keen and restless observations, flickering with medical and theological emergencies, Old Testament visitations, Jackson Pollock, hippos and bird wings, can’t help but remind me of the nature of opal itself, with its glittering internal structure that refracts light mediated by its elemental inclusions and substrates.

-ALLAN PETERSON, author of Fragile Acts and All the Lavish in Common

Ever since the emergence of the avant-garde in the 19th century, artists have taken creative risks, explored unknown territories, thrust us out of our comfort zones, and upset the status quo. No American artist, however, has used a more wildly eclectic range of methods, materials, images, and ideas than Bruce Nauman to answer the question, "Can this, too, be art?" His will to experiment has earned him ardent admirers from the get-go and, I suspect, just as many detractors.

Los mapas mentales permiten ordenar la información de una manera visual a partir de asociaciones de conceptos, palabras e imágenes. Para algunos artistas, los mapas mentales también pueden ser una metodología de trabajo o de presentación que les permite entender el mundo, crear relatos tan personales como idiosincrásicos o descubrir retorcidos complots. Jeremy Deller, Patricia Esquivias, Clara Montoya, Gonzalo Elvira, Raimond Chaves/ Gilda Mantilla y Mark Lombardi son algunos de los artistas cuyos trabajos se mueven en estas coordenadas.

Text from the first monographic publication on theory and artistic practice of Polish sculptor, Jarosław Perszko. The article focuses on the processuality of Perszko's sculpture "Multiplied Traces" examined through the medium of its film documentation.

Il termine “comportamento” entra ufficialmente nella storia dell’arte italiana con la proposta critica formulata da Francesco Arcangeli e Renato Barilli per il Padiglione Italia della Biennale di Venezia del 1972. Questa nozione indica l’insieme delle pratiche estetiche incentrate sul rapporto tra l’uomo e l’ambiente emerse sul finire degli anni Sessanta - Antiform, Body Art, Conceptual Art, Land Art, Arte Povera - e assume rispetto a esse un ruolo di sistemazione teorica. L’agire dell'artista, l’esercizio di facoltà fisiche e mentali, costituisce infatti il denominatore comune a tutte queste esperienze, tese a evidenziare la natura “transattiva” dell’esserci, l’indissolubile legame esistente tra individuo e mondo. Applicando gli strumenti della fenomenologia critica, Pasquale Fameli prende in esame i precetti teorici dell’Arte Povera e li rapporta alle soluzioni messe a punto dai suoi esponenti, indagandone le relazioni con le coeve esperienze internazionali. Compiendo una ricognizione ad ampio raggio degli artisti attivi in Italia tra la fine degli anni Sessanta e i primi Settanta, l’autore traccia un articolato percorso tra le poetiche del Comportamento, individuando strategie e modalità operative alternative a quelle poveriste, al fine di restituire la varietà e la vitalità estetica di quella fertile stagione.

Tarihte ekolojik düşünce, tıpkı doğrudan sanat yapma eyleminde bulunmayan fakat onun nüvesini oluşturan primitif komün topluluklarının doğayla birlikte uyumlu biçimde yaşamasından gelmektedir. Bu açıdan insanı doğa ile uzlaştırmayı amaçlayan ekoloji, bir bilim olarak adlandırılmadan önce de medeniyet tarihinde yerini almış ve ekolojinin temel ilkelerinin henüz belirlenemediği zamanlarda da görülmüştür. Doğada bizatihi olarak evirilen süreç anlayışı ise Alfred North Whitehead tarafından; "Haz, " "Özsel bağlılık, " "İnkarnasyon, " "Yaratıcı olarak kendi kendini belirleme, " "Yaratıcı olarak kendi kendini ifade etme" ve "Yenilik" başlıkları altında toplanmıştır. Süreç kavramını bu doktrinlerle açıklayan Whitehead'in düşüncesi ile ekolojik düşünce bir araya geldiğinde, diğer canlıların da katılımlarıyla süreç üzerinden ekolojik bir yaklaşım öneren sanat çalışmaları nelerdir sorusu sorulabilir. Başka bir deyişle, plastik sanatlarda hangi sanat çalışmaları hem Whitehead'in teolojik süreç kavramına hem de ekolojik düşünceye uyarlanabileceği sorusu araştırılabilir. Bu bağlamda, ekolojik düşünceden Whitehead'in teolojik süreç düşüncesine ve oradan da plastik sanatlardaki sanat eserlerine uzanan bir ilişkiler ağının varlığı da irdelenebilir.

