How do we think surfaces today? Are they living membranes, hermetic layers of superficiality, “hyperobjects,” systemic tissues, or something entirely different? How to make visible that which withdraws but still exists all around us, and perhaps with us?

During autumn 2022, thirteen Norwegian and international scholars, curators, artists, and architects have gathered at ROM for kunst og arkitektur; at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design; and online to discuss the status of the surface in our contemporary times as part of Metode’s first volume Deep Surface. The participants were selected after an Open Call for experimental essays draft. The invited participants share an ambitious and risky research attitude that creatively combines theory and artistic/architectural practice.

Led by Editor-in-Chief of Metode, Ingrid Halland, the group has engaged in an in-depth and transparent peer-review process with Metode’s Editorial Board and affiliated scholars. Through open-ended discussions, the group has explored the different symbolic, functional, and economic values of surfaces in the age of the Anthropocene. The key focus of the discussions has been, however, method; how do we think surfaces today, both with and through art and architecture?

Professor Sybille Krämer and Professor Tim Ingold have joined the group by sharing and discussing drafts of their keynote essays for Deep Surface. In response to the Open Call, Krämer has written essay “The Cultural Technique of Flattening” and Ingold has written the essay “The Earth, The Sky and The Ground Between.” All contributions to Deep Surface will be made public on Metode on 26^th January 2023, accompanied by public conversations curated by the participants.  

Metode is run by ROM for kunst og arkitektur: Ingrid Halland (editor-in-chief), Gjertrud Steinsvåg (project leader), and the editorial board, consisting of Victoria Bugge Øye, Gustav Jørgen Pedersen, Anna Ulrikke Andersen, Sara Yazdani, Marie-Alix Isdahl, and Anders Rubing.  Metode is supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

Participants

Andreas Ervik is a Norwegian artist, with a PhD from the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. As an artist, Ervik’s practice is multimodal, ranging from image and music production to site-specific installations and workshops. Ervik’s research is an extension of his artistic practice, applying creative methods to examine media technologies, platforms and content. In his artistic practice and academic research, Ervik is interested in how contemporary culture is formed by ecosystems and evolutionary dynamics. In 2022 his debut book, Becoming Human Amid Diversions, is published by Palgrave Macmillan. E-mail: hei@andreaservik.com  

Beatrice Zaidenberg is a trained art historian working at the intersection of art and science. She is part of the Dusts Institut in Vienna and the artist-research collective LIMB. Currently, she is a curatorial trainee at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe where she co-curated e.g. the exhibition “BioMedia,” which provides insights into possible forms of coexistence between organic life and artificial agents. E-mail: bzaidenberg@gmail.com 

Neda Genova is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. She works at the intersection of cultural, media and post-communist studies, by focusing on spatial and temporal transformations in Bulgaria’s post-1989 context. She is especially interested in thinking about surfaces as dynamic, material-semiotic sites of political enunciation. Neda holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, and has taught at Goldsmiths, University of Winchester, London South Bank, and Regent’s Universities in the UK as well as at the Henrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany. She is a member of the editorial collective of the Bulgarian-language journal dVERSIA. E-mail: Neda.Genova@warwick.ac.uk

Marius Moldvær is a visual artist, writer, and educator with a BFA from The National Academy of Art, Department of Photography, Bergen, Norway, and a Master ́s degree in Critical Theory and Creative Research from The Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR. His work is conducted on the intersection between practice and theory through mediums such as textile, photography, sculpture and writing, and formats such as exhibitions, lectures, and publications. Between the different parts that make up his practice there are no set boundaries or constraint, but the different mediums and formats blend into each other to construct paradigms that cut cross-multiple disciplines and ideas. Both through, and within these paradigms Moldvær interfere with, or disrupt linear narratives and set history, where knowledge, experience, and landscape continually osculate between personal stories, history, and collective memory. E-mail: mariusmoldvaer@gmail.com

Severino Alfonso and Loukia Tsafoulia are registered architects, educators and researchers. They are founders of PLB studio design and research practice, and Assistant Professors at the College of Architecture and the Built Environment, Thomas Jefferson University where they co-direct the Synesthetic Research and Design Lab. Their scholarly research is positioned at the intersection of responsive environments, cognitive sciences, digital technologies and the computational theory of design in the 1950s-1970s in Europe and North America. They both hold a Post-Professional MS in Advanced Architectural Design from the Graduate School of Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. Their work has been exhibited in international art and design venues such as theTrajan's Market Museum of the Imperial Fora in Rome, Italy (2022), at the 2021 European Cultural Center, Venice Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy, and at the Municipal Theater of Piraeus in Athens, Greece (2021-2022). Prior to joining TJU, they taught at Barnard + Columbia Architecture, Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, New York Institute of Technology, the Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York and at the New York City College of Technology. 

