Artistic Research: Charting a Field in Expansion 9781786611499, 9781786611505, 9781786611512

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Ch01. Theses on the Concept of Research
Ch02. Expositionality
Ch03. The Research Catalogue Exposition as a Digital Object
Ch04. Transpositions [TP] ArtisticData Exploration
Ch05. SymbioticA
Ch06. Artistic Research in an Expanding Field
Ch07. Artistic Research and Sound Art in Public Urban Spaces
Ch08. Artistic Research and Music Technology
Ch09. Design Research in Architecture, Revisited
Ch10. Artistic Research and Performance
Ch11. Artistic Research as “Participant Perception”
Ch12. A Laboratory for Performance Practice
Ch13. Artistic Research and Musical Performance
Ch14. Fantasies Finding Realities
Ch15. Philosophy AS Artistic Research
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

Artistic Research

ARTISTIC RESEARCH Series Editors: Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico “Artistic research” is a recent term that relates to a particular mode of artistic practice and of knowledge production, in which scholarly research and artistic activity become inextricably intertwined. Placed at the crossroads of art and academia, inbetween thought and sensible apprehension, articulating different artistic practices and disciplines, and giving a central role to processes and materiality, artistic research questions the boundaries between art, philosophy, and science, enabling the exploration and generation of new modes of thought and expression. Crucial in order to grasp artistic research, and how it differentiates itself from other more traditional modes of research on the arts (such as art history, musicology, sociology of art, or aesthetics), is the focus on practice: it is practice-based, practice-led, and practicedriven, being primarily conducted by practitioners. In this sense, artistic research is a specific area of activity where artists actively engage with and participate in discursive formations emanating from their concrete artistic practice. Fundamentally cross- and transdisciplinary, artistic research nevertheless starts from specific areas of artistic practices, such as music, cinema, painting, design, architecture, poetry, literature, dance, sound studies, and so on. Within a transdisciplinary horizon of thought and practices the Artistic Research series will address these more specific fields from a practical perspective, offering extended primers intended for students, docs and postdocs, but also for early-career researchers, who will find in them methodologies, strategies, and best-practice examples. Titles in the Series Artistic Research: Charting a Field in Expansion Edited by Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico

Artistic Research Charting a Field in Expansion

Edited by Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd 6 Tinworth Street, London, SE11 5AL, UK www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Selection and editorial matter © Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico, 2019 Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN:    HB 978-1-78661-149-9 PB 978-1-78661-150-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 978-1-78661-149-9 (cloth) 978-1-78661-150-5 (paper) 978-1-78661-151-2 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Introduction 1 Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico  1  Theses on the Concept of Research Jae Emerling

12

 2  Expositionality Michael Schwab

27

 3  The Research Catalogue Exposition as a Digital Object: Challenges and Future Luc Döbereiner

46

 4  Transpositions [TP] Artistic Data Exploration: Feedback and Amplification Cecile Malaspina

58

 5  SymbioticA: Interruptions in the Brain Darren Jorgensen and David Savat

71

 6  Artistic Research in an Expanding Field: The Case of BioArt jan jagodzinski

81

 7  Artistic Research and Sound Art in Public Urban Spaces Marcel Cobussen

98

 8  Artistic Research and Music Technology Jonathan Impett and Juan Parra Cancino

v

113

vi

Contents

 9  Design Research in Architecture, Revisited Murray Fraser

128

10  Artistic Research and Performance Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca

146

11  Artistic Research as “Participant Perception”: Reflecting on the Project “Computer Signals” from an Arts-Inspired STS-Perspective 175 Priska Gisler 12  A Laboratory for Performance Practice: The Case of MusicExperiment21 192 Veerle Spronck 13  Artistic Research and Musical Performance Mieko Kanno 14  Fantasies Finding Realities: The ConNext Network as a Case Study of the Evolution of an Artistic Research Dimension in Conservatories Bernard Lanskey, Shu Chen Ong, and Abigail Sin 15  Philosophy AS Artistic Research. Artist-Philosophers Arno Böhler

202

212 236

Index 249 About the Contributors

257

Introduction Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico

Initiating a book series on Artistic Research, this volume presents fifteen chapters on current perspectives, strategies, methodologies, research projects, results, and cutting-edge questions coming from the field of artistic research—a field that is in accelerated expansion, and whose contours are in vibrant and unceasing renegotiation. Aiming at charting this evolving landscape of thought and practice, the chapters expose international work of significant research projects from Europe, Asia, Australia, the United Kingdom, South and North America, revealing the great diversity of artistic research, its inherent multiplicity of perspectives, and its rich variety of modes of expression. Operating within a transdisciplinary horizon of practices and situated beyond classical disciplinary partitions, artistic research nevertheless starts from, and happens concretely at the level of specific artistic practices. It emerges from particular art disciplines, each carrying its specific media, materials, context, and history. In this sense, and in order to convey the broadest possible mapping, this book includes contributions from different disciplines, from projects of diverse size and scope, and from heterogeneous aesthetic-epistemic orientations. Within this fertile humus, a multiplicity of voices can be heard across the book, ranging from more theoretical approaches to reflections based more directly upon a palpable artistic practice, from questioning the borders between thought and practice to reflections that propose a complete reversal of hierarchies between ‘thinking’ and ‘doing.’ In this way, this volume can be read as a claim for the in-betweenness of artistic research: its most powerful force lies in the middle, in the indeterminate zone of productive tension where all the contributors to this book, independently of their degree of involvement with either artistic or scholarly practices, are looking on, reaching out of their traditional disciplinal common sense and unceasingly redefining it. 1

2

Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico

The reader will find insights coming from architecture (Murray Fraser), art theory and criticism (Jae Emerling), art epistemologies (Darren Jorgensen and David Savat), bioart (jan jagodzinski), curatorial practices (Cecile Malaspina), music (Bernard Lanskey and Mieko Kanno), music technology (Jonathan Impett and Juan Parra Cancino), performance (Laura Cull), philosophy (Arno Böhler), publishing (Michael Schwab and Luc Döbereiner), science and technology studies (Priska Gisler and Veerle Spronck), and sonic studies (Marcel Cobussen). The chapters also display a great variety at the level of methods and scope of investigation, from deep descriptions and analysis of one single project, to almost encyclopaedic mappings of entire areas. Thus, some chapters address wide-ranging issues and opportunities for artistic research in its broadest terms, while others focus on a very specific practice or situation. Some are written by art makers, others by creative scholars looking at ongoing movements and shifts within the landscape. Some stress the profound transversality of observable practices, others their unique materialities and situatedness. Despite all their differences in style and scope, all chapters share a profound engagement with currently existing practices, and they reveal the breath-taking amount of ongoing projects observable throughout the globe. It is important to underline that the scope of this book is neither to provide a general definition of artistic research, nor several more media-specific definitions of it, nor to account for an exhaustive description of the existing landscape. Even if noteworthy endeavours have been done in these directions (Caduff et al. 2010; Badura et al. 2015, Bolt and Barret 2014; Borgdorff 2012; Butt 2017; jagodzinski and Wallin 2013; Nelson 2013), such an enterprise ultimately remains an impossibility, exactly because the field itself makes of the resistance to definitions, closures, and disciplinary constraints one of its strongest points. What most matters to this book is the charting of thoughts and practices that might have the potential to break from orthodox approaches, that pioneer new practices and methodologies, and that might open up new avenues for artistic production through artistic research. Thus, even if some definitions of artistic research might emerge at some points and reference is made to case studies and their impact, the book aims at extending, problematising, or even eradicating strict disciplinary discourses, in order to suggest other modes of making art and, ultimately, another possible world to live in. In the wider rationale of the new series, this first book expects to work as the initial trigger for a rhizomatic proliferation of other books and essays. New discourses can be generated by continuing lines of thought and practices sketched here, adding further diagonal lines to the transversality of artistic research. Each one of the fifteen chapters can in turn develop and expand into an independent and autonomous new collection of essays. The diversity, complexity, and richness that we aimed at in commissioning the present collection can expand at different scales and levels, reverberating with other fields of knowledge production, impacting other modes of thought, and resonating with other systems, thus creatively operating as a proliferating machine.



Introduction 3

RESEARCH IN AND THROUGH ARTISTIC PRACTICE Even if a clear-cut definition of artistic research seems undesirable, it is nevertheless important to permanently question its provisional status and working definitions. In this sense, the question ‘What is artistic research?’ seems not soluble, if not at the price of sacrificing the productive instabilities of the field and the enrichment that even disagreement can bring to the discourse. However, in face of the worldwide usage of the term and of its growing number of practitioners, we echo Michael Schwab, in chapter 2, who in his contribution to this book proposes to ask, ‘How do we know that something is artistic research?’ or ‘When does artistic research happen?’ One fundamental trait is its positioning at the crossroads of art and academia, in between thought and sensible apprehension, articulating different artistic practices and disciplines, and giving processes and materiality a central role. Thus, artistic research describes a particular mode of artistic practice and of knowledge production, in which scholarly research and artistic activity become inextricably intertwined. Questioning the boundaries among art, academia, philosophy, and science, it enables the exploration and generation of new modes of thought and sensible experience. Crucial in order to understand artistic research, and how it decidedly differentiates itself from other more traditional modes of research on the arts (such as art history, musicology, sociology of art/music, or aesthetics), is the focus on practice: it is practice-based, practice-led, and practice-driven. It is also a mode of research conducted by practitioners, by doers—be it musicians, artists, writers, or even ‘practicing’ philosophers as we shall see in the last chapter. In this sense, artistic research is a specific area of activity where artists actively engage with and participate in discursive formations emanating from their concrete artistic practice. First and foremost, an artist researcher is a maker, having insights into the material constitution of artistic processes and objects. An artistic research process always starts with the choice of specific working materials—which implies knowledge of and a sharp focus on their contingent modes of existence, including their history and their temporal, geographic, and cultural situatedness. Second, the scholarly dimension is fundamentally intertwined with the material and affective dimension of art. It is then not simply a matter for a practitioner to ‘double’ as an observer of his or her own practice or artistic production; rather, throughout its development and renegotiations, practice generates discourse, and can in turn be steered, communicated, and reflected by discourse. In other words, an artist researcher has the capacity to infuse research with a particular kind of intensity, which comes from the intensive processes they are familiar with and daily use while making art. In this respect—what also explains the emphasis on ‘practice’ throughout this book—it is worth mentioning that we, the editors, came to the world of artistic research through our own artistic practice. We both have studied in high-education music institutions and have both been active for many years as professional musicians on stage. Even now, after many years devoted to artistic research, an activity that also includes the

4

Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico

writing of books and several modes of verbal communication, we remain active musicians, playing our instruments, composing new pieces, and staging performances. It was through our deep involvement with music performance and composition that we felt the need to develop new perspectives for our own concrete practice, perspectives that in turn can be appropriated for the general discourse in the field. Such a trajectory—from art making tout court to artistic research—is by no means unusual within artistic research, and it stresses its fundamental transversality, the creative passage between different spaces and foci of practice and reflection. Crucially, one path doesn’t exclude the other, and an artist researcher often works and appears as a ‘pure’ artist.

TRANSVERSALITY A key notion in this respect is Félix Guattari’s concept of transversality, which might be considered a ‘deviant forerunner’ (Osborne 2015) of the concept of transdisciplinarity as it has been discussed in Gibbons et al.’s The New Production of Knowledge (1994). Transversality indicates an intellectual mobility across discipline boundaries, and the concrete establishment of a continuum through theory, practice, and action-in-the-world. It opposes both verticality (in the sense of hierarchies, first- and second-rate modes of understanding or making art) and horizontality (in the sense of groups of people organising themselves within a particular discipline or subdiscipline). It cuts across both text and matter, enabling diagonal lines of thought and practice to emerge, opening previously closed avenues of movement and perception, finally producing an entirely new constitution of activities, institutions, or groups. Transversality is a central tool in eluding dualism, and in replacing it by means of a mode of thinking and relating to the world that resonates more with the irreducibly pragmatic and ‘metastable’ dimension of artistic practices. It is not about recombining or rearranging points, lines, and planes from pre-given structures, which always fall back into disciplinary orders sustained by the dualisms of subject/object, mind/ matter, nature/society, art/research, manual/intellectual, creativity/reflection, and the like. Dualisms reinstate classical partitions of socio-aesthetic distributions, making it difficult, if not impossible, to escape hierarchical structures and idealised modes of perception. In a famous passage from ‘Rhizome,’ Deleuze and Guattari (1987) address this problem, vehemently claiming for transversal modes of thought, crucially situated beyond ‘all the dualisms [which] are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging,’ in order to realise that ‘the only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo’ (20–21; 277). For Deleuze and Guattari, this passage in and towards the ‘in-between’ is linked to a crucial return to pragmatics, to experiment with new transdisciplinary constructions and reinvented processual actions. Imbued with this notion of transversality, artistic research challenges traditional institutional and epistemic compartmentations, emerging from a landscape where



Introduction 5

both artistic practices and academic models are rapidly evolving. Differently than in more established academic fields such as art philosophy, art history, or musicology, the scholarly component of artistic research is not a horizon of theory that, remaining external to art, would observe and assess art’s epistemic value from a supposedly privileged vantage point. Its function is by contrast to renegotiate the aesthetic, affective, and perceptive discourse produced in and through the making of art. A dynamic conception of both art and research clearly emerges: the discursive dimension redefines and develops along the practice, and the practice produces in turn its own discourse. The whole research process itself therefore becomes a creative act, not dissimilar from an artistic practice. Moreover, also traditional modes of art making are dynamised and brought into question, starting in the awareness that no artistic material is perfectly configured, defined, black-boxed, or identifiable once and for all. Artworks, activities, and thoughts are in permanent state of flux, becoming different things at different times and geographies. Getting a sense of and a grasp on this disparate amount of available materials is the first gesture of a productive research strategy. This approach offers as many opportunities as contentious points. In addition to the resistances from the academic world, institutions based on a ‘standard model’ of artistic practice and reception often withstand the blurring of boundaries offered by artistic research. Such model is based (again) on the dualistic division between ‘manual labour’ and ‘intellectual labour’ which, however productive during part of the last century, has become problematic, and with it the ‘boundarywork’ operated between disciplinary partitions and identities. Between clear-cut disciplinary divisions and the dangers of professional disintegration or dissolution, artistic research offers a space in between for the emergence of rigorous yet possibly anexact actions, objects, and modes of expression. In fact, moving between ‘Mode 1 science’ and ‘Mode 2 knowledge production,’1 artistic research generates varied forms of distributed knowledge, which are context-sensitive, transdisciplinary, heterogeneous, and usually peer-reviewed by experts coming from different fields of activity—which are the main characteristics associated with Mode 2. Classical partitions between basic and applied research, or between qualitative and quantitative research (typically closer to Mode 1) can still be recognised in specific parts of specific projects of artistic research, but a common trait of the majority of such projects has been precisely to problematise conventional modes of research and to suggest alternatives. If one looks at the case of music, for example, standard approaches such as historical or systematic musicology, organology, or performance studies, have all strong disciplinary limits and constraints, not necessarily helpful today to an imaginative exploration of musical objects, to the making of creative performances, or to the development of new solutions for music making. While traditional forms of research are certainly still important, new modes of producing knowledge—crucially associated with artistic research and conducted by artists and practitioners—are generating important results, contributing to new kinds of research.

6

Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico

From these considerations it clearly emerges that traditional compartmentation between art and research (not to mention even more rigorous boundaries between artistic or scholarly disciplines) start subsiding under this new way of conceiving knowledge production. An artistic practice that reflects on itself starting from implements that are generated within its own language remains within the limits imposed by its own discipline, failing to reach for an expanded epistemic insight. Research that relies on the (supposed) objectivity of analytical tools by means of quantifiably extensive (intrinsically divisible) properties is bound to reinstate the old hylomorphic model which separates dialectically form from matter, focusing on fixed structures (res extensa, which remains the preferred field for analysis and historiography) while underestimating energetic potentials (res intensa, which constitutes the working habitat of artists), and ignoring the energetic conditions and entropic processes that lead to the shaping of any given artistic form and expression. On the other hand, questions about subjectivity—which became recurrent in the last ten years or so—have a propensity to ignore or exclude the non-human component of artistic processes. Studies of subjectivity tend therefore to be human, all too human, moreover taking as object of study a subjectivity that is considered as supposedly pre-given or completely stable. In this respect, reflection of practice on practice, beyond ideological stances and beyond reliance on transcendental and supposedly stable systems of reference, manages to bypass both the objective and the subjective approach, becoming even anti-disciplinary: a reflection that strives to exit something through something (exit music through music, exit theatre through theatre, etc.), in contrast to approaches that reinstate and reinvigorate the rigidity of disciplinal and epistemic boundaries—usually artificially constructed and dictated by common sense—over and over. Therefore, if on the one hand a process of artistic research starts from an expertise in one’s field of practice and knowledge, allowing to deepen and enrich it, at the same time it opens the possibility for a critical stance towards the limits and assumptions of one’s own practice. This changed epistemic landscape also engenders a shift in the conception of art. The centre of attention ceases to be the ‘finished product,’ the artwork with its holistic (and often commercially or politically oriented) integrity, but rather the strategies, problematics, and even the inconsistencies of artistic processes. We witness here a shift from the ‘aesthetic’ dimension (mostly centred around the work) to the ‘aesthetico-epistemic,’ where the aesthetic still plays a central role, but only insofar as it is capable of producing an epistemic perturbation. Beyond aesthetic fetishisation, beyond the comforting role of art, artistic research underlines and brings to the fore a renewed role of art as a means to explore, understand, connect to, and crucially reconfigure the world. One of the main opportunities of artistic research is precisely the breakaway from the many commonsensical modes of thinking and making art. As indicated by jan jagodzinski and Jason Wallin in their introduction to Arts-Based Research: A Critique and a Proposal (2013), artistic research can do away with ‘the common sense notion that art is located in a time



Introduction 7

commensurate with the traditions of the present, or rather, that art is the reflection of distinctly human leitmotifs,’ therefore mobilising ‘an irrational sheet of time that is right futural’ (p. 7). This concept is also convincingly formulated in the opening chapter of this book, where Jae Emerling puts forward a vision of research where ‘divergent, archival-diagrammatic lines of practice . . . remake the past as much as it does the future by enabling new possibilities, new varieties of aesthetic research, new forms of knowledge’ (see page 38). Artistic research emerges then as a conception of knowledge production that challenges closure on several levels. Insisting on the permeability of disciplines, on the fluidity of institutional boundaries, on the unceasing becoming that characterises artistic production, and even on the porosity between past, present, and future, it offers a territory and a posture that allow artists to face the complexities and open-endedness which characterise life in the third millennium.

CHARTING A FIELD IN EXPANSION The chapters presented in this volume have been commissioned with the wish to give the reader the opportunity to enter the world of artistic research through heterogeneous approaches. This diversity happens at multiple levels: not only the geographical context and the disciplines where all the authors come from is highly varied, but also the scale of the territory that is observed and the angle through which it is regarded. The book starts with a series of reflections engaging with several internal perturbations inhabiting the notion of artistic research. Jae Emerling (chapter 1) proposes a critical view on the concept of research itself. By placing in dialogue reflections on the concept of ‘mediator’ (first proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), on the ‘abstract machine’ constituted by the John Soane museum in London, and on the very last writings by Italo Calvino, Emerling puts forward ten theses on the concept of research that liberate futural intensities rather than being oriented towards a reconstructionist approach of the past. In chapter 2 Michael Schwab focuses on his own central concept of ‘expositionality,’ which refers to a practice, and that was created expressly for artistic research in response to issues of publication and documentation. From its history and situatedness in the platform of the Research Catalogue2 and the Journal for Artistic Research,3 expositionality resonates across the whole field of artistic research, bringing to the fore the frictions between the conventions of academia and the need for new mediaticities. In chapter 3, Luc Döbereiner echoes Schwab’s chapter in an in-depth discussion of the Research Catalogue platform, a major tool for artist researchers that provides an intricate relation of documentation, media, and artistic practice, with consequent opportunities and risks. The author particularly examines how this online tool for the exposition of artistic research challenges the medium of ‘writing’ itself, enabling the exposition of research as research, and not simply as the representation of previously conducted research.

8

Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico

The following two contributions provide a critical view on artistic research starting in the middle of two specific case studies. Cecile Malaspina, in chapter 4, frames her contribution on the artistic research project Transpositions (funded by the Austrian Science Foundation), through the written reenactment of her visit to a particular manifestation of that project, namely in a one-week installation at an art gallery in Vienna. Malaspina underlines the criticality that this project—based on the aesthetic transposition of scientific data—brings about through the informational gap enacted between scientific rigor and the concrete bodily experience offered to the viewer. In chapter 5 Darren Jorgensen and David Savat offer an in-depth view into the operations at play in the artistic research laboratory SymbioticA. Working within a university and with materials and infrastructures that rub elbows with scientific processes, SymbioticA creates tensions that are both institutional and epistemic, which the authors examine through reflections by the historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Through bioart, we transition to a section of the book where the landscape opens up to a real mapping of fields, across spaces, times, and artistic and institutional contexts. With a great amplitude of scope, in chapter 6, jan jagodzinski maps the emerging field of artistic research in bioart. In his chapter, new boundaries emerge and are questioned, such as those between (various forms of ) art and (various forms of ) life, or the traditional primacy allotted to anthropocentric models of thought and creativity. Through the example of four artistic practices, Marcel Cobussen, in chapter 7, discusses a field with a very focused mediatic specificity, that of sound studies. He shows that systematic reflection is often at play in the practice of sound artists, even before an actual verbalisation occurs. The field of sound studies is also significantly put in relation to urban planning and environmental awareness. From sound studies we go to the neighbouring territory of music technology. In chapter 8 Jonathan Impett and Juan Parra Cancino observe how the epistemic dimension of music technological practices is often linked to, or even perturbed by their link to scientific research, commercial products, hardware and software design, and more music-philosophical considerations. After tracing a brief history of electronic music, they provide a chart of current directions and projects. A similar approach characterises chapter 9, by Murray Fraser, who traces a geo-institutional history of architectural design research, with a particular focus on the situation in the United Kingdom. In a trajectory through time, Fraser detects the epistemic implications of this evolution, discussing risks and scepticisms, offering examples from recent PhD projects, and concluding with a reflection on the opportunities that research provides for architecture to relate to the issues of a globalised world through creative experimentation. Also coming from the UK context and ranging to wider institutional territories, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca in chapter 10 reflects on the multifarious world of artistic research and performance, including in-depth remarks on terminological issues, the renegotiations of disciplinal boundaries, the pluralisation of knowledge, and the challenges encountered when facing doctoral studies and traditional documentation formats.



Introduction 9

Both coming from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Priska Gisler and Veerle Spronck, chapters 11 and 12, respectively, have been invited for accounting their experiences as external observers of the processes and outputs of two substantially funded research projects: respectively, ‘Computer Signals,’ led by Hannes Rickli and funded by the Swiss National Foundation, and MusicExperiment21, led by Paulo de Assis and funded by the European Research Council. Gisler’s main question is whether an artistic research project can further the comprehension of the field of STS; and, at the same time, whether STS can be productive for artistic research. Spronck, describing MusicExperiment21 as ‘a laboratory for music performance,’ examines its internal working mechanisms: from their collective work, to the knowledge production in the moment of performance, to the philosophical and epistemological contributions. The activity of music performance is also at the centre of Mieko Kanno’s chapter 13, in which she traces a brief history of major evolutions in the field during the last century—through the Historically Informed Performance Practice movement and the experiences of notable pianists and music analysts—suggesting that those changes might have contributed to the subsequent emergence of artistic research. Additionally, she argues for the perspective of music performance as ‘intangible culture.’ With a more institutional focus, in chapter 14, Bernard Lanskey, Shu Chen Ong, and Abigail Sin narrate the recent evolution of artistic research in music conservatoires through the case study of the ConNext worldwide network of seven music schools. Through enthusiasms, momentary tensions, and illusory stabilities, the narration ends with an opening to future perspectives and developments. The last chapter, by the Viennese artist-philosopher Arno Böhler, brings the book not to a closure, but rather to an opening towards future possibilities and challenges. From the idiosyncratic position of the philosopher who walks the stage, Böhler proposes a turnaround of hierarchies between Socratic philosophy and art making, pushing the boundaries of artistic research approaches. Inspired by Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism, the author probes the implication for a philosopher to embrace performative practices—as also happened to Plato, an inventive creator of dialogues, which actually embrace a clear literary and dramaturgical dimension. Under which conditions can philosophy be seen ‘as’ artistic research? Thus, more than addressing definitions of ‘What is artistic research?’ or ‘Which disciplines cannot do artistic research?’ this book affirms the multiplicity of approaches, methodologies, and outcomes within the field, keeping many doors open for unexpected shifts and turns that might have the power to disrupt previous assumptions and reinvent artistic research itself. After reading this volume, it seems clear to us that artistic research ‘should not be seen as a discipline or a topic, nor . . . really a method . . . [but that] it is an attitude, a perspective, a manner,’ as Florian Dombois, Ute Meta Bauer, Claudia Mareis, and Michael Schwab (2012, 11) observed in their introduction to Intellectual Birdhouse: Artistic Practice as Research. Taken as a specific attitude towards artistic materials, what seems to distinguish

10

Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico

artistic research is its focus on new, emergent, and future knowledge, especially in the invention of new modes of doing art. It is not research ‘of ’ something lost, but research ‘for’ something new, for something that was not perceived before, or something radically unprecedented—in other words: research to make the future. It is this invention of future knowledge and practices, and the futurality of invention that makes artistic research so compelling and so important. In this sense, we cannot but look very much forward to the upcoming books in this series, which will further scrutinise some of the topics addressed here, but also many other com-possible futures. We thank all the authors for their contributions and engaged conversations during the preparation of this book, and we express our warmest gratitude to Ian Buchanan and Sarah Campbell, who strongly encouraged and supported us in starting this book series, which goes back to an informal talk during the Deleuze Studies conference in Rome in summer 2016. Special thanks go to Rebecca Anastasi and Frankie Mace from Rowman & Littlefield International for their constant and attentive support during all production phases of the book.

NOTES 1.  For these notions, see Gibbons et al. 1994; Nowotny et al. 2001, 179–81; Borgdorff 2012, 91–100. 2.  The Research Catalogue is a searchable, rich-media database specifically conceived for artistic research work and its exposition, which aims the documentation of practice in a way that reflects artistic modes of presentation, https://www.researchcatalogue.net/. 3. The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) is an international, online, Open Access and peerreviewed journal focused on the dissemination of artistic research from all disciplines. https:// www.jar-online.net/.

REFERENCES Badura, Jens, Selma Dubach, Anke Haarman, Dieter Mersch, Anton Rey, Christoph Schenker, and Germán Toro Perez. 2015. Künstlerische Forschung. Ein Handbuch. Berlin: Diaphanes. Bolt, Barbara, and Estelle Barrett. 2014. Material Inventions: Applying Creative Arts Research. London: Tauris. Borgdorff, Henk. 2012. The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Amsterdam: Leiden University Press. Butt, Danny. 2017. Artistic Research in the Future Academy. Bristol: Intellect. Caduff, Corina, Fiona Siegenthaler, and Tan Wälchli. 2010. Kunst und künstlerische Forschung/ Art and Artistic Research. Jahrbuch Zürcher Hochschule der Künste 6, Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.



Introduction 11

Dombois, Florian, Ute Meta Bauer, Claudia Mareis, and Michael Schwab, eds. 2012. Intellectual Birdhouse: Artistic Practice as Research. London: Koenig Books. Gibbons, Michael, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott, and Martin Trow. 1994. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. jagodzinski, jan, and Jason Wallin. 2013. Arts-Based Research: A Critique and a Proposal. Rotterdam: SensePublishers. Nelson, Robin. 2013. Practice as Research in the Arts. Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nowotny, Helga, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons. 2001. Re-Thinking Science. Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Osborne, Peter. 2015. ‘Problematizing Disciplinarity, Transdisciplinary Problematics,’ Theory, Culture & Society 32(5–6): 3–35. Available online: doi 10.1177/0263276415592245.

1 Theses on the Concept of Research Jae Emerling

for marquard smith, a true mediator It’s art, rather than the media, that can grasp events. . . . I have, it’s true, spent a lot of time writing about this notion of event: you see, I don’t believe in things. —Gilles Deleuze (1995, 160)

I. To rethink “research” in contemporary art is to admit a real frustration with the entire discourse and practice of the “contemporary” as such. Frustration, if not outright disappointment, with not only the feigned, conservative temporality of an endless “contemporary” period, even if that endlessness is supposedly a plurality of temporalities, but also with how contemporary artistic practice has become traditional, inured, solipsistic, and tame. It has taken on these traits because the sociopolitical demands of critical postmodernism in the 1970s–1990s have now become canonical. Shifting from “postmodernism” to “contemporaneity” is no salve here, especially as the “contemporary” is elaborated in terms of a temporality that is woefully undertheorised. As such it remains quite vague, romantic, and amorphic: “contemporaneity includes within its diversity many revived pasts and wished-for futures, all of which are being lived out as vivid, or at least possible, presents” (Smith 2013, 25; see also Osborne 2013, 15–35, and Assis and Schwab 2019 for insightful challenges to the “contemporary”). If it were only that simple. All this endless oversimplified chatter about being, worlding, and the putative “shapeless state of the self ” (Nancy 2010; Smith 2013, 21; for a critique of this position, see Alliez 2001, 67). But where is the real threshold between fantasist temporality 12



Theses on the Concept of Research 13

(revivalism, solipsism, derivative works, globalised (even local) time which is never a “minor” time) and truly creative experiments with the temporal that actualise ontological, ethical, and political modes of becoming (on “minor” time, see Deleuze 2007, 297–304; Deleuze and Guattari 1986)? There is a threshold. There are levels of intensity, affect, experimentation, and criticality to cross. The discourse of “contemporary” art itself has become anemic, celebratory, dull-edged, confused, a putative social “good.” Theoretical reflections are deemed too complex for the types of exhibitionary-marketing campaigns that drive gallery and museum exhibition programs (Smith 2013, 22). Within both artistic and historical-theoretical discourse, once vital artistic strategies and points of view have become rhetorical tropes, styles to be repeated, empty signifiers. Contemporary artistic practice is quickly becoming a pantomime. Signs taken for wonders. To put it another way, contemporary art is a neoliberal globalised tradition. A half century of material, conceptual, exhibitionary, and political experimentation is now the gospel of Master of Fine Arts (MFA) syllabi and biennales throughout the world. Contemporary art exists in a role analogous to Neoclassicism in the eighteenth century, with stylistic filiations to be met, formal rules (readymade strategies, informatics, environmental participation, industrial design, tedious manifestoes, and prescribed social roles like the artist as social worker) to be reiterated. It enacts a general conservatism and liberal guilt masquerading as criticality. Within such an “aesthetic regime,” art historians and critics allow themselves to be recast as so many Winckelmanns engaged in an endless shell game of authentic forgeries (Rancière 2004; on Winckelmann see Petzel 1972). On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the 1960s! Far too much of contemporary art practice is déconner (“messing around”), but as Jacques Lacan (1991) said, “le déconne est la vérité” (p. 127). So to rethink “research” in contemporary art is to return, not to any given modernism (there is no origin) or to some forgotten aesthetics. Instead, it entails a return to research. Re-searching for the future itself. In order to step beyond the “contemporary” we must encounter the sheer plurality of the event of modernism itself, which is nothing other than divergent and discontinuous lines of theory-practice. We must encounter what remains of that event: remains that are the very material structure of our discourse, practices, and thinking about “contemporary” art and culture. To be clear, we must not focus on what has been actualised in terms of discourse or practice, but on what problematics remain to be addressed in terms of history and becoming, tradition and transmissibility, influence and mediators, forces and signs (Emerling & Preziosi 2017). New concepts must be created if we are to render the “contemporary,” if we are to re-search a “new aesthetic paradigm” capable of constituting mutual resonances between disciplines and new non-discursive intensities that allow us to encounter temporality, subjectivity, and ecology anew (see Guattari 2006, 98–116). Resonances and intensities that force us to acknowledge the power of affects and percepts, the forces and signs of art as an event of sensory becoming that transforms the world beyond our image.

14

Chapter 1

II. Artistic research can be defined broadly as a mode of critical and creative practice wherein one attempts to construct a diagrammatic passage between the past and the future when dealing with historical precedent or subject matter. But this passage has nothing to do with allusion or (un)conscious stylistic filiation. If we accept, as Marquard Smith has written, that “the subject of research, the idea of research itself, is . . . a key issue for those working in art history and visual culture studies, and curators, educators, and artists in the visual arts” (M. Smith 2008, xxii), then we must abandon tired discussions of “influence,” whether or not it causes anxiety, as well as tendentious causality. By turning to research instead “we begin to critically interrogate and find new ways of thinking about our visual, textual, and sonic cultures, our archives, historical documents, and curatorial practices themselves” (M. Smith 2008, xxii). Discovering “new ways of thinking” about research within contemporary art begins with two challenges that Smith (2008) presents us. First, “how do we reconcile our belief in the intrinsic properties and capabilities of . . . meaning-making objects—encountering the things themselves—with the very impossibility of this?” Second, “how do our encounters with art and visual cultural practices provoke the emergence of new objects and subjects of research, thereby forcing us to return to the question of research anew” (p. xxi)? Both questions imply self-reflexivity as well as the existence of a field of research wherein the objects and subjects of research are continually rethought along with the very material, distributive means by which they become visible to us. Research as an experimental methodology must examine itself as much as it does the state of the world. Research actualises itself through a movement of history and becoming, discourse and differential qualities (non-discursive intensities). Thus “to research, which by definition is ‘to look for with care,’ is an act not only of interpreting the world but changing it” (M. Smith 2013, 376). Smith hyphenates “re-search” to emphasise this complicated structure of repetition and difference, of searching again, of always being in the middle between past and future, of always being in medias res. Re-search in these terms is precisely the study of what happens “in between,” during a “meanwhile.” What takes place is an act of becoming that goes beyond the subject and its consistencies. Re-search has nothing to do with historicism, worldviews, or origins (see Alliez 2004, 22). It has only to do with divergent, archival-diagrammatic lines of practice that remake the past as much as it does the future by enabling new possibilities, new varieties of aesthetic research, new forms of knowledge. I remain convinced, as do many others (see van Tuinen and Zepke 2017), that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari give us the conceptual language to best understand the history of art as re-search—that is, the history of art as a virtual ensemble of proper names, singularities, and events. This is our field. The field immanent within our discursive conceit of linear, sequential time and objective evidence of causality, influence, symptomology, social history, contemporaneity. Re-search has nothing to



Theses on the Concept of Research 15

do with causality or filiation. But it has everything to do with “involution,” modes of becoming, “multiplicity without the unity of an ancestor,” complications and explications in the midst of deracinated narratives and images, forces and signs (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 266–67, 241).

III. These terms—re-search as a “meanwhile,” as an archival-diagrammatic threshold, as a “postromantic turning point” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 343)—are all “signposts of a research program.” As Éric Alliez (2001; 2013) has argued, this “research program” (p. 66) to come must challenge the “aesthetic regime” (p. 47) and its phenomenology of the image. He outlines this “research program” in masterful Deleuzian terms, notably that of the “diagrammatic” (the relation of force-signs, vitalism-materialism). Alliez (2013) writes: the dynamic/dialectic of forms-signs animating the “aesthetic regime” cannot in any way be equivalent to an energetics of forces because . . . it doesn’t aim at the negation of forms and the denegation of signs . . . rather, it aims at fusing and deterritorializing them as forces-signs . . . carried off in this semiotics of intensities, [thus] “information” fissures and is dissociated from the discursiveness in which it was caught (its intelligibility is suspended, scrambled, put into crisis). (p. 47)

Such a “research program” reconceptualises the notion of a “sign” in order to escape the phenomenology of the image and the mode of address that research, art criticism, art history, and philosophy deploy to articulate that phenomenology of formssigns: disinterested yet intentional, reflective, subjective, ineffable. Discourse as the guarantor of intelligibility is “suspended, scrambled, put into crisis” by an aesthetic event of forces-signs. Alliez (2013) wagers that research—whether artistic, historical, or philosophical—redefined must become capable of “making insensible forces . . . sensible” (p. 47). It is “forces” that must be researched. If we do so then our research becomes a diagrammatic net cast over “oceanic chaos” that risks us “being swept away” and finding ourselves “in the open sea” when we thought we “had reached port” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 203; see Delanda 1999, 120 on “meshwork”). This net must be made so that these “a-signifying and non-discursive” chaotic forces remain capable of diagnosing “our current becomings in a politics of experimentation . . . which really begins with the production of novel conjunctions in the tissue of fluxes of materials and of signs” (Alliez 2013, 47). Experimentation demands that we “struggle against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos itself ” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 203). Transforming our aesthetic semiology requires experimenting with how we encounter, construct, and express “the diagrammatic regime of contemporary art” (Alliez 2013, 48). Within the “aesthetic regime”—within “contemporaneity”

16

Chapter 1

itself—there is another becoming: a creative and discursive event takes place, but only if “contemporaneity” is forced to “yield to it” and become “invested as such” (Alliez 2013, 48). As Alliez (2013) explains in a beautiful sentence, such a becoming confers on signs a new material power of decoding (deductions of fragments of heterogenous codes, a-signifying and post-signifying connections in continuous variation, intensive local recoding of the global expressiveness, movement of traits of expression) that destratifies the space (physical, symbolic, discursive, institutional) in which it is inscribed by rendering sensible the trans-semiotic presence of insensible/anaesthetized forces. (p. 48)

Research in “contemporary” art must reorient itself along these semiotic vital lines of thought-practice. These lines of thought allow us to touch an outside that resides within us, to compose histories of art wherein becoming (art-work as forces-signs) remains possible, elusive, signaletic, forceful, immanent. Yet we need a strategy that refuses to let us escape the real lesson of re-search, namely that “it is the diagram’s job to come to fruition in the archive” (italics added; Deleuze 1988a, 121). The complication of the virtual within the actual, of becoming within history, composes a portrait of the researcher on the threshold, because to be “realized in this way means becoming both integrated and different” (Deleuze 1988a, 121, 122). Better still, let us say via our “mediator” Alliez (2004): art historical research is always already an unbecoming image because becoming “empiricist, synthetic, and ethological” requires “an encounter, a conjunction” within and beyond art and its histories—and all histories are not “contemporary,” they are “untimely,” which never means universal (p. 29; on “ethology” see Deleuze 1988b, 125; Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 336). A new “research program,” a “new aesthetic paradigm,” is “engaged in the study of the powers to affect and to be affected that characterize all things and their becoming, with the aim of extracting the possibility of something being produced afresh” because this “production is in turn related to that critical point when the stifled forces of the present appeal to . . . a new composition of forces”—that is, “a presentation of the infinite in the finitude of the here-and-now” (Alliez 2004, 29). This affective capacity certainly requires the non-coincidental, “constitutive relationship of philosophy with non-philosophy” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 109), of art with art history, of art history with visual culture studies, of diagram with archive, of discourse with event.

