Bilyana Palankasova
Research title: Valuing festivals as incubators of digital creativity
Research Summary
Doctoral Research
My PhD thesis considers the role of festivals of art and digital culture in the historicisation and institutionalisation of art and technology. Through archival and documentary methods and curatorial practice, I examine: firstly, curatorial methods of commissioning and presenting art and technology; and secondly, organisational behaviours and institutional transformations of festivals. Through interrogating curatorial and commissioning activities and methods, the project seeks to uncover value structures within the field of art and technology, particularly with reference to transdisciplinary practices and process-oriented and discursive forms, such as workshops, labs, symposia. By tracing the practices and development of multiple festivals, I want to uncover the relationship between curatorial approaches to programming and organisational and governance shifts. Ultimately, the research aims to articulate how festivals generate value through their practices and their role in the process of institutionalisation of digital art.
Background and wider interests
I am a curatorial researcher with background in contemporary art, digital media, curatorial practice and art history. Some of my fields of interest are:
- Creative practices employing discursive methods, process-oriented curatorial and artistic practice, post-disciplinary artistic practice, particularly in collaboration with science and technology and projects with distinc social dimension.
- Institutional praxis and processes of institutionalisation of emergent art forms and their cultural organisations in the expanded context of the “artworld”. How are emergent artistic practices and (micro)-institutions contributing to a landscape of para-academic and para-institutional practices, which remain largely undocumented and undervalued, since they operate in an extra-institutional space?
- Artists’ positions in “non-art spaces” and the potential for artistic interventions for social development through the involvement of artistic methodologies into governance and policy. How could artistic methodologies render visible usually concealed power dynamics reliant on technological (and other) infrastructure?
- Machine vision and how it determines our experience of space and landscape, via global telecommunication infrastructure and data. Relationship between landscape and infrastructure and how this informs the construction of geographies and localities. How are our experiences of space and time altered and conditioned by technology?
Supervisors
Grants
- Research Training Support Award (Feb 2023) - Research trip to Helsinki for Contacts: 20 Years of Pixelache symposium.
- Research Training Support Award (Dec 2022) - Research trip to Berlin for transmediale festival.
- Engagement Funding Award (SGSAH/AHRC) - Curatorial practice research field work.
- Collaborative Doctoral Award 2020-2024 (SGSAH/AHRC) - Full scholarship.
- Scottish Funding Council Award 2018-2019 - Tuition fees for MLitt Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) at The Glasgow SChool of Art
