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boattr.uk book & blog

boattr.uk book published with Mute publishers

Digital Arts on the British Waterways 

This boat book & blog documents our journey on our narrowboat ‘Quintessence’ and the development of the boattr prototype in collaboration with MAZI (for “together” in Greek), a Horizon 2020 research project. Boattr connects narrow boats to the ‘Internet-of-Things’ and allows for open wireless mesh-networking within the narrow boat community, by using affordable microcomputers. The main goal of this project is to provide technology and knowledge that aims to 1) empower those narrow boats who are in physical proximity, to shape their hybrid urban space, together, according to the specificities of the respective local environment, and 2) foster participation, conviviality, and location-based collective awareness of the canals.

This is an edited collection of assembled and annotated boat logs, photographs and video essays, manifested, in a scholarly gesture, as a ‘computer book’.

The boattr prototype was built on the MAZI toolkit and the capabilities offered by Do-It-Yourself networking infrastructures – low-cost off-the-shelf hardware and wireless technologies – that allow small communities or individuals to deploy local communication networks that are fully owned by local actors, including all generated data. These DIY networks could cover from a small square (e.g., using a Raspberry Pi) to a city neighbourhood (e.g., the Commotion Construction Kit used at the RedHook WiFi initiative) or even a whole city (e.g., guifi.net, awmn.net, freifunk.net), and in the case of boattr the UK canal network.

The boattr DIY infrastructures offer a unique rich set of special characteristics and affordances for offering local services to the narrow boat community, outside the public Internet: the ownership and control of the whole design process that promotes independence and grass-roots innovation rather than loss of control and fear of data shadows; the de facto physical proximity of those connected without the need for disclosing private location information, such as GPS coordinates, to third parties; the easy and inclusive access through the use of a local captive portal launched automatically when one joins the network; the option for anonymous interactions; and the materiality of the network itself. The prototype integrates existing FLOSS software, from very simple applications to sophisticated distributed solutions (like those under development by the P2Pvalue project, mobile sensing devices, and recent developments in open data and open hardware), allowing it to be appropriated by different non-expert users according to their respective context and use case.

Table of Contents

Research Journal

Adnan Hadzi

Boat Log

Adnan Hadzi & Natascha Sturny

Reflections

Natascha Sturny, Rob Canning & James Stevens

Videos

Adnan Hadzi

Images

Natascha Sturny

Resources

Franz Xaver & Anton Galanopoulos

Editor 

Adnan Hadzi

Authors Collective

Adnan Hadzi

Natascha Sturny

Franz Xaver

Anton Galanopoulos

James Stevens

Rob Canning

Tech Team

Harris Niavis – MAZI Programmer

Giannis Mavridis – Micro-Computer Programmer

Producers

Adnan Hadzi – Format Development & Interface Design

Panayotis Antoniadis – MAZI Project Manager

Mark Gaved – Coordination Creeknet

Quintessence Logo: H1 Reber / Buro Destruct

Cover artwork and booklet design: OpenMute Press

Copyright: the authors

Licence: after.video is dual licensed under the terms of the MIT license and the GPL3

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

Language: English

Assembly On-demand

OpenMute Press

Acknowledgements

Co-Initiated + Funded by

Horizon 2020 – The EU framework programme for research and innovation

The Mazi project (2016-2018) has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 ICT CAPS initiative under grant agreement no 687983.

Thanks to

Ushi Reiter – Art Meets Radical Openness, Servus.at, Linz

Vince Briffa – Department of Digital Arts, University of Malta

Clemens Apprich – Centre for Digital Cultures, Lüneburg

Rob Canning – School of Art and Design, Coventry University

Gary Hall – School of Art and Design, Coventry University

Simon Worthington – OpenMute Press, London/Berlin

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Privatised Push-Back of the Nivin

Forensic Oceanography published the Nivin report.