IV. In an October 1985 interview, Gilles Deleuze gives us a concept that sharpens our discussion of research: “mediators.” In a conversation traversing his interests in film, tennis, literature, and politics, Deleuze explains that “relations of mutual resonance and exchange” between entities, states of things, or fields like art and science take place in and through “mediators.” Mediators embody the very act of creation because they are the means—the relay transmission—in and through which forms of con-



Theses on the Concept of Research 17

tent and expression are possible. Without them, there would be no vital encounter between precedents, rivals, friends, or disciplines, defined in those same terms but certainly not limited to them. Instead, there would only be “separate melodic lines in constant interplay with each other” (Deleuze 1995, 125). However, and Deleuze is insistent here, this “interplay between different lines isn’t a matter of one monitoring or reflecting another” because “you have to make a move.” A “move” here is a creative act, a betrayal of one’s own position (aesthetic mode, discipline, subject position) by “giving or taking” to and from another (Emerling 2016). A move—a diagonal line— is drawn between entities (states of things, subjects, domains) in order to touch an outside and reconfigure one’s own position. It is along this medial-diagonal that research moves, changes, and becomes otherwise. Let us follow Deleuze closely here because he extends our discussion of research as an encounter. He insists that: Mediators are fundamental. Creation’s all about mediators. Without them nothing happens. They can be people—for a philosopher, artists, or scientists; for a scientist, philosophers or artists—but things too, even plants or animals, as in Castaneda. Whether they’re real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, you have to form your mediators. It’s a series. If you’re not in some series, even a completely imaginary one, you’re lost. (Deleuze 1995, 125)

It is this actual-virtual series that allows one to form “mediators.” Without such a series, we are lost, adrift at sea, confronting chaos alone, without a net. More prosaically, we become solipsistic and affectless. These actual-virtual series are the threads and patterns of the aesthetic and ontological reticulations that each of us must create and undergo. The creation of this diagrammatic plane is immanent to the creation of “mediators”: a finely reticulated net is cast over and against “oceanic chaos” in order not to lose yourself to cliché, opinion, and the ineffable (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 205). Medial, inversive becoming is the dangerous, violent even, ability of falsity to produce truth that lies at the heart of an aesthetic research encounter. A mediator in these terms suffers no pantomime or genuflection, but only abides becoming a contending force, an intercessor, an intimate exterior, a false witness, that which defies judgement (see Deleuze 1997, 126–35). Both “mediator” and “mediated” become a one, not a union or synthesis (One), but a disjunctive, masked one. Sua cuique personae (“to each their own mask”). A depersonalised one composed only of preindividual singularities. There is no question of “influence” here. There is nothing fluid, natural, or organic about an encounter. There is only a principle of individuation: “prehension,” artifice, falsity, challenge, betrayal (on “prehension” see Deleuze 1993, 78–81; Stengers 2011). To render a “mediator” is to rend oneself. As Deleuze explains that “it is not an emanation of an ‘I’ . . . it is a self that lives me as the double of the other . . . I find the other in me” (Deleuze 1988a, 98; Rodowick 1999). This is precisely what is “monstrous,” deterritorialising (Deleuze 1995, 6). The creation of a mediator requires an escape from one’s own subjectivity as well as the field within which it takes on a consistency.

18

Chapter 1

“It’s a strange business, speaking for yourself, in your own name, because it doesn’t at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject,” Deleuze (1995) tells us (p. 6). It is the “harshest exercise in depersonalization.” Why? Because whenever we create a “mediator” subjectivity is opened to its very depths. Elemental depths wherein subjectivity becomes “monstrous” in its encounter with the multiplicities that it is, with the intensities that run through it. A “mediator” is neither a subject nor an individual. Rather, a “mediator” is a configuration of singularities (affects and percepts), an “intensive multiplicity” wherein these singularities and modes of expression depersonalise “through love rather than subjection” (Deleuze 1995, 7). The manner in which Guattari as mediator created a different Deleuze is undeniable: “And then there was my meeting with Félix Guattari, the way we understood and complemented, depersonalized and singularized—in short, loved—one another” (italics added; Deleuze 1995, 7). We should dwell for a moment on one aspect of this co-creation, namely, how rendering Guattari a “mediator” motivated and accelerated Deleuze’s exit from a repressive history of philosophy. This history was repressive because it was tied to an academic training that is all too familiar. One wherein the discourse of master-student from the tutorial and seminar environment is mapped onto the very history of one’s entire field. So when Deleuze talks about “mediators” he is not talking about learning and accepting a given tradition or history. On the contrary, he is devising a means to escape its abject, uncreative, stolid existence. He is devising a means to escape it by one’s own means, one’s own archive-diagram. In other words, for the love of history. This is what it means for a “mediator” to become a “proper name” and not a subject or a “celebrity.” “One becomes,” Deleuze (1995) asserts, “a set of liberated singularities, words, names, fingernails, things, animals, little events: quite the reverse of celebrity” (p. 7). For Deleuze (1998b), his “mediators” “Bergson” and “Guattari” are such “proper names”—that is, no longer distinct individuals or subjects; there is nothing there to imitate. Instead, it is “us in the middle of Spinoza,” Deleuze insists (p. 122). “Guattari,” for example, zum beispiel (playing beside himself ), is a field of singularities, “a set of nonobjectified affects,” “hidden emissions,” “dislocations,” false promises, and challenges expressed in infinite verbs: to affect, to escape, to survey, to render, to become, to love.

V. A proper name, then, designates “something that is of the order of an event, of becoming . . . it is the agent of an infinitive” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 264). An infinitive like to research. Our mediators reveal that we are in the midst of ourselves, between modes of individuation and temporality. It is through our mediators that we sense and touch another temporality and semiotics within our habitual ones (on “sense” see Deleuze 1990). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explain that this semiotics is “composed above



Theses on the Concept of Research 19

all of proper names, verbs in the infinitive and indefinite articles or pronouns. Indefinite article + proper name + infinitive verb constitutes the basic chain of expression, correlative to the least formalized contents, from the standpoint of a semiotics that has freed itself from formal significances and personal subjectifications” (p. 263). An indefinite article is not indeterminate or vague; rather, it is aligned with the infinite series itself. Infinite in terms of the relations and assemblages that it collects around and through itself. Indefinite articles “lack nothing when they introduce haecceities [singularities], events, the individuation of which does not pass into form and is not effected by a subject” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 264). A child. A horse is dying. A life. Such articles do not “take the place of a subject, but instead do away with any subject in favor of an assemblage of the haecceity type that carries or brings out the event” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 265). This relates to a “proper name,” which is equally in no way “the indicator of a subject” and designates something “on the order of the event” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 264). The proper name is “the agent of the infinitive” because the infinitive verb expresses another temporality, “the floating, nonpulsed time proper to Aeon”—that is, “the time of the pure event or of becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 263). Aeon is the temporality of an event wherein a “floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, something that is both going to happen and has just happened” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 262). For example, a Deleuze to research. To research is to encounter a “populous solitude” because mediators are proper names with their own modes of expression and untimeliness. To mediate means to enter into a composition with the elements that I am: both the finite and infinite multiplicities. My face becomes a landscape. My terrain is defaced by the presence of a mediator. A solitude endures. Hence Deleuze’s notable comment here about working: When you work, you are necessarily in absolute solitude. You cannot have disciples, or be part of a school. The only work is moonlighting and is clandestine. But it is an extremely populous solitude. Populated not with dreams, phantasms or plans, but with encounters. An encounter is perhaps the same thing as a becoming. . . . You encounter people (and sometimes without knowing them or ever having seen them) but also movements, ideas, events, entities. All these things have proper names, but the proper name does not designate a person or a subject. It designates an effect, a zigzag, something which passes or happens between the two as though under a potential difference: the ‘Compton’ effect, the ‘Kelvin’ effect. We said the same thing about becomings: it is not one term that becomes the other, but each encounters the other, a single becoming which is not common to the two, since they have nothing do to with one another, but which is between the two, which has its own direction, a bloc of becoming, an a-parallel evolution. (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 5)

Research is populated with singularities, mediators, and “a-parallel evolution.” A proper name is an “effect,” a diagonal line, running between temporalities, disciplines, precedents and contemporaries, histories and becomings—“something new created in between two terms who keep their heterogeneity” (Stengers 2018, 3).

20

Chapter 1

VI. An artwork is not a mere thing or state of historical or cultural affairs. Perhaps it is evidential, but it is evidence like a baroque emblem, an encryption of an ongoing event. The subject of an artwork is the material, sensible configuration that enables it to render visible an event as it is being actualised. But the movement is a-parallel, double, intensive. It grasps the actualisation of an event as it virtualises what was given as the actual (the state of things, affairs, subjectivities). It is this double, medial movement of an artwork that research seeks to comprehend as well as to create alongside: “from virtuals we descend to actual states of affairs, and from states of affairs we ascend to virtuals, without being able to isolate one from the other” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 160). Understanding and transmitting this double movement or mode of “creative involution” is the ultimate aim of our “apprenticeship to art” (Deleuze 2000, 26, 34).

VII. It is the diagram that doubles the archive of forms, which includes the cultural, political, and historical states of things as they have taken on a consistency. The archive of formal statements, arrangements, and cultural givens is doubled by a diagrammatic “informal dimension” (Deleuze 1988a, 34). “The diagram,” as Deleuze (1988a) explicates it, “is no longer an auditory or visual archive, but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field . . . every diagram is a spatio-temporal multiplicity” (p. 34). Thus there are as many diagrams as there are social fields in history. Nonetheless, there is a crucial difference. Diagrams make “no distinction between content and expression, a discursive formation and a non-discursive formation” (Deleuze 1988a, 34). Such a discursive/non-discursive distinction places language and images in a new relation, one that shifts us from forms-signs to forces-signs, representational strategies to signaletic onto-aesthetic ones. Within the diagrammatic, forces are exercised on other forces. For this reason, Deleuze (1998a) argues that “every diagram is intersocial and constantly evolving” because it never functions in order to represent a persisting world but produces a new kind of reality, a new model of truth. It is neither the subject of history, nor does it survey history. It makes history by unmaking preceding realities and significations, constituting hundreds of points of emergence or creativity, unexpected conjunctions or improbably continuums. It doubles history. (p. 35)

An artwork is diagrammatic power: an “abstract machine,” a Joycean chaosmos, a vitalist materialism, that is, a forceful assemblage of forms that embodies an “informal” power (Zepke 2005). But research, as we’ve been considering it here, is archivaldiagrammatic aesthetic labor. It senses and grasps the movement between archive and



Theses on the Concept of Research 21

diagram, which allows for the insights, illuminations, and past-future “meanwhiles” that artworks present us. This is neither a retrograde formalism nor a cultural criticism that overwrites and turns its back on the image. Rather, it is a mode of research wherein the problematics that art works with and against are encountered both in their possible solutions (a specific assemblage of sensible material, the statements and visibilities it produces) and in their diagrammatic, virtual complications of the problematic itself. As Manuel Delanda (2002) summarises: “in a Deleuzean ontology there exists two histories, one actual and one virtual, having complex interactions with one another. On one hand there is a historical series of actual events genetically involved in the production of other events, and on the other, an equally historical series of ideal events defining an objective realm of virtual problems of which each actualized individual is but a specific solution” (pp. 155–56; Deleuze 1994, 189–90; Lampert 2011). It is in this manner that the relation of archive and diagram comprises a heterogeneous series between past and future. In fact, it reorients our research towards the future rather than the past. “The diagram stems from the outside but the outside does not merge with a diagram, and continues instead to ‘draw’ new ones. In this way, the outside is always an opening on to a future: nothing ends, since nothing has begun, but everything is transformed,” Deleuze posits (1988a, 89). Such a forcediagram presents us with actual, discursive, stratified modes of resistance, that is, “points, knots or focuses” that “make change possible” because “the thought of the outside is a thought of resistance” (Deleuze 1988a, 89, 90). To touch an outside, to think through force-diagrams as well as cultural archives, is to redirect re-search towards an open, in/consistent future. An image of thought: one picks up an arrow shot by another thinker and launches it forward, not knowing who or even if someone will find it and use it. Arrows are to be found and made, sent ahead. The arrow of time. But the bow is an artwork. The bow itself is crooked. Thus the arrow’s flight becomes sinuous, poetic, untimely, inconsistent. Past-futures lie ahead of us, and behind.

VIII. Retrace Your Steps: Remember Tomorrow was the title of a millennial exhibition. From December 1999 to March 2000 the Sir John Soane Museum in London—that singular poetic Soane-universe that presents his house and collection as an “abstract machine” creating temporal affects in space—was the site of a confrontation, a rivalry. A rivalry presented, of course, as a form of admiration. But a rivalry nevertheless. The confrontation was orchestrated by the celebrity contemporary art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who proposed to place contemporary artworks within Soane’s highly wrought, finely tuned abstract machine. Contemporary works by Douglas Gordon, Anish Kapoor, Richard Hamilton, Rem Koolhaas, Steve McQueen, and others were interposed throughout the house-museum, the life-archive. But, the contemporary works were rendered silent and lifeless within the Soane-universe.

22

Chapter 1

The “labyrinth without a thread” (Deleuze 1994, 56; see Preziosi 2003 for an alternate interpretation) of the Soane-universe composes art, architecture, history, and life into a configuration of framings and deframings, filtrations of light and shadow. Aside from the brilliant exhibition title itself, which originated with Douglas Gordon, the architectural-cinematic images that the Soane-universe generates left the contemporary works seeming quite anemic in comparison. In part because the Soane-universe is an expression of a world constructed through singular points of view that the viewer(s) come to occupy; it is not merely a Neoclassical knowledge of form but a form of knowledge itself. It is this trait that positions the Soane housemuseum as more than Neoclassical. It positions it as a past-future abstract machine. Hence its compelling nature: colored light filters, skylights, metallic grilles, the mirrors framing different sets of objects, the panels of paintings (hidden, obscured masks-within-masks), the deep red interiors repeating the image of Pompeiian houses, different traditions and periods; the rooms themselves become framing mirrors with ourselves then doubled and emplaced within these discontinuous paths through the past. Retrace your steps: remember tomorrow. The Soane-universe renders time itself sensible. Far from the Neoclassicism of Apollo, its true mediator is Dionysus. Consider again its theatre of sibylline memory embodied as so many “places of passage and things of forgetting,” faces-masks-corridors-intensities of light and heat: signals all, all signals (Deleuze 1997, 67). The Soane-universe: unconscious, differential, iterative, serial, problematic, questioning, moving, disguised, longing, pride, sorrow, love, terror. It is research in four dimensions: light, space, scale, and time. The Soane-universe is archive-diagram. Within such a field, the self (Soane as proper name) is only a mode of individuation, temporal individuation, rather than the self as masterful subject authoring a classical tradition (Neoclassicism). The clear light of the Enlightenment, of Neoclassicism, falls into the singularities of light within the crypt, in the heart of the house-museum: the virtual past, life as such. Here-and-now Soane becomes a proper name, an impersonal, anomalous multiplicity, a universe, a “meanwhile,” one who “makes perceptible the imperceptible forces that populate the world, affect us, and make us become” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 182). It is all atmospheric, variable, and eventful in the ways the material dissolves into an informal dimension, only to return transformed, revitalised. It is the Soane-universe that works within time; it is truly con-temporary and thus untimely. Untimely means to think the past against the present and to resist the latter, “not in favor of a return,” but in favour of “making the past active and present to the outside so that something new will finally come about” (Deleuze 1988a, 119). To research is to transmit the durations of the future.

IX. We are not after an image of time, but rather an image in time: an image as immanence, which can never be solely and completely in the present. An image is not time



Theses on the Concept of Research 23

as such, but we can have an intensive temporal experience within our encounters with images because they are sense-events. A sense-event forces us beyond habitual recognition (phenomenological and anthropocentric subjectivity). In other words, an image is “untimely” because it complicates perception and memory, present and past, history and becoming (Deleuze 1988a, 107–11, 119–23; Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 112–13; Lundy 2012). It “acts counter to the past, and therefore on the present, for the benefit, let us hope, of a future—but the future is not a historical future, not even a utopian future, it is . . . untimely, not an instant but a becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 112). Research in art, art history, and visual culture studies means to learn to use history against itself. It is to understand that there are always statements and visibilities, forms of expression and forms of content, that we must reaffirm critically and creatively. Becoming (intensive experience, life as such) traverses history without being confused with it, just as an image traverses an artwork without being confused with it. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) write, “what History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self-positing, escapes History” because “History [recognition, interpretation] is not experimentation, it is only the set of almost negative conditions that make possible the experimentation of something that escapes history” (p. 110). Research must become real experimentation with “something that escapes history”—that is, an event, the sensuous matter of an image, which is the temporality creatively involuted within it. What remains to be done is to experiment with ways of encountering an artwork as such a material-force. Such experimentation would allow us to create mediators, to grasp that an event is dated (it takes on a consistency in a specific past-present configuration) even as it continues to produce affects into the future, affects that alter and change the past itself. This would be a research programme, which is always already “a new aesthetic paradigm,” truly capable of thinking thresholds and passages, becoming and history: a theory-practice of multiplicities more aligned with Spinozist joy than historicist melancholy (Emerling and Preziosi 2015, 8).

X. In 1985 Italo Calvino was to present the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. He framed the lectures as a contemplation on the precarious future of literature in the twenty-first century, “the so-called postindustrial era of technology” as he says. Nonetheless, Calvino was confident because he believed that “the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.” He devoted the lectures to these “things,” “values,” and “qualities” in order to transmit them to the new millennium (our present). They are “memos” that Calvino transmits, which he titled Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Each lecture or memo locates a singularity of literature that he had identified

24

Chapter 1

through his research. These singularities have nothing to do with formalist characteristics. They are lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. There were six lectures Calvino would have given at Harvard had he not passed away shortly before being able to do so. He died from a cerebral hemorrhage suffered in the garden of his house in Roccamare, Italy, the house where he wrote these same lectures. His sudden death gives these memos an added pathos, yes, but it makes their message more urgent as it resonates as a mémoire d’outre-tombe: persistent, joyful, and original. As we realise Calvino’s desire: he sought to become a passageway, an opening, that would construct and express a relation between past and future. This desire is apparent when we see his handwritten cover sheet for the memos/mémoires. The sixth, unwritten lecture was to be called “Consistency.” This title is written in a fainter hand than the other titles. It remains unclear if it is dissolving into the ground (the sheet of paper) or emerging from it. Consistency. Such a trait is always a risk. To remain with something, a line of thought, practice, or research so that it is difficult to tell if this fidelity has stopped generating work that matters or if it repeats with such nuance and difference that it becomes “original.” To wait. To persist. To work with an inexhaustible formula. Calvino was a great lover of diagrams. They were the informal structure of his greatest literary experiments. But, as we have seen, it is the plane of consistency that allows for the most radical becoming; it is the source of the diagrammatic events that resonate through our archives and histories because the diagram differs from history and culture, but only the latter give it “a stability that it does not itself possess, for in itself it is unstable, agitated, and shuffled around” (Deleuze 1988a, 85). Forces and forms, aleatory and dependent: it is the rhythm and resonances between that delimit a threshold wherein consistency becomes an opening to the future. A mode of re-search capable of encountering “the sensations that things transmit” by combining “a scientist’s ability to produce general rules with a poet’s attention for what is singular and unique” (Calvino 1981, 34; 2002, 75). This kind of “aesthetic philosophy or delight in understanding” and not judging, Calvino (2002) intimates, “is not something that can be taught or learned,” but only proven that “it is possible to search for it” (pp. 75–76).

REFERENCES Alliez, Éric. 2001. “Undoing the Image (Signposts of a Research Programme).” In Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, edited by Armen Avanessian and Luke Skrebowski, 65–85. Berlin: Sternberg Press. ———. 2004. The Signature of the World: What Is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy? Translated by Eliot Ross Albert and Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum. ———. 2013. “Body without Image: Ernesto Neto’s Anti-Leviathan.” In Spheres of Action: Art and Politics, edited by Éric Alliez and Peter Osborne, 45–64. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Assis, Paulo de, and Michael Schwab, eds. 2019. Futures of the Contemporary: Contemporaneity, Untimeliness, and Artistic Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press.



Theses on the Concept of Research 25

Calvino, Italo. 1981. If on a winter’s night a traveler. Translated by William Weaver. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers. ———. 1988. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. New York: Vintage International. ———. 2002. Collection of Sand. Translated by Martin McLaughlin. Boston and New York: Mariner Books and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Delanda, Manuel. 1999. “Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Form.” In A Deleuzian Century?, edited by Ian Buchanan, 119–34. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2002. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988a. Foucault. Translated by Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1988b. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books. ———. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1995. Negotiations 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1997. Essays Critical and Clinical. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2000. Proust and Signs: The Complete Text. Translated by Richard Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2007. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, edited by David Lappujade. Translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2006. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London and New York: Continuum. Emerling, Jae, and Donald Preziosi. 2015. “Kunstgriff: Art as Event, Not Commodity,” Esse: Arts + Opinions 85 (Fall): 7–11. ———. 2016. “To Betray Art History,” Journal of Art Historiography 15 (December). https:// arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/emerling.pdf. ———. 2017. “Transmissibility: A Mode of Artistic Re-search.” In The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research, edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici, 437–45. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Guattari, Félix. 2006. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Sydney: Power Publications. Lacan, Jacques. 1991. Le Séminaire, Livre XVII: L’envers de psychanalyse. Edited by JacquesAlain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Lampert, Jay. 2011. Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History. London: Continuum. Lundy, Craig. 2012. History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

26

Chapter 1

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2010. “Art Today,” Journal of Visual Culture 9, no. 1 (April): 91–99. Osborne, Peter. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London: Verso. Petzel, Thomas. 1972. “Wincklemann, Mengs, and Casanova: A Reappraisal of a Famous Eighteenth-Century Forgery,” The Art Bulletin 54, no. 3 (September): 300–315. Preziosi, Donald. 2003. “The Astrolabe of the Enlightenment.” In Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity, 63–91. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum. Rodowick, D. N. 1999. “A Memory of Resistance.” In A Deleuzian Century?, edited by Ian Buchanan, 37–57. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, Marquard. 2008. “Asking the Question: ‘What is Research in the Visual Arts? Obsession, Archive, Encounter’?” In What Is Research in the Visual Arts? Obsession, Archive, Encounter, edited by Michael Ann Holly and Marquard Smith, x–xxvi. Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. ———. 2013. “Theses on the Philosophy of History: The Work of Research in the Age of Digital Searchability and Distributability,” Journal of Visual Culture: The Archives Issue 12, no. 3 (December): 375–403. Smith, Terry. 2009. What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2013. “‘Our’ Contemporaneity?” In Contemporary Art 1989 to Present, edited by Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, 17–27. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Stengers, Isabelle. 2011. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Translated by Michael Chase. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2018. “Gilles Deleuze’s Last Message.” http://www.recalcitrance.com/deleuzelast.htm. van Tuinen, Sjoerd, and Stephen Zepke, eds. 2017. Art History after Deleuze and Guattari. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Zepke, Stephen. 2005. Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge.

2 Expositionality Michael Schwab

PART 1: TERMINOLOGIES In 2009, Florian Dombois, then the Head of Y (Institute for Transdisciplinarity) at the Berne University of the Arts, commissioned me to investigate how a peerreviewed journal for artistic research could be introduced. My “Draft Proposal” was published on November 12, 2009, and shared across a number of networks in a “Call for Support” leading to the foundation of the international, non-profit Society for Artistic Research (SAR) in 2010 and the launch of the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) as well as its technical framework, the Research Catalogue (RC), a year later.1 The Draft Proposal invested heavily in the notion of “exposition” as key conceptual ingredient through which the “practice-theory deadlock” (Schwab 2018a, 54) as I later called it was proposed to be challenged. With it came the shift from notions of practice-based or practice-led research to artistic research, since the latter emphasises the importance of self-determination for artists in regard to which part of their research may be considered “practice” or “theory”—if this distinction was still deemed relevant, that is. Embracing the adjective “artistic” (as in “artistic research”) rather than the nouns “art” or “artist” (as in “art research” or “artist’s research”) has also shifted the focus away from notions of “high art” and its modernist discourse. As Gina Badger and Alise Upitis remind us with reference to feminist criticism and the case of Ann Bermingham in particular, historically, the “artistic” (as in “artistic female”) is also a derogative term for work “embodying art without necessarily mastering it.” (Bermingham quoted in Badger and Upitis 2012, 258) My own proposition to look at artistic research as “second-order art-making” (Schwab 2009, 2012a) follows suit; it embraces often minor artistic forms and highlights their particular aesthetic as well as epistemic value. Expositionality in my understanding of the term is tied to these forms, bearing in mind that after the mid-twentieth century and 27

28

Chapter 2

the demise of formalist approaches to art, second-order art marking has gained in relevance. When conceiving of a peer-reviewed journal that is of and for artistic research rather than about it, it is important to relate to what may be called “artistic values” in order to invite artistic modes of research, making and thinking. On a more personal level, as an artist, I expect that aspects central to my practice will remain so even as I develop it as research. In an attempt to spell out those values as explicitly as possible, in the introduction to The Exposition of Artistic Research. Publishing Art in Academia, Henk Borgdorff and I suggest that they may be paraphrased as: 1. Art is self-determined and suffers when it is told what to do. 2. Art challenges existing forms of practice. (Schwab and Borgdorff 2014, 13) In my text “Imagined Meetings” (Schwab 2015b, 10), I refer to these values also as the self- and indetermination of art, where the indetermination of art’s self-determination is potentially so strong as to disrupt historicising models of development including that of one’s own practice. I have deployed notions of experimentation (Schwab 2013a, 2014a, 2014c, 2015a) and, more recently, transposition (Schwab 2018b, 2018c) to investigate the kinds of aesthetico-epistemic operations that make expositions of artistic practice as research possible. The following text serves as a critical introduction to expositionality in the context of artistic research. It is written from a perspective for which the concept of exposition has already entered the general discourse of research in the arts, and where my own understanding of the term matters less than its concrete use and appropriation in different contexts. However, rather than surveying and comparing those at times blurred uses, in what follows, I will aim to re-emphasise that in my understanding expositions are events that problematise rather than represent the artistic practice they embody. Exposition The term “exposition” has Latin roots (exponere as to set forth, to explain). It has only entered the field of art as “public display” with the emergence of World Fairs and the Great Exhibition of 1851 in particular, in the context of which “exposition” (today: Expo) started being used perhaps also since the French precursors (Exposition des produits de l’industrie française, 1798–1849) had suggested that notion for events of this kind. This history, in which the English language has—as so often—appropriated words from other languages, explains why it is difficult to translate back into French the term “exposition” as it is used in the context of artistic research, since its difference and distance to notions of “exhibition” would not be apparent despite the fact that there are expositional aspects in exhibitions and vice versa to the degree that exhibitions and expositions may sometimes coincide.



Expositionality 29

As far as the English language is concerned, “exposition” is an apt concept for at least three reasons. First, in its original meaning (to set forth), it alludes to explanations of all kinds, that is, discursiveness. Second, with the French influence, it is suggested that this discursiveness may happen at a site of display, that is, in embrace of non-verbal means. Third, expositions are also technical and hence mediated and choreographed events that demonstrate not only various products, but the art of display itself, with the Crystal Palace (built for the 1851 Great Exhibition) being one of its prime examples. On the other hand, the proximity of the notion of “exposition” to commerce may be seen as problematic, in a manner not dissimilar to the notion of “research” entering the field of art. As the history, for instance, of the British development shows (Candlin 2001), the 1991 white paper “Higher Education: A New Framework” that prepared the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, which granted many art schools university status and hence access to research funding, is very much concerned with relations to industry and the capitalisation of research in general very much in line with what today is called “knowledge economy.” As a term, “exposition” does not suggest any critical distance to those developments, although in practice when the notion is used, things may be different. Another important aspect has to do with the monumental character of the historical form of exposition as World Fair, which suggests some form of overview over a totality and a celebration of its greatness—such as the British Empire in 1851, for instance. Should an exposition in the context of artistic research aim at an overview? At a celebration? And if yes, of what kind? When looking at, for instance, Robert Smithson’s more ironic appropriation of the term “monument” in his 1967 text “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (Smithson 1996, 68–74) that followed his 1966 essay “Entropy And The New Monuments” (pp. 10–23), a changed relation to history is suggested as well as very different associations of form, materiality, and locality pointing to possible new understandings of that heavily historicising notion in contemporary art. For those reasons, I have always been uneasy about “exposition” as a noun, only accepting it in the context of the RC, where an exposition is a clearly defined digital object—a set of multimodal web pages created on the RC for the purpose of presenting artistic research (Schwab 2014b). As a verb (to expose), the notion of “exposition” has very different connotations suggesting in particular a relationship to photography and the politics of light and visibility. In this sense, exposition is also exposure—a making-available of something to perception and, as indicated earlier, discourse, which qua enlightenment carries its own relationship to visuality. Crucially, however, through the suffix -ure, exposure suggests a certain passivity on the side of that which is exposed. In comparison, the notion of exposition is neutral in this respect. However, when the verb “to expose” is used, it is not immediately clear whether it is meant as exposure or exposition—that is, suggesting passivity or neutrality. By

30

Chapter 2

default, I would suggest that a sentence such as “to expose my research” will lean to an understanding infused with some degree of passivity since “exposure” is the more dominant term also perhaps related to the ubiquity of photography.2 This suggests that when referring to the activity of exposition care needs to be taken to avoid those connotations, which is important to me but which complicates the language to be employed when expositions are discussed. At the same time, since they offer points of entry into the articulation of research, slippages to exposure are not unwelcome as it is a familiar concept expressing a certain wish by many researchers to bring into the light of discourse what they have been doing in the comparative darkness of their studio or lab. The fact that an exposition affects what we assume is simply exposed is at times forgotten—that is, more representational understandings may take hold and a difference may get lost between “to expose my research” and “to represent my research,” for instance in a talk. Hence, an awareness is required that, despite the ease with which I can talk about “exposure,” the reality of things is more challenging. As Ella Joseph (2014) remarks in her chapter in The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia, there is a complex relationship where “exposure and exposition generate each other” (p. 166) where the role, for instance, of Jean Cocteau’s (1986) Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film is “that of exposing his own self, which has the function of making clear what the film as exposition veils” (Joseph 2014, 170). In other words, the positive import of notions of exposure to an understanding of exposition lays in the fact that acts of exposition affect everything including the image and the body of the artist, on which discourse may be seen to be inscribed. Exposition cannot escape making implications; nakedness, veiled or otherwise, is always on the cards—but perhaps not in the sense of “undressing.” To Expose “As” The sense of passivity in a statement such as “to expose my research” is also created since in this construct the act of exposition does not appear to affect the research other than making it visible. Hence, in order to avoid a folding of “to expose” into notions of exposure, the more complex phrase that I have been advocating always comes with the preposition “as”—to expose A as B. This grammatical construct makes it much more difficult to think of photography, where silver salt is exposed to light but not “set forth” in any meaningful way. Hence, more than the noun “exposition,” it is the phrase “to expose practice as research” that has the most critical potential—short-hand usages, such as “my exposition” or “to expose my research” are easier to use and deploy, but they always run the risk of being understood in such a way as to put practice at a place of passivity. With this shift yet another term proposed to identify our emerging field—“art as research”—becomes relevant. However this phrase, while also relying on the preposition “as,” is at risk of shedding some of its critical potential if it is meant to express that “art is and always has been a research practice” (Mersch 2015, 24), perhaps



Expositionality 31

also in the sense in which Borgdorff (2012, 230) characterises the “Nordic model” as “sui generis”—that is, “foreground[ing] artistic values when it comes to assessing research in the arts.” In his text “What Is Artistic Research?,” Julian Klein (2017) is also sceptical about possible re-definitions of art as research, since they fail to capture “artistic experiences” to be had outside of art. Hence, while I support the term “art as research” due to the importance of the preposition “as,” I question the grammatical construct linking two nouns, “art” and “research.” To my mind, this signals a context of ontology; that is, an interest in fields and disciplines rather than processes of understanding—epistemology—and the labor to be carried out when the one becomes the other. “Art” may or may not be research; without building bridges that ground either kind of understanding all we can do is rest on presuppositions, which is precisely what the notion of “research” fundamentally suggests challenging. “To expose” is not only a verb, but also a practice. In fact, being a practice is all that counts in this construct—the notion of “exposition” perhaps chosen on the background of my own engagement with photography could easily be replaced by other indicators of practice, such as “to perform practice as research,” “to curate practice as research,” or “to stage practice as research,” since they all describe similar grounded movements of articulation. Such shift towards forms of practice seems a more recent, important development in the field. The book Künstlerische Forschung. Ein Handbuch (Badura et al. 2015), for instance, is organised around entries as diverse as “to annotate,” “to think; to reflect,” “to form; to arrange,” “to improvise,” “to set in scene,” “to compose,” “to model,” “to practice,” “to work serially,” “to exhibit,” “to diagram,” “to experiment,” “to design,” “to install,” “to interact,” “to work collectively,” “to concert,” “to note,” “to publish,” “to sing,” “to translate.” Focusing on aspects of “non-propositionality,” Mira Fliescher and Julia Rintz (2014) also propose a “toolbox” that includes practices such as “to think,” “to say,” “to show,” but also notions that may act as ingredients to practices such as “joke/wit [Witz],” “model,” “force.” In other words, the preposition “as” must be seen as situated in a practice that delivers practice’s articulation as research—that is, its epistemic claim. The most general formulation would thus be: “to practice practice as research” where the first “practice” is a verb, the second “practice” a noun, and the third practice a noun (“research”) as practice’s transposition into the epistemic. As becomes apparent here, then, “practice” is a multiplicity and simplifications such as “artistic practice” do not do justice to the various practices involved in artistic research, which must interrelate in such a way as to carry the weight of the distributed uniqueness that is being articulated. Moreover, it means accepting difference in practice and the differentiation of practice as epistemically productive, even in their crudest form of “art making” and “writing,” or “practice” and “theory” both of which now, after the “practice turn” (Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, and Savigny 2001), I am suggesting are terms that allow for an understanding of the differentiation of practice and not for its demarcation. “Theory” is as much a practice as “practice” is. Esa Kirkkopelto is right to suggest that what is ultimately at stake in “artistic research” are relationships to institutions, and the institutions of “art” and “academia”

32

Chapter 2

in particular. In his text Artistic Research as Institutional Practice (Kirkkopelto 2015), he questions whether approaches usually referred to as “institutional critique” act sufficiently deeply on the problematic of institutionality ultimately idealising counter-institutional practices while failing to understand that those practices collectively referred to as “critique” amount to institutions in their own right seemingly passing below their own (critical) radar. In difference to this, Kirkkopelto suggests that artistic research is also a practice of “instituting”—that is, whatever artistic research produces must have the potential to be instituted into “new knowledge” without which its inventiveness must be challenged. The relation to institutions of knowledge offers the critical dimension to the practice of instituting, which is historical—it needs to research and work on existing institutions and is as such not so much an expansion of knowledge than always also re-institution of what it is we know and how we know it. In effect, to expose practice as research as genuine departure from what is already institutionally captured, existing notions of “research” must be investigated, challenged and replaced by new understandings. It is only when new notions of research are registered beyond simple claims to it that we can assume that a case has successfully been made for this and that new practice to count as research. This implies that forms of epistemology must be part of expositionality, but also that expositionality may offer new departures for epistemology, which now becomes neither a theory of knowledge nor its sociocultural genesis, but a materially situated, exemplary, and speculative enterprise and a proliferation of possible knowledges beyond what a single logos can capture. The same case must also be made for the institution of art. Klein (2017) in effect turns the construct of expositionality around suggesting that at stake are also expositions of research as art, since the question of institution very much also applies to art. With regard to transpositionality, which I see as fundamental to expositionality (Schwab 2018c), I suggest characterising such double operations of exposition as “aesthetico-epistemic”—that is, the multiplicity with which I characterise artistic research practice needs to be extended to also include its institutions. On this level, the institutional context of JAR in which the notion of “exposition” has been developed becomes relevant. What may be a suitable format for an academic peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the exposition of practice as research? Expositions are aesthetico-epistemic transpositions of practice aimed at articulating artistic research. While we can see such expositions working on all levels of complexity, we need to keep in mind that this understanding is not as yet sufficiently secured. In other words, part of the reason why the short history of artistic research has been so confusing stems from attempts in grounding it in what ultimately are unsuitable adaptations from non-artistic fields, such as the humanities or the sciences, which by and large do not do justice to the importance of the aesthetic for research reducing the epistemic implications of aesthetical labor to some form of sensory or experiential input. Frustratingly, this problem is not new to art education, where on all levels forms of verbal expression are prescribed that are supposed to deliver “reflection.” Thus, the link that Tom Holert (2009), in his article “Art in the



Expositionality 33

Knowledge-Based Polis,” suggests between artistic research and the transformation of art education in the twentieth century needs to be followed up with the question: Have the forms, which have been developed as the studio became a place of conversation, been radical enough to critique both the traditional art education (“atelier,” “master class”) and the critical response often idealised under the label of “1968”? For instance, when looking at Mick Wilson’s (2018, 34f.) suggestions about “the crit”—the “group critique and analysis sessions” that form a key institution of arts pedagogy, as he says—in the context of a discussion on method in artistic research, it is important to ask whether its auto-critical elements when described as “discursive reflection” can touch upon the more fundamental operations of knowledge creation. Rather than suggesting that artistic research should be discussed as extension of these developments, we should perhaps take it as an opportunity to question the nonartistic elements of current art education, which have been haunting debates about artistic research. This is not to say that art must be idealised once again; it is to say that under post-media conditions, hierarchies are not (yet) flat enough and that there should not be predetermined sites for, for instance, “reflection” or “creation.” In this sense, expositionality has the potential to question and replace the ongoing emphasis on criticism. However, there is no existing theory as yet to actually make the case on the scale that is required. When discussing notions of exposition in the context of artistic research, one needs to keep in mind that the field is very much in movement and that there is a lot that needs to be tested, evaluated, or better understood. In fact, I very much consider JAR a research project in its own right and an attempt at finding out what happens when practice expresses itself in articulations of research outside conventional orders of production and reflection.

