Does Artistic Research Produce Knowledge? A Five-Fold Distinction (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction: Art and research [Introducció: Art i investigació]
2017
Focusing on the relations between art and research, this single topic issue was the result of several conversations held over the last few years between members of the CAIRE, the Experimental Art and Research Cluster. Founded by four research groups at the UAB, UB, UPF and UOC together with the HANGAR artistic production and research between in Barcelona, the objective of the CAIRE is precisely to contribute toward artistic research by capitalizing on its specific and unique features. In this respect, taking advantage of the framework offered by the symposium Questioning Aesthetics: Arts Research & Aesthetics, which took place from 20th to 22nd June 2017 at the Palau Virreina in Barcelona, organized by the UAB, the Transdisciplinary Aesthetics Foundation and Banco Sabadell Foundation, we issued an open call for articles that focus on the relation between the Arts and Research, which, after the peer-review process, ended up as this node of the journal Artnodes. Therefore, the first five articles are written by authors who took part at the aforementioned symposium at the time, while the rest of the articles in the single topic issue come from other writers who share their experiences and reflections with us from a range of different perspectives and approaches. The end result fulfils the desire expressed in the original open call for articles, in which we highlighted the diversity of approaches that exist in relation to the nature of the interrelation between art and research, including research for art, research on art, and finally, research in art, which is claimed by many to be the most genuine type of artistic research. Moreover, the selection of the articles published here in one way or another relates to the four lines specified in the open call, linked both to the theoretical perspective for and on artistic http://artnodes.uoc.edu artnodes
English version of "Künstlerische Forschung", in Hans-Peter Schwarz (Hg.): Zeichen nach vorn. 125 Jahre Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich. Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich, Zürich, 2003
Knowledge in its current form is not identical to the knowledge of the sciences. Scientific knowledge is a specific kind of discourse that is set off from the discourse genres of other, non-scientific areas of competence. In concert, they all form a diversity of essentially equivalent and equally necessary systems. Nonetheless, the currently prevalent style of thinking is that cultivated by the sciences and the humanities. And it is primarily scientific technology that has proven to be the most efficient contributor to contemporary society's focus on innovation. Scholarship and the sciences also constitute the last bastion of a culture that exists exclusively as high culture. Scientific research is a curious mixture of ideology and practice, of realistic procedures and unreal demands. The need to resort to scientific support in order to reinforce the relevance or status of a given area of competence has become obsolete. In this paper I shall outline a few thoughts on the character of research in the fine arts. The concept of research is closely allied with the sciences. Even so, it is fruitful to apply this term to the pragmatic context of artistic endeavour although it is not possible to address the concepts of research and art in greater depth in this context.
The Problem of Artistic Research
Sisyphus — Journal of Education, 2015
Although almost every debate about artistic research highlights its novelty in references to «uncertainty», »indefinability», and to its lack of identity whilst «bound to a tradition external to itself», this novelty has lasted for a few decades already. Many of the problems raised today are to be found back when research and art education began to relate within the academic context in the 1980s. So where is the speculative discussion on its uncertainty taking artistic research to? Is a solution intended to be found? Is there a problem to be solved? Through ‘productivitism’ this text argues that the aprioristic idea that artistic research is problematic has been securing its state of pendency and increasing its fragility. The final part of the article suggests a creative potential and a challenging dimension in the process of institutionalization, and ends by pointing out possible topics of work for a shared agenda with contemporary art.
Objects of Study or Commodification of Knowledge? Remarks on Artistic Research
2009
We read Capital as philosophers, and therefore posed it a different question. To go straight to the point, let us admit: we posed it the question of its relation to its object, hence both the question of the specificity of its object, and the question of the specificity of its relation to that object, i.e., the question of the nature of the type of discourse set to work to handle this object, the question of scientific research. – Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, 1969.
2018
To inquire, create, unveil, discover, invent, and express: these are pleasant tasks at the psychic root of desire for art and research. When curiosity, the spirit of the game, the questioning turns into a career-in the dual sense of professionalism and pursuit, competition and eagerness to win-, those pleasant and free inquiries are fed back into the complexity of the values of use and change. It is then difficult to think about research without addressing certain characteristics of our cultural, technological, social, institutional present times. Culture is a system of transmission by non-genetic procedures, through material and immaterial elements that catalyse learning processes seeking reproduction and repetition. The more despotic, the more a culture will want that self-replication to be seamless with no changes, for which it will create learning systems, artifacts, stories, rites, myths, doctrines, techniques, and coercive, instigator or seductive systems. This is the reason why anthropologist Edward T. Hall warned that all culture is, in itself-by its exclusiveness and latency-dictatorial. Due to repetition and contingency, to what is mandatory and what is not forbidden, the degrees of freedom are the cause and effect of cultural diversity.