In November 2018, five months after Matteo Salvini was made Italy’s Interior Minister, and began to close the country’s ports to rescued migrants, a group of 93 migrants was forcefully returned to Libya after they were ‘rescued’ by the Nivin, a merchant ship flying the Panamanian flag, in violation of their rights, and in breach of international refugee law.

The migrants’ boat was first sighted in the Libyan Search and Rescue (SAR) Zone by a Spanish surveillance aircraft, part of Operation EUNAVFOR MED – Sophia, the EU’s anti-smuggling mission. The EUNAVFOR MED – Sophia Command passed information to the Italian and Libyan Coast Guards to facilitate the interception and ‘pull-back’ of the vessel to Libya. However, as the Libyan Coast Guard (LYCG) patrol vessels were unable to perform this task, the Italian Coast Guard (ICG) directly contacted the nearby Nivin ‘on behalf of the Libyan Coast Guard’, and tasked it with rescue.

LYCG later assumed coordination of the operation, communicating from an Italian Navy ship moored in Tripoli, and, after the Nivin performed the rescue, directed it towards Libya.

While the passengers were initially told they would be brought to Italy, when they realised they were being returned to Libya, they locked themselves in the hold of the ship.

A standoff ensured in the port of Misrata which lasted ten days, until the captured passengers were violently removed from the vessel by Libyan security forces, detained, and subjected to multiple forms of ill-treatment, including torture.

This case exemplifies a recurrent practice that we refer to as ‘privatised push-back’. This new strategy has been implemented by Italy, in collaboration with the LYCG, since mid-2018, as a new modality of delegated rescue, intended to enforce border control and contain the movement of migrants from the Global South seeking to reach Europe.

This report is an investigation into this case and new pattern of practice.

Using georeferencing and AIS tracking data, Forensic Oceanography reconstructed the trajectories of the migrants’ vessel and the Nivin.

Tracking data was cross-referenced with the testimonies of passengers, the reports by rescue NGO WatchTheMed‘s ‘Alarm Phone’, a civilian hotline for migrants in need of emergency rescue; a report by the owner of the Nivin, which he shared with a civilian rescue organisation, the testimonies of MSF-France staff in Libya, an interview with a high-ranking LYCG official, official responses, and leaked reports from EUNAVFOR MED.

Together, these pieces of evidence corroborate one other, and together form and clarify an overall picture: a system of strategic delegation of rescue, operated by a complex of European actors for the purpose of border enforcement.

When the first–and preferred–modality of this strategic delegation, which operates through LYCG interception and pull-back of the migrants, did not succeed, those actors, including the Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Rome, opted for a second modality: privatised push-back, implemented through the LYCG and the merchant ship.

Despite the impression of coordination between European actors and the LYCG, control and coordination of such operations remains constantly within the firm hands of European—and, in particular, Italian—actors.

In this case, as well as in others documented in this report, the outcome of the strategy was to deny migrants fleeing Libya the right to leave and request protection in Italy, returning them to a country in which they have faced grave violations. Through this action, Italy has breached its obligation of non-refoulement, one of the cornerstones of international refugee law.

This report is the basis for a legal submission to the United Nations Human Rights Committee by Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) on behalf of an individual who was shot and forcefully removed from the Nivin.

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First WG1 EFAP meeting

Working Group 1 met at Tranzit for the first meeting to discuss contexts. The expansion of research across a civil society and the proliferation of practice-based research across academic landscapes have brought about new stakeholder alliances, modes of research, and applications. These are the contexts from which many Advanced Practices emerge. However, many of these initiatives are idiosyncratic (e.g., ad-hoc funding initiatives and/or efforts to think ‘outside the box’); others are deeply embedded in institutions whose cultural roles are evolving (e.g., archives’ efforts to leverage collections in response to shifts in popular interest or intellectual property potentials).