PART 2: IMPLICATIONS In this second part, I want to indicate two lines of enquiry that could suggest the kind of work required to test and secure notions of expositionality in a wider field. The first is taken from an epistemological context, the second from the field of art. In a final section I aim to bring those approaches into greater proximity as a basis to introduce some of the experiences had as we edited the first fifteen issues of JAR. Experimentation The often extremely material processes through which art is developed suggest a certain proximity to the experimental sciences, which could likewise be described as “practice-led.” Despite this, the importance of practice in experimentation has often been limited to the testing of hypotheses—that is, theoretical constructs. For instance, Karl Popper, a key proponent of this view, does not sufficiently discuss the generative potentials of experimentation in his seminal book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Popper 2007), underestimating aspects of “exploratory experimentation”

34

Chapter 2

(Steinle 1997). It is those understandings, however, that are led by practices and not theories that have the greatest potential to help developing the epistemological implications of expositionality. More specifically, I want to suggest that in order to work, expositions of practice as research must have a matter-of-fact character. “Matter of fact” is a concept that Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer take from Robert Boyle, the inventor of the air pump and arguably one of the fathers of experimental science. In fact, it must be argued that much of the historical success of this kind of science rests on our ongoing belief in matters of fact. As they say: “In the conventions of the intellectual world we now inhabit there is no item of knowledge so solid as a matter of fact. . . . A discarded theory remains a theory. . . . However, when we reject a matter of fact, we take away its entitlement to the designation; it never was a matter of fact at all” (Shapin and Schaffer 1992, 23). When, for instance, Boyle demonstrated in experiment twenty-seven that the ticking of a watch could no longer be heard after the air had been removed from his pump, this new and surprising matter of fact is nothing that can be contested without suggesting that one would have been tricked. This is because matters of fact appear as natural phenomena and not as human interpretations. Counterintuitively, though, despite being given, matters of fact are created—Boyle set up the air pump, invited witnesses and reported matters of fact in his writings—that is, material, social, and literary technologies are employed that seem to disappear as matters of fact emerge. This strange, two-way operation may explain why the history of the theory of science only very recently has been able to more fully engage with experimentation in a way that takes its practice into account. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere (Schwab 2015a) this is comparable to the history of art, in which representational conceptions of realism were in the way of understanding realism as an effect of a certain type of painting practice—one whose apparatus disappears in the reality-effect of the painting. Thus, certain types of articulations, to which I refer here as expositional, have the ability to self-ground reversing as it were the temporal order of cause and effect thus de-historicising the impact of historical action; matters of fact, be they scientific phenomena or works of art, are eternal—once they exist, they may be forgotten, but they cannot be undone. Out of the three interconnected technologies (material, social, and literary) that Shapin and Schaffer mention, I will not expand any further here on aspects of the social apart from reiterating that potentials for institutionalisation are necessary, and that the communities that, for instance, JAR, the RC, or SAR represent may be as vital for the establishment of expositional approaches to artistic research as the Royal Society was for the experimental sciences, since they create sites for expositions of practice as research and behaviours around them—for instance, in JAR’s peer-review process, which includes aesthetic dimensions allowing for reviewers to divert from what otherwise would be the application of criteria to identify research (Schwab 2018a). As for the material technology, I will approach it rather from the arts than from the sciences in the later section “Counting As.” Here, though, I want to expand



Expositionality 35

a little on the concept of literary technology, since it will help keep the focus on the context of publishing in which notions of exposition have been developed. Literary Technology The concept of “virtual witnessing” is central to Shapin’s understanding of literary technology. Fundamentally, if matters of fact appear as natural phenomena, they need to be witnessed to become epistemically relevant; at the same time, being created in often complex settings perceptible only for limited amounts of time, the witnessing of matters of fact is problematic. As a result, matters of fact in their material state are difficult to conceptualise (unstable referent) and also have a limited reach (people able to witness them first-hand). Replication—repeating experiments in different social and geographic contexts in particular by multiplying the experimental apparatus—provides some remedy, although fundamentally the proliferation of a matter of fact will be limited and its impact restricted. Boyle’s literary technology, so Shapin, allowed him to overcome this socio-material bottleneck; his writings and publications were done in such a way that readers could trust his description to the degree that by reading the report they believed to have witnessed the matter of fact. As Shapin (1984) says: “The validation of experiments, and the crediting of their outcomes as matter of fact, necessarily entailed their realization in the laboratory of the mind and the mind’s eye. What was required was a technology of trust and assurance that the things had been done and done in the way claimed” (p. 491). A publication that manages to create such a “laboratory of the mind” by substituting material aspects through literary devices is the basis for a virtual witnessing that can secure matters of fact without direct material access. In artistic research the problem is not dissimilar, although further, more subjective dimensions—such as embodiment and affect—may make it even harder to engage virtual witnessing. At the same time, if virtual witnessing can be extended to also cover those dimensions, “matters of fact” could phenomenally become much more varied, making it harder to challenge artistic insights as merely “subjective.” How this can be done is part of the research on artistic research that is still lacking. Going back to Shapin’s analysis of Boyle’s books, it is at least possible to indicate how the virtual witnessing of matters of fact can be achieved. Important seems to be, first, the use of different media—here text and image—rather than relying on a single media type to do the work. While Shapin stresses with Boyle that the use of a variety of media can communicate with a wider readership (including those “requir[ing] visual assistance” [Shapin 1984, 492] by the illustrations) I would focus more on the multiplicity that this creates. There is no preferred form in which matters of fact can be encountered, which by extension includes also the material experimental situation. Such distribution also suggests that each form adds its own qualities to it, to the degree that what is understood through a publication may experientially be poorer but epistemically enriched in a way that a “real” but discursively

36

Chapter 2

limited encounter may not be able to deliver. Ultimately then, there is no single original site despite the fact that the distributed multiplicity manages to bring into focus the matter of fact as if there were one. While Boyle’s work is historically distant, it is these aspects that make it systematically relevant, in particular since ideas of distribution have also been linked to contemporary art (Osborne 2013, 120ff.). In the field of artistic research one should perhaps point to Project Anywhere, an umbrella for research projects with inaccessible or unclear sites “at the outermost limits of location-specificity.”3 As Sean Lowry and Nancy de Freitas (2013) explain, such distributions “symbolically represent the aesthetic experience as network” (p. 141) with the result that “we are now less likely to expect artworks and their documentation to exist in a singular destination, but rather, to be situated and understood within an unfolding process of formation” (Lowry and de Freitas 2013, 146) which, I would add, includes the formation of the work in “the laboratory of the mind.” A second aspect of Boyles’s use of media has to do with a-representational modes of realism of the kind indicated earlier. In other words, the experience of a reader entering a page must not be too dissimilar to a visitor entering a site of experimental demonstration. In Boyle’s case, as Shapin (1984) reports, this is achieved through “the density of circumstantial detail” and a level of “noise” not detrimental to the communication but epistemically productive (Malaspina 2018; Serres 1982). There is no formation of knowledge without a background from which and against which it is formed; removing that background in a directed, representational communication might tell me what it is that I should see, but it will not allow me to see for myself, a necessary requirement for virtual witnessing. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1997), whose “epistemic things” (Schwab 2013b) could be conceived as matters of fact, is very clear that, at the bench of the experimenter, epistemic things are first experienced as disturbance, irritation, or contamination. Rather than excluding those from processes of communication and dissemination, Shapin’s (1984) “literary technology” embraces them in order to keep the experimental situation open. This includes not only depictions of experimentally irrelevant details but also descriptions of failed experiments, whose main function is not to report negative results but to convey the reality of the experimental situation. In terms of writing, it also includes a style that is “plain, puritanical, unadorned (yet convoluted)” as well as modest and functional (Shapin 1984, 495). In Shapin’s (1984) explanation of “literary technology” those qualities of Boyle’s writings are described to originate from the images as “mimetic devices” (p. 492), which is the reason why Shapin (1984) suggests that “we should also appreciate that the text itself constitutes a visual source” (p. 491). However, important to my understanding of expositionality is also a discussion of the inverse, namely, how those images also become a form of text, or, rather, what image of “text” might appear through such forms of inter- and trans-mediality. Text or “the literary” would then be liberated from its historically close proximity to written language and linguistics in a way that Roland Barthes (1977) may have had in mind in his essay “From work to text,” which discusses many aspects that I have already mentioned in



Expositionality 37

the context of literature, such as, “the activity of production” (p. 157), “plurality” (p. 159), or “network” (p. 161). As suggested by this reference to Barthes, it is important to stress again that what the history of science has described—which I suggest taking into consideration for a better understanding of expositionality—is not meant as a blueprint for what I expect the arts to do. That is, while its analyses have bordered on the aesthetic (such as Shapin’s (1984) “literary technology”), it has by far not connected with the aesthetics of contemporary art, which is the context in which artistic research has been emerging. In fact, it is only very recently that science and technology studies has registered “artistic research” as a phenomenon to engage with. Hence, with “matter of fact” and “virtual witnessing” in mind, I want to jump in the next section into the context of art to suggest the kind of research needed to engage with the aesthetical dimensions of artistic research. Counting As As I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, expositionality is tied up with a paradigmatic shift in the development of artistic research away from notions of “practice-based” or “practice-led.” In other words, as “practice” was conceived to be fixed at a particular point either below, before, or after research, regardless of how much it may affect notions of “research” itself, expositionality cannot take centre stage. This is also a problem of writing, insofar as writing, if associated with aspects above or behind practice, cannot come close enough to the issues developed in many projects. Standards of academic writing, thus, need to be adapted (Schwab 2012b) at the same time as writing as practice is addressed. Again, research is missing into the links between artistic research and art writing as well as the ever-increasing amount of artists’ publications, but as a more general point for artistic research, Katy MacLeod and Lin Holdridge were right when 2006 they demanded: “We need to bring our writing nearer to our making” (p. 12). In fact, the introduction to their book Thinking through Art: Reflections on Art as Research (Macleod and Holdridge 2006), in which that statement was made, was instrumental to the development of my own thinking at the time (in the closing stages of my doctorate) since it offered as far as I was concerned a new departure for the field. Crucially, however invested the volume was in the academic problems of artistic research, the departure that I am referring to did not stem from this context but from an appropriation of a contemporary art exhibition and its catalogue to the debates around research, a fact that I find significant. This already tells us that, as writing moves closer to practice, artistic research might move closer to contemporary art. Or, conversely, artistic research’s unresolved relationship to academia holds artistic research at a distance to contemporary art, which may explain some of the unease and struggle that many artists experience as they embark on research degrees. In other words, expositionality does not only deal with problems of practice and theory in artistic research, it also offers a bridge to contemporary art and potential critical interventions into it (Schwab 2019).

38

Chapter 2

The exhibition to which that catalogue belongs is As Painting: Division and Displacement (Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; 5 December 2001–8 December 2001; curated by Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville); the essay from the catalogue that MacLeod and Holdridge focus on is Melville’s “Counting/As/Painting” (Melville 2001). In it, Melville describes the point of departure of the exhibition—an interest in what today can count as painting. Implied are at least two equally important aspects: (1) that the category of “painting”—its ontology—is in flux, since otherwise we would not need to ask the question, and (2) that how something can count as painting—a question of epistemology—comes to the fore once we are in doubt what it is. Both are of course issues that only arise under conditions of post-media in a way that, for instance, Rosalind Krauss (2000) conceptualises. In some sense, these debates in the context of contemporary art can be seen as a further problematisation—and also liberation—of mediality that above I introduced with reference to Boyle. The multiplicity of media that I hint at in that section is now complicated by their distinction from notions of “technical support” suggesting that the mediality of works—or expositions—may be emergent rather than invested. Before and beyond a discussion of any details that follow, the transposition of this exhibition-event to the field of artistic research is what facilitates the departure I am referring to, that is a shift in the vocabulary leaving behind notions of “practiceled” in favour of the critically more relevant term “as research.” It suggests that the question of “What is artistic research?” which had been dominating the field, could be replaced by “How do we know that something is artistic research?” (or, “When is artistic research?”), a shift from ontological to epistemological concerns that put into jeopardy all the presuppositions that hitherto had been taken for granted, albeit often gruntingly so. However, if that step was made in a sufficiently radical manner—for instance, if we recognise painting in something that is not a painting, or if an artistic research project convinces while defying all criteria of research we could throw at it—something in the thing itself needs to provide the grounding for the proposition of something as research as the basis for serious engagement and assessment. How can criteria for painting—or artistic research—be immanent? Melville answers this question in a number of ways, but fundamentally, as he says, “whatever sense it [the work] makes has finally to be measured against one’s experience of that work” (Melville 2001, 2). In other words, what the work is taken for is a matter of fact and not a question of interpretation. This requires, if not the abolishment of subject and object positions, at least their complication to a degree at which a work starts to have qualities of both, subject and object, or, as Melville (2001) says, “matter thinks” (p. 6). Melville summarises the implications of this statement as such: 1. Matter thinks. “Thinks” here means “makes a difference,” so the proposition is that matter gives itself over to difference or to a process of difference.



Expositionality 39

2. This process must be grounded in matter opening itself to sense through some interruption of its apparent absolute continuity with itself; the ground of thought is something like a cut or fold, a moment of delay or excess, in which substance refigures itself as relation. 3. Because thought taken this way is above all articulation, matter is not conceivable apart from language and the structures of difference to which it gives particularly compelling expression. There is no perception and so no visibility that is not also a work of articulation, and so also no visibility not structurally worked by invisibility, blindness, reserve (Melville 2001, 8). Although Melville does not conceptualise what he calls “articulation” as exposition, what he writes here describes many relevant aspects. Despite this, I am not sure how much I am willing to follow him into the more ontological dimensions of his point; for instance, I doubt whether one should make statements about what matter in general is or does. In fact, such generalisations may be afforded in art criticism, but they also show the limits of interpretation when it closes the “experimental situation.” In the context of a debate about expositionality a sensitivity to this shift is important since “subject-works”—to use a notion that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (1988) have introduced—are not simply given but part of larger processes with multiple agencies and affordances, in which not just the art works matter, but also artistic practices and as well as the problematisation of art. Regardless of the question of ontology, expositional matter—as which I understand Melville’s formulation “matter thinks”—must be a differential construct since it otherwise could not make a difference and rupture what is already given and known. It folds in such a way that its unfolding in various acts of articulation is implied (Latin: implicare as “to enfold”) including those acts that operate at greater distance—that is, in absence of “the work.” In fact, only through a network of articulations can the multiplicity of expositional matter be represented. The inverse is however also the case: as what we take the work to be—what is enfolded, for instance, in its title—also follows its articulations. In other words, expositional matter unfolds and enfolds simultaneously, allowing it, by suspending the order of cause and effect, to disrupt time itself. To Melville, the grammatical construct suitable to capture the differential operator invested in painting practice revolves around the preposition “as.” He moves from “to count paintings,” where what a painting is, is ontologically clear, to “to count as painting,” where what is at hand becomes a painting through the act of being counted as such. The difference between those two statements has a lot to do with how active we consider things to be and whether it can only be us who do the counting. Again, I am not too sure whether one should enter ontological discussions about the “work,” since it is sufficient to say that the effect of being counted as painting emerges from a distributed articulation that includes human and nonhuman actants—say, myself and a canvas. More recent literature that is increasingly

40

Chapter 2

relevant to the discourse of artistic research is discussing those distributions in terms of entanglement (Barad 2007). The aesthetics of this process (which is, as I hope has become clear, also always epistemically active) must be described as post-conceptual, also in a historical sense. With this, I mean that the exhibition “As Painting” can be used to mark a historical point at which post-conceptual practices could be developed to engage with forms of art (“painting”) whose aesthetics don’t necessarily strike one as being of that type. Post-conceptualism in this sense engages the history of art differently without requiring artists-creators to authenticate what their work should be understood as. This point is very much related to what Barthes says about the emergence of “text” at the site of reading: “The text . . . decants the work . . . from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice. This means that the text requires that one try to abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading, in no way by intensifying the projection of the reader into the work but by joining them in a single signifying practice” (Barthes 1977, 162).4 Exposition Writing With regard to expositionality and the current situation of artistic research, it is very clear that there is still a massive deficit in the field: expositions of practice as research tend still to be made first of all by the artists who put their own practice forward rather than by researchers whose work does not discriminate along lines of creative authorship. At the very least it should be said that a discourse is lacking that recognises as artistic research such post-conceptual practices carried out by people who don’t call themselves “artist” in a way that I suggest here for the curators of “As Painting” or, to take a more prominent example, as Mika Elo (2018), one of my colleagues on the editorial board of JAR, has done for the work of Walter Benjamin.5 This contemporary moment is, thus, part of much larger historical developments, which could be revisited with a focus on expositionality, such as when Lucy Cotter (2014) conceives Brian O’Doherty’s guest edited double-issue (5+6) of Aspen magazine as an “early exposition.” As she says: “The pertinent question for the artistic research exposition is how O’Doherty creates those framing conditions for the material in the box, how he actualizes an artistic way of thinking. How might an artistic research exposition be set up so as to enable others to think outside of the conventions of disciplinary lineage and methodology?” (Cotter 2014, 227). Engaging with the expositionality of historic examples has at least two positive effects: in terms of the history of art, discussing works of art as expositions may help shed light on some of the artistic concerns that may otherwise be overlooked; in terms of the contemporary practice of artistic research, it may become possible to engage with them in a way that continues their own unfolding either through appropriation of materials or transposition into one’s own practice. Very recently, Theodor Barth (2018) has proposed yet another, very interesting application of expositionality in his introduction to the special issue on “Drawing”



Expositionality 41

of the Norwegian journal FormAkademisk. Here, the notion of “exposition” is used as analytical tool to compare the individual articles collected in the issue. This seems to follow my suggestion that expositions have matter-of-fact character— they disappear when they produce their objects and can be made to appear only if looked at an angle provided by other cases. As Barth (2018) says: “Indeed, the idea that initially contradictory positions can be developed in a pattern where they hold each other—such as in a ‘holding pattern’ (Barth and Raein 2009)—proposes a learning strategy where exposition can hit and impact at a variety of different junctures, where decisions made and understandings reached occur simultaneously. They do not have to happen before a privileged instance nor at one point in time, bringing a distributed intelligence into the equation” (p. 7). The suggestion here, then, is that expositionality emerges more across than in expositions, which might explain why it is so difficult to describe the specific labor that a single exposition of practice as research performs. In fact, it may be that the layers of multiplicity, which amount to ideas held in material constellations involving us, make thinking about expositions so exciting. Returning to the more practical implications of expositionality in the face of such fundamental intellectual implications, I would suggest that the making—or writing—of expositions as well as their appreciation isn’t a simple task. Or rather, its “im-plications” have the potentials to grow. In this sense, I consider, for example, more conventional scholarly writing supported by images also as expositional, albeit in a more limited sense (Schwab 2018a, 55). The question to the practitioner—or writer of an exposition—then is: How far can you go before expositionality disintegrates—that is, before the complex fabric you weave comes apart and stops making sense? I for one, despite all my investment in the topic, keep being disappointed by my own ability to hold sufficient thought in the pages of my own expositions despite the excitement of having begun. A “reader” has an equally difficult task since conventions do not necessarily help in establishing how to read an exposition of practice as research. When we point to examples, we cannot really point to the way in which an exposition—sometimes also through rhetorics of frustration—makes itself read. In this sense, they are “thick descriptions” (Geertz 2017) that must be activated to allow a reader’s position to be sufficiently shifted to a place from which what is in front of his or her eyes and ears can unfold. As a peer reviewer to JAR explained her experience to us when she became a “deep reader”: “It is only in this close reading that I became aware of how effective your format works,” which I understand to mean that the work required of a peer reviewer does not only lead to a list of desired revisions but also to his or her transformation—feeling, as it were, the en- and unfolding in oneself. I very much share this view and continue to be positively surprised by submissions to JAR, which on first sight don’t promise as much as they later deliver. At the same time, since the reader is also “im-plied” and as such brings something to an exposition, we should not suggest that it always works, which of course poses a challenge to peer-review and editorial processes.

42

Chapter 2

These are some of the reasons why I cannot easily point to examples of “best practice”; instead, in order to get a sense of how expositionality is engaged with for example in JAR, I would suggest paying particular attention to examples: •  where media content (audio or video) starts straight away; •  that give visual guidance of how and in which direction to read; •  that create productive confusion/overload/multilayeredness; •  where the effect is less in the design but in the multimodality of language (at times also including multiple languages); •  that present alternative archives; •  that allow for a comparison between documentations of external events and their recreation in the exposition; •  that play with the size of media elements including how wide text columns run; •  where presentations of works happen through process descriptions (and how they deal with “failure”); •  that use and problematise the first person singular; •  where materials are repeated. In doing this, one will find that not all submissions are equally developed, nor that they need to be developed according to such lists. In fact, as I hope has become clear, there are no formal criteria for effective expositions; at the same time, while anything might “go,” the aesthetics of expositionality are clearly not arbitrary. Much more research would need to be invested to better characterise the aesthetics that are emerging, in particular in context and perhaps also contrast to contemporary art as well as non-artistic publications in enhanced journals. As a very final point, I want to suggest my personal take on the urgency of matters of expositionality, that is the self-grounding of knowledge in its articulation, at a point in time where external frameworks are either crumbling or encrusting into increasingly hollow forms, due to the complexities of contemporary life. In effect, strategies of epistemic distancing that provide “overviews” or “representations” either fail by excluding phenomena (simplification) or by missing the historical moment at which action is still possible (delay). Both fail to do (epistemic) justice to the world and plethora of phenomena at hand. This results either in (1) impoverished knowledge that Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) characterises as the result of an “epistemicide” when it suppresses or erases the knowledges of the world and—closer to “home”—the knowledges that artistic practices might hold or (2) a decoupling of knowledge and action of a kind that perpetuates “progress” regardless of the political and environmental fallout that we have now been witnessing for some time without much ability to change direction. More positively put—and this is the experience of expositionality in action as proposed departure from this crisis—it is the sense that local, situated, material, affective, or contradictory knowledges are not only possible but also sharable, and that learning and understanding need not be built on one’s own presuppositions. For the time being, “artistic research” is the name that I give to this dream.



Expositionality 43

NOTES 1.  In “The Case of the Journal for Artistic Research: Or How a New Field of Research Is Articulated”—chapter 11 of his book The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research in Academia (2012)—Henk Borgdorff describes the process that led to SAR, JAR, and the RC in detail. 2.  Using Google’s Ngram Viewer, https://books.google.com/ngrams, to compare the use of the terms “exposure” and “exposition” in books from the period between 1800 and 2000 reveals that exposure is dominant only since approximately the 1930s; in 2000, for instance, the use of exposure is approximately eight times more likely than exposition. 3. These could be inaccessible “subjective” places or remote places that an art audience would not visit (e.g., a remote desert) or cannot visit (e.g., outer space). https://www.projectanywhere.net/ 4.  I conceive of this “single signifying practice” as distributed. 5.  See also Elo’s lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhIYLwzNFsE&t=470s (in Finnish).

REFERENCES Badger, Gina, and Alise Upitis. 2012. “On the Research Paradigm in Contemporary Art Discourse: A Dialogue.” In Intellectual Birdhouse: Artistic Practice as Research, edited by Florian Dombois, Claudia Mareis, Ute Meta Bauer, and Michael Schwab, 257–69. London: Koenig Books. Badura, Jens, Selma Dubach, Anke Haarmann, Dieter Mersch, Anton Rey, Christoph Schenker, and Germán Toro Pérez, eds. 2015. Künstlerische Forschung. Ein Handbuch. Zürich / Berlin: Diaphanes. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barth, Theodor. 2018. “Drawing in Artistic Research—Whence and Wherefore?” FormAkademisk 11 (3): 2–7. https://doi.org/10.7577/formakademisk.2945. Barth, Theodor, and Maziar Raein. 2009. “Walking with Wolves—Displaying the Holding Pattern.” Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 1 (1): 33–46. Barthes, Roland. 1977. “From Work to Text.” In Image Music Text, 155–64. London: Fontana Press. Borgdorff, Henk. 2012. The Conflict of the Faculties. Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Candlin, Fiona. 2001. “A Dual Inheritance: The Politics of Educational Reform and PhDs in Art and Design.” Journal of Art & Design Education 20 (3): 302–10. Cocteau, Jean. 1986. Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film. New York: Dover Publications. Cotter, Lucy. 2014. “Between the White Cube and the White Box: Brian O’Doherty’s Aspen 5+6, An Early Exposition.” In The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia, edited by Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff, 220–36. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Elo, Mika. 2018. “Ineffable Dispositions.” In Transpositions. Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research, edited by Michael Schwab, 218–95. Ghent/Leuven: Orpheus Institute/ Leuven University Press.

44

Chapter 2

Fliescher, Mira, and Julia Rintz. 2014. “Tool-Box. Für die Arbeit zwischen Nicht-Propositionalität und ästhetischem Denken.” In Ästhetisches Denken: Nicht-Propositionalität, Episteme, Kunst, edited by Florian Dombois, Mira Fliescher, Dieter Mersch, and Julia Rintz, 134–300. Zürich: Diaphanes. Geertz, Clifford. 2017. The Interpretation of Cultures. 3rd ed. New York: Basic Books. Holert, Tom. 2009. “Art in the Knowledge-Based Polis.” E-Flux Journal, no. 3 (February). http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/40. Joseph, Ella. 2014. “When One Form Generates Another: Manifestions of Exposure and Exposition in Practice-Based Artistic Research.” In The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia, edited by Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff, 165–76. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Kirkkopelto, Esa. 2015. “Artistic Research as Institutional Practice.” In Artistic Research Yearbook 2015: From Arts College to University, edited by Torbjörn Lind, 48–53. Stockholm: Swedish Research Council. https://publikationer.vr.se/en/product/arsbok-kfou-2015-frankonstnarlig-hogskola-till-universitet/. Klein, Julian. 2017. “What Is Artistic Research?” Jar-Online.Net. https://doi.org/10.22501/ jarnet.0004. Krauss, Rosalind. 2000. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. New York: Thames & Hudson. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1988. The Literary Absolute. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lowry, Sean, and Nancy de Freitas. 2013. “The Frontiers of Artistic Research: The Challenge of Critique, Peer Review and Validation at the Outmost Limits of Location-Specificiy.” In 2013 Conference Proceedings, 137–51. Adelaide, South Australia. Macleod, Katy, and Lin Holdridge. 2006. “Introduction.” In Thinking through Art: Reflections on Art as Research, edited by Katy Macleod and Lin Holdridge, 1–14. London: Routledge. Malaspina, Cecile. 2018. An Epistemology of Noise. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Melville, Stephen. 2001. “Counting/As/Painting.” In As Painting: Divison and Displacement, 1–26. Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts MIT Press. Mersch, Dieter. 2015. Epistemology of Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Osborne, Peter. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London: Verso. Popper, Karl. 2007. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Routledge. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Schatzki, Theodore R., Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny, eds. 2001. The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. 1st ed. London: Routledge. Schwab, Michael. 2009. “First the Second: The Supplemental Function of Research in Art.” In Art and Artistic Research: Music, Visual Art, Design, Literature, Dance, edited by Corina Caduff, Fiona Siegenthaler, and Tan Wälchli, 6:56–65. Zurich Yearbook of the Arts. Zürich: Zürcher Hochschule der Künste/Scheidegger & Spiess. ———. 2012a. “Exposition Writing.” In Yearbook for Artistic Research and Development, 16–26. Stockholm: Swedish Research Council. ———. 2012b. “The Research Catalogue: A Model for Dissertations and Theses in Art and Design.” In The Sage Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses, edited by Richard Andrews, Erik Borg, Stephen Boyd Davis, Myrrh Domingo, and Jude England, 339–54. London: Sage. ———, ed. 2013a. Experimental Systems: Future Knowledge in Artistic Research. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press.



Expositionality 45

———. 2013b. “Introduction.” In Experimental Systems: Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, edited by Michael Schwab, 5–14. Leuven: Leuven University Press. ———. 2014a. “Artistic Research and Experimental Systems: The Rheinberger Questionnaire and Study-Day—A Report.” In Artistic Experimentation in Music: An Anthology, edited by Darla Crispin and Bob Gilmore, 111–23. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. ———. 2014b. “Expositions in the Research Catalogue.” In The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia, edited by Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff, 92–104. Leiden: Leiden University Press. ———. 2014c. “The Exposition of Practice as Research as Experimental System.” In Artistic Experimentation in Music: An Anthology, edited by Darla Crispin and Bob Gilmore, 31–40. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. ———. 2015a. “Experiment! Towards an Artistic Epistemology.” Journal of Visual Art Practice 14 (2): 120–31. ———. 2015b. “Imagined Meetings.” In Why Would I Lie?, edited by Susannah Haslam and Peter Le Couteur. London: Royal College of Art. ———. 2018a. “Peer-Reviewing in the ‘Journal for Artistic Research.’” In Evaluating Art and Design Research. Reflections, Evaluation Practices and Research Presentations, edited by Walter Ysebaert and Binke Van Kerckhoven, 52–59. Brussels: VUBPRESS. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-work?work=483124. ———. 2018b. “Transpositionality and Artistic Research.” In Transpositions. Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research, edited by Michael Schwab, 191–213. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. ———, ed. 2018c. Transpositions. Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. https://www.oapen.org/ search?identifier=1000226. ———. 2019. “Experimental Systems. Contemporaneity, Untimeliness, and Artistic Research.” In Futures of the Contemporary. Contemporaneity, Untimeliness and Artistic Research., edited by Paulo de Assis and Michael Schwab, 159–77. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Schwab, Michael, and Henk Borgdorff, eds. 2014. “Introduction.” In The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Serres, Michel. 1982. Parasite. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Shapin, Steven. 1984. “Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology.” Social Study of Science 14 (4): 481–520. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. 1992. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Reprint. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smithson, Robert. 1996. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. 2014. Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Steinle, Friedrich. 1997. “Entering New Fields: Exploratory Uses of Experimentation.” Philosophy of Science 64 (December): S64–74. Wilson, Mick. 2018. “Engaging Perfomative Contradiction: Introducing the Rhetorics of Practice and Method to Artist Researchers.” In Practicing Art/Science: Experiments in an Emerging Field, edited by Philippe Sormani, Guelfo Carbone, and Priska Gisler, 21–44. New York: Routledge.

3 The Research Catalogue Exposition as a Digital Object

1

Challenges and Future Luc Döbereiner

Artistic research is characterised by a methodological multiplicity. Different disciplinary practices, institutional requirements and conceptions of research in and as art inform ways in which creative works are produced, experienced, assessed, and documented. Moreover, many artistic research practices have come to elude standardised forms of documentation that are geared to representing features of an art object that is considered the principal product of a creative process. Instead, many approaches increasingly centre around the interplay of complex networks of material, contextual, semantic, and experiential layers and relations. In doing so, the creative work situates itself in relations of exegetical discourse, explicit propositional articulation of knowledge, sensory and aesthetic experience, non-perceptual meaning and material and social context. Ways of documenting an artwork, event or performance have thus become both particular to the individual practice and deeply entangled with the artwork itself. At the same time, institutional and academic contexts, including universities, journals and funding bodies, demand referenceable forms of documentation for archiving, reviewing and assessment purposes. The online platform Research Catalogue (RC),2 discussed in this chapter, seeks to investigate this relation of documentation, media and artistic practice and it aims to provide practitioners and institutions with the means to develop unique yet referenceable ways of representing the complex and relational nature of artworks from a variety of disciplines. The RC is a free collaborative online platform for the archiving, reviewing, documentation, and publishing of artistic research. While the RC was initially conceived as the technological backbone for the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR),3 it has grown into a much broader workspace that hosts a variety of different journals and acts as a tool for reviewing workflows in educational institutions and funding organisations. At the same time, the RC itself can be viewed as a research project. It investigates how formats condition, constrain and thereby enable creative processes 46



The Research Catalogue Exposition as a Digital Object 47

and their representation. The RC’s developments have often been prompted by collective discussions among its users and stakeholders. Recent transformations in artistic practices, academia, and research management have created demands and desires for new spaces of representation and have led to the further expansion of the RC, which has come to assume new roles in facilitating and interlinking individual researchers, institutions, media repositories, and research administration. The challenge to account for a great variety of artistic practices and modes of documentation while observing standards for archiving, referenceability, and discoverability has driven the ongoing evolution of the concept of exposition,4 a key notion and technical concept employed by the RC. In this process, four interrelated strands have emerged that reveal the diverse nature of the RC: social network aspects, the facilitation of administrative workflows, the archival use, and the RC’s functionalities as a writing and publishing tool. In what follows, we aim to focus on the latter aspects, and, in particular, on the notion of exposition, its potentials, challenges and developments. In doing so, this paper reflects on developments, insights and discussions in the RC community that have emerged since the publication of Michael Schwab’s (2014) publication “Expositions in the Research Catalogue.” In response to our experience with the practical applications, consequences and problems related to the notion of exposition, which can itself be seen as a medium of art, we aim to outline recent developments and potentials in particular with regard to the exposition format’s nature as a programmable digital object.

