Launching the Project

We have been preparing simularr for 2 1/2 years now, and we are finally ready to go! In March 2022, the decision board of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), following two peer reviews with excellent rating of our application, gave green light to the funding within its renowned Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK).

The roots of simularr are longer than our project formalisation, including various collaborative projects we have engaged in within the past six years—such as Sublim (Daily Rhythms Collective 2016), Chain Reaction (Daily Rhythms Collective, Rutz 2016), swarming + networking (Castillo, Grossegger, Rutz 2017), Meanderings (Castillo, Hofmüller, Raggam, Rutz 2017–2019), Iterations (2017–2020), or Through Segments (Kang, Pirrò, Pozzi, Rutz 2020), to name only a few. Collaborative practices have been at the heart of many endeavours, including duos and participatory projects, and in the past two years we have worked out and published the draft for the research agenda, for instance with Three Spaces (xCoAx 2021) and Simultaneous Relaying as a Transformative Mode of Artistic Research (SAR Conference 2021).

The most tangible event in anticipation of simularr was the pilot project Swap Space that took place in spring 2022, bringing together a group of artists and researchers within a scaled down experiment, sounding the approach and methods envisioned for simularr. We are now editing a booklet on this pilot, which will be published by Reagenz before the end of the year.

Behind the scenes, we have also gathered a group of like-minded artists-researchers and conducted a few informal meet-ups with them, and we hope and expect that many of them will participate in the project’s activities over the next three years.