WG1 will survey these shifting contexts in order to ‘map’ currently emerging resources and adjacencies. Its goal is to develop a provisional set of typologies that are:

  1. descriptive not prescriptive,
  2. overlapping and non-exclusive, and
  3. responsive to the needs of different actors/entrants.

These typologies will not serve, even informally, as certification process or ‘registry’ of Advanced Practices; and while WG1’s mandate is to conduct diligent broad-based research, these typologies, by definition, cannot be exhaustive.

Possible typologies might include: areas of interest (e.g., oceans, logistics, national security), practical methods (e.g., rules/guidelines for collaboration), participant needs (e.g., individual or institutional aspiration), and/or formats/techniques of dissemination.

WG1 objective: ‘Map’ emerging resources and adjacencies in order to develop typologies for understanding Advanced Practices.

WG1-specific activities: Identify a wide range visual/textual models for mapping findings; develop flexible/extensible system for annotating typologies and other useful annotations and indexing techniques.

WG1-specific tasks: (1) Develop a shared, rich-media user-writable resource (e.g., a wiki) to maintain provisional typologies linked to examples and supporting resources; (2) identify relevant typologies; and (3) populate and annotate the mapping platform.
WG1 milestones: (1) Setup of online working environments, and (2) publishing a dynamic map of Advanced Practices.

WG1-specific deliverables: Visual maps of annotated typologies of Advanced Practices

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boattr.eu @AIS conference

Adnan presented boattr.eu – Awareness raising regarding the Central Mediterranean Migration crisis during the AIS conference.

In 2019, the  theme of the Association of Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS) annual conference will be Interdisciplinarity in Global Contexts. Since a defining feature of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity is not to abstract or isolate problems but rather to approach them in their real-world contexts, this conference theme asks participants to consider the global and local contexts of interdisciplinary education and research. Obviously, contexts differ in scale and can be defined at microscopic or macroscopic levels: chemical properties are influenced by molecular configurations, for example, organic functions by bodily states, individuals by their societal environments, public health by geographical and climatic conditions, and cities by their world-wide connections. Adding to this complexity are various dynamic interactions across these dimensions, further making an interdisciplinary perspective necessary.

This paper presents the envisaged interdisciplinary boattr.eu research project. boattr.eu is planned as a European research project currently initiated by the Migration Research Cluster of the University of Malta. ‘boattr.eu’ (b.eu) stands for boat migrants, forced migrants, and the aims of the boattr.eu project is to stimulate discussion and offer counter-narratives surrounding the current forced migration situation in Europe, through the use of novel immersive experience (IX) technologies which provide a complete sensory experience for participants. To achieve this aim, four case studies on particular events that have triggered different reactions to the migration crisis in the dominant public discourse of four European countries, namely Malta (Solidarity), Italy (Containment), Greece (Criminalisation), and Spain (Militarisation), are planned to be used as a basis for developing the relevant sensory experiences.

As long as there is no option of safe passage to Europe, people will continue risking their lives, forced to take what is now the host of some of the the world’s most dangerous migration routes, the Mediterranean Sea. [Fargues Philippe, “Four Decades of Cross-Mediterranean Undocumented Migration to Europe” (International Organization for Migration, 2017)] Setting off in flimsy rubber boats, many soon find themselves heading for rocks or sand banks that can readily capsize or sink a dinghy. Others are abandoned by smugglers who drop them at beaches that are inaccessible via land. The majority of people are wearing fake life jackets, giving them a false sense of safety. [Hannah Al-Othman, “Tricked into death: 150,000 migrants’ life jackets – many of which are useless fakes- lie piled on the coast of Lesbos in a grim memorial to those who die crossing the Mediterranean” (The Daily Mail, 2017)]

The boattr.eu research project envisages using the expertise from the Immersive Lab project in order to allow researchers to create immersive experiences around the central Mediterranean migration crisis. Sound and image constantly surround us, their presence is ubiquitous therefore we are all part of an immersion, whether or not we are aware of it. Immersive experiences introduce audiences to digital journeys where they are transported through the content of, for example, a science project, an architecture simulation, a documentary, an art installation or a performance.