WRITING TOOLS AND RESEARCH In one of his few typewritten letters, Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote that “our writing tools are also working on our thoughts” (cited in Kittler 1999, 204). The insight that media condition their transmitted content and that the technologies of writing and reading affect what is and can be written, read and thought is at the core of the RC as a whole. The question of the particular modes of writing that artistic research produces and necessitates and the ways in which technology comes to shape artistic research practices in this process has influenced the notion of the exposition in fundamental ways. As Michael Schwab (2014) has expounded, the notion of exposition has emerged as an extended form of writing aimed to account for artistic modes of research and their evaluation. The notion of exposition and its implementation in the RC has been an attempt to provide practitioners from diverse artistic fields with a digital format and an online workspace that allows for ways of perceiving and documenting the products of research activities that go beyond the confines of standardised forms of academic publishing in the humanities. Epistemologically, artistic research tends to challenge propositional semantics and creates experimental openings that give rise to forms of knowledge that, as Dieter Mersch (2015) writes, “reflect the perceivable through perception, and the experiential through experience” (p. 46). The reflexivity of aesthetic knowledge always also involves its own forms of

48

Chapter 3

presentation and representation, its mediality and its performative elements. The RC aims to accommodate for potentially multi-sensory, media-rich forms of unfolding artistic thinking while aiming to ensure referenceability. Moreover, it forms a collectively used tool that negotiates the entangled and multi-layered nature of artworks, creative processes, their context, material, and documentation. The possibilities and limitations proposed by the notion of exposition in the RC highlight the reflexive entanglement of form and content that is often disregarded by logocentric discourses. This is of course not only an issue in the arts but across many disciplines that study the role of media, technology and writing practices in the production of knowledge in the arts and sciences. Bruno Latour (1986), for example, has famously stressed the importance of immutable and mobile inscriptions as well as their manipulability for scientific practices and knowledge production. For Latour, the mobilisation of inscriptions has been unleashed by the “paperwork” conducted by scientists on twodimensional inscriptions. This paperwork is characterised by the ability to robustly visualise invisible structures and transform entities to different scales, and allows for their reproducibility. It is “because of this optical consistency, that everything, no matter where it comes from, can be converted into diagrams and numbers” (Latour 1986, 20). The perceptual, and mostly visual, aspects of writing are thus deeply entangled with knowledge production itself. As Johanna Drucker writes with regard to the visual production of knowledge, “[g]raphics make and construct knowledge in a direct and primary way” (Drucker 2014, 9–10). The role of graphemes, inscriptions, scribbles and sketches has been highlighted by, among others, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (2003), who has shown how writing processes take part in experimental systems. According to Rheinberger, experimental systems are material arrangements that allow for the emergence of scientific objects and concepts. Experimental systems are practical instruments for the investigation of questions and phenomena that are still indeterminate and partially unknown. The process of research, as described by Rheinberger, is characterised by an entanglement of tools, practices, instruments, concepts, and phenomena that marks out a space at the “interface between the material and the conceptual side of science” (Rheinberger 2003, 623). Far from being merely a medium for the published communication of findings or the recording of data, laboratory writing in its preliminary and fragmentary forms is crucial to the practical formation of knowledge and research questions. In contrast to the well-ordered delineation of arguments in scientific publications, research notes are tentative and ambiguous traces of experimental thought processes that are potentially collective and combine drawings, plots, data inscriptions, measurements, text, formulae, code and notations. As Rheinberger (2003) writes, “the exploratory potential of experimental systems is carried over into the exploratory space of notetaking with its enhanced freedom of combination, unrestricted by narrow compatibility considerations” (p. 626). The sketch is thus located in the interstices of practical experimentation that operates in opacity of the unknown and the transparency of conceptual articulation. In many ways, the exposition format is closely related to practices of note-taking and sketching in the sciences. It challenges



The Research Catalogue Exposition as a Digital Object 49

standardised publication formats and seeks to retain possibilities for the representation of the multi-sensory semantic openness and potential of sketches, even though as a writing tool it has been designed with a focus on fixed publications. The RC exposition editor aims to establish writing gestures and, by forming an aesthetic, social and technical context, it seeks to create what Rüdiger Campe (2012) has termed a “writing scene.” Campe’s notion of a writing scene emphasises the materiality of written language by highlighting its dynamic nature, its technical, cultural and social context and its processuality. It points to the practical preconditions and denotes an ensemble of language, gesture and technology. Writing is thus to be analysed beyond the inscribed letters themselves and with regard to its production process and its preconditions. The exposition on the RC in many ways contributes to the formation of a “writing scene” for artistic researchers by setting up technical and social preconditions that mediate aesthetic practices and technological concepts. The exposition and the RC workspace editor as a writing scene are thus constituted in the relation of artistic thinking and (the materiality of ) digital objects. This relation harbours potentials and both the aesthetic practices and the technological objects and concepts are subject to continuous evolution and development. The relation between aesthetic practices and digital technology gives rise to new artistic forms and ways of writing as it creates synergies, couplings, connections and resistances. Instead of understanding publishing and writing technologies primarily with regard to their functioning and effectiveness or as a means for the automation and control of corresponding data processing, the exposition—and the RC as a whole—researches the productive entanglement of artistic thought, writing and technologies in practice. While writing and documentation, even in a more extended sense, generally function as means of capturing and fixing ephemeral events for later reference, contemporary artistic practices often explore the dynamic and open-ended interplay of media, situations and experiences. Documentation tools for artistic research thus need to be able to negotiate archiving demands and possibilities for assessment on the one hand and the contingency and processuality of artistic works on the other hand. As Sean Lowry and Nancy de Freitas (2013) write: adequate artistic documentation for the task of communicating new knowledge also needs to be able to incorporate the kinds of open-endedness and contradiction that art itself can experientially manifest. Otherwise, any understanding produced between the complexities of the creative work (which cannot be other than itself ) and parallel, contextualizing elements (i.e. documentation, reflection, analysis, interpretation etc.) will never hold. (p. 146)

The RC, and in particular its notion of exposition, seek to explore the dynamic potential of digital objects in order to develop open-ended contexts for the documentation of artistic works and research that go beyond publishing the reified products of creative processes. In what follows, I will describe the current format and its challenges as well as a number of technical and conceptual aspects that relate to the further development of the exposition as a programmable dynamic digital object.

50

Chapter 3

THE EXPOSITION FORMAT AND ITS CHALLENGES There are currently two different exposition formats on the RC: a graphically oriented format that uses absolute positioning and a recently introduced “text-based” format that allows for the creation of responsive web designs. The graphical exposition format can be said to follow a poster paradigm. In this section, I will describe the most significant challenges we have experienced with regard to the former format. The latter format has been introduced in order to begin addressing these issues and pave the way for future developments (see the last section of this chapter). Anyone with an RC account can create an exposition and may decide to publish it, submit it for review to one of the RC-hosted journals or share it publicly. After providing the initial metadata the researcher is presented with an empty white page. An exposition may consist of any number of pages and each page adapts its size to the position of content on the page. A page can thus be virtually infinite in size. Text fields can be created anywhere on the page and media items can be dragged onto it. The writing process is thus not limited to the creation of a text. On the contrary, the visual structure, context and place need to be reflected and constructed by the authors. On several levels, the exposition format thus thematises and problematises the medium of writing itself. No layouts, hierarchies, or structures are provided upon creation of an exposition and hence the first important step in writing is the construction of a spatial configuration. Authors are thus prompted to reflect upon the ways in which meaning is affected and conditioned by visual, spatial and technological contexts. Over the course of the last years, the RC has become a central platform for a growing number of publications and institutions. In doing so, the exposition has become an important form of publication for diverse disciplines, fields and aims, ranging from pedagogy to the continuous documentation of ongoing research projects to the creation of funding applications. The increasing usage of the RC and its workspace editor and exposition format have revealed three major and exceedingly insightful challenges to the notion of the exposition, which derive from the nature of digital technology and inherent dichotomies in the concept of the format itself. These challenges in many ways inform the general outlook on future and current developments I will give the last section of this paper. They manifest certain tensions in the system that indicate major potentials for future developments. Sketching and Publishing The exposition, and the RC as a whole, had initially been conceived as the backbone for artistic research publications. Stability, persistence, and referenceability have thus been of prime importance and the format has thus not been designed to facilitate preliminary, changing, or transforming content. In an exposition, every media item or text block has a statically assigned absolute position. While this emphasises the inseparability of content and its presentation and renders visible the semantic



The Research Catalogue Exposition as a Digital Object 51

effects of graphical juxtapositions, it also hampers the tentative nature of drafting, sketching, and note-taking. Visual placement and layout decisions necessarily accompany the writing process in the exposition workspace editor. However, due to the absolute positioning of all items on the page (see next section) and due to the general ideal of fixity, there is a finality to these decisions that thwarts the open productiveness of indeterminate and tentative note-taking. A text, for example, cannot exist without a certain width, height and location, this makes it difficult to use the RC as a research diary for taking temporary or fragmentary notes. In order for the RC to become instrumental as part of the experimental system of artistic researchers’ practice beyond being a publishing platform, it has to accommodate the indeterminate, incomplete, tentative, and fragmentary modes of writing and thinking that characterise the emergence of knowledge in research processes. Absolute Positioning A second major challenge results from the way that text and media items, or tools, are placed on the page of an exposition. Each tool has a fixed size and location given in pixels. This allows for an intuitive and unrestricted way of placing elements. Researchers have made use of the specific possibilities afforded by this way of positioning tools by creating complex layerings and diverse non-linear rich-media topographies. However, while absolute positioning seems to suggest that expositions have a certain fixed appearance, they are rendered differently by different browsers and operating systems. The pursued fixedness of the exposition format thus stands in contrast to the dynamic nature of HTML and web technologies. The exposition format has inherited the ideal of a single static and fixed appearance from print publishing. However, web pages are much more dynamic and flexible in nature. Today, web pages are read using diverse types of devices including smartphones, wristwatches, cameras, cars, glasses, tablets, desktop computers, and notebooks and the diversity of technologies is likely to increase in the near future. Absolute positioning and the ideal of a fixed “printed” publication make it necessary to continuously develop ways of maintaining the same appearance on evolving technologies and hardware thus also challenging long-term archiving. Moreover, it makes it impossible to respond to the requirements of specific devices and adapt to different hardware and software platforms. In order to render content dynamically and responsively a more structural and dynamic representation is necessary. To some extent this requires rethinking the role of the author in designing an exposition. Instead of striving for absolute control, the dynamic potential of web pages should be embraced. Dominance of the Visual While the RC supports a great variety of types of media, the (graphical) exposition format is at its core based on the visual and spatial composition of tools. Proximity, spatial patterns or pathways, size and topography are vital to meaning and structure

52

Chapter 3

of an exposition. While this allows for the creation of aesthetic relations among elements, above technical or purely structural ones, it strongly prioritises the visual and spatial above other senses or media modalities. The openness of the RC should be further developed by seeking sonorous, textual, temporal and other ways of structuring and experiencing expositions. To overcome the dominance of the visual, the exposition needs to be conceived as a structured computational entity, a dynamically transforming, programmable object that can be linked, rendered, stored and converted in infinite ways. We thus have to address the exposition as a digital object.

THE EXPOSITION AS A DIGITAL OBJECT The exposition format is situated in the relation of artistic thinking and the domain of digital objects. On the one hand it provides writing tools to artistic researchers and on the other hand it aims to become part of a network of reading practices and display instances. It interoperates with archives, repositories, and provides metadata for search engines and access to other forms of algorithmic processing. Hence, as a digital object an exposition links human authoring and consumption with machine processing. The evolution of technical concepts and their concrete implementations, in particular web technologies and digital objects, are crucial for the notion of the exposition. The particular synergies, forms of coherence, properties and potentials of writing tools depend not only on their usage or functionality. Rather, their inner workings are always functionally overdetermined in ways that allow for technologies to form connections and participate in the emergence of novel technical assemblages and artistic practices. The notion of the exposition embraces this form of openness and is thus not so much conceived as a solution to pre-existing problems but much rather as a dynamic creator of techno-aesthetic relations and translations of concepts and practices. This is why it is crucial to look at the nature of the technologies on which the RC as a writing builds. These technologies do not merely serve the implementation of otherwise independent ideas, their non-linear evolution, tensions and potentials inform and condition the exposition format as a digital object. Tim Berners-Lee’s (1989) original proposal of the “World Wide Web” was an answer to the necessities of representing continuously changing related information. It was a response to the dynamic web-like work environment at CERN. BernersLee’s proposal describes an evolving non-linear linked information system based on human-readable hypertext. Within this vision and Berners-Lee’s later idea of a semantic web of meaningful linked data, interconnected humans and machines exchange, process and transform digital objects. Digital objects consist of data and metadata, data describing data, encoded in accordance with particular schemes, standards, models, and ontologies. They can be processes, programmed, transformed and linked, and extended.



The Research Catalogue Exposition as a Digital Object 53

In his seminal article “A Dao of Web Design,” John Allsopp (2000) anticipated the major tenets of responsive web design by emphasising that “adaptability is accessibility.” Traditional web design is still very much conditioned by printing technologies and the forms of control these technologies offer. The exposition in many ways seeks to provide means of design that are similarly derived from printing technologies. By contrast, Allsopp (2000) argues that one needs to embrace the dynamic and flexible nature of web technology in order to ensure accessibility: “The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the web doesn’t have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility.” Current work on the RC is concerned with developing ways of introducing more adaptable and responsive behaviours into the exposition format that display the exposition differently depending on the devices and settings of the person experiencing the exposition. By drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s (2017) work on technical objects Yuk Hui (2016) has pointed out that digital objects exist in a network or “milieu”: “a digital object is also constantly in the process of reestablishing and renegotiating its relations with other objects, systems, and users within their associated milieux” (p. 57). Digital objects and digital tools are constituted in a dynamic network of relations with other technologies, human actors, and quasi-natural environmental objects. Digital objects come into being through relations to exterior objects and programs. A web page, for example, is not an autonomous two-dimensional canvas, but a dynamically changing data structure that depends on a multitude of standards and services. This structure is continuously being transformed and processed by servers, clients, and events and may include programmed behaviour. Interactions create and send elements, receive information to be displayed, delete, update, process, and create relational objects. This structure is rendered, one could say “performed,” by the browser. RC expositions exist in association with a number of milieux, including the aesthetic, political, and social context of their creation and consumption. To some extent, this context is represented in the RC, which also acts as a social network. Moreover, expositions exist in a technical milieu of connected web technologies, services, databases, and repositories. Published expositions on the RC, whether they have been self-published or published by a journal, receive a digital object identifier (DOI) registered with Crossref.5 DOIs allow for the unique and persistent identification and referencing of digital objects, while their metadata and location may change. Moreover, metadata relevant to the exposition is encoded using machinereadable JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) using structured data schemas from Schema.org.6 However, the inner composition of graphical expositions still remains opaque to machines, which hampers adaptability and longterm archiving. The new “text-based” exposition format provides greater flexibility, programmability and interoperability. It can be converted to a variety of different formats including PDF, HTML, Microsoft Word, and the OpenDocument format. Moreover, it can be created by importing any of these formats.

54

Chapter 3

CONCLUDING OUTLOOK: THE DYNAMISATION OF THE EXPOSITION The previously mentioned challenges have incited new developments that aim to fundamentally rethink the exposition format. Current developments centre around three main sets of issues: the multiplicity of authoring tools, the responsiveness and adaptability of expositions, and their programmability. We have developed a number of prototype formats and the “text-based” format, which was introduced in spring 2018, is a first step in this ongoing process. It is important to emphasise that these developments themselves are carried out by an open community of artists, users, and partner institutions. The process of further opening the exposition format and rendering it into a dynamic and adaptable digital object thus goes along with the emergence of a community demonstrating the interrelation in the formation of technological, aesthetic, and social entities. One of the most important steps that will lay the foundations for the three main sets of issues I want to discuss here is to provide a consistent and comprehensive definition of the exposition format. In the past, the format grew out of practical necessities, yet the format was never formally specified. Expositions can be exported as HTML files to be read offline, which ensures accessibility and is vital for archiving purposes. However, a formal definition will have crucial and far-reaching consequences. Multiplicity First and foremost, a formal specification allows for the implementation of independent authoring, conversion and rendering tools. The “text-based” exposition editor is already able to read a variety of established formats. We are currently working on developing a more generalised specification of the exposition format encompassing text-based and graphical expositions. Once the specification has been done, expositions can be entirely or partly written in existing specialised tools for text-processing, vector graphics, web design, and so on. The openness to external tools greatly enhances the long-term accessibility and digital preservation of RC expositions. Content on the RC will thus consist of programmable structures of connected text and media that adhere to widely accepted technical standards and their mode of presentation can adapt to evolving technologies. Content is thus no longer tied to a single format or implementation, but can be displayed in forms that can be read and processed by many different programs and software libraries. Digital obsolesce is an important challenge. The archival functioning of RC will be greatly strengthened by supporting a variety of content formats. The multiplicity of concepts of exposition embraces the dynamic programmability of digital objects and in doing so opens the format up to “non-visucentric” ways of working. Expositions may thus consist solely of a video or a sound and may be structured temporally instead of spatially. The specification of the exposition format



The Research Catalogue Exposition as a Digital Object 55

will also allow those artists and researchers whose material are digital objects to develop concepts of exposition. Adaptability While the notion of the exposition very much rests on the questioning of the separation of form and content in conventional scientific publishing, a more responsive and adaptable approach will entail a certain detachment of the content from its particular appearance. This, however, should not be understood as a relapse into an idealising hylomorphic model that fails to recognise the constitutive role of media and their specific materialities. On the contrary, embracing the mutable nature of objects on the web rather shifts to a more digital and computational understanding of materiality. Experimentation with the effects of form and content will be greatly facilitated by representing structural and semantic connections in the document format. Different modes of presentation and their repercussions can thus easily be studied and compared. Instead of controlling precise appearances, the writing process will determine behaviours. The authors relation to the technology and writing tools would thus less be one of control, realising preconceived designs as closely as possible and rather one of an exploratory investigation of potentials. The turn towards adaptable and responsive design should also be seen as an opportunity to rethink the exposition as a more dynamic entity. A single exposition may thus be viewed, listened to, touched or read in numerous ways. The notion of the exposition is thus understood as techno-aesthetic potential that can be linked and performed in various ways by humans and machines. This is also an important opportunity to rethink access for people with vision impairment or hearing loss, as the display of expositions can meet specific technical and human requirements. Programmability The distinction between data and programs is often difficult to make. Over the last decade, web pages have largely transformed from documents into web apps. Web pages are programmable entities, that transform, react and connect to each other. Recent specifications by W3C7 define JavaScript APIs for processing audio, 2D and 3D graphics as well as videos. Our vision for the exposition format is to make it possible for creative coders as well as for researchers with little coding experience to access these functionalities. Of course, this requires significant investigations into questions of interface design and usability. It will constitute a departure from the “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) techniques that the editor currently relies, towards a more open design of behaviours closer to a “what you see is what you mean” paradigm. An exposition could thus transform into a dynamic digital object that can connect to other objects, services, technologies, and humans and unfold a virtual potential in these encounters, embracing the non-linear and relational evolution of technology.

56

Chapter 3

In general, these sets of issues constitute a dynamisation of the exposition format that moves away from the ideals of the print medium and embraces the fluidity and programmability of digital objects. This has repercussions for the role of the author and her relation to technology. The vision of the RC as a writing tool is one in which the researcher engages with technology not as a mere utensil for executing a certain task but as an element of a practice that allows for the emergence of new research questions and aesthetic forms. As Simondon (2017) wrote, “[Man] is among the machines that operate with him” (p. 18).

NOTES 1.  The main ideas expressed in this text have been developed in collaboration with Casper Schipper. I would also like to thank him for his valuable comments on this text. Moreover, I would like to thank Michael Schwab and Gabriel Paiuk for their comments and ideas on this text and related topics. 2. https://www.researchcatalogue.net. 3. http://jar-online.net/. 4.  There are currently two exposition formats: a graphic one and a text-based format. Unless explicitly stated otherwise “exposition” in this text always refers to the graphic format. 5.  See https://www.crossref.org/. 6.  See https://schema.org/. 7.  See https://www.w3.org/.

REFERENCES Allsopp, John. 2000. “A Dao of Web Design.” A List Apart. https://alistapart.com/article/dao. Berners-Lee, Tim. 1989. “Information Management: A Proposal.” https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html. Campe, Rüdiger. 2012. “Die Schreibszene, Schreiben.” In Schreiben Als Kulturtechnik. Grundlagentexte, edited by Sandro Zanetti. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Drucker, Johanna. 2014. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hui, Yuk. 2016. On the Existence of Digital Objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophon, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1986. “Visualisation and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands.” In Knowledge and Society Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, edited by Henrika Kuklick and Robert A. Jones, 6:1–40. Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present. Amsterdam: Jai Press. Lowry, Sean, and Nancy de Freitas. 2013. “The Frontiers of Artistic Research: The Challenge of Critique, Peer Review and Validation at the Outermost Limits of Location-Specificity,” in Critique 2013. Conference Proceedings, Adelaide, South Australia, 2013, pp. 137–51. Mersch, Dieter. 2015. Epistemologies of Aesthetics. Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes.



The Research Catalogue Exposition as a Digital Object 57

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2003. “Scrips and Scribbles.” Modern Language Notes 118 (3): pp. 622–36. Schwab, Michael. 2014. “Expositions in the Research Catalogue.” In The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia, edited by Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff, 92–104. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Simondon, Gilbert. 2017. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing.

4 Transpositions [TP] Artistic Data Exploration Feedback and Amplification Cecile Malaspina

I. You enter a traditional gallery space. In the first room you encounter a grand piano. It may be silent. The piano’s long silences alternate with barely audible ripples flowing across the keyboard, mutely rushing the hammers across the strings. The self-playing keys occasionally fidget, rattling the hammers against the piano’s cords in a dry, rustling percussion. Silence, muted percussion, or occasional light play of isolated notes, all may, apparently at random, give way to unpredictable spurts of thundering clouds of sound. At any time, the piano may start abruptly into a deafening fury traversing the keyboard for an indeterminate length of time. The sounds appear to fall into a category of “natural” sounds, like rustling leaves, at other times recalling the clamour of a bookshelf falling over noisily, or even the éclat of a smashed stash of crockery. Beguiling and unpredictable, yet they are also consistent like the pitter-patter of rain, the humming of a transistor or the wind rushing through a field. The subtleties and breadth of tonal differentiation bear no resemblance to the exuberance of a child whacking the piano without skill, nor does it remind even remotely of a piece of experimental improvisation.1 At first sight the piano commands your attention with an evocation of its innermost, almost meteorological états d’âme. A little further away a microphone hangs suspended from the ceiling by a black cable. On the floor, a red trigger button produces a thick white cable swooping across the space back to the piano, and a pink cable winding its way to the next space, loosely following the direction of a series of wall-stencilled trigonometric variations. As you follow the wall drawings into the adjacent room, an atrium-like space opens. Here you come across a towering rack of digital-to-analog converters and amplifiers. A neat bundle of thick black cables pours down from it, collecting into 58



Transpositions [T P] Artistic Data Exploration 59

Figure 4.1.   Gerhard Eckel, Michael Schwab, David Pirrò, DA TA Rush, May 2016, Angewandte Innovation Lab, Vienna.

a loosely tangled black stream. The cables connect, via another red floor trigger, to a set of thirty small speakers, arranged in a square and sculpturally positioned on the floor. They produce an almost otherworldly sound, reminiscent of deep-sea recordings, or perhaps of an imagined haunting radio communication from outer space—occasionally competing with the sounds of the piano flooding the gallery. Placed on the floor near it is a black TV monitor with a set of headphones. It screens a continuous, white on black, geometric transformation, recalling the drawings stencilled onto the wall, changing apparently in sync with the fluctuations and rhythmic peaks of an electronic sound, audible via the headphones. Slightly further into the space you may sit on the descending gallery steps and interact with a “jackfield,” a switchboard allowing you to place a headphone jack, perhaps strategically, as if on a chessboard—but you know neither the rules nor the scope of the game. As you change the jack’s position, you track also a change in the nature of the filtering and spatiality of the sound texture transmitted by the headphones. You displace your jack on the field according to no clear preconception, as if positioning your ear to find your bearings in what sounds like the inner tensions and powers of a rainstorm with cracking thunderbolts and lightning. The very back of the gallery opens towards a large windowpane. The same wallstencilled drawings lead through the space, which you may only circumnavigate nearest the walls in order to avoid a large, lightweight sculpture hanging from the ceiling, filling the core of the space like a white zeppelin.

Figure 4.2.

Figure 4.3.

61

Transpositions [T P] Artistic Data Exploration 61 Chapter 4

Figure 4.4.

Downstairs, a projection of apparently randomly moving light dots. To one side of it, you enter a dark space through a blackout curtain: a group of retro-style filament lightbulbs are suspended by thick white cables. It gleams with variable intensity to the whizzing sound of a rising and ebbing electrical humming. To the other side of the projection you enter a space which, once more, can only be circumnavigated along the walls, as this time the floor is laid out with steel bars, stretched out in parallel, each lined by solenoids on either side, small electromagnetic hammers, producing occasional reverberating clanging sounds that run along the steel bars across the space. Evocative of a metallic wind harp, or steel works, these sounds ring out dramatically against the constant background noise of a regular clicking, reminiscent of old-fashioned typewriters rattling away. The solenoids are joined by cables leading to a power supply unit, to a control unit determining the pattern of impulses going through the solenoids, and to a large capacitor, buffering the spikes in energy supply. This much is what can be said of the first, intuitive encounter with the works of the exhibition Data Rush—Transposition Not Exhibition, organised by artists, composers, and musicians Gerhard Eckel, Michael Schwab, and David Pirrò, and including the piece played on the grand piano, “XMM_Newton,” a work by the composer Artemi-Maria Gioti. The exhibition took place at the Angewandte Innovation Laboratory in Vienna, Austria, during 13–17 May 2016.

Figure 4.5.

Figure 4.6.



Transpositions [T P] Artistic Data Exploration 63

Figure 4.7.

II. The rationale for presenting the exhibition in this abrupt way, without additional information on the works, artists, and background to this exhibition, is to highlight an information deficit with which the viewer was met when first contemplating and interacting with the works. This information deficit is a critical point, it seems to me, rather than a flaw that needs remedying with the benefit of theoretical hindsight. It is at once curious and, I will argue, critical in the context of its scientific funding and regarding the use it makes of scientific data. The exhibition was in fact part of a wider “artistic research” project hosted and funded by the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF PEEK). The project spanned several years and a good number of research events, performances, exhibitions, online material and publications, including two events of immediate relevance in the context of this exhibition: the interventions by artists and performers Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico, performing their artistic project RaschX on the piano,2 concurrently with a symposium, which took place in the exhibition space on 17 May 2016, convening artists, scientists, and philosophers around the contemporary dialogue between art and science.3 Since what is at stake in Transpositions [TP] is a renewal of the relation between science and art, taking the form of “artistic research,” it is all the more relevant that

64

Chapter 4

we stumble over the information gap that the viewer is presented with, rather than compensate for it, as a matter of course, in this interpretative account. It is in this information gap that we can situate the specificity of this particular approach to artistic research. For it is here that the binding contract with information, which is characteristic of scientific endeavour, is rewritten by the artists. The scientist is, by convention and with funding constraints, held to produce, assess and interpret data, so as to transform it into reliable information about the empirical world. One could say that the first, and most intuitive gesture of Transpositions [TP], is to introduce an obliqueness into this information process. In other words, the artistic transposition of scientific data into audio-visual installations deflects the purpose and task, the work and obligation that normally destines scientific data to become information. A second, informed run through the exhibition demonstrates this gap, by opening up dimensions unlikely to be grasped in full by the viewer, who is made to rely chiefly on the direct experience of the work, supplemented by minimal didactic material in the form of A4 handouts and by wall labels detailing little more than the exhibition title and names of participating artists and institutions. Whatever auxiliary information is made available to the viewer—for instance in the form of online material and of a subsequently published, experimental exhibition catalogue—it is clearly of an entirely different nature and intent than the information produced by and required of scientists, in order to consolidate their findings and legitimate their funding. By contrast, the information provided in this exhibition by the artists, in addition to the direct experience of the works, barely more than hints at the technical and scientific feats that the works engage with, and which are the result of dialogues with astronomers, particle physicist, and computational neuroscientists. To dwell on this information gap is to recognise it as an opportunity wherein the artists perform a conversion of what we ordinarily call information, of its mode of being, and of our experience of it. What we ordinarily call information is stretched to include a more intimate encounter with the genesis of form, the transformation of form, and the different forms of interest we may take in both the everyday and the scientifically and technologically mediated experiences of the empirical world around us. All these dimensions of information and no doubt more, here come to blur the viewer’s expectations of being “informed” about and by what is going on in the exhibition. The artists speak of a transposition of scientific data. This artistic transposition, however, does not aim at the idea that art somehow creates a mirror image, and in this banal sense, a representation of empirical reality, albeit empirical reality in its scientific guise. The artworks do not transpose the scientific data onto an analogous structure that would somehow re-present scientific data—they don’t merely re-enact data in a different medium or form, for instance in a straightforward sonification or visualisation. This artistic transposition of data, from a scientific body of knowledge to an artistic body of work, is thus best understood as a deliberate conversion of the mode of expression of what is given to experience scientifically and technically, hence



Transpositions [T P] Artistic Data Exploration 65

of data insofar as the term is derived from the plural of the Latin word for “given.” It implies a conversion also of the telos, implied in the act of giving, of making available for experience. In short, science is taken abreast artistically; not as symbol of a modernist striving, as with Russian constructivism, nor as the figure of an (infernal) engine of modernity, as with Italian Futurism, but intimately: art is here taken to insert itself in the very mode of existence of scientifically given empirical reality, of data, and its possible significations. So as to help us grapple with the sense of the conversion that is implied in this artistic transposition, let us enter the exhibition once more, this time taking into account both the cue given by the exhibition title, DATA Rush—Transposition, Not Exhibition, and the limited background information available to the inquisitive viewer, and which points in the direction of the artists’ willingness to enter the laboratory, to dialogue with scientists, and to mobilise the artists’ own background in science and technology, where applicable. The exhibition’s subtitle, Artistic Data Exploration, suggests that the installations engage in a sustained exploration of scientific data, analogous perhaps to the idea that scientists explore galaxy clusters or the uncertainty space of particle physics. Yet unlike scientific exploration, and its reliance on data analysis, the artists engage with the data obtained from the scientists on artistic terms.

III. We learn from online material that the work “XMM_Newton” by Artemi-Maria Gioti “transposes” data obtained from the astrophysicist Martin Sahlén of the Beecroft Institute of Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Oxford University in Great Britain, and the department for Astronomy and Space Physics at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. Gioti is said to have devised an algorithm to sonify a dataset shared by Sahlén with the artist. It is derived from a catalogue of observational data, related to 503 galaxy clusters, generated in 2012 from archival X-rays of the satellite XMM-Newton, as part of the European Space Agency’s Cluster Survey collaboration.4 The self-playing grand piano, which may or may not be an intrinsic element to this work, thus lends itself to an algorithmic expression of this data, which is not a mere representation, not a mere mirroring of data in “real time” sonifications. To begin with, there is no indication whether the datasets have been merged into a single acoustic work, or whether they correspond to separate “works,” and if so, which one is being performed at any given time. All we know is that there are datasets, pertaining to both observations and modelisations of cosmic clusters, that have been transposed onto “arpeggiated” musical clusters, consisting of chords with adjacent tones—that is, seconds instead of the thirds of tonal harmony. The velocity of played keys is set to correspond to the cluster’s degrees of luminosity, while pitch-range and

66

Chapter 4

the duration are said to correspond to data relating to mass. The piano’s register, finally, is said to correspond to data pertaining to the clusters’ distance to earth. Unlike the accountability associated with the scientific use of data, here, the viewer is in the dark about the specific steps taken by the artist in transposing the datasets; is deliberately denied the possibility of reconstructing the technical process of Gioti’s transposition. This contrasts with the accountability asked of the scientist, whose experimental and theoretical data is valid only if the method can be reconstructed and the experiment can be repeated with the same results. What is more, the piano’s run through the datasets is deliberately complicated by another, entirely unrelated set of variables: the suspended microphone and floortriggers throughout the exhibition act as additional sources of input that affect the piano’s performance. In fact, all works in the exhibition are connected and thus part of a dynamical system: the microphone, trigger switches, as well as the signal load of each work, all feed into a chaotic feedback and amplification process. Street traffic and any other sound picked up by the suspended microphone, but also the input of viewers operating the floor triggers, the “jackfield” in the adjacent room, no less than the sound installation involving iron rods in the basement—even the works’ own sound output— all feed into this dynamical system, amplifying and transforming the performance of the connected pieces. The luminosity of the suspended light bulbs in the downstairs darkroom is, in fact, an expression of the signal load of the exhibition system as a whole. Consequently, although Gioti’s algorithmic transposition of astrophysical data, “XMM_Newton,” is attributed to her directly on her personal website5 and on the online research catalogue,6 no attribution was made explicitly in the exhibition and the self-playing piano used for this sonification, together with all other works, is presented in such a way as to fuse the work with the various contributions of the artists and composers Gerhard Eckel, David Pirrò, and Michael Schwab, such that the entire exhibition becomes one dynamically interconnected installation, such that no single work can any longer be attributed to one artist solely. While the monitor piece “Rebody” is a transposition of dance movements, captured and transposed into a dynamic drawing that informing musical composition,7 the wall drawings, entitled “Lansner,” are, once more, based on scientific data, this time obtained from Anders Lansner, Professor of Computational Brain Science at Stockholm University, who develops algorithms and software capability for computer systems that perform brain-like functions.8 The Lansner Lab at the Computational Neuroscience and Neuro-Computing research group at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm generates computational models of biological brain function, creating artificial “neural” networks capable of modelling large-scale biological neuronal networks. The artistic work titled “Lansner” is thus an artistic transposition of data from the “Lansner lab,” generated by one such artificial neural network, which simulates the spontaneous self-activation of stored memory patterns. What was earlier described as sounding like a continuous hailstorm, halfway between what we ordinarily think of as white noise and continuously varying percussion, can



Transpositions [T P] Artistic Data Exploration 67

thus be identified as the artists’ transposition of audified data spikes, whose visual pendant is expressed in the form of trigonometric variations.9 The “jackfield,” again, works around the sonification of Lansner’s dataset. The “jackfield” is operated by the listener who connects the headphones to different jacks, as if positioning the ear on different coordinates within the data. By operating the “jackfield,” switching the jack across different positions on the board, the listener experiences the audified data according to varying spatial and acoustic factors, specific to each of the 81 transpositions of the dataset, which are laid out in the matrix of jack connectors, and combined so as to produce a “binaural” soundscape—that is, separating out the listening experience.10 The acoustic sculptural installation of iron rods in the lower ground floor, Data Rush Compass Installation (DRCI) and its relation with the zeppelin-like sculpture displayed in the space above, both refer to data obtained from scientists working at the COMPASS (Common Muon and Proton Apparatus for Structure and Spectroscopy) experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN. The two works differently transpose data relating to a set of detectors, recording the scattering of a muon beam colliding with a lithium deuteride target, at an intensity of 160 GeV (a muon is an elemental particle comparable to an electron, which is here transmitted at an intensity of 160 billion electron-volts). Each iron rod in the sculptural installation is attributed a dataset, corresponding to the first one hundred scattering events recorded by particular group of detectors (totalling more than a hundred thousand detector hits). The recorded scattering events are then transposed by the artist onto activation patterns for the solenoids, which produce a sound by hitting the allocated iron rod, by means of a control unit using an Arduino micro controller, devised especially for this installation. Of all datasets available, those were selected which appeared to offer the greatest acoustic interest from the artist/composer’s subjective point of view. All connected sound installations thus appropriated and transformed the role and function of scientific data. Criteria of pertinence, relating to the production of knowledge, were exchanged with musical and artistic criteria, sensitive to the temporal and rhythmic dimension of these cosmic, subatomic, and simulated neuronal events. The artist’s choice of iron rods and copper wire, for instance, signals a sympathy with the scientific use of ferromagnetic anchors and copper coils, rather than a stringent criterion of efficacy; it suggests an empathetic transposition rather than a strict logical transposition of these materials’ capacity to endure and materialise these extremely ephemeral events. Noise is, in all installations, here given a mediating role in the transposition of a scientific to an aesthetic experience. While scientific rigor strives to reduce or eliminate the inevitable noise, affecting for instance the detectors at CERN, the artist here chooses to give noise a platform: by opting for the mechanical production of sound, using the electromagnetic hammers, the artist embraces acoustic variations far richer than what Gerhard Eckel calls the “boring and always monotonous” acoustic behaviour of speakers.11

68

Chapter 4

The zeppelin-like sculpture differently transposes the spread of this “deep inelastic scattering” of subatomic particles, this time focusing not on the temporal signatures of the “hits,” as in the sonification of the Compass installation, but by creating a spatial transposition of the uncertainty characteristics of the reconstruction, postmeasurement, of these scattering events. The reconstruction of these particle collision events is rendered in graphs that represent a probability space, which in this case takes on an oblong ellipsoid form. The sculpture is a deliberately rough and imperfect transposition of this mathematical reconstruction in an ultra-high precision probability space. It transposes it, hyperbolically, scaled up to a fifth of the exhibition space, onto a three-dimensional object covered in an inflatable fabric.12 The sculpture thereby transposes the uncertainty that characterises the reconstruction of events at the subatomic level onto an aesthetic experience, making it accessible to the senses as a body in space. All the works in this exhibition harmonise, in their endeavour to transpose scientific data into the aesthetic domain, the scientific reconstruction events and bodies in time and space to an experience in situ, thereby bridging with the scale of the infinitely small and the infinitely large in space and time. The abstraction of mathematical formalisation of such events and objects is transposed onto the intuitive concreteness of the viewer’s lived experience, alleviated of theoretical context.