This episode is a special 'listener response' to episode 17's 'esoteric in art,' with guest Michael Carter. Michael is an artist and teacher living in Los Angeles, CA. He holds an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in CA, shows his work in live performances, gives lectures, and and exhibited works in both the U.S. and Europe. 

Michael's personal interest in Theosophy plays a large role in his own research into the spiritual dimensions of abstract art. 

This discussion includes Michael's personal opinions and research about the history of spiritual movements as they relate to the category of modern abstract art, as well as his own personal background as an artist and spiritual 'seeker.' We also discuss his essay regarding metaphysical art, where he explains his ideas about the two cateogories of art, and his own work with a pendulum. We also talk about Jack Burnham's ideas about kinetic art, then move to a discussion about the condition of the Theosophical movement today, including his own opinions about whether or not today's artists feel comfortable expressing their own spiritual questioning as it is reflected in their art. Plus much more!

This  paper  discusses the issues of process and agency in generating data, sound art and music compositions in the context of Composing [De]Composition, a BioArt installation/ laboratory that explores the creative potential in sonifying compost temperature. The project was first presented at University of California Riverside’s Sweeney Art Gallery in 2015, and the second iteration of it is presented as part of the 8th Computer Art Exhibition hosted by Brasilia’s National Museum of the Republic. After first describing the project and defining key terms for the reader, I share my three-tiered process of working with compost, transforming, and translating its temperature data for digital sound art and acoustic music. Finally, I will delve into the issues of agency in sharing my creative role with the biota and in using datasets in my creative process.
Keywords:  Process, Agency, Data Sonification, BioArt, Sound Art

From processing within a computational framework of Dry-media and ‘algorithmic complexity’ towards infinity and ‘organic complexity’ by navigating through a field of consciousness. This artistic vision is put to test through a series of experimental creative projects based on the combination of three principles, “Reprise”, “Processing” and “Generative” – that recreates an artwork by reprocessing and regenerating it within a computational system. Through the observations of this practical and creative experimentation called, re.prOCesS.iN_(G)_ene/Rate, along with the introduction of a number of theoretical and conceptual ideas, I shall seek to elaborate, contextualize and understand the properties of a computational system within a digitally Dry environment; in order to define qualitatively the nature of an ‘algorithmic complexity’ – which emerges or manifests itself through an artistic process. This exercise will provide the foundations for me to further develop a methodology of counter-argumentation, in order to perceive and comprehend the nature of the yet unknown territories of an ‘organic complexity.’

In his forward essay for The Event of Art (described below) Mathieu Borysevicz writes about Lafia's early computational works wherein Daniel Coffeen in the follow up essay takes on his relational work , The Post-Media, Post-Relational Work of Marc Lafia

...Lafia's work foreshadow the instantaneous transmission of the image and the omnipresence of the social network that digital technology was ushering in. Marc was aware that the picture, moving from emulsion to code, would initiate an entirely new relation to photography, one in which our bodies, knowledge, and time would unfold. It was in this envelope of technological transition that Marc’s work found its solid ground. Yet while his interest is in the power of the image and its changing universal nature, he also constantly endeavors to make the image one’s very own. His pursuit is about the changing notion of subjectivity, of self, against the assault of representation.
... While Marc’s pursuits were very much informed by his meanderings in
deconstruction theory, his real creative impulse was dictated by his coming
of age with MTV. Variable Montage, Loops and Iterations, Computations and Permutations were some of his earliest and most mesmerizing exploits that came after the artist’s introduction to the programming software engine MAX/MSP.

...Marc would take his interest in recording to interrogate new modes of creating a personal archive and self-organizing computational system. Here recording is not only memory, and a data structure, but a permutational instrument and ever-changing horizon of iterations.

The Event of Art
(forthcoming Punctum Books, winter 2020) presents the work of art as a complex material and societal event. The event is multiple, a continual becoming of perception, being, materiality, participation, a coming to one’s own senses. The work of art is the event of becoming present to one’s embodiment. Lafia traverses and self examines how his early strategies of cultural reading of photography and film, of interface and network culture and social media transform to an investigation of materiality itself. His interest becoming the realm of the sensible and the sensate. Here he presents the idea of art as a medium itself, giving us wide permission to explore and examine our deepest feelings and senses, our world and its becoming.