Goldsmiths College also hosts the Forensic Architecture agency and the Forensic Oceanography project, which recently published a report on the central Mediterranean migration crisis entitled Mare Clausum [Mare Clausum, a report by Forensic Oceanography (Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani), affiliated to the Forensic Architecture agency, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2018] which offers the boattr.eu research project a conceptual awareness raising method for the unfolding migration crisis at the borders to Malta.

The mission of the University of Malta Cluster for Migration is to offer a dialogical space in which researchers from different academic disciplines can work towards understanding all the evolving aspects of international migration, including that of belonging across generations. The long-term goal is to thereby contribute to an equitable, more sustainable and more inclusive society that brings benefits to migrants and their families, communities of origin, destination and transit, as well as their sending and receiving countries. Today the migration crisis renders the Mediterranean an opaque space, removed from the public eye, where the key founding values of the European Union are put under strain, making the Migration Cluster initiative all the more necessary. The cluster can help to shed light and raise awareness among stakeholders, policy makers, and the general public about the unfolding crisis at the common maritime borders of the Member States.

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EFAP Kick-Off meeting

EFAP, the European Forum for Advanced Practices, will be launched in a kick-off meeting in Madrid from October 10-13, 2019. The events will take place in CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo. The program on Thursday and Friday from 1800-2200 is open for the public. Participation in the working group sessions requires prior registration.

PROGRAM

THURSDAY, 10.10.2019

Public program
18:00: Welcome by Manuel Segade, Director of CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo
18:15: Presentation by Irit Rogoff.
18:45: Lecture by Maria Hlavajova
20:15: Conversation: Andrea Phillips & Jesús Carrillo
21:15: Conversation: Sybille Peters & Victoria Pérez Royo
22:00: El Drama de una realidad Sur Performing lecture by Javiera de la Fuente

FRIDAY 11.10.2019

12:00 – 18:00
Core group meeting

Conference/public program
18:00: Video Conversation with Brian Massumi by Florian Schneider
18.30: El texto como Notación (experimento de escritura). Lecture by Jon Mikel Euba
20:15: Conversation: Andrew Patrizio & Héctor Tejero
21:15: Conversation: Inés Moreira & Ethel Baraona 

SATURDAY, 12.10.2019

Working Group sessions

10:00 – 11:00: Welcome
11:00 – 12:00: General introduction into the WGs
12:00 – 18:00: WG parallel sessions

SUNDAY, 13.10.2019

Working Group sessions

11:00 – 14:00: WG parallel sessions
15:00 – 17:00: Debriefing (optional)

 

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Video Vortex #12

Adnan gave an Interview to Kultura.TV on the Video Vortex XII conference.

VideoVortex, an artistic network concerned with the aesthetics and politics of online video, will gather again in Malta for a conference in late September 2019. In this edition we are in particularly focussed on bringing new research, theory and critiques of online video – in addition to questions around its integration with social media – to Malta. If you are a graduate student or researcher/critic that is engaged with the theoretical challenges of contemporary (moving) image cultures, please join us for the conference.Given its ease of access and use, video has historically been aligned with media activism and collaborative work. Now, however, with video’s prevalence across social media and the web, its dominance of the internet of things, the role of the camera in both the maintenance and breaking down of networks, in addition to the increasing capacity of digital video to simulate that which has not occurred – we require novel theories and research. That is to say that rapidly changing technological formats underscore the urgent need to engage with practices of archiving and curation, modes of collaboration and political mobilisation, as well as fresh comprehensions of the subject-spectator, actors and networks constituted by contemporary video and digital cultures.
Conference and screenings: September 26-29, 2019.
Exhibition:  September 13 until October 27, 2019 (in Spazju Kreattiv)

Download the full program here.