IV. That the artists never intended to produce a logical transposition entirely determined by a code applied to an original set of scientific data is evident by the information asymmetry with which the viewer is presented, bracketing out the scientific framework. What appeared as a mere information deficit, when measured against the conventions of scientific information, can now be interpreted as a carefully maintained corridor of uncertainty, cultivated, not unlike the wildlife corridors that are increasingly being adopted in agriculture, to mitigate the undesirable effects of monocultures. The use of a dynamical system, controlling the signal flow and electrical load of the combined artworks in this exhibition, reinforces the idea of a deliberate complexification. It certainly distances the works from the idea of a straightforward transposition, as it introduces chaotic possibilities of amplification and annulment that are not immediately evident to the viewer and that scramble the one-to-one correspondence of scientific data and its sonification or visualisation. The works, instead, entertaining interactions with each other, with their context and with the viewer that are open to each other and to the “outside.” As a consequence, the transposition of scientific data into the context of what is here called “artistic research” cannot be understood as a formal, logical process. It implies, on the contrary, a transmutation of what science determines as evidence, as given. Data is here given to the senses in the realm of subjective experience. Sound



Transpositions [T P] Artistic Data Exploration 69

and vision are mobilised to create a relation between otherwise incommensurable dimensions of the space and time of experience, from the formation of galaxy clusters around quasars, (or quasi-stellar objects), extremely luminous active galactic nuclei (AGN) forming around supermassive black holes with mass ranging from millions to billions of times the mass of the sun and dating back billions of years, to the extreme velocity of a muon beam scattering around a lithium deuteride target to the tune of 160 billion electron-volts. In other words, the sensory dimension of the exhibition is linked up with dimensions of space and time that we cannot normally experience, from the subatomic to the cosmic level. The fact that the artworks are shown without explanatory wall labels is intriguing, once you know by what criteria the sounds are produced and the space is occupied, and what dynamics are at play, including the viewer’s own effect on the dynamical system. The information deficit on the side of the viewer is the pendant to a deliberate excess of information on the side of the work. A deliberate gap is being opened up between the nature of experience afforded to the viewer and the nature of technical and scientific experience that is constitutive of scientific data. It is in this information gap that I see the specificity of this collective exhibition, as it creates an oblique and deliberately problematical relation between the viewer’s direct experience of the works, and the works’ relation with scientific data. The relation between science and art always seems to imply that aesthetics pertain only to the senses, to what the Greeks called aisthesis, mere sensation and perception, and which stands opposed to the idea of pure intellection, or noesis. But what this opposition between aisthesis and noesis appears to imply is that one can cut a straight line between pure experience and pure idea, and by extension, between art and science. Spinoza remarked in the third part of his Ethics, dealing with the origin and nature of the affects, that “no one . . . has determined the nature and powers of the affects, nor what, on the other hand, the mind can do to moderate them.”13 The artists’ idiosyncratic use of the transposition appears to say that science alone does not fully exhaust this Spinozist problem of affect and mind. Their artistic transpositions appear to stretch our understanding of the possible affections of bodies, bodies of data, acoustic bodies like the piano and iron rods, as events at different scales of time and space, from the infinitely small scale of space time of muons, to the infinitely large scales of galaxy clusters and the distribution of dark matter. The intuitive experience of the “starry heavens above” has long since become a hybrid of affect and mind, of cosmic and ideal bodies. Just so, the neural networks referred to in Lansner consist of both observational data and computer simulations. The muon collision is at once experimental and theoretical reconstruction. One could say that the temporality and the space occupied by galaxy clusters, particle physics or simulated neuronal networks coincides with ours only in this interregnum that is our intelligence, which is capable of holding together cosmic events like the births of galaxies ten billion years ago, and our subjective experience of an exhibition in that took place in 2016. It is our subjective experience of space and

70

Chapter 4

time that is brought together with the scientific exploration of space and time in this artistic data exploration. The space for this relation, I would argue, was not only the exhibition space, but also the gap that the artists cultivated between subjective experience and objective reconstruction.

NOTES   1.  Listen here: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/94538/331575 (accessed 5 February 2019).  2. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/285515/285516  3. Is a meaningful dialogue possible between research practices in the arts and in science and technology? This symposium was organised by myself, with the participation and interventions of Paulo de Assis, https://musicexperiment21.eu; Luc Derycke, http://www.studiolucderycke.be/projects; Gerhard Eckel, https://www.researchcatalogue. net/profile/?person=10953; Lucia D’Errico, https://orpheusinstituut.be/en/orpheus-researchcentre/researchers/lucia-derrico; Artemi-Maria Gioti, http://www.artemigioti.com; Wolfgang Hofkirchner, http://www.hofkirchner.uti.at; Cecile Malaspina, https://www.bloomsbury.com/ uk/an-epistemology-of-noise-9781350011786/; David Pirrò, http://pirro.mur.at/; Michael Schwab, https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/?person=10953; Volker Straebel, http:// www.straebel.de/praxis/index.html; Phoebe Stubbs, phoebestubbs.info; Mauricio Suarez, http://probpropcond.blogs.sas.ac.uk; Neal White, http://www.nealwhite.org  4. https://wwwmpa.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/virgo/millennium/  5. http://www.artemigioti.com/research.html  6. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/94538/453147  7. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/94540/94541  8. http://www.csc.kth.se/forskning/cb/cbn/  9. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/103078/142821 10.  The attribute ‘binaural’ adds precision here with respect to the rendering of the soundscape (as opposed to ‘stereo’), which is assumed to be projected through headphones, as the properties of the human hearing apparatus (pinnae, shoulders, body) are integrated into the audio signal such as to produce an experience of being in the space. I thank the artists and Gerhad Eckel in particular for this and other comments. 11. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/94538/472684; https://vimeo.com/gerhardeckel/zeitraumlimassol; https://vimeo.com/gerhardeckel/therattler; https://vimeo.com/gerhardeckel/zeitraumgothenburg 12.  2017. da ta transpositions. Ghent: AraMER. 13.  Benedict De Spinoza. 1996. Ethics (London: Penguin), 69.

5 SymbioticA Interruptions in the Brain Darren Jorgensen and David Savat

SymbioticA is an artistic research laboratory that focuses on the experiential engagement with life. Situated at the University of Western Australia, it is a place where artists, designers, and researchers can work in scientific laboratories, with scientific techniques, as well as staff that are typically only available to engineers and scientists. More broadly, SymbioticA dedicates itself to “the research, learning, critique and hands-on engagement with the life sciences” (http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu. au/). SymbioticA in that respect is very much a space that opens up new sorts of possibilities in the life sciences, making bioart that frames these sciences through art and experimentation. Being part of a university since 2000, however, does produce tensions of an institutional kind, as its artists must navigate the governance of the freedom that SymbioticA otherwise represents. In what follows we briefly consider both SymbioticA’s institutional place in the university and some of the artwork that has been enabled by it. The tensions within these works, and within the processes SymbioticA has established to facilitate their making, are both institutional and conceptual. In the twenty-first century biology has become increasingly capable of changing genes, tissues, and stem cells in ways that reshape life. Emblematic of that increased capability is the rhetorical shift, in the 1950s, where biology increasingly came to be thought of in terms of information and code, and where DNA came to be thought of as the source-code of life (Chun 2011, 105). As Chun points out, there is a close relationship between developments in computing and biology, and the idea that biology is code and information enabled science to make very different statements from that point onwards. Most notable of all, perhaps, is the idea—albeit one that in different forms existed before the 1950s (Chun 2011)—that life is somehow programmable; that is, controllable, in both positive and negative ways, to different degrees than previously imagined. SymbioticA is both an expression of this technological concep71

72

Chapter 5

tion of life, as it uses the life sciences as a medium, and a means by which artists can critically engage with life framed as such. This technological framing of life includes not only the wet biological materials with which artists work, but the layered apparatuses by which science conducts itself, including technical instruments, techniques, laboratories, and offices. This architecture becomes a highly visible feature of much of the work made in SymbioticA. To see Verena Keniniarz’s May the mice bite me if it’s not true (2008) (http://www.aedc. ca/verena/v_projects.htm), for example, a visitor needed to dress in gloves, mask, and gown to enter a restricted animal holding facility deep in the maze of laboratories at the University of Western Australia. Here Keniniarz built luxury housing for mice that she rescued from being killed after their experiments had been run on them. They lived out their natural lives in simulations of a terrace house and a New York loft, isolated from the world within this sterile environment. Using life as an artistic medium distinguishes SymbioticA’s projects from those of the scientists who also make use of the university’s facilities, but the difference is always blurring and slipping, as artists put on masks, gloves, and gowns to simulate scientific processes. The processes themselves not only become the subject of these artworks, but also allow us to redefine science itself. As the historian of science HansJörg Rheinberger, and the philosopher and artist researcher Michael Schwab (2013) point out, science too in the experimental process closely considers “a dialectic between epistemic things and technical objects” (p. 202). As Rheinberger stresses, in scientific experimentation [t]he technologies with which one works are normally used as black boxes; they can, however, be reopened and become things of epistemic interest. It was this dialectic between the epistemic and the technical that appeared to me . . . to be at the core of the scientific process of experimentation. The technical object and epistemic thing respectively are the material correlates to the interplay between stability and change, which keeps the experimental process intrinsically open to the future, although, or even because, full use is made of earlier acquisitions. In an experimental system each sort of thing is articulated with the other. (Rheinberger and Schwab 2013, 202)

Such experimentation, and this opening of experimentation to future possibilities, is made possible by the very medium of experimentation itself. This focus on the medium has been a strong feature of the history of art, more so than the history of science (Rheinberger and Schwab 2013). This is not to state that scientists do not critically engage with “the medium”—that is, closely consider the role of the instruments, techniques, laboratory, and, indeed, the broader institutional setting their work is conducted through, but that, unlike much of art history, when they begin to communicate their work to a larger audience, the instruments, the technologies or media, tend to disappear from sight. As Rheinberger explains, “[t]hey appear to be there just in order to look through; they are not thick. Such assumed transparency contributes to the neglect of the material and practical side of the process of scientific knowledge acquisition” (Rheinberger and Schwab 2013, 203). Indeed, Rheinberger



SymbioticA 73

continues, “[s]een from a media perspective, one could even go so far as to claim that all these instruments used by the sciences are the media without which they would never even be able to get at their bits and pieces of knowledge” (Rheinberger and Schwab 2013, 203). In this regard SymbioticA has an important and critical function, because it highlights the institutional contexts by which science is produced. On this point it is also worth noting that Rheinberger and others (Assis 2018; Deleuze and Guattari 1994; Schwab 2013; Sormani, Gisler, and Carbone 2018) see a common ground between science and art. For Rheinberger (2019), for example: what is at stake [in both science and art] are the practices of making, an understanding of a production process with an uncertain outcome, at whose end things will stand that did not command and determine its beginning. This, I think, distinguishes scientific research and artistic work from the structure of technical production processes and the fabrication of goods of all sorts. In this respect, one could talk of an epistemic uncertainty relation in a rather constitutive sense, and one should possibly also talk about an aesthetic uncertainty relation. With that, what moves into the foreground of interest are the configurations of materials, instruments, arrangements, and cognitive-practical lists—both in the sense of agendas and in that of tricks—that go into the process, and that determine together and inseparably its epistemic and aesthetic design, respectively, in ever new forms. (p. 236)

Indeed, what interests Rheinberger in comparing art and science is precisely the very notion of an experimental process, especially the specificities or “micro-structure” of such a process. In particular what he stresses is the “process character, that is, the temporal dynamics of experimentation,” which is “exactly the point where the notion of a system of experimentation gains its importance” (Rheinberger 2019, 238). As he points out, “[a]n experimental system constitutes a trajectory extending in time and changing in the course of this extension, as do the scientific objects pursued in its confines, sometimes incrementally, sometimes abruptly. Examples reach from in vitro systems of biochemistry to, say, the monitoring of the dynamics of an experimental ecosystem” (Rheinberger 2019, 238). It is on precisely this point, the temporal aspect of experimentation, that Rheinberger refers to the importance of the art historian George Kubler’s work The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things ([1964] 2008)—in particular his sequence perspective; that is, a different approach to understanding historical change—who argued that “novelty is not the result of a free-swerving imagination, but rather, if one may say so, the result of an unprecedented abduction” (Rheinberger 2019, 239). That is to say, an experimental system, as a process, has a very particular character or form. For Rheinberger what is especially instructive is Kubler’s view of how an artist works: “Each artist works on in the dark, guided only by the tunnels and shafts of earlier work, following the vein and hoping for a bonanza, and fearing that the lode may play out tomorrow” (Kubler quoted in Rheinberger 2019, 239). More to the point, the artist, and by extension scientist, is for Rheinberger not guided in this process by “intuition never experienced before,” but rather “by the tunnels and

74

Chapter 5

shafts of earlier work.” In short, art, in much the same manner as Thomas Kuhn conceptualised science, is “a process driven from behind” (Kuhn quoted in Rheinberger 2019, 239–40). What is important for Rheinberger is that such a process, as an experimental system in the form of art and science stand[s] for the integral of all ingredients—materials, research technologies, laboratory environment, collective experience—necessary in order to set an experimental process in motion and to keep it in ongoing transformation. An experimental system can be seen as having a double face. On the one hand, it designates a unit of research. It is thus an element of an experimental culture. On the other hand, it serves as a unit of historical analysis, and as such helps to assess the experimental sciences and their historical development, not at the macrolevel of science as a discipline—as a disciplinary system thus—but at the sub-disciplinary micro-level of the material procedures and manipulations so characteristic for empirical research. (Rheinberger 2019, 240)

In other words, the objects produced by way of science and art, by way of the experimental process, “cannot be conceived and thought of independently from the means and the media with and through which they are being shaped” (Rheinberger 2019, 240). Notably those objects are not to be understood as final products of the research process, but rather “as the driving forces, as the germinating powers of the research process.” To state this in more simple form, this is properly speaking, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) phrased it, not a science that reproduces, what they term “royal” or “State science” (p. 372), but an ambulant or nomad science, a science that follows: Reproducing implies the permanence of a fixed point of view that is external to what is reproduced: watching the flow from the bank. But following is something different from the ideal of reproduction. Not better, just different. One is obliged to follow when one is in search of the “singularities” of a matter, or rather of a material, and not out to discover a form; when one escapes the force of gravity to enter a field of celerity; when one ceases to contemplate the course of a laminar flow in a determinate direction, to be carried away by a vortical flow; when one engages in a continuous variation of variables, instead of extracting constants from them, etc. And the meaning of Earth completely changes: with the legal model, one is constantly reterritorialising around a point of view, on a domain, according to a set of constant relations; but with the ambulant model, the process of deterritorialisation constitutes and extends the territory itself. “Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil’s weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later . . . you can extend the size of your territory.” There are itinerant, ambulant sciences that consist in following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities are scattered like so many “accidents” (problems). For example, why is a primitive metallurgy necessarily an ambulant science that confers upon smiths a quasi-nomadic status? (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 372 emphasis original)



SymbioticA 75

The figure that both Rheinberger and Deleuze and Guattari invoke here as emblematic or most expressive of the experimental system and nomad science is that of the tinkerer, though they also, respectively, invoke grafting and metallurgy, amongst others, as processes indicative of a science that follows. In relation to tinkering Rheinberger (2019), for example, notes, “I have already pointed to the loose coupling of the elements of experimental systems. It makes them, on the one hand, liable for disintegration, for tinkered assemblages tend to be fragile and brittle. On the other hand, it makes them particularly apt and susceptible for the implementation of novel research procedures” (p. 241). Notably, and which has some relevance for SymbioticA, Rheinberger (2019) mentions bioart as being especially well-placed to create “surprising effects” in the manner that it surmounts “barriers of specialisation and [engages] the epistemic with the aesthetic” (p. 244). Not only the reference to the figure of the tinkerer, but also the use of the word assemblage is instructive here. Rheinberger, notably, argues that “it is not the materiality of the entity that defines whether it’s a technical object or an epistemic thing” (Rheinberger and Schwab 2013, 210), but instead notes that the context is important, and that dichotomies such as that of technical object/epistemic thing are quite problematic when considering the experimental system, including those dichotomies that relate to materiality. Instead he states that “there are differences in regimes of materiality” (Rheinberger and Schwab 2013, 210). In a similar vein Guattari (1993), referring to Francisco Varela, notes that materiality is not what defines a machine or assemblage, but rather “the ensemble of the interrelations of its components, independent of the components themselves” (p. 16). In short, what matters is the manner in which the components of the assemblage are organised, including temporally, in relation to each other, rather than the materiality of those components—which is a properly topological approach—and the institutional context and its arrangement forms part of these components, or more precisely, is the actual assemblage or arrangement in question here. In short, what is important to emphasise in experimental systems and nomad science, then, is the focus on the process, understood as an assembly or ongoing arrangement (Buchanan 2015) of material, techniques, instruments, methods, and so on, to form, properly speaking, the institution (Savat and Thompson 2015, 294). That is, there is a particular character to the materialisation at work, and that processual character—at least according to Rheinberger—deserves primacy. As Rheinberger (2019) points out in the context of science, while the experiment has generally been attributed a central role in characterising what is specific about science, this typically has been done in such “a way where theories and ideas are privileged over experiments as the proper subjects of philosophical and historical interest” (p. 238). Indeed, in some respects it is driven by what Deleuze and Guattari, reflecting on the work of artists, might term cliché (Deleuze 2005, 71–80; Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 204). In short, the actual processual or experimental character of science has tended to be pushed into the background. Or as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) also argue— and it’s important to keep in mind here Rheinberger’s approach to experimental

76

Chapter 5

systems: “nomad science is not a simple technology or practice, but a scientific field in which the problem of the relations [between science and technology, science and practice] is brought out and resolved in an entirely different way than from the point of view of royal science” (p. 367). Again, experimental systems and nomad science follow, rather than reproduce. As part of this they are guided less by concepts, hypotheses, theory, templates, or “axiomatic power,” and more by the actual process of following, or as Schwab (2013) in relation to artistic research states: “dedication to a limited set of materials, attention to detail, continuous iterations, and the inclusion of contingent events and traces in the artistic process, allowing the material substrata to come to the fore as a site where traces are assembled” (p. 7). From such a perspective, experimental systems and nomad science—that is, tinkering, stand in a particular relation to disciplines, specialisations, and formalised institutions more broadly. More to the point, the two kinds of science “have different modes of formalisation, and State science continually imposes its form of sovereignty on the inventions of nomad science” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 362). This is not to state that this is not a two-way street—nomad science certainly impacts on State science, even if State science adopts only what, as Lyotard (1984) might have termed it, improves the performativity of the system. Or as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) state: “State science retains of nomad science only what it can appropriate” (p. 362). This is instructive in part because it speaks to the institutional setting or context that science, and in the case of SymbioticA its artistic research, is conducted in and through, which also has ramifications conceptually. This then raises interesting questions, and indeed, an interesting problem for centres of artistic research such as SymbioticA. Their institutional position in some respects contradicts the ways in which the works that they produce emphasise the material and institutional conditions for producing living art. Institutionally, they have in fact been incredibly successful, being the first in the world to set up such a university-based artistic laboratory, and inspiring others in Canada and Europe. They have also been successful in art institutions—works produced at SymbioticA exhibiting all over the world—while SymbioticA has gathered a handful of awards for their work facilitating it. This institutional success is, however, itself produced out of the ways in which SymbioticA negotiates institutional tensions. To secure the lives of her experimental mice, for example, Keniniarz needed to secure permissions and agreements from the university ethics committee, from the scientists who manage the laboratory itself, and arrange for the mice to be fed and cared for even after she had left Australia. The work consists, then, of these processes that constitute royal science, while incorporating within itself a tension with its own “unprecedented abduction” of these same processes. Keniniarz follows scientific methods while producing a difference to science, and it is this difference that constitutes it as art. There is an instructive comparison here with artworks using life and more particularly biology that are produced outside of institutional settings. In 2004, artist Steve Kurtz was arrested for bioterrorism after police found his home laboratory, where he was making work for an exhibition. The tragedy here is that Kurtz had called emer-



SymbioticA 77

gency services because his wife had just died, and that while coping with this, his home was raided by agents in hazmat suits, and his wife’s body taken for autopsy. It is no coincidence that authorities focused on Kurtz. Much of his previous work as part of the Critical Art Ensemble was dedicated to visualising the relationships between corporations, genetic engineering, and the government as food and medicines are increasingly controlled by patents (Kurtz and Sirius 2007). Since Kurtz’s ordeal, SymbioticA has assumed a new significance as a place where artists can experiment with biological materials without fear of persecution. This includes Kurtz himself, who with Lucia Sommer was resident there in 2007 and 2008. Works produced since 2004 are imbued with the ethical conundrums of scientific research funded by industries of agriculture, meat, medicine, and warfare. The repetitions of scientific research, and their deviations, are subject to a society of control. In this sense, hopeful arguments for the normalisation of art made with living materials are dated (Hauser 2007, 187) and do not pay adequate attention to the way that such art is largely made in institutions. So it is that incubators, petri dishes, test tubes, and images of the laboratory become politicised when they feature in exhibitions of SymbioticA’s work. In 2004, Jason Knight and Jennifer Willett, for example, developed BIOTEKNICA, a fake corporation selling teratomas, tumours of bone, muscle, and hair. The science fiction of this corporation echoed the science-fictional quality of these growths, the mutations of contemporary capitalism interchangeable with a mutation of the human body. The exhibition of BIOTEKNICA’s pamphlets and propaganda, their sales booth, illustrated the way that science has been constructed as much by secondary mediation as by its material practices. Science’s “production of presence” in living forms is also the production of a social or cultural truth-effect of scientific practices (Gumbrecht in Hauser 2016). While the politics of institutions and research practices captures some of the art made at SymbioticA, another feature of this art is the failure of science to realise the expectations of the artist. As the performance artist Stelarc explains, “[i]deas are easy. Anyone can have an idea. It’s actualising the idea that makes it meaningful” (Stelarc and Ambrose 2016). Stelarc has pushed this experience of living materials further than most, as in Extra Ear: Ear on Arm (2006) he implanted a prosthetic ear into his arm, designed so that his skin now grows over it. He developed this work after growing an ear in a petri dish at SymbioticA in 2003. While these ears do not hear, not serving any function, although Stelarc hopes the one on his arm might one day host a microphone that will broadcast its sounds to the internet. It is instead, and for now, mute and absurd, pushing the human body into technological metonymy, doubling an ear that is already doubled, in a regress of this body part. Stelarc is an artisan or tinkerer as someone who follows “the matter-flow as pure productivity” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 411). Science, then, certainly experimental science, is in many respects not part of an imagined human progress towards something better, but is instead an ongoing experiment whose consequences are still working themselves out, or as Rheinberger (2019) states: “every solution to a problem creates

78

Chapter 5

a number of new problems” (p. 241). Again: “There are itinerant, ambulant sciences that consist in following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities are scattered like so many ‘accidents’ (problems)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 372, emphasis original)—in other words, an extension of the territory through a process of ongoing deterritorialisation. The failure of the ear to hear, its purely prosthetic quality and redundancy, is typical of many SymboticA projects. Aspirations are often constrained by the fragility of living cells. When the artist Orlan came to SymbioticA, she imagined making a flowing cloak of cells taken from people from around the world. The final garment, however, was instead an installation of photographs of cells arranged on the wall, and not living at all. This is not to say that this scientific failure is however an artistic one. As SymbioticA co-founder Ionat Zurr (2015) explains, failure is the very difference between science and art, as the latter can fail, while science must contribute to knowledge. In scientific terms, the artist will always be marginal as she plays out the social implications of what science has already established as truth. Of course, one could well argue that science in its form as an experimental system or nomad science is increasingly marginal too in the institutional context of the university—a context in which royal or State science dominates—that is, in Rheinberger’s terminology, science from the top down (Rheinberger and Schwab 2013, 205). In any case, such failures trouble royal science as they highlight the tensions at work within the institutions that host it. Their strange repetition of scientific practices reflects critically back on such established practices as tissue culturing (Orlan), the engineering of human organs (Stelarc), animal experimentation (Keniniarz), and corporate sponsored research (Knight and Willett). However, such practices are also themselves highly institutionalised, having been produced out of the bureaucracy of the university, simulating ambulant or nomad science without actually being it, that is, a symbol: “this nomad science is continually ‘barred,’ inhibited, or banned by the demands and conditions of State science. Archimedes, vanquished by the Roman State, becomes a symbol” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 362). In this sense artists simulate the kinds of repetition Rheinberger (2019) argues constitute both scientific and artistic practices, but without the deterritorialisation that such practices potentiate. A simulation that serves to emphasise the institutionalisation of artistic and scientific experimentation today, though, of course for Deleuze, unlike Baudrillard (1994), it is important to stress that a simulation has productive—and positive— power in its own right. It is on this point that it is worth to briefly remind ourselves that science, art, and, indeed philosophy, while they have much in common, are also quite distinct from each other, especially with respect to what they produce (Deleuze and Guattari 1994; Rheinberger 2019; Schwab 2013). On the one hand, art and science may share much common ground in the manner that they follow, rather than reproduce. More than this, for Deleuze and Guattari (1994) art and science, together with philosophy—art, science, and philosophy as the daughters of chaos—do not simply plunge into and struggle with chaos, but their common struggle “is only the instrument of



SymbioticA 79

a more profound struggle against opinion, for the misfortune of people comes from opinion” (p. 206). Indeed, for Deleuze and Guattari (1994), art, science, and philosophy each constitute a plane that constitutes the brain. Importantly, these three planes are irreducible: plane of immanence of philosophy, plane of composition of art, plane of reference or coordination of science; form of concept, force of sensation, function of knowledge; concepts and conceptual personae, sensations and aesthetic figures, figures and partial observers. Analogous problems are posed for each plane. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 216)

The brain, in other words, not as the unity, but the junction of the three planes (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 208). In that junction the planes run constant interference with each other—an interference that is constituted by the production of quite different objects or problems. As Rheinberger (2019) notes, “[w]hereas in scientific research, the new has a predominantly epistemic connotation, what is relevant in artistic research is that the knowledge of the materials is connected to and intertwined with aesthetic effects of sorts that irritate perception” (p. 246). SymbioticA, in that respect, is perhaps best understood not as a unity, but as a junction that effectuates particular sorts of tensions, and tensions which are productive in their own right.

REFERENCES Assis, Paulo de. 2018. Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance through Aristic Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Buchanan, Ian. 2015. “Assemblage Theory and Its Discontents,” Deleuze Studies 9, no. 3, 382–92. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2011. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Burchell H. Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press. Guattari, Félix. 1993.  “Machinic Heterogenesis.” Translated by J. Creech. In Rethinking Technologies, edited by Verena Conley, 13–27. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Hauser, Jens. 2007. “Bioart: Taxonomy of an Etymological Monster.” In Ars Electronica. Hybrid—Living in Paradox, edited by Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schopf, 182–87. Linz: Ostfilder-Ruit. ———. 2016. “Biotechnology as Mediality: Strategies of Organic Media Art,” Performance Research 11, no. 4, 129–36.

80

Chapter 5

Kubler, George. 2008. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kurtz, Steve, and Ru Sirius. 2007. “Art or Bioterrorism: Who Cares?” Interview with Ru Sirius. 10 Zen Monkeys, 26 September 2007. http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/09/26/ art-or-bioterrorism-who-cares/. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoffrey Benningtion and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2019. “Epistemics and Aesthetics of Experimentation: Towards a Hybrid Heuristics?” In Practicing Art/Science: Experiments in an Emerging Field, edited by Philippe Sormani, Guelfo Carbone, and Priska Gisler. Milton: Routledge. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, and Michael Schwab. 2013. “Forming and Being Informed: HansJörg Rheinberger in Conversation with Michael Schwab.” In Experimental Systems: Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, edited by Michael Schwab. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Savat, David, and Thompson Greg. 2015. “Education and the Relation to the Outside: A Little Real Reality,” Deleuze Studies 9, no. 3, 273–300. Schwab, Michael. 2013. “Introduction.” In Experimental Systems: Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, edited by Michael Schwab. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Sormani, Philippe, Priska Gisler, and Guelfo Carbone. 2018. “Introduction: Experimenting with ‘Art/Science’?” In Practicing Art/Science: Experiments in an Emerging Field, edited by Philippe Sormani, Guelfo Carbone, and Priska Gisler. Milton: Routledge. Stelarc, and Melanie Ambrose. 2016. “Meet Stelarc, Australia’s Human Transformer,” Perth Now, 1 August 2016. https://www.perthnow.com.au/lifestyle/stm/meet-stelarc-australiashuman-transformer-ng-40371eaccf8a219d5770d17566539046. Zurr, Ionat. 2015. Panel talk, Experimental Art Education Workshop, National Experimental Arts Forum, Perth, 5 October.

6 Artistic Research in an Expanding Field The Case of BioArt jan jagodzinski

SETTING THE SCENE To fully comprehend the significance of bioart and its “research” agendas in the contemporary global institutions of art and design, it is necessary to pull back and grasp the significant achievements in genetic sciences that led up to the turn of the century. The developments surrounding The Human Genome project, which began in 1990 and ended in 2003, was largely responsible for characterising it as the “biotech century” (Rifkin 1999). Transgenic art emerges shortly before the turn of the twenty-first century; roughly two decades have passed since its inception. Bioart requires that its “research” problem be weighed against an Anthropocene imaginary, euphemistically called climate change where the anthropogenic activity of our species has brought about an environmental crisis within a global capitalist economic system. Its broad “research agenda” looks at the future of the twenty-first century from an awry perspective, both anamorphically and topologically, to generate ethical and political questions regarding “life” that science in its present forms—under capitalist modes of organisation—is less likely or reluctant to address. The boundary not to manipulate the human genome has been crossed in China as of November 2018: He Jiankui (aka JK) of Southern University of Science and Technology in the province of Shenzhen claimed that he altered embryos for seven couples during fertility treatments (Cyranoski 2019). One pregnancy resulted in twins, bestowing a trait to resist possible future infection with HIV. Crispr-Cas9, a well-known gene editing technology (used extensively in bioart experiments), enabled him to disable a gene called CCR5 that forms a protein doorway that allows HIV virus to enter a cell. China has since put a moratorium on such research. The point, however, is that such technologies will continue to be advanced in the future despite prohibitive legislation and condemnation by a global community of geneticists. Transhumanism counts 81

82

Chapter 6

on it. This chapter undertakes a somewhat skewed and topologically twisted look at bioart as a minoritarian development (Deleuze and Guattari 1986), which requires the coming together of art, science, technology, and philosophy into assemblages that enable new ways of decentring subjectivity, necessary to grasp an important disjunctive synthesis between science and the humanities where nature and culture mesh together: natureculture. Four decades have passed since Foucault’s (1978) History of Sexuality (Volume 1) was published articulating the claims of biopower in “Part Five: Right of Death and Power over Life.” In the nineteenth century the sovereignty’s right to “take life or let live” (Foucault 1978, 136) was replaced by the power “to make live and let die” (Foucault 1978, 138). Foucault (1978) makes clear that capitalism instrumentalises biopower over life to ensure production and economic growth. “Sex was a means of access to the life of the body and the life of the species” (p. 146). The first “test tube baby,” Louise Joy Brown, was born 25 July 1978, two years after the publication of Foucault’s first volume on the history of sexuality. Foucault’s account of biopower and governmentality, while expanded, challenged, and modified (Agamben 1998; Biddick 2016; Rabinow and Rose 2006) still continues to be seminal: vital aspects of human life are intervened for the purpose of rationalising authoritative regimes, while discourses of “truth” shape the imaginary through which individuals construct and interpellate their subjectivities between a sense of self and the collective. But, much has changed since Foucault when it comes to both biopolitics and the bioengineering of life, given that Foucault’s most influential account remains anthropocentric and species-bound despite Thomas Lemke’s (2015, 2016) spirited defence that Foucault had made a shift for himself between 1976 and 1978. Gilles Deleuze’s (1992) “supplement” to Foucault’s disciplinary societies by way of “societies of control” did not entirely displace Foucault’s influential disciplinary societal claims, as a number of scholars have already articulated and explored (Hardt and Negri 2000; Kurz 2012; Morar, Nail and Smith 2016; Nealon 2008; Savat 2013). It was Deleuze’s development of immanence (2001), and an expanded notion of life as “passive vitalism” (Colebrook 2009, 2010)—what he was to call “A Life”— that marks a theoretical shift, incorporating and modifying Gilbert Simondon’s (2017) developments of individuation, technoaesthetics, transduction, and disparation. A Life is indefinite and impersonal, an absolute immanence that is “made up of virtualities, events, singularities” (Deleuze 2001, 31). It cannot be reduced to the “subject” who experiences it. Such Life resonates with the “problematic” that surround bioengineering and bioart.

BIOART The assemblages that entangle the human with the nonhuman and the inhuman (artificial intelligence; AI) are soundly embedded in a global capitalist biopoliticoeconomy where the gene and “life” (as nature) are exploited for profit ends with



Artistic Research in an Expanding Field 83

claims of providing a more harmonious future (Cooper 2008). This is a strongly anthropocentric and speciesist view that celebrates a “world-for-us” despite the rhetoric of its achievements in health sciences via big Pharma, AgriFood and industrial design. It should be no surprise that bioart emerges concurrently towards the turn of the twenty-first century when these corporations have established themselves. While the literature is vast when it comes to telegenic art, chartered through the decades by artist-writers (Anker and Nelkin, 2003; Anker, Shaken, and Nelkin 2008), my claim, I hope, can make a different contribution: namely that BioArt, spelled with a capital B and A, is a “minoritarian development” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 1987), an ethicopolitical challenge to the larger biotechnical capitalist economy. BioArt provides an anamorphic “look” of deterritorialisation by inverting and perverting relationships and protocols found in mainstream life sciences. A different understanding of subjectivity (subjectivation, individuation) is required to grasp BioArts affective forces as seminally theorised by Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. In particular “difference” is mobilised to decentre the “human,” primarily by blurring the boundary between human and nonhuman (organic and inorganic) and the inhuman (AI, robotics, smart machines) through assemblages that are engaged in various BioArt installations. BioArt in general is difficult to define. The array is extraordinarily broad. The Portuguese bioartist Marta de Menezes, for instance, coordinates Cultivamos Cultura and Ecotopia, a rather impressive organisational array of global residences, exhibitions, festivals, conferences that are dedicated almost exclusively to bioart installations, exhibitions, and experimentations. Hence, caveats are in order. The first caveat is to ask: is it possible to include Body Art as a form of bioart, especially endurance performative art as a response precisely to the flights of figurative fantasy that transhumanism projects, the idea that humans can be “designed” in any which way through genetic engineering. The premise of Body Art being that the profound embodiment of materiality as presented by blood, skin, wounds, penetrations, and body fluids of all kinds, presents us with the enigma as to “what a body can do,” especially by extreme performance artists such as Marina Abramović, Tehching Hsieh, and Orlan, where pain and endurance as affects supersede any norms of tolerance, releasing the body’s own endorphins and transcendental brain waves to enter unknown realms of meditative spirituality. The body, with its complex play of microbiomes, becomes physically and mentally changed by manipulating its metabolic speeds by slowing down heart rates, breathing rates, and reaching states of self-hypnosis. Such performances can be identified as extreme examples of Foucault’s (1988) “technologies of the self.” While such “bioart” questions the limits of the body, often raising ethicopolitical claims, I would argue such exemplars are highly anthropocentric expressions of body-centrism. This would also include bioart like Julia Reodica’s hymNext Hymen Project, whose “designer hymens” are sculptures made from her own vaginal cells utilising a form of regenerative tissue engineering. Or, Sonja Bäumel’s Oversized Petri Dish (2009) and Expanded Self (2012) where she uses her own body’s bacteria to “expand” the image of her identity, to show its

84

Chapter 6

bio-existence with all forms of bacteria. While these are exemplars of interspecies bioart expression, it is more to do with the artist than the recognition of the nonhuman and inhuman contributions made in these assemblages. Encoding, recoding, and decoding the body, the informatic protocol used in regenerative medicine provides bioartists with all kinds of potentialities (like Stelare’s “third ear”), yet, this direction is more in keeping with transhumanist flights of the imaginary, questionable when its affects seem to reinforce humanist values of a world-only-for-us. Thacker (2004), usefully, refers to this as “biomedia.” There are however “hybrid forms” of bioart that bridge body-art and bioart proper, yet still remaining anthropocentric. One extreme would be the performance May the Horse Live in Me (Que le cheval vive en moi) by the French duo L’Art Orienté (2011). Objet: Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin (2011). Although an example of a transspecies assemblage (human–nonhuman) where there is a physical interaction with a live horse through an exchange of the horse’s blood that is injected into Laval-Jeantet, it may be said that the donor horse simply becomes a cog in the performance, reduced to the processed blood plasma, a metonymic element. The performance is all about Laval-Jeantet’s experience. I think the same charge can be levied against their Artists’ Skin Culture (Culture de Peaux d’Artistes), and Roadkill’s Coat, where the epidermal cells of both artists were cultivated and then grafted onto a pig’s dermis, which was then tattooed with motifs of endangered species. While the skin is a site of symbolic alliance, yet again, these trans-species or inter species transplants speak more about the performers than the species they have chosen. Another example is Orlan’s latest performances: The Harlequin Coat. With the help of SymbioticA lab, known for its tissue culture performances (discussed next), Orlan’s “identity” is exhibited as an “organic coat,” her gene spliced with other organisms. While also a transspecies performance that comments of hybridisation among species and culturenature crossbreeding, it highlights only Orlan. Identity and surveillance is a problematic that has received wide attention by bioarts, given the plethora of DNA commercial kits that are available to “identify” your genetic inheritance. Who owns your DNA? The Chicago-based BioArtist, Heather Dewey-Hagborg is able to 3D print faces based on the DNA sampling she finds on gum and cigarette butts and hair follicles. The masks that are produced are startling look-alikes of the actual person as Dewey-Hagborg’s own experiment on herself showed. Ironically, like many bioartistic tactics, Dewey-Hagborg has marketed a spray to mask one’s DNA. To challenge corporate interest, BioArts often produce faux corporations or pharmaceutical companies to present the absurdity of the situation. Jennifer Willett and Shawn Bailey’s Bioteknica and Tana Hargest’s Bitter Nigger are further examples (Hargest 2002; Levy 2011, 289). Bioteknika is designed to study teratomas, monstrous living tumorous growths that are out of control. At SymbioticA, Willet and Bailey created the P19 mouse teratoma cell line, a “meat sculpture” that they then 3D digitally printed. In a virtual laboratory on their website a viewer can actually generate their own teratoma (Anker et al. 2008, 235–36). The ethics and questions regulating human tissue donorship have received wide attention



Artistic Research in an Expanding Field 85

(Czarnecki 2012). Face Lab, located in Liverpool John Moore’s University, is capable of reconstructing facial images of historical figures who have long since passed away from their skull and bone remains. There is also a distinction that Robert Mitchell (2010, 16–36) makes between “prophylactic bioart” and “vitalist bioart”; the former does not engage with biotechnologies but with more traditional media, and not “life” itself; that is, living matter. It does, however, address the worries that the biotech order ushers in. Dorothy Nelkin and Suzanne Anker (2002), for instance, list many bioartists who explore the DNA as an icon, index, and symbol (Charles Sanders Peirce’s well-known semiotic typology) through more traditional arts of sculpture, painting, and forms of installation where no living bodies are on display. Susan Merrill Squier’s (2017) historical explorations of drawings and models around the concept of epigenesist would be an exemplar as well. Many of the “gene-artists” surveyed by Suzanne Anker and Dorothy Nelkin in their early book, The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (2003), would fall in this category. Lastly, when it comes to identifying prophylactic bioart, an amazing edited book by Giovanni Aloi (2017), part of the Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture series of art books, covers a wide range of bioartists during 2007–2017; however, only a few of them engage with actual “living” bodies. Those who do, do not necessarily have a developed research problematic; often the bioart remains “sensational” and a provocation, which ends up in undecidability. An infamous example of this is South American Marco Evaristti’s Helena (2000), which featured live gold fish in blenders that could be turned on by members in the audience and “killed,” which happened twice. This is certainly an exemplar of using “live” animals in an art gallery, and it raises a myriad of ethical questions that relate “pets” to their owners (flushing of fish down toilets), the treatment of animals in research be it science or art; the responsibility of the artist as accomplice for the killing of a fish by an audience member, after all, Evaristti set the stage and made the choice available. Can one “sacrifice” animals (goldfish) for a greater good—that is, to make audience members more aware of interspecies relationships? Finally, what to make of “companion species,” like tropical fish that float belly up in aquariums around the world, or pet/companion animals like dogs that are fed processed flesh from other animals, or that contemporary veterinarian practice remains dependent on animal experimentation? (Mizelle 2017). The question of violence is constantly raised, but the undecidability of a satisfactory ethical response ends up circulating in the media—be it curatorial commentary, blog sites, artist’s statements, or audience feedback. For some, Evaristti’s “stunt” is his responsibility. For Anna Munster (2011), the work raises the control relationship between humans and the products of their own artifice—the technologies that they use, more than human relationship with animals. The effect of the installation, its sensory violence for Munster at least, was one of repulsion that “haunted” her. “It disconnects the participant from the life of the fish enclosed in the blender and sacrifices both human and fish to the relentlessness of technology” (Munster 2011, 248).

