SENSING LIVING SYSTEMS at the 16th International Conference on Artistic Research (SAR)
SENSING LIVING SYSTEMS took part in the 16th International Conference on Artistic Research (SAR), the largest gathering dedicated to practice-based research through the arts. At the University of Porto, the 2025 edition explored the theme of Resonance as a transformative, connective, and critical dimension of artistic research. We contributed in two formats: a SIG session and the poster session.
As part of the Special Interest Group Co-Agency: Artistic Research as Transformative Practice, we joined the performative and dialogical presentation COLLECTING TURNS + RETURNS IN OPEN CIRCLES – Encounters of Co-Agency in Artistic Research. The session explored co-agency through practices grounded in ecological sensitivity, material thinking, and contextual responsiveness. Artists and researchers shared brief but intense insights into their work – bringing a sound, a word, an object, a scent – as an interface for collective reflection and exchange, inviting participants into a shared zone of practice-based transformation.
Contributors: Alexander Damianisch, Paul Divjak, Nikolaus Gansterer, Emily Huurdeman, Anke Haarmann, and Jeanette Mueller.
In the poster session, we presented the olfactory installation CONCEPTION OF SŸS – The Smell of a Mythological Being, part of our Series of Scenographic Studies. Visitors were invited to smell six specially composed scents and cast a vote in response to the question: “Imagine a being that knows and feels everything about connectedness and interaction – how would it smell?” By engaging directly with scent and bypassing conventional cognitive access points, the installation sparked exchange around embodied knowledge production and sensory methodologies in research – demonstrating how artistic research can offer poetic, participatory, and transformative encounters that resonate across disciplines and beyond the academic sphere.
May 2025 – University of Porto, Portugal