All events are held at Spazju Kreattiv, except for “Session 2:
Activism”, on Day 2, which will be held at Aula Prima, University of
Malta Valletta Campus . Please refer to details below and in the program.

VV XII conference registration:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/video-vortex-xii-conference-tickets-63022752750

VV XII screening registration:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/video-vortex-xii-screenings-tickets-63025027554

Special: ASMR workshop
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/video-vortex-xii-special-asmr-workshop-tickets-63027029542

Schedule of Video Vortex #12 Conference:

Day 1: Thursday – September 26, 2019

15:00: Video Vortex Pre-Screening: Dance: Please refer to the screening pages for the detailed screening schedule.

17:00: Opening of Video Vortex Conference

• Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam)

•  Wilfried Agricola de Cologne: Curated screening – The W:OW

18:30: Opening Lecture & Performance

• @lbert figurt: Lecture: Desktop Horror

• Annie Abrahams, Lisa Parra and Daniel Pinheiro: Performance: DISTANT FEELINGS #6

20:00: Meet the Video Vortex Artists

• Vince Briffa and Michael Alcorn: OUTLAND

• Ryan Woodring: The oldest new structure

• Q&A with video vortex artists: Werther Germondari, Letta Shtohryn, Pablo Núñez Palma, Bram Loogman, Tivon Rice & Hang Li (together with Caroline Rosello)

Day 2: Friday – September 27, 2019

09:00: Welcome, Registration & Coffee

10:00: Session 1: Online Video Theory I

• Andrew Clay: The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. Oakley in the Land of the Video Bloggers

• Karla Brunet: Online Video Cartography

• Ana Peraica: Disinterested and Dead: Spinning Visual Media Reporting Events

• Kathy Rae Huffman: ON/IN Time – video art from outsider to insider

12:00: Break

13:00: Session 2: Activism

NOTE: this session is at a different Venue: Aula Prima, University of Malta Valletta
Campus

• Donatella della Ratta: The vanished image: who owns the archives of the Arab uprisings?

• Aishwarya Viswanathan: Staged Fear: Real and Imagined Audiences of Mob Lynching Videos in India.

• Confusion of Tongues: Moving Membranes

• Miguel Oliveros Mediavilla: Dictature 4.0: ‘La prison à plein air’

15:00: Break

16:00: Session 3: Streaming & Platforms

• Dino Ge Zhang: A Theory of Livestreaming Video

• Andreas Treske and Aras Ozgun: Narrative Platforms: Towards a Morphology of New Audience Activities and Narrative Forms

• Tomasz Hollanek: The Netflix Clinic: (experi)Mental Entertainment in the Age of Psychometrics

• Antonia Hernandez: There’s something compelling about real life: early webcam tropes on current sexcam platforms

Special: ASMR workshop (parallel session on invitation only)
Lucille Calmel & Damien Petitot: Soft Screens Soft Skins Soft: an ASMR workshop

18:00: Break

20:00: Video Vortex evening screening
Please refer to the screening pages for the detailed screening schedule.

Day 3: Saturday – September 28, 2019

09:00: Welcome, Registration & Coffee

09:30: Special: Breakfast Screening

• Colette Tron: Screening: Digital images and films, what’s the matter?

10:00: Session 4: Online Video Theory II

• Colette Tron: Digital images and films, what’s the matter?

• Mitra Azar: From Selfie to Algorithmic Facial Image

• Jack Wilson: PLAYING FROM ANOTHER ROOM

• Chris Meigh-Andrews: EDAU Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection

12:00: Break

13:00: Session 5: Experiments in Aesthetics

• Dan Oki: The Absence of Telepresence

• Hiroko Kimura-Myokam: Video hosting service as a presenting space and a repository