86

Chapter 6

ART AS LIFE: BIOART I employ the spelling BioArt to differentiate those minoritarian artists who specifically undertake biophilosophically “life” as their “medium.” Further, rather than just collapsing art, science, and technology together, they provide a strong philosophic problematic in their work: art, science, and philosophy are variously configured in an infinite multiplicity. Their research places “life” at the crossroads and confluence of art–science–philosophy. Given this aim of a minoritarian ethicopolitical BioArt, which tries to expose the molar workings of biotech industries, there is no one style or method for its expression. Rather one can only point to singularities where specific problematics are addressed. This is the very opposite of William Myers’s (2015) assessment of bioart as simply an exploratory relationship between culture and science, which is the standard view. The pioneers of BioArt are well known, all of whom began their “research” just prior to the twenty-first century: Eduardo Kac (1962– ), Critical Art Ensemble (founded 1987), and TC&A (initiated 1996) were the most active and continue to be so, followed by Natalie Jeremijenko (1966– ) who has made significant contributions as discussed later. They remain significant “avantgardists without authority” (jagodzinski 2019) as they continue to address the ecological issues of the Anthropocene by decentring the “human.” There are, of course, now “countless” artists who call themselves bioartists. Three significant collections document much of the field: Eduardo Kac’s (2007) Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond documents issues relating to biotech culture, bioethics, and bioart; Tactical Politics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, edited by the late Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip (2008), concentrates on the genetic issues within the life science, and provides the interface between art and science via artists and theorists; lastly, Linda Weintraub’s (2012) To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet provides an international array of artists, which mixes eco-artists with bioarts with an expanded view to address the eco-crisis of the Anthropocene. Eduardo Kac Kac’s (2007, 18–20) introduction sets the stage to the field by maintaining that bioart’s manipulation of life’s processes generally follow three approaches: biomaterials are “coached” into specific inert shapes or behaviours; usual or subversive use of biotech tools and processes; and lastly, and most importantly: inventing or transforming living organisms with, as well as without social and environmental integration. Kac’s is generally given recognition as setting the stage for this development. His glowing “green” (pet) rabbit under ultraviolet light, named Alba, had been genetically modified by injecting Green Florescent Protein (GFP) of a Pacific Northwest jellyfish into the fertilized egg of an albino rabbit. Exhibited as “GFP Bunny” in 2000, it became an iconic symbol for transgenic art, primarily because it caused shock and protests by both scientists and animal activists alike: animal activists were outraged by the potential violence and abuse if such a bioengineering direction was



Artistic Research in an Expanding Field 87

to be pursued, while scientists were equally upset that bioengineering had been utilised for such a frivolous pursuit by an artist. The Bunny was not received well, as Kac received personal attacks from the audience when he attempted to display the “pet” as a performance (Anker et al. 2008, 306–8). Moreover, the lab that did the genetic “makeover” refused to give Kac the rabbit—it was not in the contract! Alba marks a stark contrast to the genetic “dryware” cyberart of the mid-1990s, often referred to as the “new media” or information art, iconically perhaps presented by Joe Davis’s Microvenus (1996) where the graphic icon of a Germanic rune representing life and the female earth (three linear elements resembling the letter “y” with an upwardly extended vertical element) is converted into a sequence of DNA base pairs. The journal Leonardo, founded by the astronautical pioneer kinetic artist Frank Malino in 1968, explores this “new media” based on information sciences where art, science, and technology have come together (Vesna 2011, 235). Kac’s installation Genesis, which is often cited in the literature given it was one of the first bioart installations, presents an array of issues which enable me to show why it is an exemplary case of minoritarian BioArt. It serves to illustrate how the protocols of bioinformatics and biotechnology can be manipulated to enable the articulation of concepts that cannot be problematised within the life sciences that are hampered by “results,” which are then commodified into products by capitalist industries adhering to strict protocols for human release, primarily drug and food industries. Genesis is well named as it marks and identifies a paradigmatic change in the life sciences where new forms of “life” are created, manufactured and reproduced. The work was first installed in 1999 at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria. Kac began the project by choosing a well-known passage from the Old Testament, Book of Genesis (1:26), which read: “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” This sentence underwent what is considered a bioengineered process of encoding, recoding and decoding (Thacker 2003). Kac modified this biological process as he began with “dryware” rather than “wetware,” reversing the usual protocol. The installation, for Kac, had an ethical and political purpose: not only to question man’s dominion over nature, but also to exploit the feedback loops between dry information and wet biology. It was possible, at the end of the first Genesis exhibition at Ars Electronica to translate back the modified DNA of the artist’s gene into Morse code and then back into English. When the mutant bacteria that contained the “living verse” was reverse bioengineered—that is, decoded, it now read: “Let aan have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that loves ua eon the earth.” The Judeo-Christian message had been altered. The word “Man” has now become a nonsensical signifier and the sentence transformed—a small gesture to be sure, but one of ethical significance. It is Kac’s way of questioning the “god-complex” that bioengineering presents. Kac’s installation Genesis shows that “life” is very much unbounded, contingent and subject to chance events where mutations occur. When spectator-participants are placed in a “disembodied” position based on their

88

Chapter 6

telepresence through computer-mediation, their interactions with “living material” force an immediate encounter that has strong affective resonances, soliciting feelings of disgust, sympathy, anxiety and bewilderment. Critical Art Ensemble Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) has been a major player in raising important societal questions when it comes to the shift towards biocapitalism. Critical Art Ensemble: Disturbances (CAE, 2012) provides an historical account of their performances. Steve Kurtz, one of the co-founders was involved in an infamous case of bioterrorism, brought on by a zealous FBI after 9/11, when the vigilance of Homeland Security was in overdrive. For Kurtz, “art no longer imitates life, it had become life” (West 2011, 259). CAE also staged an installation performance theatre event questioning genetically modified organisms (GMOs). They explored the inherent dangers of releasing transgenic organisms (modified E. coli bacteria in this case) into the environment and the fear such an act solicits. Under the label of GenTerra (2001–2003), a bogus company that deals with transgenic species, CAE “educated” visitors that visited their performance by engaging them in rudimentary lab techniques where they grew and stored their own transgenic bacteria in petri dishes. Fear of what might happen when GMOs are introduced in alien environments—often referred to as “bioterror”—was very much part of this performance. Such an emotion pervades public opinion. CAE worked with this “fear” so that it could be distanced and contained by creating a gap or hesitation for thought by lab participants. When it came to the decision as to whether or not a transgenic form of bacteria should be released into the lab environment, the action taken was an informed understanding as to the consequences of what might happen, as opposed to simply an immediate reaction where fear becomes overwhelming and uncontrollable. To create this “gap” of undecidability, a pedagogical component was necessary. Spectator-participants had to be taught rudimentary lab techniques to be able to mutate a bacteria strain in a petri dish before deciding whether it could be “released.” In this way, the distance from “living matter” collapsed, forwarding a tactile sensibility rather than the distancing of sight. It is important to note that in BioArt the spectator is positioned as a participant in these bioethical and political performances. There is an attempt to have spectatorparticipants interact with living GMOs directly. The performative aspect of BioArt comes from an artistic tradition established by such figures as Joseph Beuys, Alan Kaprow, Chris Burden, and Valie Export amongst others. In early performances of the late 1960s and early 1970s, audiences were encouraged to participate, placing them often in awkward and confused states. When precisely was the performance over? What were they to do? This was certainly the case with Kac’s Genesis where a computer terminal enabled local and telepresent visitors to access the website and to actively participate in the installation by either choosing to irradiate the bacteria, or to shield them from the short-wave ultraviolet (UV) light that causes the mutation. The audience was shielded from these short-wave UV rays, while long-wave UV



Artistic Research in an Expanding Field 89

(known as “black light”) was used to “glow” the synthetic gene projected on an adjacent wall. There is then a strong techoaesthetic at work, which Gilbert Simondon (2017) had explored; this technoaesthetic applies not only to the bioartists who are involved with the inhuman aspects of the installations, but the spectator-participants as well, who are drawn into the assemblages of productive desire via the aesthèsis (sensation) available. Tissue Culture and Art For BioArt to be effective, it is necessary to physically engage the audience with GMOs to create transference of affect, perhaps better to name this as a transversal transduction given the nonhuman and inhuman elements each of which has its own affordances. Such affect can materialise into sympathy, rejection, care, disgust, responsibility and so on (Catts 2002; Catts and Zurr 2011, 2016). This is a difficult task as BioArtists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (aka TC&A—Tissue Culture and Art) maintain. They make the point that audience-participants cannot generally relate to their tissue culture sculptures as “living organisms.” The same applies to bacteria where, due to its invisibility, the ethics that surround its “release” in an open environment—given a choice by the audience—is dependent more on the imaginative circumstances of what “may happen” than what actually could happen, especially in the case of CAE where the release of mutant bacteria is usually harmless, often known beforehand, and thus ineffective as a deterrent. Unless spectator-participants come back to a TC&A installation and see actual “growth” of the organisms, it is unlikely they will be affected. Their metabolism rate is so different from the audience that they remain inanimate and simply become “objects” that are on display. A certain distance has to be closed so that these living organisms “look back” and are viscerally alive. They are given “voice” in this way and become agential in their potential affects. TC&A instituted “feeding” and “killing” rituals to decrease such distancing and to increase the potential of one body affecting another body. Attention and care were ways to promote a possible encounter. The “killing ritual” simply meant exposing these “semi-living sculptures” to a non-sterile environment. At the end of an exhibition, the audience is invited to “touch” them, which is enough to “kill” them. This act alone is often enough for audience members to realise that these sculptures are indeed alive. The technoaesthetic dimension of these installations was enhanced by TC&A members designing the “look” of their lab equipment (special enlarged vessels and bioreactors) to make the “living sculpture” more visible and prominent for spectators-participants. A further way distance was collapsed by TC&A was to make their “semi-living sculptures” into food. Tissue Engineered Steak (2000) made of skeletal muscle cells was edible, and the audience were invited to consume it. Consumption of food is usually an “objective” act—one does not think that a “living thing” has been killed so that its consumption can sustain life; but here the “table” is turned around as the “killing ritual” is enacted so that the meal could begin. Of course, the range of participant reactions differed, from enthusiasm to abject disgust.

90

Chapter 6

TC&A’s explorations of the semi-living through such audience-participation is to question and push against what they call “Neolifism.” “Neolifisms tend to view life as a raw material devoid of context and in the service of human control” (Catts and Zurr 2016, 136). Neolifism is a form of tranhumanism and biomimesis. Rather than looking at technology as imitating life through biomimetic bioengineering where an organism’s affordances of movement are mimicked through design technologies, TC&A is interested in manipulating life so that it can “move” and have an agential influence. This problematises life as one needs to think of the care and nurture when it comes to “neolife”—that is, life that defies taxonomic classification as to what is “natural.” Life, for TC&A, exists in fragments, in parts, living outside of any organised body—semi-living, like cell lines that have a “life” of their own, given their ability to mutate in an immortal infinite way, like cancer cells (i.e., HeLa cells). As Catts and Zurr (2016) say, “Life defies and resists the human desire to turn it into a fully controlled utilitarian technology” (p. 147). A perfect example is the Frozen Ark initiative begun in 1996, consisting of twenty-one major zoos, aquaria, museums, and research institutions in eight countries around the world. The idea is to cryopreserve the DNA of extinct species so they may be revived in the future—promoting a “Jurassic Park” science fiction. Frozen Ark resurrects the biblical idea of species essentialism, an insurance policy for the “end of the world.” Life as Art: Beatriz da Costa and Natalie Jeremijenko TC&A, CAE, Kac, and Beatriz da Costa (1974–2012) were the forerunners of what was to come. Beatriz da Costa’s (2007) projects with CAE, and especially her “pigeon project” PigeonBlog (da Costa 2012) that “used” pigeons to test the air quality in Los Angeles, caused controversy with PETA and the scientific community, putting her into a tailspin as to how she is to position herself as an artist when it came to animal-human interactions. By and large, this generation of BioArtists exemplified “life as art” given that the performative and ready-made influences were largely enacted within art galleries, museums, and even medical clinical facilities. The ready-made association with Duchamp and the performative aspects with 1970s artist like Kaprow, Chris Burden, Beuys, and others is strongly argued by Robert Mitchell (2010, 2012), and Suzanne Anker et al. (2008, 308–13). There are BioArtists who moved out into the environment exemplifying the inverse: “art as life.” Beatriz da Costa (Kelley 2017) was an early pioneer in this regard, which led to many other BioArt projects. Due to illness that led to her passing in 2012, she could not continue her work. BioArtists like Natalie Jeremijenko have continued such human-nonhuman-inhuman assemblages, but with a twist. She has set the path and the standard for what many BioArtists have come to develop further: her reversal of anthropocentrism is that we are the ones who must listen to the voices of the nonhuman other to co-habit within a healthy environment. Jeremijenko achieves this by constructing interspecies technologies. In her TED talk, “The Art of the Eco-Mindshift” (2010), Jeremijenko unveils her vision to



Artistic Research in an Expanding Field 91

confront the global healthcare crisis, the major environmental health issues culled by interviewing New York physicians. The idea behind her founding the Environmental Health Clinic at NYU is to turn the table around between humans and the environment; human well-being requires a healthy environment, and so “(im)patients” who visit her clinic, so named because nothing environmentally is ever done quickly enough, are given ways they can actively intervene in the environment. But this intervention is somewhat absurd, ironic, campy, and whimsical—almost laughable—yet oddly scientific and soundly engineered, supported often by sophisticated technological interfaces and the telepresence of media. Her assemblages are unique. An example of her interspecies technology is Tadpole Bureaucratic Protocol (Jeremijenko 2007, 2009). Tadpoles are treated as “companion species” (Haraway 2003), each named after a local bureaucrat of the Department of Environmental Conservation, whose decisions affect water quality in New York; each tadpole is thus given a personhood. A “tadpole walker” is developed, a stroller with a tadpole in a glass container that can “inquire” into the local water quality when released. The idea is to stroll New York streets to do some testing. Tadpoles have exquisite biosensors to respond to industrial contaminants of endocrine disruptors and t3-mediated hormone emulators—ingredients in personal care products, cleaning products, BPAs found in plastics and canned food containers, pesticides, antibiotics, and hormones fed to farmed animals. These all find their way into the local water supplies and then into the oceans, putting aquatic animals and fish in danger. The idea of such a seemingly outrageous act of taking a tadpole for a stroll is to have neighbours or anyone on the street ask what’s going on so a tadpole walker can explain the issues regarding water quality. Tadpoles use the same three mediated hormones as humans, so a network is established between human and nonhumans to see how each tadpole is getting along. The link to the endocrine disruptors is made to the bodily changes young girls are undergoing: falling age of puberty, obesity, and breast cancer. Once the social network is established and the “health” of the network tadpoles is assessed, it is possible to approach the local bureaucrat with evidence to insist on environmental policy change. Tadpoles are used here as a sensitive bio-monitoring device, and one assumes ethically (as well as politically) in the assemblage created. It should be pointed out that animals of all kinds have been instrumentally employed in the same capacity as these tadpoles, like canaries in mines. A whole new technology of genetically modified plants and animals is emerging in the new field known as biosensing: the others being biomimicry and synthetic biology (Ginsberg et al. 2014). Such a trajectory of animal capital expands the more-than-human sensorium, reinstating an anthropocentric worldview where plants and animals become “pollutant sensors” (Johnson 2017). In Jeremijenko’s case, tadpoles are given “citizenship” and personhood in the sense that, being vulnerable to toxicity, they are able to produce knowledge and metrics regarding their condition, which can then be “shared” for change. They are not instrumentalised solely for human ends; humans as well are affected in turn. Jeremijenko (2007; Jeremijenko and Dehlia, 2017)

92

Chapter 6

project “TREExOFFICE” repeats the same ethicopolitical stance. A tree is recognised for the agency of its sentience, consonant with Bolivian Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, which became a law in 2010. The tree acts as its own landlord; it has property rights in the space it occupies in the city. With the technology provided, humans become its tenants who pay rent by using it as a workspace or office for freelancers. The proceeds then go to the tree that “determines” if its soil needs augmentation, or if other trees should be planted, giving it a self-monitoring agency, capitalising on the resources it receives. So, personhood is bestowed on the nonhuman and inhuman world, recognising its agential contribution to the nonhuman, inhuman, and human assemblages that are symbiotically formed. Agential contribution does not refer to full individual agency, but is “distributed” over the assemblage itself.

BIOPHILOSOPHY: THE NECESSITY OF NEW THOUGHT A minoritarian understanding of BioArt requires a philosophy that is able to decentre anthropocentrism, question speciesism, forward interspecies communication and rethink life in its zoë and bio forms differently in order to come to face-to-face with the endgame of the Anthropocene, a non-sustainable planet for our species in “our” inability to co-exist with the range of species. In other words, a post-anthropological approach is required as both inhuman (AI and variant technologies) and non-human (organic and inorganic entities) are accounted within the assemblages that co-exist in ecological milieus. The BioArtists mentioned in this chapter have recognised that Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari have provided a strong basis for such an understanding that provides some semblance of adequacy to grasp the biotech shift in thinking that forwards a designer capitalist worldview. Eugene Thacker (2008) has usefully made a distinction between the philosophy of biology and biophilosophy, which helps to understand what is so pressing. Biophilosophy is not a philosophy of life that deals with essences—like the structure of the genetic code and its categorisations—a representational theory of life; rather biophilosophy focuses on that which transforms life—the focus is on the multiplicity of relations—the network of relations that take the living outside itself, a diagram that is extrinsic as opposed to intrinsic characteristics of a form of life (hylomorphism). The philosophy of biology is trapped in a dichotomy between nature and culture, or human and nonhuman, or human and inhuman (AI, bioBots). Biophilosophy tries to overcome this dualism by decentring the agency of the human subject, a non-anthropocentric ontology and ethics that considers the human as necessarily enmeshed in a multiplicity of relations with human and nonhuman and inhuman (AI) others. Relational multiplicity is not the same as “many” (like the one and the many) but in terms of a combination—a proliferating number that differs. Gilles Deleuze (1990, 174) would call this connective logic: and + and + and. This is a dynamic and agentic



Artistic Research in an Expanding Field 93

account of matter, and a refusal of human exceptionalism (that is placing humans foremost in a world only for us—only for our species). Biophilosophy has to do some heavy lifting as the future endgame is upon us: climate change and the possible extinction of our species. In this regard, BioArt is positioned paradoxically in a rather “nowhere” and “now here” place in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) concerns in What Is Philosophy? In other words, its potentials—as we have seen by artists like Jeremijenko and others who bring an interspecies awareness and a shift in planetary ecological consciousness—seem utopian (“nowhere”), yet the germs of what might develop are “now here.” BioArt has a way to question scientific technological advancement through its own ironic and often far-fetched experimentation to give “voice” to the nonhuman and inhuman that belong to a world-not-for-us. BioArt, as a minoritarian impulse, faces two other significant developments since the turn of the century that add to a picture of a bioeconomy awash with genes: biomimesis and its specialised subset, the biosensing industry that explores and markets the “more-than-human” sensorium. Janine Benyus’s book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature came out in 1997 promising a new revolution in industrial production. This development has long since overcome hylomorphic passivity toward nature where form is imposed on matter through the industrial methods of “heat, beat, and treat.” This is where the information in material is homogenised by applying energy that uses even more energy to impose a new structure. Biomimesis, sometimes called “synthetic biology” and a “synthetic aesthetic” (Ginsberg et al. 2014), calls on nature as its inspiration and innovation to bring together engineering, design, and biology in new ways to grow physical devices and structures (cells, from the ground up, rather than from the top down). “Life” rather than the “gene” is its focus, although both are obviously entangled. It is the careful examination of nature’s design that can be expanded (e.g., the study of how birds conserve energy by changing their wing shapes in various conditions of flight so that such knowledge can be transferred over into the aircraft industry, new material synthesised from spider’s silk, mycelium bricks, termite-mound inspired buildings). The corporate world, especially venture capitalism, is highly invested in biomimetic design. In brief, biomimesis, while so full of promises, is thoroughly harnessed for its utilitarian usefulness for industry and the military (Johnson 2010, 2017). Nonhuman life is harnessed to a capitalist imaginary. Nonhuman life becomes intellectual property (as opposed to raw material) to be harnessed as an active producer of knowledge (and not for passive consumption). It is what nonhuman entities can “do” through their physiological capacities to guide and “teach” us how to do it (nature’s “wisdom”), which is what becomes identified as “enclosed” intellectual property (the patent), and not the nonhuman entity “in-itself ” (Goldstein and Johnson 2015). Nature becomes productive in its processes that can be mimicked for specific utilitarian needs and effects as animal and machine boundaries break down. In effect, they are the “nonhuman extension” of the “Maker entrepreneurial culture” (Hatch 2013)

94

Chapter 6

that has spread throughout universities and industry. Each organic creature is now carefully dismantled, dissected and explored for its capacity to perform, evaluated for its bio-value. Its “vitality index.” Such knowledge also generates the building blocks to construct “wetware machines” as neurobiology meets robotics so that bio-techscience can begin to mimic nature’s own creatures (e.g., stigmergy navigation in ants and geese, bat sonar, lizard limb regeneration, and so on). The proviso being, only those species whose productivity can be exploited are chosen. The sleight of hand to stave off accusations of enslavement, which would be ineffective anyway given that The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not apply the nonhuman other, is to maintain that Nature is now honoured and respected for its capacity to “show us the way” in collaboration. Nonhuman life now becomes “terra economica” a repository of limitless potential to become capital (Goldstein and Johnson 2015, 76).The economic blueprint for such a world order is presented by “natural capitalism” (Hawken, Lovins, and Lovins 1999) with claims to “intentional biology,” meaning more and more knowledge leading to complete control of nature. Such “distributed biological manufacturing” will (optimistically) by conditioned by “open-source biology” (Carlson 2001). I end this chapter this way given the dire outlook as to what the future will bring. The climate deniers (e.g., a long list that includes Franklin Center, State Policy Network, Heartland Institute, Hudson Institute, and so on) all point in the direction to the “Good Anthropocene” that promises new riches to exploit for capital gains as the ice receded and the coasts are flooded. The tech industries forwarding Green capitalism are hard at work drawing on biomimetic design and artificial intelligence—colloquially SMART technologies (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology)—to keep the economy booming, while the signifier “sustainability,” already captured and owned by capital (Parr 2009), is held out as some sort of panacea: all will be well. BioArt, from its minoritarian positioning, can only continue to show the folly of this direction and implore, to some extent, for a change of consciousness, a decentring of the world-forus, knowing full well that to do this is a choice without a choice.

REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Aloi, Giovanni. 2017. Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture: A Decade of Art and the Non-Human 07-17. Billdal, Sweden: Förlaget 284. Anker, Suzanne, and Dorothy Nelkin. 2003. The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age. New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. Anker, Suzanne, Susan Lindee, Edward A. Shanken, and Dorothy Nelkin. 2008. “Technogenesis: Aesthetic Dimensions of Art and Biotechnology.” In Altering Nature, Volume One: Concepts of “Nature” and “The Natural” in Biotechnology Debates, edited by Andre B. Lustig, Baruch A. Brody and Gerald P. McKenny, 275–321. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer Science + Business B.V.



Artistic Research in an Expanding Field 95

Benyus, Janine 1997. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. New York: HarperCollins. Biddick, Kathleen. 2016. Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties. Earth, Milky Way: Punctum Books. CAE. 2012. Critical Art Ensemble: Disturbances, foreword by Brian Holms. London: Four Corner Books. Carlson, Rob. 2001. “Biological Technology in 2050.” http://www.synthesis.cc/biologicaltechnology-in-2050/. Catts, Oron, ed. 2002. The Aesthetics of Care? The Artistic Social and Scientific Implications of the Use of Biological/Medical Technologies for Artistic Purposes. Nedlands, Western Australia: SymbioticA, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia. Catts, Oron, and Ionat Zurr, eds. 2011. Partial Life. London: Open Humanities Press. ———. 2016. “The Biopolitics of Life Removed from Context: Neolifism.” In Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies, edited by S. E. Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė, 135–55. New York: Routledge. Colebrook, Claire. 2009. “Queer Vitalism.” New Formations (Deleuzian Politics?) 68 (Autumn): 77–92. ———. 2010. Deleuze and the Meaning of Life. London: Continuum Books. Cooper, Melinda. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Cyranoski, David. 2019. “The CRISPR-Baby Scandal: What’s Next for Human Gene-Editing.” Nature 566 (28 Feb.): 440–42. Czarnecki, Gina. 2012. Art and Ethics Advisory Panel. https://vimeo.com/43719685. da Costa, Beatriz. 2007. “Reaching the Limit: When Art Becomes Science.” In Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, edited by Eduardo Kac, 365–85. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2012. “Pigeonblog.” In Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design, edited by xine burrough, 192–99. London: Routledge. da Costa, Beatriz, and Kavita Philip. 2008. Tactical Politics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience. London: MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, 59: 3–7. ———. 2001. Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. Introduction by John Rajchman. Translated by Anne Boyman. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986 [1975]. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  ———. 1987 [1980]. Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. ———. 1994 [1991]. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. “Part Five: Right of Death and Power over Life.”  In The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, 135–59. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds. Amherst: Massachusetts University Press. Ginsberg, Daisy Alexandra, Alistair Elfick, Drew Endy, and Jane Calvert. 2014. Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

96

Chapter 6

Goldstein, Jesse, and Elizabeth Johnson. 2015. “Biomimicry: New Natures, New Enclosures.” Theory, Culture & Society 32(1): 61–81. Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Others. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hargest, Tana. 2002. “Bitter Nigger Inc.” Social Text 71 (Summer) 20(2): 115–23. Hatch, Mark. 2013. The Maker Movement Manifesto: Rules for Innovation in the New World of Crafters, Hackers, and Tinkers. New York: McGraw-Hill. Hawken, Paul, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins. 1999. Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. jagodzinski, jan. 2019. “An Avant-Garde ‘Without Authority’: The Post-Human Cosmic Artisan in the Anthropocene.” In Aberrant Nuptials. Deleuze and Artistic Research, edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Jeremijenko, Natalie. 2007. “OneTree.” In Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, edited by Eduardo Kac, 301–2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2009 (17 September). Amphibious Architecture. Available at: http://www.sentientcity. net/exhibit/?p=5. ———. 2010. Natalie Jeremijenko: The Art of the Eco-Mindshift- TED talk transcript. Available at: https://en.tiny.ted.com/talks/natalie_jeremijenko_the_art_of_the_eco_mindshift. Jeremijenko, Natalie, and Hannah Dehlia. 2017. “Natalie Jeremijenko’s New Experimentalism’.” In Anthropocene Feminism: Between Human/Non-human Valorization and the Notion of Difference, edited by Richard Grusin, 197–219. London: University of Minnesota Press. Johnson, Elizabeth R. 2010. “Reinventing Biological Life, Reinventing ‘the Human.’” ephemera; Theory and Politics in Organization 10(2): 177–93. ———. 2017. “At the Limits of Species Being: Sensing the Anthropocene.” South Atlantic Quarterly 116(2): 275–92. Kac, Eduardo, ed. 2007. Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kelley, Lindsay. 2017. “The Political Life of Cancer: Beatriz da Costa’s Dying for the Other and Anticancer Survival Kit.” Environmental Humanities 9(2):230–54. Kurz, Joshua. 2012. “(Dis)locating Control: Transmigration, Precarity and the Governmentality of Control.” Behemoth: A Journal on Civilization 5(1): doi: https://doi.org/10.6094/ behemoth.2012.2.1.653 Lemke, Thomas. 2015. “New Materialisms: Foucault and the ‘Government of Things.’” Theory Culture & Society 32(4): 3–25. ———. 2016. “Rethinking Biopolitics: The New Materialism and the Political Economy of Life.” In Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies, edited by S. E. Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė, 55–68. New York: Routledge. Levy, Ellen K. 2011. “Defining Life: Artists Challenge Conventional Classifications.” In Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts, edited by Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, and Victoria Vesna, 275–89. Bristol: Intellect. Mitchell, Robert. 2010. Bioart and the Vitality of the Media. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ———. 2012. “Simondon, Bioart and the Milieu of Biotechnology.” Inflexions: A Journal for Research Creation 5 (March). Available at: http://www.inflexions.org/n5_mitchellhtml. html.



Artistic Research in an Expanding Field 97

Mizelle, Brett. 2017. “The Goldfish Thread.” In Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture: A Decade of Art and the Non-Human 07-17, edited by Giovanni Aloi, 19–28. Billdal: Förlaget 284. Morar, Nicolae, Thomas Nail, and Daniel W. Smith. 2016. Between Deleuze and Foucault. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Munster, Anna. 2011. “Biotechnical Art and the Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm.” In Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts, edited by Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, and Victoria Vesna, 243–258. Bristol, UK: Intellect. Myers, William. 2015. Bio Art—Altered Realities. London: Thames and Hudson. Nealon, Jeffrey. 2008. Foucault beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensification since 1984. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nelkin, Dorothy, and Suzanne Anker. 2002. “The Influence of Genetics on Contemporary Art.” Nature and Society 3 (December): 967–71. Parr, Adrian. 2009. Hijacking Sustainability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rabinow, Paul, and Nicolas Rose. 2006. “Biopower Today.” BioSocieties 1(2): 195–217. Rifkin, Jeremy. 1999. The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World. New York: Penguin Putnam. Savat, David. 2013. Uncoding the Digital: Technology, Subjectivity and Action in the Control Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Simondon, Gilbert. 2017 [1958, 2012]. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. Squier, Susan Merrill. 2017. Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thacker, Eugene. 2003. “What Is Biomedia.” Configurations 11: 47–79. ———. 2004. Biomedia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2008. “Biophilosophy for the 21st Century.” In Critical Digital Studies: A Reader, edited by Marilouise Kroker and Arthur Kroker, 132–42. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Vesna, Victoria. 2011. “Shifting Media Contexts: When Scientific Labs Become Art Studios.” In Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts, edited by Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, and Victoria Vesna, 233–42. Bristol: Intellect. Weintraub, Linda. 2012. To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet. Berkeley: University of California Press. West, Ruth G. 2011. “Working with Wetware.” In Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts, edited by Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, and Victoria Vesna, 259–74. Bristol: Intellect.

7 Artistic Research and Sound Art in Public Urban Spaces Marcel Cobussen

ARTISTIC RESEARCH AND SOUND STUDIES Since the (late) 1990s, research in and through artistic practices as well as the production of theoretical treatises on this topic has been booming. Hesitantly but undeniably, academic institutions have opened their gates to welcome modes of knowledge (practical, embodied, tacit, enacted) that can only be brought to the fore by artists through the making of (new) art. By presenting their art in new contexts (e.g., in academia, at conferences, at scientific fora, through scholarly newsgroups), by adapting certain research strategies already common in the academic world, and by adopting discourses from various disciplines, artistic research has also created a different type of artists: artists who are able to (linguistically) articulate questions, hypotheses, or simply the motivations driving their work; artists who are able to clearly and thoroughly (re)contextualise their practice; artists who are not only contributing new work to the art world but also new insights and new knowledge to various academic disciplines and theoretical discourses; artists who are presenting their work in a rather different context and situation than their habitual milieus; artists who are able and willing to account for their artistic, methodological, and discursive decisions in front of their (artistic as well as academic) peers. Simultaneously with this (modest) (r)evolution, the last decade of the previous century saw the rise of another phenomenon within the academic world that also made an impact on the art scene: sound studies. Benefiting from an increase in attention for the senses and sensuous knowledge—the “sensory turn”—in disciplines such as cultural studies, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology, sound studies focuses on the way humans (and animals) relate aurally to their environment and the way the sonic environment affects human (and animal) behaviour. It is clear that sound studies thereby deviates from musicology, music theory, and music history 98



Artistic Research and Sound Art in Public Urban Spaces 99

(while not excluding reflections on music) as it addresses in principle all sounds that together form a sonic environment: musical as well as non-musical sounds, noise as well as inaudible ultrasounds or infrasounds, natural as well as human-made or technologically produced sounds. The prevailing idea that Western culture, at least, has long been dominated by an emphasis on the visual is more and more contested by historical research showing that living beings have always also demonstrated a strong aural orientation toward the surrounding world; only consider the development of devices such as the stethoscope, the radio, and the telephone. In that sense, one might deem it strange that it took so long before sound studies appeared as a (quasi-)independent discipline. It may not come as a surprise that artistic research and sound studies have more in common than their shared emergence at the end of the twentieth century. A substantial part of sound studies is devoted to sound design and sound art, and publications, especially regarding the latter, are often generated by sound artists themselves. Therefore, I would like to defend the claim that many sound artists are also artistic researchers, given that they often systematically reflect on their own work as well as on the work of others; they—implicitly or explicitly—contribute to knowledge about our environment and how we perceive, experience, and evaluate it; they often have to explain and justify their work, their aesthetic choices, their interventions in an extant sonic environment; they have developed their own research methodologies before arriving at artistic work; they sometimes pose questions that are not posed by others. It is the aim of this chapter to expand and examine in more detail how artistic research and sound art relate to one another. To do so, I will concentrate on several existing sound art works, all situated in public urban spaces. The main reason for this demarcation is that working on and with public urban spaces often requires more “research” from the sound artist than producing a so-called autonomous, non-site-specific artwork. I will try to answer questions such as: How do sound artists contribute towards developments in the arts as well as knowledge production? Which spaces of research and which methodological tools do they use? Which new concepts have they developed? It is my hope that this chapter will show that artistic research and sound studies—both still marginal (and marginalised) in current academic fields—contribute in significant and unique ways towards rethinking our being-in-and-with-the-world.