Claiming the Legacy of the Artist-Researcher
2013
Gothenburg and Pitea. Related qualitative research disciplines with a focus on practice have existed for much longer, primarily in the social sciences, but to some extent also in medicine. In the present paper, we suggest that the development of artistic research is at a point where it is no longer productive to discuss it as a field in development in which methods and formats are in a constant flux, but where we need instead to discuss a set of defining frames and methods for researchers to use or depart from. This is not to say that a single method should (or could) be used for all artistic research but rather to state that there is a great need to establish workable methods that can serve as starting points for future development. Mika Hannula makes a similar diagnosis and argues that it is time for artistic research to adopt a bolder position in relation to the institutions: Since artistic research has been accepted and established as credible research within art education and a...
A Paradigm Analysis of the Common Origins of Artistic and Scientific Methods of Research
The “Scientific Revolution” refers to historical, social, and institutional changes in thought and belief that unfolded in Europe between roughly 1550-1700. Given that the scientific method is only several centuries old, why aren’t researchers and scholars just as conversant about those successful pre-scientific and artistic bases for knowledge-building and modeling our understandings that preceded the establishment of early scientific methods and arguably laid the groundwork for the revolution to follow? This article begins by exploring the “missing links” and precursors for the successes of the scientific method which are hidden in plain sight in the various arts of memory and other methodological experiments in the rational preservation and advance of experiential knowledge documented most thoroughly between 1300 and the early 1500s during the Renaissance in visual arts, literature, and other symbolic forms. This analysis concludes with some important speculations about the future of arts-based research in light of its illuminated legacy.
Artistic Research: Context, Perspectives & A Definition
2017
Excerpt of the introduction: In the first part, I will dissect the term research, dipping into the everlasting dispute about art versus science, coming back to the initial term of artistic research and giving ideas of what it is and what it can contribute to scientific research. In the last part I will focus on the education reformation, elaborating detected challenges and chances it might bring. As literature, the essay draws – amongst others – from the book Artistic research published by philosopher, editor and curator Annette W. Balkema and philosopher, editor, curator and Professor for Artistic Research at the MaHKU, Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design Henk Slager, who is also leading the publication of the Journal of Artistic Research (JAR). It is a collection of essays and discussions from a two-day symposium on artistic research. Other sources are websites of art academies involved in the development of artistic research, different speeches on the topic and the Belgian philosopher, writer and critic Dieter Lesage’s text Who’s Afraid of Artistic Research? On measuring artistic research output (2009). As the evolution of artistic research is still ongoing, I found it important to include a variety of different opinions, in order to detect common tendencies.
Insight and Intensification - Some Thoughts about Artistic Research
English version of "Einsicht und Intensivierung - Überlegungen zur künstlerischen Forschung", in Elke Bippus (Hg.): Kunst des Forschens. Praxis eines ästhetischen Denkens. Diaphanes, Zürich/Berlin, 2009
What is it that distinguishes artistic research? Can one speak of a tradition of artistic problems? The tendency is to concentrate on trying to define the essential features of artistic research. This involves inquiry into not only how artistic research differs from but also how it resembles or is comparable to scientific research and philosophical work. As far the pragmatics of research are concerned, there is no fundamental difference between the systems of art and scholarship. And in both fields, it is often no easy task to distinguish substance, i.e. what is essential and intrinsic to the conditions and rules of the research process, from accident, i.e. what factors should be assigned to the external operations of research. One might inquire into whether artistic research works with special methods, whether it makes use of a specific set of tools, whether it typically addresses a specific subject of research, and whether it produces knowledge that is characteristic of art.
Field, 2018
This paper presents the outline of ten years of research projects situated between art and anthropology that I have initiated, coordinated and participated in, both as an artist and as an anthropologist. These projects took place in Athens, Greece, between 2007 and 2017 and certain of their common characteristics are the following: All research projects included a rather large number of participants coming mostly from anthropology and the visual arts but also from disciplines such as history and theory of art, cultural studies and other fields. The projects were initiated inside the academy but surpassed its limitations, with students and teachers having equal say on the development of the activities that focused on different social issues. Each project enhanced both diversity and coherence, by giving form to the different personal, social and political concerns of the group members, while promoting exchanges amongst them and collaborations with other groups or individuals. Every single research project came about via a long-term, open-ended, creative and reflexive process, which kept pace with the political, social and economic developments of the decade of economic "crisis" in Greece. This complex, individual-cum-collective, research-cum-art making process was mostly based on participant observation, frequently including visual and audio documentation and sometimes interviews. The process was constantly stimulated by references to the literature and by feedback provided by all group members, while other individual artists or theorists, social or artistic groups were invited to contribute on specific issues throughout. Each participant was encouraged to bring in all kinds of relevant data, archives, materials, objects, photos or videos that he/she had found or made for the occasion, in order to contribute to an end product which was exhibited as a public event comprising presentations, discussions, performances, projections and other activities. The qualification of this kind of research as "artistic"[1] would be congruent with the above mentioned characteristics, but what is more salient is its experimental status, "in between" art and anthropology, academy and social life. It is true that the research in question here is not provided with strict protocols, evaluation processes or consistent financial support. At the same time, most of these projects did benefit from the academic status of certain 1