• Patrick Lichty: Not Really Like Being There

• Richard Misek: A Machine for Viewing: a virtual reality video essay

15:00: Break

16:00: Session 6: Workshops/lecture on tech issues

• Pablo Núñez Palma and Bram Loogman: Jan Bot

• Heiko Recktenwald: Montage der Sensationen

• Adnan Hadzi, Simon Worthington and Oliver Lerone Schultz: VV12 after.video book

Special: ASMR workshop (parallel session on invitation only)
Lucille Calmel & Damien Petitot: Soft Screens Soft Skins Soft: an ASMR workshop

18:00: Closing Ceremony

• Andrew Alamango and Andrew Pace: Magna Żmien (Time Machine)

• Judit Kis: Practices Beyond the SELF

Day 4: Sunday – September 29, 2019

14:00: Replay Day
Please refer to the screening pages for the detailed screening schedule.

Schedule of Video Vortex #12 Screenings:

Day 1: Thursday – September 26, 2019

15:00: Pre-VV12 Screening: Dance

• Rita Al Cunha: Error 500, 1:44

• Daniela Lucato: When I dance, 67 min.

• Vito Alfarano: I have a dream, 11:00

17:00: Curated screening – The W:OW

Wilfried Agricola de Cologne, 61 min

Day 2: Friday – September 27, 2019

20:00: Screening I: Structures

• Adam Fish: Points of Presence, 18:46

• Albert Merino: Bestiary, 5:10

• Lotte Louise de Jong: BRB, 5:25

• Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum: Go Move Be, 9:50

• Samantha Harvey: Auto tune me, 4:31

21:00: Screening II: Internet, Sadness, Love

• Andres Azzolina: Puntomov, 15:15

• Glasz DeCuir: Yes I saw an angel, 2:37

• María José Ribas: Torremolinos Match, 8:51

• Pedro Gomes: Mutilated Dreams, 10:22

• Salvador Miranda: Aim Down Sights, 7:30

22:00: Screening III: Myself Any Other Night

• Sofia Braga: I stalk myself, 13:26

• María José Ribas: Seismographical, 2:03

• Zimu Zhang & Zheng Lu Xinyuan: Just like any other night, 29:33

Day 4: Sunday – September 29, 2019

14:00: Screening I: Structures

• Adam Fish: Points of Presence, 18:46

• Albert Merino: Bestiary, 5:10

• Lotte Louise de Jong: BRB, 5:25

• Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum: Go Move Be, 9:50

• Samantha Harvey: Auto tune me, 4:31

15:00: Screening II: Internet, Sadness, Love

• Andres Azzolina: Puntomov, 15:15

• Glasz DeCuir: Yes I saw an angel, 2:37

• María José Ribas: Torremolinos Match, 8:51

• Pedro Gomes: Mutilated Dreams, 10:22

• Salvador Miranda: Aim Down Sights, 7:30

16:00: Screening III: Myself Any Other Night

• Sofia Braga: I stalk myself, 13:26

• María José Ribas: Seismographical, 2:03

• Zimu Zhang & Zheng Lu Xinyuan: Just like any other night, 29:33

17:00: Screening IV: The W:OW

• Wilfried Agricola de Cologne: Curated screening – The W:OW (ca 60 min.)

18:00: Screening V: Crash Theory
•  Adam Fish: Crash Theory, 45:00

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Restorative Justice & AI paper presentation @MEA conference

Adnan presented the paper on restorative justice and AI during the MEA conference in Toronto.

MEDIA ETHICS. Human Ecology in a Connected World was the 20th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association (MEA), a four-day international conference hosted by the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto.

THE CONFERENCE drew attention to the ways that contemporary communication practices and emerging technologies are marked by ethical issues and decisive political, societal and cultural questions.

WITH THIS AGENDA, conference participants shared research that engages with the nature of contemporary media, communication, and technological struggle, and the potential that communication, media, and digital technologies hold for enacting positive social change.

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ELIA Artistic Research Platform Meeting

University of Malta joins ELIA on the artistic research patform.