MAX NEUHAUS—TIMES SQUARE Scholars—musicologists, art historians, scholars of comparative literature or theatre studies—can examine and analyse artworks or events by which they become study objects. This scholarly research aims at disclosing specific knowledge about art and almost always requires a certain distance between researcher and research object. Science and scholarly research can also serve art: they can provide artists with specific

100

Chapter 7

insights and understanding or, more concretely, develop and design products which can then be used by artists. Artistic work and scholarly research can also coincide when undertaken by the artists themselves; in this third case, the artist becomes a researcher (Borgdorff 2012; Frayling 1993). Retrospectively, American percussionist and sound artist Max Neuhaus’s Times Square can be considered as an outcome of this third option. First installed in 1977, the location of this “audio sculpture” is a seemingly unused and useless area between Broadway and 7th Avenue and 45th and 46th Street, a traffic island on the northern edge of a square that is traversed daily by thousands of pedestrians. The work consists of a digital sound synthesis system generating and transmitting continuous low droning tones. The technical system is placed under the traffic island in the subway ventilation vaults which consist of a network of tunnels. These tunnels amplify the sound and, as they differ in size, each produces its own resonance. The effect is that, at different spots on the grid, the sounds resonate in different ways, thereby leading to potentially diverse listening experiences. According to Neuhaus (1994), [Times Square’s] sonority, a rich harmonic sound texture resembling the after ring of large bells, is an impossibility within this context. Many who pass through it, however, can dismiss it as an unusual machinery sound from below the ground. For those who find it and accept the sound’s impossibility, though, the island becomes a different place, separate, but including its surroundings. (p. 20)

In other words, as Neuhaus states in the same text, Times Square is not meant to startle but to entice; it is a work that doesn’t require (prior) indoctrination. There is no plaque or any other indication of its existence, its title, its author, or its sponsors. Its sounds are closely related to the sounds in the environment, which means that they in principle won’t disturb anyone; in fact, the work is hardly noticeable, especially when there is lots of traffic. Nevertheless, for those with good and attentive ears, it is immediately obvious that the sounds of Times Square not only merge with the environmental sounds but also fundamentally differ from these. One could say that the work is static: it doesn’t undergo any development in time; there is no sequence of varying sounds, no generative or predetermined intervals of sound and non-sound. In contrast to the vast majority of conventional music compositions, Times Square is continuous and invariable through time. Therefore, it is up to the individual passerby to respond to it (or not). To be able to respond, Times Square requires a listener in motion. Not only the sounds themselves must be discovered and recognised as belonging to an artwork, the listener must also engage with the sounds while moving in order to detect and co-compose the sonic changes afforded by the different tunnel sizes and acoustic modulations arising. The work thus emerges from a field of infinite possibilities involving tunnel propagation, ear position, and ambient soundwave intersections; composes itself within the spacetime continuum by means of a curve generated by the choreography of the moving body; and develops through productive and mobile perception. Listening can no



Artistic Research and Sound Art in Public Urban Spaces 101

longer be regarded as a passive or re-active event but requires here an active engagement with the sonic environment. Times Square is the result of a meticulous and time-consuming process of experimentation in which various actants were operative and needed to be taken into consideration: the technological system (the computer, the loudspeaker, the software, etc.), the interaction with the various subway tunnels, and of course the influence of the extant and ever-changing sound environment.1 The sustainability of the equipment, the resonating effect of the tunnels, and the relation with the present soundscape are just three components that required extensive in situ research, thus already providing a contribution to general knowledge about installing sound artworks in public spaces. However, on a more conceptual level, Times Square also influenced the contemporary discourse on sound and music. First, this work owed much to a radical break with musical thinking. As curator Ulrich Loock maintains in his short text on Times Square, Neuhaus himself thought of his sound works in terms of a real paradigm shift, namely “that of removing sound from time, and setting it, instead, in place” (Neuhaus quoted in Loock 2005, 1). In other words, Neuhaus considered his public sound artworks as practical research into the possible relations between sound and space. In Background Noise, sound scholar and artist Brandon LaBelle regards these relations as reciprocal: sounds are positioned within a given space and are thus affected by its materiality, its size, its shape, its borders; yet, conversely and simultaneously, space is also defined by sounds, either the ones present in that particular space or those outside the given space (LaBelle 2007, 149). To integrate the sonic within the spatial, both as material and as experience, and to combine the constructed and the found, are both possible components of a methodology of investigating the (acoustical) environment. One could call this sonological science; without this science Times Square wouldn’t have been possible, but conversely, without this concrete artwork Neuhaus wouldn’t have been able to develop such a sonological science. Times Square also teaches us something about listening and about ourselves as listeners. Not only does experiencing a sound artwork such as Times Square require an open, susceptible, and attuned subject, it also demands a listener in movement, an exploring listener, traversing a space to experience the work’s varying sonic qualities. As Loock (2005) remarks, “each listener perceives something different, both because of the real changes of all that occurs irrevocably in time and, as such, belongs to the work, and also on grounds of the individual disposition of each listener” (p. 4). Listening becomes a physical activity, a mode of orientation and disorientation; Times Square is rediscovered, demarcated, and shifted by listening to it. To put it differently, one hears Times Square again—again but also for the first time—by actually not hearing it, not being able to hear it due to the fact that its original and ordinary sounds are (partly and temporarily) covered by this other Times Square, an other that is also the same so as not to startle and indoctrinate; as soon as one has discovered Times Square, the sounds of Times Square will not be the same anymore—one will hear them in a different way, detached from their ordinariness, detached from a

102

Chapter 7

direct connection to their sources, in a kind of reduced or aesthetic listening. Precisely because Times Square doesn’t sound so different from the sounds of Times Square the importance of this work exceeds the work itself: Neuhaus’s contribution lies in the fact that he makes us aware of our sonic environment and how we often neglect the possibility to sonically design a public space. Concerning this moving listener, curator-researcher Elena Biserna adds the insight that through the moving, the listener actually participates in the creation of a soundscape, contributing to the ongoing constellation of sound events that are always already present in an urban space (Biserna 2018). Through her presence and tactile exploration, the listener is affected by the environment, just as one’s walking affects the space that this walking produces: the doing is also a making (Duff 2010, 882). In other words, as the listener to Times Square is invited to explore the work by moving around, she not only reorganises the space but also co-creates the soundscape she is listening to. She actively interferes with the many other sounds taking place on that traffic island with her own personal gait; while walking, she also interacts with the acoustic qualities of the environment. It brings Biserna to the conclusion that “from an auditory point of view . . . we always both perceive and take part in auditory spaces as we traverse them. We read and rewrite them” (Biserna 2018, n.p.). What brought Biserna to this conclusion is not so much theoretical speculation or creative thinking but, above all, the many artistic projects she curated, participated in, and analysed. Neuhaus’s artistic explorations in public urban spaces were also acts of reading and rewriting, charging the environment not only with a sensitive ear but also eavesdropping on acoustic forces that influence, control, and discipline citizens. By linking sounds and (public urban) space, Neuhaus also entered and disclosed a social, political, and ethical domain where power relations are exerted and specific behaviour is orchestrated, a topic that will—implicitly or explicitly—reappear in the other case studies and be specifically reconsidered in the final paragraph of this chapter.

PETER CUSACK—BERLIN SONIC PLACES During 2011–2012, the British sound artist Peter Cusack was a guest of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. During this residency, Cusack developed his so-called Berlin Sonic Places Project. Unlike Neuhaus’s sonic intervention, the outcomes of this project were not directly artistic: a website (http://sonic-places.dock-berlin.de/) and Berlin Sonic Places: A Brief Guide, a small booklet edited by Cusack, contain the reporting of his experiences and activities during this residency. Nevertheless, I will argue that Berlin Sonic Places should be considered an artistic research project with clear research questions, a methodology, concrete contributions to knowledge and art, and adequate dissemination of the project results. Additionally, I hope to show that this project could only be executed by an artist.



Artistic Research and Sound Art in Public Urban Spaces 103

The subtitle of the Berlin Sonic Places Project is “Perspectives of Acoustic City Development,” indicating its point of departure, namely, “to explore the importance of sound in the urban context and how it is affected by city planning and development” (Cusack n.d.). The overarching goal of the project was initiated to find out how Berlin sounds—its various neighbourhoods, its particular buildings, streets, squares, parks, and public transport. As Cusack writes: “When moving around a city we pass through a continual succession of local soundscapes that merge, often unnoticed, from one to the next. Each is connected to a particular place or spot” (Cusack 2017, 4). Cusack calls these local soundscapes sonic places, an assemblage of the physical environment and the sounds created by its infrastructure, by humans and other living beings, by nature, and by all sorts of technologies. A sonic place is a dynamic assemblage—affected by the city’s own rhythms, weather conditions, seasonal changes, sociocultural activities, redevelopment, etc.—as it consists of more stable agents (architecture, roads, parks and their acoustics) as well as variable ones (weather, time of day, number of people); in between these two are non-continuous sounds that nevertheless have their own regularity: church bells and playground noises after school as well as sirens and birdsong (Cusack 2017, 5). The project concentrated on three Berlin locations—Prenzlauerberg, Rummelsburg, and Tempelhof Airfield—chosen for the types of development that they exemplify. The topics Cusack was specifically interested in were the effects of social changes on city sound environments, methodologies to study urban sound in the context of planning, and city soundscapes of the future. To establish a wide-ranging dialogue on Berlin’s changing soundscape, Cusack organised several events in which a variety of interest groups were brought together: residents, architects, urban planners, policymakers, (inter)national (sound) artists, sociologists, etc. The motivation underlying these events was the observation that city governments and urban planners still seem to have a rather limited knowledge of and interest in (public) soundscape design, mostly relying on legal regulations concerning noise abatement, hence the invitation to sound artists to present alternatives to this ostensibly one-sided and narrow, institutionalised approach. The urge to engage residents was rooted in the idea that they possess a wealth of knowledge concerning particular sonic places, albeit often tacitly or unconsciously. As Cusack (2017) writes, “their very familiarity means that they [the sonic places] are essential to personal city knowledge, key to our sense of place and vital to our navigation through urban geography” (p. 6). Berlin Sonic Places was partly meant to draw attention to the significance and interest of these everyday and ordinary soundscapes; similar to Neuhaus’s, Cusack’s role as an artist was to prompt an awareness of sonic ambience and how it affects perception, well-being, and behaviour. Panels, interviews, lectures, and open discussions were not the only methods and results. As can be seen and heard on the website, audiovisual documentaries, field recordings that can be manipulated online, sound installations, performances, sound compositions, and soundwalks were also significant elements of the whole project.2

104

Chapter 7

Thus, in various ways, sound artists and musicians contributed to the analysis, evaluation, preservation, or improvement of certain sonic places, making people more conscious of the sonic environments in which they live. The relevance and importance of adding artists to this project is stressed in an interview with Cusack in which he mentions another project in Berlin involving collaboration among acousticians, urban planners, community groups, and researchers: the Nauener Platz redevelopment (Lappin and Ouzounian 2015, n.p.).3 Nauener Platz had been a place housing anti-social behaviour, and to make it communityfriendly again, several “audio islands” were installed where visitors could listen to pleasant sounds chosen by the local residents: sea sounds and birdsong, albeit unfortunately in loops of fifteen seconds and played on rather small loudspeakers. Although the residents are quite happy with the complete redevelopment—vandalism has decreased and social control improved—Cusack and his colleague, anthropologist Fritz Schlüter, have criticised the invariance and decontextualisation of the sounds, claiming that “they should have invited an artist to do the sound design” (Lappin and Ouzounian 2015, n.p.). It is here that they briefly mention a potential role for a sound artist. To dwell on this a bit more, what they are implicitly suggesting is more directly expressed by Jordan Lacey (2016) in his book Sonic Rupture: “Artists entering the conversation after the fact, via public art programming, does little to relieve the demands of city life . . . artists must be plugged in at the beginning of the decision-making process” (p. 176). Lacey argues in favour for sound installations as ruptures that diversify the sonic environment to make new experiences possible. Although I certainly sympathise with Lacey’s ideas, I see a more comprehensive role for sound artists, not only as practitioners who (re)shape sonic spaces, but also as thinkers-through-practice who contribute on more conceptual levels as well to improve these spaces (Cobussen 2016). It is here that we might tease out a fruitful difference between the artist and the artistic researcher.

EDWIN VAN DER HEIDE—FLUISTERENDE WIND [WHISPERING WIND] The context within which Dutch multimedia artist Edwin van der Heide’s permanent installation Fluisterende Wind came into existence in November 2017 was partly formed by the renovation of the Humanities campus of Leiden University (the Netherlands). During several talks I had with architects and project developers involved in this renovation project, they became convinced that sound design should be regarded as an inextricable element of the architectural plans. Van der Heide’s artwork is, for now, the first concrete outcome of this awareness, an awareness that remains all too often absent in urban planning. Fluisterende Wind is situated in a new passage that traverses underneath a Leiden University building, creating a new pathway between the Leiden Observatory and the Hortus Botanicus, both elements in a prospective park. It consists of a 12.5 by



Artistic Research and Sound Art in Public Urban Spaces 105

2.5 meter4 wall relief and an eight-channel generative sound composition.5 The composition generates a continuum with a varying interplay of soft swooshing wind—swelling and decreasing—silence, and human speech. This sometimes gives the impression that the wind is whispering phrases and messages, even though the sounds will never turn into clearly recognisable words or sentences: the abstract sounds and compositional developments remain the most important elements of this perpetually self-transforming, spatial piece. Oscillating between nature (wind) and culture (voice), between breathing, whispering, and rustling, between hardly audible sounds and incidental outbursts, between comforting distant and abrupt nearby sounds, the effect Fluisterende Wind has on an audience fluctuates from peaceful to ominous and alienating. The composition can be called an example of “sonic architecture,” providing the passage with a specific, unforeseen identity and creating a cocoon in which the sounds envelop the listener. Traversing an ostensibly insignificant space turns into a special, multisensorial experience, reinforcing the relation between spatiality, corporeality, and immersive perception. It is as if the site attempts to communicate with the passersby while simultaneously connecting and interacting with the extant and more familiar sonic environment. Technology, nature—their duality implicitly being questioned in and through this work6—sound, space, and their interconnections become an assemblage in which the pedestrians and bikers traversing the underpass are also actively involved. Fluisterende Wind is not the result of a research project in the classical sense of the word; first of all, it was an artistic project, meant to “challenge” or “incite” the existing soundscape and to make a connection between the academic world inside of the building and the everyday human and natural life outside. Implicitly it connects to other “tunnel art” such as Mo Becha’s Champ Sonique7 in Amsterdam and the West Street Tunnel project8 in Brighton. Whereas the former is described in rather neutral terms as sonically accompanying passersby while they traverse the IJ-tram tunnel, the latter explicitly refers to helping mitigate antisocial behaviour, basically by playing classical music to discourage loitering (Kang and Schulte-Fortkamp 2016, 251–56). While especially the West Street Tunnel project was thus designed to stimulate people to travel more quickly through the underpass, Van der Heide’s intentions were almost the diametrical opposite: visitors encountering the composed sounds— oscillating between familiarity and unusualness—should be tempted to stop, or at least slow down, and listen. Perhaps a listener might even carry the desired form of (attentive) listening outside of this specific site and become more aware in general of the everyday sonic environment. It is in this sense that, through Fluisterende Wind, the concept of sound installation can be rethought: less as an art genre—a fixed form, filled with fixed content—but rather as an affective practice, experimenting with and within spatial conditions. Van der Heide’s sound installation should not (only) be regarded as a site-specific, autonomous artwork, but (also) as an affective, transformative, and deterritorialising practice. Fluisterende Wind is not only the end product of an artistic process in which

106

Chapter 7

technical, historical, ecological, architectural, and economic issues were or needed to be taken into account; simultaneously it can be applied as one model of sonic methodology, for example for research into human experiences of space and sound, for research into the affective relations between human and non-human agents and/ or bodies (their attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions), for research into various listening attitudes, for research into the role of sound in appropriating places (processes of sonic territorialisation, deterritorialisation, and reterritorialisation), for research into all kinds of forces that generate a site. In short, Van der Heide’s work is not only, and perhaps not even in the first place, aesthetically motivated. Instead, his work commences from the question of how art can insert its influence within public spaces and thereby realise a change in behaviour of people moving through those spaces; moreover, it makes listeners aware of and even encourages them to (re)structure their sonic environment.9 It is in this sense that I understand Fluisterende Wind as a sociopolitically inspired research-in-andthrough-artmaking.

ÅSA STJERNA—CURRENTS The only person mentioned in this chapter who designates herself as an artistic researcher is Swedish-based sound artist Åsa Stjerna. In an almost quintessential PhD dissertation in artistic research she presents four of her sound projects, theoretically and conceptually contextualised through texts inspired by, among others, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Point of departure for her thesis are the everyday conditions and complexities Stjerna encounters when working as a sound installation artist on various sites. As she writes: “All of these projects have shared the same core: they have explored a specific site’s unique conditions, and engaged in the renegotiation and transformation of the experience of that particular site through sound” (Stjerna 2018, chapter 1). With an initial hint of her (theoretical) affinity with Deleuze and Guattari, Stjerna further describes these conditions and complexities as “affective relations between heterogeneous actors of entirely different sorts, material expressions, and discourses” (Stjerna 2018, chapter 1). The most extensively documented project in her thesis is a twenty-two-channel sound installation called Currents which was exhibited at the foyer of the Oslo Opera House during the Ultima Contemporary Music Festival in September 2011.10 Currents is based on data derived from scientific measurements of the melting Arctic polar ice caps. These datasets are gathered at an automatic research station north of the Faroe Islands and sent to the installation in the Opera House. There they are transformed into sounds through a process known as sonification in order to make an affective, sonic experience possible.11 While the scientists filter out the information they need from the collection of raw data received from the research station— information about the North Atlantic current—Stjerna decides to include datasets



Artistic Research and Sound Art in Public Urban Spaces 107

that are less relevant for their direct scientific purposes, for example data regarding the semi-diurnal tide, the diurnal tide, and the ionosphere. To make the datasets audible for humans, she speeds up the data of the tides and the ionosphere nine million times, resulting in two drone-like sounds for the tides and more granulated, “dripping” sounds for the ionosphere. The data derived from the current itself, the gulf stream, is almost impossible to sonify, so Stjerna decides to use it not as a sound source but as a control signal for the sonic textures and spatialisation of the other three. Currents may definitely lead to new knowledge, but it also raises questions that directly relate to artistic research. Perhaps the most pressing one is how much information can be extracted from the artwork itself, in this case the sound installation? Although primarily interested in establishing artistic transformations on existing sites (see also footnote 5), Stjerna in her thesis explicitly connects Currents to the issue of global warming, thus turning it into an artwork with an overtly political message. But can this be heard? Will the foyer’s visitors be able to recognise the origin of the sonified data and the political-ecological intentions of the artist without having access to additional, textual, information? Put differently, if research done by artists has as its outcome new art, how do we know what kind of research has been done—its questions or hypotheses, its methodology, its objectives, its confinements? How much needs to be explained through words? And should we consider those words as belonging to or excluded from the artwork?12 By presenting Currents as the result of artistic research or as artistic research itself, these questions become urgent and pertinent. A second problem has to do with the alleged objectivity of sonification. Although the aim is to make sonification systematic, objective, and reproducible so that it can be used as a scientific method, it should also be acknowledged that every translation of data (here a translation into sound) also means a transformation, especially when the sounding result should be aesthetically appealing and culturally communicative too. Certainly, it is fully justified to use scientific data, speed it up or let it control certain musical parameters to create an interesting sound installation, but it is equally justified—as Paul Vickers does in his article “Sonification and Music, Music and Sonification”—to ask whether “the goal of communicating essential information can be masked in the effort to achieve a stronger musical expression” (Vickers 2017, 138). In other words, Currents implicitly poses the problem of finding a good balance between being data-centric and listener-friendly. It exposes the “ever-present tension existing between compositional strategies on the one hand and the information transfer and signification goals of sonification on the other” (Vickers 2017, 141). Perhaps Stjerna’s Currents also adds, on a more conceptual level, to the production of new knowledge. She presents her work in a theoretical context, informed and inspired by Deleuze and New Materialism, stating that the sound installation must be understood as an agent on an immanent plane interacting with all kinds of heterogeneous components. Together they form an assemblage in which each single

108

Chapter 7

component achieves its own specific agency, emerging from the interactions with the other components. As such, sites—for example, public spaces such as the one in which Currents was exhibited—cannot be considered as stable and static. Instead, Stjerna (2018) writes, sites should be understood in terms of complex configurations of spatiotemporal processes, which are manifested through material and immaterial expressions. Processes of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization affect a place, engaging it in a constant, ongoing process in which the place’s structures of identity are negotiated and reformulated content is de- and re-coded over time. This changes the identity of the place, in which artistic interactions are also part of the process of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. . . . Public space can thus be considered as a constantly ongoing process, wherein a variety of instabilities—that is, unexpected/unpredicted events—constitute a space for negotiations, exchanges, and confrontations. (chapter 3)

With these observations and reflections Stjerna contributes to the current discourse on sound art in public (urban) spaces. It is remarkable and also refreshing that she doesn’t immediately allocate art a special position, as fundamentally differing from other processes that (temporarily) define and mark a place: artistic interventions are “only” part of ongoing processes that temporarily construct and identify a place; they are not only deterritorialising forces, for example, because they also have (re) territorialising effects. However, in and through her work she simultaneously shows how sound art is also a specific component, able to disclose a site’s inherent capacities by establishing an affective encounter with the other forces that generate a place. Perhaps more so than other components, art also works on a different plane, a virtual plane, revealing what could be instead of what is, thus challenging established notions of a site.13 In and through sound, in and through an artistic research project, Stjerna’s sonic intervention connects previously disconnected places (the North Polar ice caps, the research station, the Opera House), establishes new relations between already existing components (e.g., scientific data, sounds, the foyer, the artist), and presents a specific public space as a potentially unstable, constantly changing site where the sonic ambience is (re)negotiated and transcoded. Like Times Square, Berlin Sonic Places, and Fluisterende Wind, Currents proposes us to regard places as always unfinished processes.

TOWARDS A MICROPOLITICS OF SONIC MATERIALISM Neuhaus, Cusack, Van der Heide, and Stjerna—four sound artists who work in/on/ with public urban spaces, four sound artists whose work is, or can be understood as closely connected to artistic research as I have argued in the previous sections of this chapter. However, somehow these cross-connections remain quite generic and rather superficial. Although certain traces can already be found in the pages above,



Artistic Research and Sound Art in Public Urban Spaces 109

here I would like to elaborate on the added value the artworks described in this chapter have and share. At some points I termed them “sonic interventions,” thereby implicitly or explicitly hinting at their sociopolitical significance. What makes these works socially as well as politically significant—in the broadest terms—is that they intervene in an existing order or, better yet, in an ongoing process of becoming that is not dependent on the essence of the involved components but can be characterised, instead, as an open field of encounters through which various relations become possible (Marrati 2001, 212). As Stjerna (2018) writes, “the sonic work in fact modifies the existing assemblage of the place. In this latter capacity, the work affectively renegotiates, decodes, and de-territorializes a specific spatial assemblage . . . [N]ew connections are made between the existing components of a context” (chapter 3). By making new and alternative relations possible, sonic interventions are always also sonic inventions.14 However, their influence is not limited to the sonic only; sonic interventions neither exclusively change the auditory atmosphere of a site nor should there be a sole focus on their aesthetic capabilities. Adjustments or transformations in the sonic domain can have more far-reaching implications, potentially providing information about and transforming the architecture of a site, the way it is or was used, the people who are or were using and occupying the site, and its functions and position within larger material as well as immaterial contexts; sonic interventions raise awareness about the way people affect and are affected by the structure and organisation of sites, how they discipline and control and are disciplined and controlled by spaces (either with the help of sound and sound art or not); sonic interventions have attractive and repulsive powers: they may heighten sensation but can also disperse energy. With Deleuze and Guattari, I would call these sonic interventions a form of micropolitics regarded as “the existence of an entire world of unconscious micropercepts, unconscious affects, fine segmentations that grasp or experience different things [that] are distributed and operate differently” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 213). Micropolitics refers to the small cracks in a system, to veiled fatuities and creative changes or desires, often leaving the system intact but able to evoke mutations as well—“lines of flight” as they are termed by Deleuze and Guattari—eventually leading to new, temporary organisations, new assemblages. Staying closer to a sonic vocabulary and sowing the seeds for a sonic materialism, Steve Goodman’s terms the micropolitics of frequency or the ecology of vibrational affects could be used, referring to the production, transmission, and mutation of an affective tonality (Goodman 2010, xv). In this ecology of vibrational effects the listening subject is no longer detached from the sonic events; she becomes “another actual entity in a vibrational event” (Goodman 2010, 46), possessed, abducted, or enveloped by an affective tonality that can be felt as mood, ambience, or atmosphere (Goodman 2010, 189). What connects Times Square, Berlin Sonic Places, Fluisterende Wind, and Currents is their implicit affirmation that the affective agencies—that is, the capacities of acting and being acted upon—form a material and immaterial, polyrhythmic network. The works let us experience possible ways in which sound

110

Chapter 7

(vibrations and frequencies, rather than music, noise, and silence), architecture, space, nature, technology, science, art, audience, politics (power relations, stakeholders, governmental organisations) always already interact in many different, ad hoc constellations, thus compelling us towards a non-anthropocentric ontology. In various ways, in various circumstances, and with various outcomes, Neuhaus, Cusack, Van der Heide, and Stjerna have, in and through their artistic practices, contributed to a sonic micropolitics, perhaps inserting small cracks in our systems of thinking and perceiving, thereby evoking affective mobilisation.

NOTES   1.  A short movie about the development and realisation of Times Square can be found at http://www.max-neuhaus.info/audio-video/.  2. See http://sonic-places.dock-berlin.de/.  3. See, for example, http://www.soundscape-cost.org/documents/Carpri_2011/SchulteFortKamp.pdf or http://sonic-places.dock-berlin.de/?p=9#more.   4. The visual component of the work, the wall relief, exhibits a snapshot of a spectrogram of a tone changing timbre, the horizontal axis being the timeline, the vertical axis the frequency.   5.  The term “generative” implies that the composition is not fixed in advance but develops “by itself ” according to certain predetermined rules. The sounds, generated and digitally processed in real time, are continually being modified and reordered, thereby creating a perpetually evolving and auto-transforming soundscape composition.  6. Technology, human voice, and natural sounds also come together in the “content” of Fluisterende Wind. Although never producing recognisable words or sentences, the voice’s articulations are drawn from botanical and biological terms, thereby implicitly referring to the adjacent Hortus Botanicus as well as the initial function of the building covering the passage, namely as a botanical lab and storage facilities for the state herbarium.  7. See http://www.anythingispossible.nl/projects/champ-sonique.  8. See http://www.delphilab.eu/research/acoustic-characterisation-of-the-west-street/.   9.  Edwin van der Heide in a personal conversation with the author. 10.  For a short impression of Currents see https://vimeo.com/137682471. 11.  On the website www.sonification.de, physician Thomas Hermann (2010) writes that the most commonly used definition of sonification is “the transformation of data relations into perceived relations in an acoustic signal for the purpose of facilitating communication or interpretation.” In Stjerna’s project, however, the main purpose is not primarily to enable communication, free of interferences, or interpretation, directly leading to applicable knowledge, but to evoke affective experiences; in other words, communication and interpretation are supplementary, accessories or side effects of an artistic transformation of a site. 12.  It is Jacques Derrida who has already dealt with a similar issue in his famous essay “Parergon” in The Truth in Painting, by asking some fundamental questions about the status of the frame which is “neither simply outside nor simply inside” (Derrida 1987, 54). As an outside, the frame also intervenes in the inside, the “artwork itself,” because this inside is lacking: the artwork needs the frame—ranging from the “real” frame around a painting to the wall of a museum or the surrounding aesthetic discourses—to constitute itself as an artwork.



Artistic Research and Sound Art in Public Urban Spaces 111

In the case of artistic research I would add that supplementary texts are (often) needed in order to provide artworks with a necessary frame within which it can be regarded as research. These texts are not simply outside the artworks; they are neither on the outside nor on the inside, and, simultaneously, both on the outside and on the inside. They help to constitute the artwork as artwork and as something more than an artwork, namely as belonging to a research project. 13.  Likewise, the scientific data can be understood as virtualities with an inherent capacity to become sonic material (Stjerna 2018, chapter 4). 14.  Invention derives directly from the Latin inventionem (nominative inventio) and invenire meaning to come upon, to find out, to discover, to devise. Invention is applied to the contrivance and production of something that did not exist before; as such it contrasts with discovery, which brings to light what existed before, but was not known.

REFERENCES Biserna, Elena. 2018. “Step by Step: Reading and Re-Writing Urban Space through the Footstep.” Journal of Sonic Studies 16. Borgdorff, Henk. 2012. The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Cobussen, Marcel. 2016. “Towards a ‘New’ Sonic Ecology.” Leiden: Leiden University. Cusack, Peter. n.d. http://sonic-places.dock-berlin.de/. ———, ed. 2017. Berlin Sonic Places. A Brief Guide. Hofheim am Taunus: Wolke Verlag. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Duff, Cameron. 2010. “On the Role of Affect and Practice in the Production of Place.” Society and Space 28/5: 881–95. Frayling, Christopher. 1993. Research in Art and Design. Royal College of Art Research Paper series 1/1. London: Royal College of Art. Goodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare. Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hermann, Thomas. 2010. “Sonification—A Definition.” http://sonification.de/son/definition. Kang, Jian, and Brigitte Schulte-Fortkamp, eds. 2016. Soundscape and the Built Environment. Boca Raton: CRC Press. LaBelle, Brandon. 2007. Background Noise. Perspectives on Sound Art. New York: Continuum. Lacey, Jordan. 2016. Sonic Rupture: A Practice-Led Approach to Urban Soundscape Design. New York: Bloomsbury. Lappin, Sarah and Gascia Ouzounian. 2015. “Sonic Places. In Conversation with Peter Cusack.” Journal of Sonic Studies 11. Loock, Ulrich. 2005. “Times Square, Max Neuhaus’s Sound Work in New York City.” First published in Open: Cahier on Art in the Public Domain 9. Rotterdam: NAI Uitgevers. Marrati, Paola. 2001. “Against the Doxa. Politics of Immance and Becoming-Minoritarian.” In Micropolitics of Media Culture. Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, edited by Patricia Pisters, 205–20. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

112

Chapter 7

Neuhaus, Max. 1994. Place. Sound Works Volume III. Ostfildern: Cantz. Stjerna, Åsa. 2018. “Before Sound—Transversal Processes in Site-Specific Sonic Practice” (unpublished PhD dissertation). Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg. Vickers, Paul. 2017. “Sonification and Music, Music and Sonification.” In The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art, edited by Marcel Cobussen, Vincent Meelberg, and Barry Truax, 135–44. New York: Routledge.

8 Artistic Research and Music Technology Jonathan Impett and Juan Parra Cancino

The scope of artistic research in music addressing music-technological questions is potentially immense, touching on many areas of current research related to technology and to its cultural roles and impact. Given the self-consciously technological spirit of much contemporary creative practice, it is unsurprising that engagement with the recent, computational technologies of music is widespread. This technological inclination also means that many of the areas of investigation directly associated with the uses of technology on music are—in the most conventional, vernacular sense—immediately understood as fields of scientific research, both in the popular imagination and in the context of research funding bodies: computer science and its associated applications (signal processing or acoustics, for example), interaction design, cognition. In addition, the “softer,” philosophically inclined fields are directly implicated: media theory, digital cultural theory. This overlap with “hard” technological research, which attracts both research funding and media attention, can skew the perceived position of artistic research in music technology. That is, artistic practice is a significant and essential component of many research projects in music technology. Such practical elements may be the testing ground or motivation for advances in technology. By the same token, there are artistic projects that explore the affordances and implications of new technologies, with no ambition to contribute to the development of technology itself. Balancing this connection with “hard” technological research, there is a long-standing relationship with what we might term “science-vision,” imaginings that manifest themselves variously as science fiction, radical aesthetics or new technical or theoretical frameworks. The Theremin, for example—well known from The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations but invented by Lev Theremin in 1920—arises from the same early twentieth-century cultural milieu as the fictional music-producing computer of Yevgeny Zemyatin’s dystopian novel 113

114

Chapter 8

We, from 1921. It is not the intention of this chapter to discuss the bounds or nature of artistic research, but rather to map the landscape inhabited by such work as it relates to music technology, and to describe representative research environments and projects. It is of course logical that the creative and intellectual endeavours of any time should be concerned with the technologies—the tools and concepts—of their own moment. Now and here, however, we are dealing above all with those of computation and electronics, together with their supporting technologies of sensing and communication. We might point to two distinguishing properties of these current technologies as they relate to music. First, that those of creation or production are near-identical with those of reproduction; the ubiquitous DAW (Digital Audio Workstation, such as Apple’s Logic or Digidesign’s ProTools) presents such a model. The DAW is the computer environment within which sounds can be recorded, created, transformed, and mixed—the platform that has allowed the continual remix to become a trope of popular culture, that allows the DJ to stand at the juncture of high-tech studio micro-construction and performative spontaneity. The simultaneous affordance of creation and reproduction takes the state of contemporary technological media beyond that of reproduction proposed by media theorist Friederich Kittler (1999), into one more akin to social theorist Jacques Attali’s (1985) “era of composition,” the last stage of his “political economy of music.” Attali posits successive states and roles of music through human history: sacrifice (ritual music), representation (music as an immanent aesthetic experience), and then the era of repetition characterised by the notion of repertoire and the technologies of recording. These eras are followed by that of composition, in which technologies designed for repetition are subverted to become those of production; the technologies and economic models of control are repurposed to facilitate the democratisation of creativity. Second, the operational concepts associated with current digital music technologies are based, to a high degree, on abstract models—models that have no concrete form. This is already evident in basic data structures such as the soundfile or waveform—numerical or graphical representations of sound—in operations of copying, editing, or looping. It is even more true of ideas such as mapping—the transposition of data from one parameter to another—or algorithmic generation. Such notions are commonplace in the most user-friendly environments, designed for consumer production of pop and dance music such as the live performance-oriented music sequencer Live (produced by Ableton), or the more traditional, studio-oriented digital audio workstation Garageband (created and distributed in bundle with their OS X operative system by Apple), but persist through all levels of creative engagement. The role of abstraction in current music technologies affords a high level of plasticity in the relationship with the user. The representational properties of music-related data—from sound input, sound analysis, gesture, control, or visual interface—have no inherent priority in the digital domain. This affords reuse, reinterpretation, or combination with data from other sources. Sensing technologies invite artists to



Artistic Research and Music Technology 115

source input from every aspect of the physical world. Materials are thus mobile both conceptually and, through the ubiquity of computing and communications, physically. From complex custom software/hardware systems to commercial music production applications, such environments are designed to induce creativity; at the same time, they constrain action and conception. In all cases, the artist-researcher’s work stands at a node in a network of technologies developed by others; contemporary technology is characterised above all by its distributedness, among individuals and institutions, skills and techniques, modes of art and modes of enquiry.