Severino holds two MS in Urban Design and Advanced Architecture respectively from the school of architecture in Madrid (ETSAM) where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate. He has worked with international architectural studios such as Carme Pinos, Angel Fernandez Alba and Federico Soriano in Spain, Lomar Arkitekter in Sweden and Per-forma Studio, KDF Architecture and Natalie Jeremijenko in the United States. 

Loukia received her diploma in Architecture Engineering from the National Polytechnic School of Athens where she is a Ph.D. candidate. She is the editor of the book publication titled “Transient Spaces” and editor of the upcoming book “KatOikia, Housing in the Age of Rapid Globalization, Ubiquitous Technologies, and Information”. She has collaborated with Studio Dror, LEESER Architecture, and Jorge Otero Pailos in New York, and with K+T Architecture and the NTUUrban Environment Lab in Athens. E-mail: Loukia.Tsafoulia@jefferson.edu and Severino.Alfonso@jefferson.edu

Jenny Perlin makes 16mm films, videos, and animations. Her films work with and against the documentary tradition, incorporating innovative stylistic techniques to emphasize issues of truth, misunderstanding, and personal history. Her projects look closely at ways in which social machinations are reflected in the fragments of daily life. She is a PhD Research Fellow at the Oslo National Academy of Art and director of The Hoosac Institute, an interdisciplinary platform for the arts. E-mail: jennperl@khio.no 

Adam Hudec is a researcher, architect, and activist, currently a PhD student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His research is based on the intersection of science, art and architecture, where interdisciplinarity has become a tool to explore hidden or ignored anomalies of the environment. His projects have been published internationally in various exhibitions including the Bi-City Biennale in Shenzhen, the BIO26 Biennial in Ljubljana and Venice Biennale 2022. Since 2019, Adam Hudec's activities are represented by Dust Institute, a research platform in Vienna that he co-founded. E-mail: a.hudeca@gmail.com

Julie Barfod is a qualified architect at Bergen School of Architecture. She works as a performing artist in the intersection between performing arts and visual arts. Barfod’s field of interest is currently linked to gender in creative processes with a focus on extended forms of craft, tool use, and movement. She is concerned with collective learning processes and interdisciplinary knowledge exchange. In ongoing projects, she collaborates with various dance artists on themes related to interior elements and homes where inherent impulses for self-reflection are expressed. E-mail: julie.barfod@gmail.com

Jakob Oredsson is an artist, architect, and scenographer, currently Artistic Research Fellow at Norwegian Theatre Academy with the project Scenography as Symbiosis, 2020-2023, which seeks to outline an ontology of scenography, exploring how scenography exists. After receiving a BA in scenography from NTA, Jakob studied architecture at The Cooper Union and The Pratt Institute in New York and received an MA in Architecture from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Oredsson has realized works in public, gallery and theatre contexts. Works which seek to queer binaries such as art-context, active-passive and culture-nature, accentuating ambiguity and embracing flat ontology. E-mail: mail@jakoboredsson.com

Nick Walkley is a PhD Research Fellow at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Previously, Walkley completed his BA(hons) and his BArch at the Manchester School of Architecture, followed by an MA at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and subsequently held positions within architectural profession and as a professional musician. He returned to academia in 2021 with interests in preservation, recording, rediscovery, renewal and reinterpretation of cultural heritage through digital technologies. His ongoing PhD dissertation takes the continuing trajectory of the Urnes Stave Church Portal as starting point for the investigation of ornamental architectural components, their study through reproduction and their projection into a digital future. E-mail: Nick.Walkley@aho.no

Benjamin Blackwell is a Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Manchester. After completing his BA (hons) and MArch in architecture at Manchester School of Architecture, and spending time in architectural practice, he completed his PhD in Architecture at the University of Manchester, which was completed in 2022. His research explores the infrastructures of knowledge creation and dissemination, looking both at buildings of scientific and technological research and development, and, more recently, at the design and use of secondary school buildings. E-mail: benjamin.blackwell@manchester.ac.uk 

In addition, the group has been joined by artists Petrine Vinje and Marte Eknæs who in different ways explore the notion of surface on their current work. Vinje is currently on display at the gallery F15 in Moss, Norway, with the exhibition Surfacing Solids and Eknæs will open her exhibition at ROM for kunst og arkitektur on 25^th January 2023.