The Artistic Research Platform is a virtual and, occasionally, a physical forum for institutional, programme and project leaders; heads of departments; researchers; PhD students and supervisors of ELIA member institutions who are professionally involved in and want to contribute to, the development of artistic research.

You can join the VIRTUAL PLATFORM to receive specific updates on the topic of artistic research by registering below. Registration to the platform is free, however, it is restricted to professionals affiliated with ELIA member institutions.

The first Artistic Research Platform Meeting, which took place from 13-14 June 2019 in Vienna, dealt with the question of how higher arts education institutions can provide a substantial and sustainable framework for artistic research. Particularly, the discussion focused on what artistic research projects and artistic research doctoral programmes need in terms of:

  • Infrastructure and Spaces;
  • Critical Mass, Community and Feedback process;
  • Multidisciplinarity vs Discipline Specifics;
  • Dissemination, Open Access, Open Research Data;
  • Handling Stereotypes and Institutional Challenges;
  • Internal and External Funding schemes.
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boattr.uk @DCAC

Adnan presented the boattr.uk project at the DCAC conference.

The aim of the DCAC 2019 is to bring together technology, art and culture in the Digital Era, as well as to provide a forum on current research and applications incorporating technology, art and culture, to deepen cooperation,exchange experiences and good practices.

Researchers, artists and scholars are encouraged to participate in the discussion about the interaction between interdisciplinary creativity, technology, arts and culture. Authors are invited to present original papers for oral or poster presentation in the fields of New Media Arts and Digital Culture.

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Malta joins European Forum for Advanced Practices (EFAP)

The proposed European Forum for Advanced Practices (EFAP) aims to initiate and host a network of
researchers, practitioners, and theorists from across Europe who are actively shaping innovative and
transformative forms of research across and among many artistic and academic fields, industry, the
private sector, and civil society. Their research activities, which are often hybrid in method, are usually consigned to the categories ‘practice-based’ or ‘artistic research.’ While both of these terms can be broadly descriptive, they are too general to keep pace with the inventive experimentalism of practice-oriented research activity. In particular, they fail to capture the extent to which these new and cross-disciplinary collaborative research practices are reshaping the institutions and contexts around them. Rather than adhere to established ‘best practices’ or seek, as ‘advance studies’ do, to advance particular disciplinary or institutional contexts, these research practices aim to reconfigure conventional assumptions and approaches. Their strength lies precisely in their ability to radically reformulate problems outside of conventional frames, and to draw on a wide range of epistemologies, protocols, and practices to propose innovative or even transformative forms of impact. In doing so, they redefine assumptions about who the stakeholders are, how they relate to each other and their fields, and, crucially, what the nature of the stakes can be.

For these reasons, EFAP proposes a new umbrella term, Advanced Practices, to describe this
widespread ‘research turn’ composed of cross-disciplinary practices and hybridized methods across
disparate contexts. EFAP believes that recognizing (1) the fundamentally advanced nature of these
activities, (2) surveying and studying specific examples and programmatic contexts in order to
understand how they can be nurtured at all levels, and (3) developing vocabularies and frameworks as
dynamic and generative as the practices themselves to articulate and assess them are essential steps
in realizing their potential for European society.
This initiative comes in response to widespread need among academic and civic institutions, as well as
the private sector, to clarify the protocols, means, and potentials of practice-oriented research activity.
EFAP sets out to:

  • survey the range of emerging practice-driven research modes;
  • develop new vocabularies and typologies for describing and assessing the operations and
  • methodologies of these emergent research forms;
  • develop provisional criteria and flexible procedures for valuing and evaluating them; and
  • propose flexible principles, structures, and procedures, for the fostering of new practice-driven
  • research for institutions, funding agencies, and the private sector.

EFAP’s aim is to promote both the development of advanced forms of research and advanced ways of
translating their practices and findings into teaching curricula, incentive frameworks, innovation projects, and multi-layered, matrixed responses to complex societal challenges.