Archival Speculations: Artistic Research and Transmedia Practice

Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts 2026

July 20–31, 2026

Course Premise

Archives are not merely repositories of the past. They are active sites where memories, histories, desires, and futures are negotiated. This course approaches the archive simultaneously as material, method, and artistic strategy. Participants will explore archival practices in contemporary art while activating personal and collective archives through experimental transmedia processes.

Working across photography, film, video, sound, text, performance, installation, and digital media, students will develop individual projects that ultimately converge into a collective multimedia installation. The course combines artistic research, critical reflection, technical experimentation, and collaborative exhibition-making.

WEEK 1

Mapping the Archive

Session 1 — July 20

Introduction: Artistic Research and the Archive

Topics:

  • Introduction of participants
  • Course structure and expectations
  • What is artistic research?
  • What is an archive?
  • The archive as process rather than repository
  • Critical artistic research as transmedia practice

Activities:

  • Introduction to the space
  • Presentation of participants’ practices
  • Archival mapping exercise
  • Collective discussion

Output:

  • Initial archive inventory
  • Research questions

References:

Harun Farocki films:

Session 2 — July 21

Archival Practices in Contemporary Art

Topics:

  • Archive as intervention
  • Archive as fiction
  • Archive as speculation
  • Contemporary artistic references

Artists:

  • Harun Farocki
  • Walid Raad
  • Susan Hiller
  • Akram Zaatari
  • Forensic Architecture
  • Hito Steyerl
  • Christian Kosmas Mayer
  • Pablo Martínez-Zárate

Activities:

  • Case-study discussions
  • Speculative archive exercise

Output:

  • Preliminary project proposal

Session 3 — July 22

Personal Archives: Narratives and Materialities

Topics:

  • Reading personal archives
  • Family archives
  • Institutional archives
  • Found materials
  • Material qualities of media

Activities:

  • Archive excavation workshop
  • Narrative mapping

Output:

  • Identification of key materials
  • First project sketches

Session 4 — July 23

The Body and the Archive

Topics:

  • Embodied memory
  • Performance and archival activation
  • Oral histories
  • The body as archive

Artists:

  • Rebecca Schneider
  • Tania Bruguera
  • La Pocha Nostra
  • Marina Abramović
  • Coco Fusco
  • Aura Arreola + Pablo MZ

Activities:

  • Performative exercises
  • Memory activation exercises
  • Recording sessions

Output:

  • Performative component proposals

Session 5 — July 24

Project Development and Installation Planning

Topics:

  • Individual consultations
  • Exhibition thinking
  • Spatial narratives
  • Installation formats

Activities:

  • Studio work
  • Collective review

Output:

  • Project roadmap
  • Technical requirements sheet

Session 6 — July 25

Independent Production Day

No formal class.

Participants work independently on:

  • filming
  • recording
  • editing
  • collecting materials
  • developing prototypes

Optional individual consultations.

July 26

Rest Day

WEEK 2

Activating the Archive

Session 7 — July 27

Aesthetics and Ethics of the Archive

Topics:

  • Ownership
  • Representation
  • Testimony
  • Absence and erasure
  • Care and responsibility

Readings:

Activities:

  • Seminar discussion
  • Final project review

Output:

  • Final production plan

Session 8 — July 28

Production Studio

Topics:

  • Technical troubleshooting
  • Installation design
  • Spatial relationships

Activities:

  • Studio production
  • One-on-one mentoring

Output:

  • Advanced project prototypes

Session 9 — July 29

Collective Installation Production

Topics:

  • Collective authorship
  • Relations between works
  • Exhibition dramaturgy

Activities:

  • Fabrication
  • Testing projections, sound, objects

Output:

  • Installation components completed

Session 10 — July 30

Exhibition Assembly

Topics:

  • Display strategies
  • Spatial composition
  • Light, sound, and movement

Activities:

  • Rearrangement of the space
  • Installation of works
  • Final testing

Output:

  • Collective exhibition completed

Session 11 — July 31

Open Studio and Closing Session

Activities:

  • Open studio presentation
  • Collective walkthrough
  • Reflection circle
  • Documentation of projects

Questions:

  • What can archives do?
  • How has the project transformed?
  • What remains unresolved?

Final Output:
A collective multimedia installation composed of individual and collaborative works developed through archival research and transmedia experimentation.