Collaborative artistic processes have become increasingly popular in the past decades. Different forms of community art, relational art, and participatory art, as well as artistic collaborations, and art collectives have occupied a central role in the art world. Does this collaborative taken on art, with its focus on the artistic process, entail a move towards openness and communality, or is it rather an obligation put on us? Is the growing interest in the artistic process a fruitful approach that enriches our understanding of art, or is it an unfortunate sign of art being subordinated to capitalism that pressures us to produce constantly new products, without critical reflection or qualitative criteria? This exposition investigates this dialectics between artistic processes and art objects by following my own research process on collaborative writing. (The article can be accessed via the link: http://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/141545/141546)

Du 23 octobre au 1er novembre 2014 avait lieu à la Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen de l’Université Concordia une exposition-performance intitulée Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie. Déjà, l’incertitude plane un peu sur le type de proposition artistique; ni tout à fait une exposition, ni tout à fait une performance, on est très clairement dans l’interdisciplinarité, à l’image de ce que propose généralement le collectif PME-ART.

This thesis is an investigation into performance-based drawing and its relation to ‘multiplicity’, as explored through a philosophical tradition of thought.  By leading my research through this practice, where I use bodily gesture to engage a mark-system exploring ‘the point’, I ask how thought in drawing could be imperative to its event (of thinking and making).  I examine the proposition that by making physical performance the question of thinking in its event can be critically investigated under a trace that indicates thought as multiplicity.
I argue that ‘the point’ is a unique, conceptual mark that emphasizes bodily appearance; and that this mark engages physicality through properties of mediation, dislocation and obstruction. These properties are demonstrated throughout my practice as ‘post-phenomenological’, that is the irreducibility of bodily presence and indexical imprints to ‘thought’.
In my practice I construct performances using marks associable with notation, such as periods [ . ], brackets [ ( ) ], or ellipses [ … ].  These notational marks structure the space in which a dislocated form of bodily gesture occurs – as in standing, turning, or pointing – which is mediated by weight and restriction.  While my thesis closely examines my practice I look at artists – such as Paul Harrison and John Wood, and Trisha Brown – who explore indexical mark-making, task-based actions and digital video.  I therefore examine how I use gesture to investigate a non-representational trace, which challenges drawing through conventions of line-making and embodied movement, or inscription.
Throughout my thesis I examine post-structural debates around ‘multiplicity’, a philosophical notion of thought posited as a radical question. I evaluate ‘multiplicity’ through Alain Badiou’s critique of Gilles Deleuze’s vitalist proposition (that thought is engaged materially through movement) and thus consider that thought/multiplicity is void-like and obstructive. I articulate Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of ‘exscription’, that gesture is dislocated from inscriptional marking; this dislocated gesture being unable to engage with thought under phenomenologies of presence. Finally, I consider Maurice Blanchot’s argument that the trace as such – as distinct from the imprint of a line – is impossible to both represent and materially depict as ‘presence’. 
My research aims to reconsider conventions of performance-drawing, placing greater emphasis on bodily gesture and a conceptual trace that interrupts embodiments by either imprint or physical presence.  Overall, I propose a new approach to mark-making under a post-phenomenological method, which uses a dislocated gesture to investigate an obstructive event of thought or multiplicity.

Morse shows that Forti's work negotiated John Cage's ideas of sound, score, and theater through the unique approach to movement, essentially improvisational and grounded in anatomical exploration, that she learned from performer and teacher Ann (later Anna) Halprin. Attentive to Robert Whitman's and La Monte Young's responses to Cage, Forti reshaped Cage's concepts into models that could accommodate Halprin's charged spaces and imagined, interpenetrative understanding of other bodies.

Originating in New York, FormLAB (FormLaboratory), is a nomadic, multi-media structure and system of operations. It engages the studio and exhibition site as a mobile laboratory to explore art-making and performance using a plurality of materials from host sites, video, photographs, sounds, and music.

Since 2009, FormLAB has explored sites and their found objects as a means of observing the ontogenesis of art making as mirrored by local host cultures in cities in the US, Germany, Singapore, Korea, Brazil and, soon, in Mongolia.

As a mobile “museum-within-a-museum”, FormLAB problematizes the passive viewing of artworks by creating a multiplicity of perspectives from which the LAB can be perceived, namely as: a) an ecosystem for the production of artwork; b) an observable model for the artist’s mind as making art through the creative process; and, c) a dynamic lens into the cultures that create artwork through a multiplicity of processes.