Diakron is a platform and studio for transdisciplinary research and practice. We establish collaborations across disciplinary backgrounds and institutional frameworks. Our own backgrounds are composed of experiences from artistic practices, curatorial practices, social sciences and graphic design.
Diakron is based on explorative research as a core value. This means, that we adapt what our practices do and what the organization is, according to the research projects we undertake.
We are currently interested in creative and explorative ways of identifying and dealing with changes, that invisibly permeate or unavoidably overwhelm ways of life. This work is tied to concerned interests in various pervasive ecological, humanitarian, existential, digital, or economic shifts. We approach these issues through experimentation with our own ways of working and the relationships we maintain through our practices.
Our modes of engagement, processes of making and research methodologies grow out of our projects and collaborations. We combine our transdisciplinary outset with an open-ended and relational approach to methodological experimentation. Outputs and expressions are not predetermined, but are developed in a responsive manner according to each research process.
Amitai Romm
Artist. MFA, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Visual Art. Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Vienna
Asger Behncke Jacobsen
Graphic designer. BFA, Gerrit Rietveld Academie
Aslak Aamot Helm
PostDoc, Medical Museion, Diakron and Serpentine Galleries. PhD, Space, Place and Technology at Roskilde University
Bjarke Hvass Kure
Artist. MFA, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Visual Art
David Hilmer Rex
PostDoc, Human Centred Science and Digital Technology at The Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Danish Design Center, The Systems Innovation Initiative at The Rockwool Foundation and Diakron. PhD, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Aarhus University.
Victoria Ivanova
Curator and writer. R&D Strategic Lead, Arts Technologies, Serpentine Galleries. PhD, Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London Southbank University.
+45 30271851
email@diakron.dk
In this issue we explore the infrastructures that influence the thinking, production and effects of art. The focus is a thinking of infrastructure as a framework of production, something that artistic practice is formed by but also constantly collaborates with, exceeds and modulates.
In his text “Is the Academy of Fine Arts Worth Debating in 1979?” artist Willy Ørskov briefly mentions his unrealised idea for a so-called “institute for aesthetic planning”. The institute would presumably function as a transdisciplinary state organ, weaving together pressing matters of politics and urban planning with aesthetic practices. His idea points toward a lack, or perhaps more precisely an unexplored potential, stemming from the absence and deficiency of infrastructure. For him, it seems, infrastructural changes could become instigators that alters arts place and function in society.
What Ørskovs perspective opens for is an imaginary of artistic organization that reaches beyond art institutions. This view is one that looks for stronger ties between artistic environments across disciplinary or national borders. It is also one that challenges modern notions of art and non-art, by delimiting the possible connections for channeling resources to include other institutions than traditional cultural ones.
Leading on from this, we could see infrastructure as a productive enabler, producing contexts and practices, and perhaps even new relationships where none existed before. In this issue we look at the intersections of artistic practice and infrastructure. We are trying to think about infrastructure in a way that understands it as key to understanding the limits and potentials of art, seeing it as an integral producer of practice and discourse.