COURSE MATERIALS

Introduction: Artistic Research and the Archive

“In recent years, I have a hard time judging all these digital images and all these codecs that are coming up. I don’t know what to say about colour correction, because it no longer looks like a photographic image, it’s more like a chalk painting, it has no luminiscence. So there are a lot of changes that have confused me in my aesthetic judgment about how I would like to have an image or whatever. But that’s also liberating, because you must question your standards again, and that is what I’m trying to do” HF, 2014

3rd Flusser Lecture, 1999, PDF

“While I was looking for a way to order my collection of material , I thought of the dictionaries, which provide chronological evidence of the usage of a word or expression and then I noticed that there’s nothing that could correspond to a dictionary for film. What should it be called, this thing I was missing? One could ca ll it an “image book”, one could perhaps call it a “thesaurus” or an “image treasury”. one could al so perhaps call it an “archive for cinematic expressions”.” HF

“A contribution of this type aims at sharpening the consciousness of language, and surely there should be something similar to educate the consciousness of cinematic language! I’m mainly concerned that the texts in this archive find their reason purely within themselves, those that don’t derive their right to exist from a system. And so, my first contribution to this imagined archive was Workers Leaving the Factory, and the second The Hands and their Meaning, 1997. Presently, I’m working on a third contribution. I want to do something on prisons: how does the prison appear in film?” HF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p4VkqL_BJthmXPlvyFdwu1RnvAyEf4Y6/view?usp=drivesdk

Diagrammatic imagination

Didi Huberman: the visual & the visible

Eccentric Pedagogy. Artistic Research in Times of Crisis.

Página 97 del manifiesto de la Pedagogía Excéntrica.

Poiesis is a Greek term meaning “to bring forth” or “to create.” More than the production of an object, it describes the emergence of something that did not previously exist. In philosophy, poiesis names the creative act through which the invisible becomes visible and the possible becomes actual. Within artistic research, it can be understood as a mode of inquiry in which thinking and making are inseparable, allowing new forms of knowledge to emerge through artistic practice.


When we examine introductory texts on methods and methodology on artistic research, we can extract a series of activities that are understood as valuable, or at least possible, methods, next to the traditional interviews, observations, surveys, focus groups, or case studies: • making art/design work • observation and drawing (in all forms) • sketchbook/notebook, idiosyncratic notation/symbols • visual diary/self-reflection/personal narrative • critical writing • photography, video, sound • modelling, experimentation with materials • concept mapping, diagrams • use of metaphor and analogy • organisational and analytical matrices, flow charts, storyboards • multimedia/hypermedia applications • modelling/simulations, soft systems • electronic databases, visual and textual glossaries and archives • annotating • expositioning (“ausstellen”) • designing (“entwerfen”) • experimenting • arranging • improvising • installation • staging • inter-action3 • intervention • collective work • composing • modelling • notating • rehearsing • working serially • singing • translating (pgs. 5-6)

Algunas intuiciones de mis propios procesos

Eccentric Pedagogy. Artistic Research in times of crisis.

Radicality as method

I cannot fix my subject. It is always restless, and reels with a natural intoxicationMontaigne

Media, Gaze and Memory

Title of the book by Getino and Solanas that evoques a huge tradition in Latin American Political film
Glauber Rocha – Aesthetics of Hunger and Aesthetics of Dream

ANA-ARCHAEOLOGY (Deep time of the media, Zielinski https://archive.org/details/deeptimeofmediat0000ziel)

THE ARCHIVE AS A CRITICAL EVENT

Estas imágenes son verdad. Microarchivo de la ignominia.

https://fundacionesyconquistas.mx

POETICS OF INFORMATION

https://dsctlatelolco.net

The Atlas Group, Walid Raad / Catálogo A, B. Walid Raad

ARCHAEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

forensics & artistic research

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CAqSfSIeKw8QRSUC1ySG_idWMLFc7_d8/view

“The ancient Greeks used the word aisthesis to describe that which
pertains to the senses. Aesthetics thus concerns the experience of the world.
It involves sensing – the capacity to register or to be affected, and sensemaking
– the capacity for such sensing to become knowledge of some kind.
The finding or invention of means to achieve such effects is to aestheticise.
Defining aesthetics in this way allows us to derive two other terms:
hyper-aesthetics , which we consider to be the augmentation and elaboration
of such experience, and hyperaesthesia , which we consider to be the state in
which experience overloads or collapses, and, as a result, sensation stops
making sense.
In this expanded meaning, as a way of sensing the world, aesthetics does
not exclusively refer to a property or capacity of humans. It equally refers to
other sensing organisms, such as animals and plants, which themselves
apprehend their environment. Further, we argue that sensing is also found in
material surfaces and substances, on which traces of impact or slower
processes of change are registered, including in digital and computational
sensors, which themselves detect, register and predict in multiple novel
ways.” (p. 33).

Huffschmid, Anne (2020). The Human Remains. Forensic Landscapes and Counter-Forensic Agencies in Violent Presents – The Mexican Case. Alemania: Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ev6Te58Sf1KkO6mi6P1XcqSfImD-epv1/view

Wizeman and Fuller, Investigative Aesthetics. Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth; On Forensic Architecture, conversation with Eyal Wizeman

Forensic Landscapes

Forensic Landscapes: notas de arte 1, 2, 3, 4

CARTOGRAPHY

https://atlas.tryspaces.org/

Transposiciones, with Julieta Gil (vid 1, vid 2, vid 3)

ARCHIVAL CHOREOGRAPHIES