PART 1 Research Environments The formal abstraction of music and the abstract nature of musical data are also what mark the historical closeness of music-technological research with wider projects; music has both attached itself to and served as a laboratory for research in other areas—usually areas with wider industrial-commercial reaches. Conversely, sound has been an area of interest to areas of industrial research which has thus required the involvement and guidance of artists. In a very broad sense of artistic research, therefore, we see a long history of work in electronic music technology, the nature of which is crucially conditioned by its institutional context. The research of composer Lejaren Hiller is a case in point. Hiller carried out the earliest experiments in computer composition in 1955 with the ILLIAC machine.1 In many ways, Hiller’s was an activity of “pure” artistic research, in being a visionary but highly theorised leap into a new world of concepts and practice. It also led to the foundation of the Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, which became a center for radical and experimental musical practice, producing artists such as James Tenney and David Rosenboom. The earliest work on synthesis languages was conducted by engineer and Computer Music pioneer Max Mathews at Bell Labs in Chicago, as part of their optimisation of telephony. His development of the MUSIC-N languages, a series of programming languages derived and evolved from his original MUSIC, the first computer music program for generating digital audio waveforms by using direct synthesis, was clearly pursued in the practice of composition, part of Mathews’s own continuing artistic research program. Composer Edgar Varèse’s Poème Electronique, of 1958, was the direct fruit of collaboration with engineers at Philips, but it was also the experimental implementation of poetic ideas that Varèse had been developing since the 1920s. Following post–World War II cultural reconstruction, some European radio stations took more responsibility for cultural development and production, hence their technical support of the projects of composers as Karlheinz Stockhausen (WDR Cologne), Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono (RAI Milan), or Pierre Schaeffer (Radio France). Without wishing to extend the notion of artistic research to all such compositional work, these projects might certainly be regarded as such

116

Chapter 8

avant la lettre, in their experimental investigation of inseparable poetic, musical, intellectual, and technical questions. The work of Iannis Xenakis at the Gravesano studio of conductor Herman Scherchen—its explicit research mission sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization—must be seen in the same light. As the technological future of music became an area of wider cultural and commercial interest, new research institutions emerged with a specifically musictechnological focus. These naturally tended to be the artistic research vehicle of their guiding figure. In Paris, composer and conductor Pierre Boulez founded IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), which opened under the new Pompidou Centre in 1977 (see Born 1995) and produced works such as Boulez’s Répons (1981–1985). Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics was founded in 1975 by John Chowning; its technological developments such as FM synthesis and spatialisation are fundamental to his music. The close relationship between the Paris and Stanford institutions and the confluence of music and research in their titles are indicative of developing cultural and institutional awareness. In Florence, Luciano Berio led Tempo Reale, from 1987, where research and production for his later works were carried out. Its stated mission as a “centro di ricerca produzione e didattica musicale” likewise points to an established link between production and research in technologically focused music institutions. While research/practice has naturally continued in ever more sophisticated studio environments within major institutions such as universities and conservatories, the trend to large-scale music technology institutions has followed the same path as that of major recording studios. The projected National Centre for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United Kingdom is a case in point. At the beginning of the 1990s it was a well-developed project with location, building, design and mission all in place. In the relatively short time of its planning and funding phase, the rationale for such an institution had largely dissolved; the laptop had become ubiquitous and the relevant software was no longer the exclusive domain of technical experts. Certain vital aspects of music technology research infrastructure remain rare; large experimental acoustic spaces such as the Espace de projection at IRCAM, the SonicLab at Belfast’s Sonic Arts Research Centre or the Haus für Musik und Musiktheater (MUMUTH) at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, are cases in point. The range of media, technologies, skills and practices represented in such music research institutions has expanded enormously, such that as communities they now tend to be dynamic constellations rather than clear structures. Current generations of artists are highly digitally literate and technologically aware. Roles have become more fluid and dynamic, particularly in terms of previous artist-technologist distinctions, and connections with other fields of research are the rule. The notion of “artist researcher” as embodied in a single individual applies very appropriately in such contexts. At the same time, more collaborative, less formal entities emerged to give researching artists access, support and community in developing new work, techniques and



Artistic Research and Music Technology 117

ideas. The distinctive ethos of each such grouping naturally leads to different dynamics of research and collaboration. The San Francisco Tape Music Center, founded in 1962 by composer Pauline Oliveros, had a major influence not only on synthesiser technologies and musical language, but on listening itself as a cultural practice. The researching-performing group Composers Inside Electronics, including David Tudor and Bill Viola,2 marked a Cage-influenced approach to sound art and to an artisanal relationship with electronics as instruments (as opposed to electronic instruments). Amsterdam’s STEIM3 has been concerned especially with the design of interfaces and the role of touch, notably under the leadership of composer and electroacoustic performer Michel Waisvisz. Its mission has always been achieved through the projects of individual artist-researchers; a more recent shift of emphasis from performance- and instrument-focused work to sound art projects reflects evolving artistic practice. Research and Music Technology The highly distributed nature of music technology means that individual and collaborative roles and projects are perhaps less separable than in other areas of artistic research. The work of artists in such contexts is inherently bound up not only with technological investigation but with music cognition, with design, with artistic and cultural practice, and with music-philosophical consideration of the nature of their practices and artefacts. This could certainly be said of many areas of music research, but here the institutional practice of publishing in scientific journals tends to make such associations more explicit. The field of music technology therefore brings into sharp focus questions about the nature and identity of artistic research itself—as a community, as an ethos or a label. Not all such artists are explicitly engaged with all these topics, of course. As work in the field has proliferated over recent decades, communities have emerged with common interests across institutions, musical styles and areas of practice. These provide invaluable context and discourse as well as a distributed network for technical development. These are often associated with particular conference series. We might point to New Instruments for Musical Expression, since 2001; International Computer Music Conference, from 1974; International Conference on Auditory Display, since 1994; or Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, since 1990, for example. Such communities overlap; individuals are typically situated in multiple networks of research and practice, and not all would self-identify as “artistresearchers.” These conferences have a vital artistic role. Alongside scholarly papers and performances of new work, they are most significantly characterised by hybrid presentations in which the “research” and “art” elements are indivisible. Most artists working creatively with music technology would identify themselves as composers, sound artists, or improvisers. The distinction between these activities is itself increasingly dissolved by the very technologies they work with. We might think of the sonic surface of a particular musical phenomenon as being the product of many decisions, constraints, practices, affordances, and events distributed across time, technologies, cultural and social structures. The possible patterns of this

118

Chapter 8

distribution evolve continuously, of course, but the technologies of computation, sensing, and communication have transformed the potential landscape entirely. The inherited temporal and spatial paths of music creation are redrawn. Laptop-based digital sound processing allows the manipulation of material in real time, responsive to performance or environmental input of all kinds. Network technologies connect material, performers or environments across continents—what philosopher and sociologist Jean-François Lyotard (1991) has described as “telegraphy” or “writing at a distance.” Computer-assisted composition affords the design and redesign of complex compositional procedures to produce large numbers of possible outcomes—a process akin to rapid prototyping—replacing the painstaking work that composers may have been more reluctant to revise. The fundamental difference of these technologies from the media of previous generations, as media theorist Lev Manovich (2001) has pointed out, is their programmability, their conditionality. Fundamental is the development of a critical relationship with the technology itself. While impossible—and undesirable—to reduce to simplistic distinctions, this clearly distinguishes creative approaches to music technology from its less reflective use as a production tool, however complex and sophisticated the modern recording studio has become. The articulating and sharing of new knowledge can be regarded as a primary responsibility of artistic research (Impett 2017). This aspect comes sharply into focus in the case of creative work such as composition. The documenting or explanation of a creative or technical process is not necessarily sufficient in this respect. The sharing of technical knowledge is often an integral part of more extensive research projects—a standard requirement of the funding bodies whose support is needed to carry out such ambitious work. The publicly available datasets or toolkits arising from projects such as composer Pierre Alexandre Tremblay’s FluCoMA project4 or the C4DM at Queen Mary, University of London,5 are cases in point. In both cases, an artist stands at the centre of the work and yet the resultant technical knowledge is distributed widely. By these means, artist researchers are also able to address the funding imperative to “impact”; the trace of such research in the wider world will be the use of the tools it has generated. Perhaps a deeper mark is made by the concepts associated with such developments, however. Philosopher Alva Noë (2016) makes a case for understanding technologies as philosophies; artists, he suggests, produce “strange tools” for human thought. The presenting of new music is perhaps likewise insufficient in itself to be considered within a stricter understanding of artistic research. In this respect we might look to the world of software design and artificial intelligence, likewise bounded by technological innovation on one hand and “product” on the other. In the context of Artificial Intelligence (AI), media theorist Philip Agre (1997) proposed a notion of Critical Technical Practice (CTP), which has been adopted as a model in various creative contexts, and developed in workshops by the Music, Thought and Technology research group at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, whose members include the



Artistic Research and Music Technology 119

authors of this chapter. CTP is an approach that critically acknowledges the situatedness, aspirations, and narrative of the research process in a technological context. However, the context of such presentation might itself be the topic of research. New technologies have freed music from the concert hall. They play a major part in work that proposes new cultural configurations and hence new ontologies and understandings of the musical phenomenon itself. Sound artists have been preeminent in this respect—indeed, one might posit non-conventional approaches to the cultural context of production, presentation, and reception as a prime perceived distinction between “composition” and “sound art.” A few well-known examples suffice to illustrate. The work of sound artist Christina Kubisch6 is a paradigmatic instance, encouraging individuals to explore the sonic potential of electro-magnetic fields in urban environments. Multimedia artist Christian Marclay7 brings about new encounters between the theory and practices of sound and visual art. The sound art of Jakob Kirkegaard8 brings the listener into close relationships with very specific sonic environments—geographical, architectural or cognitive—extending the work of pioneers such as Maryanne Amacher. Electronic composer Ryoji Ikeda9 presents sonic and visual projections of the patterns of data with which we are surrounded. There is an irony here that we must acknowledge: that the more successful such artists have been at persuading the art world to acknowledge their work, the less inclined they seem to be to reflect publicly on the intense research that it entails. This reflects the economies of knowledge and art in which particular artist researchers operate. The new concepts embodied in such work may, through their clarity and through the diffusion of the work, enter the discourse of listeners and practitioners alike without the artists themselves drawing specific attention. In other cases, personal aesthetic-technical methodological reflection and development may take on a more general form and contribute importantly to the formation of new critical and professional discourse. The writings of electro-acoustic composers Denis Smalley (Spectromorphology, 1997) and Trevor Wishart (On Sonic Art, 1997) are cases in point. The writings of Pierre Schaeffer are a direct historical model (À la recherche d’une musique concrète, 1952, Traité des objets musicaux, 1966). Primarily a composer, the names of the communities formed round Schaeffer already intend to convey the need for an ethos of research: Club d’essai, Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète. Artists and Technology Like other areas of technological endeavour, that of music technology would appear to be in increasingly rapid development. Underlying this impression is not actual rate of change—rapid as that can seem—but the urgency of the desire to be at the forefront. There is thus inevitably a high turnover of concepts, a rapid renewal of discourse through, for example, the annual cycles of conferences and festivals. Much discussion of such work appears to have a relatively short shelf life, unless researchers make a conscious decision to theorise across a broader time scale, in which contact

120

Chapter 8

with the work itself may be more tenuous. By the same token, the research of artists is often closely bound up with a very specific technology, which itself has a particular narrative, life cycle, and sphere of interest. This spirit of urgency is the product of music technology being at the confluence of two powerful forces. First, as artistic activity, the drive towards originality, towards uniqueness, is culturally deeply engrained. There is a sense that new work has to announce its own originality—or if that cannot be relied upon, then that the artist should explain it. This can be seen as the product of inherited modernism, the contemporary imperative to individualism, and the practice of scientific publishing. Second, as technological research, there is the need for novelty and innovation in order to be worthy of attention. This world exploits the technologies of smartphones, entertainment systems, computers and Artificial Intelligence (AI)—but it also shares their platforms. The artist-researcher working with music technology confronts both these imperatives, a situation that leads to some of the most inventive thinking; the very context and its constraints have to be re-imagined. The re-situating of musical activity and experience with technology also transforms its traces. The most common descriptors—site-specific, responsive, generative, interactive, real-time or improvised, for example—point to the essential ephemerality of the result. Documentation is therefore still more mediated than in the case of “classical” repertoire. The work may have little sonic identity between instantiations; a received notion of “reproduction” does not apply. Music Technology as Research Here we return to the commonly perceived condition of work with music technology as research: sharing of context and process must be an integral component of the activity if the result is not to remain a disembodied, free-floating putatively aesthetic object. The establishment of a new conceptual consensus, however local or temporary, becomes part of the artistic project. In a technologically aware culturalhistorical moment such as our own, there exists a wider, common discourse that derives from informal understandings of science- and technology-derived concepts. We can understand this in terms of what sociologist of science Harry Collins (2012) calls “relational tacit knowledge.” The Music, Thought and Technology research group seeks to develop new ideas for contemporary music creation and reception by exploiting this situation, by developing instrumental critical concepts from a common cultural hinterland. The more widely distributed nature of creation and research with music technology is matched by that of the skills and tools themselves. Contemporary technologies used in practical contexts are invariably hybrids of many sub-technologies—syntheses of more generalised components of electronics, computation or design that are the products of a vast range of specialised research and skills. As economist and complexity theorist Brian Arthur has pointed out, a characteristic of the abstract notion of “technologies” is that we can see them as “complexes of working processes



Artistic Research and Music Technology 121

that can be combined into further combinations. . . . Technology builds itself organically from itself ” (Arthur 2009, 24). No individual has expert mastery of all the components of a particular technological instantiation. Bringing such elements together for the user—whether at the “lowest” level of code compiler or the “highest” of commercial application—means constraining the actions of the user, and with that their field of thought. In certain dominant instances—the standard operations of the DAW are an example—we might think of this as a form of techno-hegemony. An important thread through artistic research with music technology has therefore been to resist or propose alternatives to such models. A few examples serve to illustrate the range of such subversion. Composer John Oswald’s (b. 1953) Plunderphonics10 adopts the standard soundfile-manipulation model directly, using it to subvert its own conventional behaviour by operating on iconic materials. Sound artist Thomas Grill’s (b. 1972) Rotting Sounds project (2018–present) explores the fragile materiality of our relationship with sound; its manifesto is titled Embracing the Temporal Deterioration of Digital Audio. The work of composer Nicolas Collins (b. 1954) often repurposes consumer electronics, exposing their potential to reveal unintended, unanticipated musical worlds. It reflects a wide interest in intervening directly in technologies (Collins 2009). Generative models acknowledge the inherent autonomy of the computer, such that its musical actions escape direct control, often affording new stimulus to human creativity. The culturally and politically disruptive nature of live coding has received significant attention (Collins 2016). The public interventions made possible by music technology are the subject of work by artists such as Cathy van Eck (b. 1979) (2018). Creative research in this area has accelerated since the advent of the laptop and the establishment of common protocols such as Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and Open Sound Control (OSC). As computer science and AI have passed through various phases—rule-based systems, statistical models, artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, machine learning—artist researchers have immediately mined their creative potential. Eduardo Miranda (2019), composer and Head of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research at Plymouth University, provides an overview of recent experiments with unconventional modes of computing. It is notable that the majority of such projects both arise from an artistic motivation and require the involvement of the artist to explore, test and validate their findings. There is a fluid boundary between technological model and creative metaphor. Composer David Rosenboom has been a pioneer in working with biofeedback technologies, which have both made possible his artistic output and informed his theoretical concept of propositional music. Agostino di Scipio’s long-standing Audible Eco-systems project brings together one of the fundamental properties of audio technology—feedback—with conceptual models from ecology and agent-based computer science, the concerns with situation and embodiedness of current cognitive science and the null-point essentialism of modernist aesthetics. The project is itself driven by a feedback dynamic between theory and poietics. Algorithms that Matter (Almat) is an artistic research project by sound artists Hanns

122

Chapter 8

Holger Rutz and David Pirrò at the University of the Arts, Graz, that explores the notion of algorithmic agency in sound. The wide relevance of music technology-related artistic research projects is such that individual projects may be characterised by their outward disciplinary emphasis—on technology, practice or theory, for example, according to institutional context. Those with a primarily technological gloss are characteristic of institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where since 1985 composer Tod Machover’s Hyperinstruments and Opera of the Future projects have generated new instruments and technologies, papers on technical, theoretical and cultural topics, and a continuous stream of new music by Machover and others. Other artist researchers contribute on a more theoretical level, to practice and to the understanding of the nature of practice in such a rapidly changing environment. We might mention particularly composers Simon Emmerson (2009) and Curtis Roads (2015) in this respect. Both are at once practitioners who have worked through the evolution from 1970s tape music to contemporary computer-based real-time sound manipulation, and theorists of the long-term development of music technology practice.

PART 2 Case Studies The nature and focus of the work in artistic research do not escape the political and economic considerations that filter, by resonance or opposition, the activities in our cultural world. Therefore, the institutional spaces where technology-based artistic research in music operates today are varied. Artistic researchers have thus developed the ability to navigate these different spaces, and to adapt and respond to their affordances and limitations. The divisions between the nature, goals, and demands of different institutional activities tend to reflect artificial constructs—cultural, economic, political. This apparent rigidity presents opportunities for creative navigators of institutional frameworks. To better illustrate the nature and character of these navigators we propose three kinds of spaces where these technological artist-researchers operate: academic spaces, cultural spaces, and hybrid spaces (or “hubs”). Academic Spaces There has been an undeniable explosion in the setup of higher educational programs in the arts, and those relating to music technology have been no exception. The historical demand of art-production studios created by private companies, such as Philips (Acoustic Instrumentation facility, Eindhoven, 1956–1960) or Bell labs (home to Max Mathews’s initial experiments in 1957, through his work as head Acoustic Research group in the 1960s, until the development of a sound-oriented computer in the 1970s, which ceased production in 1981), has been reduced due to,



Artistic Research and Music Technology 123

among other factors, the over-democratisation of digital technology. This in turn has forced some of these studios to find new life either by becoming cultural institutions, through partnership programs with music schools and universities, or by becoming educational institutions themselves. Conservatoires have also gone through similar changes, and given that the nature of funding tends to favour the acquisition of tangible goods rather than the hiring of personnel, for example, we have seen an increase in the technical infrastructure at the disposal of students of composition and other technological-based creative disciplines. The case of university departments is similar. Areas of research connected to digital humanities, such as computational musicology, have seen a strengthened need for establishing their own spaces for test and experimentation. To a degree, the interdisciplinary nature of certain project profiles, that in the past were activated by the need to share resources, as were the cases of acoustics, engineering, and physics departments doubling as electronic music production centres in decades past, has now given way to a more specific, more isolated kind of work. Paradoxically, the increasing equipping of institutions to carry out technology-related research appears in some cases to jeopardise the interdisciplinary potential of projects, by providing self-contained environments for the production of scientific experiments that are no longer treated as opportunities for ad-hoc artistic productions. The commonality of these three loci of activity within academia (ex-industrial or public, conservatoire, university) is that they benefit from the multifaceted nature of the technology-based practitioner (composer, performer, and technologist). Conservatories in particular tend to provoke an unnecessary friction by embodying an inherited hierarchy of roles and modes of employment by having contemporary multiskilled, multidisciplinary artists working as technologists. In a mirror scenario, some universities—focused on a more traditionally scientific angle of research— complete the mismatching cast, by placing engineers in situations where they may find themselves making musical decisions about materials for auditory display, sonification, etc. In short, the roles and structures of research institutions do not always reflect the evolution of the skills and activities of researchers. An interesting example of an institution that has navigated the waters of industrial, university academic, and conservatoire academic contexts is the Institute of Sonology, based at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. According to their own description, its roots are in the production of electronic music at the Philips Research Labs (1956– 1960), as well as the academic curricula of both the Delft University of Technology (1957–1960) as well as the activities of the CEM Studio in Bilthoven. The articulating figure behind the integration of these initiatives was Gottfried Michael Koenig, who, in his position of artistic director of the Studio for Electronic Music (STEM) at Utrecht University, merged both the artistic and compositional practices and to the notion of research. STEM became the Institute of Sonology, which remained in Utrecht until 1986, year where it relocated to the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague.11 A similar example of a current educational initiative with its roots in the private sector is the Visconti studio at Kingston University, United Kingdom. It operates

124

Chapter 8

simultaneously as a private recording and production studio, as a place for research and production for the university students, and as a “live museum” as part of the research and teaching project “The British Analogue Music Studio: Heritage, Nostalgia, Future.” Built around the figure of pop producer Tony Visconti, the project, a partnership between Kingston University, the British Library, and the Science Museum, aims to preserve and document the heritage of analog production techniques. It does not only focus on the preservations of tools but also on the recovery of practices. Its intended outputs are both archival-oriented (recordings, techniques, tools) as well as production oriented, and scholarly reflection.12 Cultural Spaces Well-established cultural institutions operate under the constant pressure of renewing their impact to their community. The trade-off here is almost always the reduction in risk-taking: even the occasional “radical” art manifestations that are being promoted have been curated either for the apparent radicality of a particular artist, manifested in his public claims, rather than the aesthetic, artistic risk-taking nature of the work itself. In the current cultural-economic climate, when funding bodies tend to take decisions on the basis of impact rather than aesthetic judgement, and where less commercially proven, “popular” artistic manifestations are being evaluated with the same parameters as the commercial counterparts, researchers in this area, in order to obtain funding, point to the technical innovation as contribution of their work, rather than its artistic merits. The areas where technology-based artistic researchers can operate and contribute are—again—more on the technical side, leaving their aesthetic contributions hidden in the inevitable decision-making involved in the design of tools, techniques and setups which appear as parts of (in service of ) more mainstream artistic manifestations. Technology-driven cultural institutions such as IRCAM in Paris started from an artistic impulse, a creative vision, and a political drive. Nowadays the same institution finds itself reinventing the way it relates to other research communities (through interdisciplinary projects), education (through “artistic research residences”), industry (synthetic voices for cinema, sound signals for transport systems) and the music-production world (mainly as technical collaborators of well-established composers and cultural organisations—such as their involvement with the operas of composer Kaija Saariaho). Another example of a cultural organisation going beyond its expected institutional boundaries is ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. Conceived as a multi-institutional collaboration, ZKM’s facilities were designed to host “a museum, a (media art) collection, research institute, studios, as well as a media theater” (reference). This initial plan, conceived in the mid-1980s, went through several postponements and changes. Its current building and body of activities has been ongoing since 1997, with the addition of the Hertz-labs, in 2017, aimed to continue and expand the activities of the Institute for Visual Media and the Institute for Music and Acoustics as well as to “meet the requirements of digital society.”13



Artistic Research and Music Technology 125

ZKM defines its activities as focused both on artistic production and media technology research, which brings up the question of to what extent it is possible to divide these two, particularly in the field of music technology. We don’t have to go further than the description of the European inter-institutional project “interfaces” (which has ZKM and its Hertz lab as a primary partner) to find how these terms merge again. In its description they begin by describing their activities as researchbased, and finish by stating that the lab focuses on “artistic production.”14 Hybrid Spaces or “Hubs” Given the cultural, aesthetic and ultimately commercial pressure that music production experiences nowadays, the staff of technologists working at established academic and cultural centres do not always find an appropriate resonator for their creative, artistic endeavours in their own institutions. In a similar fashion, independent artists who are keen on incorporating new technologies to their creative palette but do not want (or can’t afford) to follow the academic route proposed by institutions, nor to subscribe themselves to the aesthetic trends of bigger cultural organisations (or other agents in the market), find it difficult to engage in a context of learning, test and development of technology-based works and are forced to find ways to educate themselves alone, or in virtual environments, limiting their potential by not having access to the kind of interaction that only happens in a community context. The need to find these creative and technical resonators, as well as the organic countercultural outburst that comes from opposing establishment in any way, have given birth to a hybrid model for community-driven initiatives, based on cross-pollination between technologically literate art-makers and countercultural-motivated artists. Such initiatives tend to seek alternative ways for funding, producing and disseminating work that would not necessarily fit in the “big” cultural venues, nor be seen as the standard for an educational model. It is not strange that most of these “hubs” have, in recent years, abandoned the labels of “music” and “performance” for the broader “sound art,” which encompasses several art forms and welcomes a hybrid (and therefore, potentially collaborative) model of creative practice, as well as outputs. The activities of these hubs can be encompassed in two areas: education and production. The didactic initiatives use primarily a modality that can be described as “workshop by peers,” inviting artists in residence not only to share their work, but to transmit aspects of their practice as hands-on workshops. The production aspect is realised by artists based on these spaces on “residencies” of various lengths, which enables not only the focusing on a particular project, but also the potential of exchange and collaboration with peers under the same roof. In the topic of funding, these initiatives tend to resort to a blend between structural funding coming from government institutions, as is the case of STEIM and the city of Amsterdam and the Dutch funds for Performance Arts NFPK (Nederlands Fonds voor Podiumkunsten), or the dual model of private funding and local government that enables Barcelona’s HANGAR, a center for art research and

126

Chapter 8

production for media artists that nowadays occupies 2,600 square meters of warehouses repurposed as artist studio spaces, production rooms, media labs, classrooms, and residency spaces.15 This structural support allows these “hubs” to then function on a “Do It Yourself,” or cooperative, mode for the organisation of workshops, events, and residencies, where the request of volunteering work, and in consequence the buildup of a sense of community is essential for the functioning economy.

CONCLUSION Over the last half-century, the field of music technology has inherently lent itself to artistic research. Not all individual projects in the area might be seen as such, but as an aggregate pursuit it embodies the notion of knowledge production through artistic practice. Largely collaborative and inescapably multidisciplinary it embodies changes in the dynamics of culture, academia, science and technology. Artistic research in music technology at once exploits and subverts the innovations that nowdominant software corporations have brought to music. It is perhaps in the field of artistic research through music technology that we see work that most directly challenges inherited concepts regarding the nature of musical practice: the ways in which it is situated, embodied and distributed. It challenges historical assumptions concerning the ontologies of musical objects: that they can be both highly technical and highly conceptual, fully determined and yet unpredictable. And in its inescapable multidisciplinarity, work with music technology it expands the kinds of knowledge that can emerge from creative engagement with music and sound.

NOTES 1.  The Illinois Automatic Computer (ILLIAC) was part of the first attempt to create compatible computers (machines that would be able to run the same instruction set) and was most famously used to calculate the orbit of the Sputnik satellite after its launch. 2.  Composers Inside Electronics was founded in 1973 for the collaborative realisation of the electroacoustic environment Rainforest IV, conceived by Tudor at the New Music in New Hampshire Festival (Chocorua, New Hampshire). 3.  Studio voor Electro-Instrumentale Muziek, founded in 1969. 4.  The Fluid Corpus Manipulation Project, FluCoMA (www.flucoma.org), deals with making complex scientific algorithms accessible to musicians. Last accessed on 20 August 2019. 5.  The researchers at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London, C4DM (c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk), focus their efforts on Music Information Retrieval, Music Informatics, and other areas of machine-hearing investigation. Last accessed on 20 August 2019. 6.  www.christinakubisch.de. Last accessed on 20 August 2019. 7.  www.whitecube.com/artists/artist/christian_marclay. Last accessed on 20 August 2019. 8.  www.fonik.dk. Last accessed on 20 August 2019. 9.  www.ryojiikeda.com. Last accessed on 20 August 2019.



Artistic Research and Music Technology 127

10. John Oswald coined the term Plunderphonics in 1985 to describe a compositional method based on the alteration and recombination of pre-existing audio recordings. 11.  More information at www.sonology.org/news/introduction-to-sonology. Last accessed on 20 August 2019. 12.  More information at www.visconti-studio.co.uk/about. Last accessed on 20 August 2019. 13.  More information at www.zkm.de/en/about-the-zkm/development-philosophy/founding-history. Last accessed on 20 August 2019. 14.  More information at www.interfacesnetwork.eu/post.php?pid=125-residency-mycitymysounds. Last accessed on 20 August 2019. 15.  More information at www.hangar.org/en/sobre-nosaltres/missio. Last accessed on 20 August 2019.

REFERENCES Agre, Philip. 1997. Computation and Human Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arthur, Brian. 2009. The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. London: Penguin. Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Born, Georgina. 1995. Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press. Collins, Harry. 2012. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Collins, Nicolas. 2009. Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. London: Routledge. Collins, Nick. 2016. “Live Coding and Teaching SuperCollider,” Journal of Music, Technology and Education 9 (1): 5–16. Emmerson, Simon. 2009. Living Electronic Music. London: Routledge. Impett, Jonathan. 2017. “The Contemporary Musician and the Production of Knowledge: Practice, Research and Responsibility.” In Discipline and Resistance: Artistic Research and Music, edited by Jonathan Impett, 221–40. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (trans. G. Winthrop-Young). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1991. The Inhuman, 1991: Reflections on Time. Translated by G. Bennington. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Miranda, Eduardo Reck. 2019. Guide to Unconventional Computing for Music. Cham, CH: Springer. Noë, Alva. 2016. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York: Hill and Wang. Roads, Curtis. 2015. Composing Electronic Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schaeffer, Pierre. 1952. Á la recherche d’une musique concrète. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Schaeffer, Pierre. 1966. Traité des objets musicaux. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Smalley, Denis. 1997. “Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes,” in Journal Organized Sound, Volume 2 Issue 2, August 1997, pp. 107–126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Eck, Cathy. 2018. Between Air and Electricity: Microphones and Loudspeakers as Musical Instruments. London: Bloomsbury. Wishart, Trevor. 1997. On Sonic Art. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

9 Design Research in Architecture, Revisited Murray Fraser

Among British academics and practitioners it is not typical to use the term “artistic research” in the same sense it is used in continental Europe. To us it feels too much of an all-encompassing phrase to be helpful, plus often in Europe it carries an implication of being something separate from “scientific research”—another generalising term that worries us greatly. Instead, certainly within the architectural sphere in Britain, we prefer to talk of architectural design research—some of which by its nature will be extremely artistic, while other aspects could be majorly scientific, and others yet might be historical, sociological, anthropological and so on. How then do architects, through their design work and professional practice, carry out forms of research that produce their own particular kind of new insight and knowledge and which openly use design to fit with other kinds of research? It seems an obvious and vital question to ask, but also one containing many problematic aspects. When therefore I came to edit the first comprehensive survey of the topic within architecture, pointedly titled Design Research in Architecture: An Overview (Fraser 2013), it meant that there were a few important “lines in the sand” that I wished to draw. One of my central aims was to distinguish architectural design research from earlier attempts in the 1960s and 1970s to codify such research under the rubric of “design methods,” such by as Geoffrey Broadbent and Anthony Ward (1969) or John Christopher Jones (1970), or in the case of proponents of systems theory and cybernetics, like Gordon Pask (1969) or Ranulph Glanville (1980), a tendency to tip the discussion over into what was then termed as “design science.” Philip Steadman (2013) has written an insightful and useful critique of this earlier phase, and particularly of its unfortunate attempts in effect to tie the hands of designers. Even if not quite following the “design methods” or “design science” routes, subsequent books on the subject in the 1990s and 2000s tended to remain somewhat intellectu128



Design Research in Architecture, Revisited 129

ally trapped by those earlier rigid formulations (Downton 2003; Dunin-Woyseth and Merete, 2004; Lawson 1980, 2002, 2004; Lawson and Dorst 2009). This led on to a second aim, which was to ensure an academic framing that would be as open and accepting as possible. To those of us involved in architectural design research in Britain, it seems essential to create a truly expansive view of what it might consist of. Indeed it is plain to see that there are already many different types of research within architectural design research, just as one can find many kinds of research in science or social science or history or fine art. To begin the investigations in my book in 2013, I proposed a working definition that described architectural design research as the processes and outcomes of inquiries and investigations in which architects use the creation of projects, or broader contributions towards design thinking, as the central constituent in a process which also involves the more generalised research activities of thinking, writing, testing, verifying, debating, disseminating, performing, validating, and so on. When it is put in this way, the definition seems hardly new or revolutionary. After all, Adrian Forty (2000, 11–16) in his book on Words and Buildings showed eloquently that architects have been deploying a combination of these modes of expression for a rather long time in their work. Yet there had also been for centuries a strong resistance among British architects, like those in other countries, to regard the activity that they were engaged upon as research—as if somehow admitting this fact would destroy the originality or creativity of their projects. To us it felt like an outmoded value system, and hence another of the vital tasks of the book was to try to distil some general principles that might be seen as common to architectural design research, even then explored in such diverse ways by individual architectural academics and practitioners. In summary, these underlying principles of architectural design research were articulated as follows: •  It should be seen as a mode of investigation that is able to blend willingly into other more established research methodologies in the arts, humanities, and sciences with no intrinsic antagonism. •  It should never be something that simply happens at the beginning of a project, as a sort of Research-and-Development stage, before the architect “lapses” into more normative and routine productive modes. •  When undertaken properly, the design element and the other research modes and methodologies will operate together in an interactive and symbiotic manner throughout the whole process, from start to finish. •  Furthermore, it can embrace the full panoply of means and techniques for designing and making and evaluating that are available to architects (including sketches, drawings, physical models, digital modelling, precedent analysis, prototyping, digital manufacture, interactive design, materials testing, construction specification, site supervision, building process, user occupation, or user modification).

130

Chapter 9

•  There is, however, a constant need to critique its own methodological assumptions, as well as those of the other disciplines it draws upon, whether for example science (repeatability), history (transparency), or in the case of social science, the distinction made between theory-testing (deductive) and theorybuilding (inductive) approaches. Thus the incorporation of creative, imaginative, speculative methods of investigation in no way diminishes the quality of research that is being produced. Indeed the importance of speculation and imagination to the scientist, or the social scientist, or the historian, is well testified, and thus the only difference with architectural design is a matter of degree. “Project making in architecture is no more certain of its outcome than research in modern sciences,” writes David Leatherbarrow (2012), “[so] when the actual methods of scientific research are kept in mind, and their similarity to project making understood, architecture’s membership in the research community ceases to be a question” (p. 12).

THE FORMATION OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN RESEARCH The value of design research more generally was demonstrated by its ready adoption—along with concomitants such as PhDs by Design or by Practice—in other creative fields such as the fine arts, design or music, which indeed in many countries are more advanced in terms of the acceptance of design research than in architecture (Biggs and Karlsson 2010). In the case of Britain, for example, there were several ground-breaking art schools in the early 1990s at which the idea of PhDs by Practice was inaugurated: Adrian Rifkin at Leeds University was one of the best known of these founding art tutors. The genesis within architectural discourse of the concept of design research is for me a fascinating subject. Although over the years there were of course architects who mentioned the research they engaged upon, such mentions remained fragmentary and were also limited conceptually, being merely to do with initial investigations in a topic that needed to be undertaken in preparation for design as a separate and more important second stage. Instead, the first instance that I am aware of an explicit reference to the term “design research” in the architectural realm came within a brief concluding section for Eliel Saarinen’s 1943 book on The City. In this end passage, he mostly refers to the activity as “research design,” and only sometimes as “design research,” yet both meant the same. Saarinen described the research process as one that operates essentially in reverse—that is, by the architect imagining how their future vision for a city could be used to shape present-day buildings and urban plans, and then using these insights to shape what he regarded as the forward-moving process of creating and erecting buildings. It matters not so much if his proposition was correct, for more important was it was strikingly original for Saarinen to propose that archi-



Design Research in Architecture, Revisited 131

Figure 9.1.   Eliel Saarinen’s diagram in The City (1943) to indicate the two-fold movement of design research, necessitating a balance between the urge to project forward from the present and to project backwards from the future.

tectural design research, if it is conceived and practiced properly, involves a “two-fold movement” back-and-forth between the future and the present (see figure 9.1). Despite this intriguing mention in The City, Eliel Saarinen seems not to have fully grasped the implications of architectural design research when seen as an innovative process of inquiry and investigation in which thinking and writing and designing are integrally interlinked throughout. But in this he was far from alone. References to design research were still used only in the vaguest sense until Aldo Rossi sat down in December 1969 to write the preface for a new Italian edition of his seminal text, The Architecture of the City. By this point Rossi felt confident enough to observe: “These two terms, analysis and design, seem to me to be coalescing into one fundamental area of study, in which the study of urban artifacts and of form becomes architecture” (Rossi 1966, 166). In 1960s and 1970s Britain, the irascibly radical architect Cedric Price also operated on what was in effect a research laboratory method, as opposed to a typical professional architectural practice, from his offices in Alfred Place in central London. Viewed in that light, Price’s projects such as the “Fun Palace,” “Potteries Thinkbelt,” “Interaction Centre” and “McAppy” are best understood as early formative examples of architectural design research (Fraser 2007, 270–76; Hardingham 2017). This altered approach to design research was pushed even further by smart young practitioners of around the same time, notably Rem Koolhaas in Delirious New York (1978) and Bernard Tschumi in The Manhattan Transcripts (1981). And then in turn the growing identification with research-based design processes spread in the 1990s from the likes of Rem Koolhaas to highly ambitious and even younger Netherlands practices like UN-Studio, headed by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, who have over the years made repeated reference to using research techniques such as “diagrams” or “design models” as translational devices for creating their buildings (van Berkel and

132

Chapter 9

Bos 2006, 17–18). Another research-orientated Dutch practice, MVRDV (2005), even commented in 2005 upon the emerging professional conditions that are now increasingly compelling them to take design research seriously: “A more ambitious terrain clearly demands a more research-like approach within architectural practice” (pp. 43–44). Yet it was via the academic route in Britain that the formation of architectural design research took place most concertedly. Significant here is the figure of Jonathan Hill, who along with Philip Tabor set up at the Bartlett School of Architecture in 1995 the first-ever PhD by Architectural Design. Hill also became the inaugural product of this experiment when, in 2000, he was the first person to graduate with a design-based architectural PhD. It was subsequently published in separate parts in two of his books (Hill 1998, 2003). From 2003 I had established a distinct PhD by Architectural Design stream at the University of Westminster, nearby in London, and so in tandem with Jonathan Hill—plus another Bartlett colleague, Jane Rendell—we were able to convince Ashgate to launch our “Design Research in Architecture” book series that, as noted, used my edited book as its foundation. Within the academic realm, the other major impact has come from Leon van Schaik and colleagues in the Australian realm, initially through their PhD programme at RMIT University in Melbourne but since then spread internationally. Theirs is a model that, although part of the university structure, is very much geared towards the exploration of design research in the work of selected architectural practitioners (Blythe and van Schaik 2013; van Schaik 2005, 2018). Until relatively recently, there persisted this marked geographical grouping in architectural design research, with its twin nuclei in Britain and Australia. Nonetheless a handful of academic practitioners in some continental European countries (i.e., Norway, Sweden, Belgium, and The Netherlands) also became increasingly active in the field, with their efforts frequently linked to the formation of their own versions of design doctorates. Within this European context the most effective contributors were probably the late Johan Verbeke, Michael Hensel, Halina Dunin-Woyseth, and Fredrik Nilsson (see Nillson, Dunin-Woyseth, and Janssens 2017; Nilsson and Hensel 2016; Verbeke 2013). Today there is very much a condition of collaboration and mutual support between these and other like-minded European architectural academics, and indeed I used my own contribution to a recent book that DuninWoyseth and Nilsson edited—on the subject of how one ought to assess creative PhD theses—to once again reiterate the case for maximum openness and experimentation so as to prevent attempts by anyone to narrow down or claim ownership of the field (Fraser 2017).

WAYS FORWARD FOR ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN RESEARCH If this then is a brief history to date of architectural design research, what is its likely future? My general impression now is that any hitherto battle for acceptance



Design Research in Architecture, Revisited 133

within architectural discourse is now effectively over, with any of the academics or practitioners who try to reject the concept of design research appearing more and more as fossils. Of course there still remain many large and unanswered questions about the essence and practice of architectural design research, especially in terms of what it might become in future, but that is precisely the same for every academic discipline there is. Put in a more positive light, a great deal of the strength of architectural design research lies in its ability to absorb, adapt, and mutate influences from the changing intellectual climate around it, and as such it seems well poised to address such pressing concerns as globalisation, digitalisation, artificial intelligence, environmentalism, and so on. I would go further than this and would argue that the main threat to architectural design research—now that it is becoming far more widely accepted around the world—is that of complacency. In other words, if it simply continues to do more of the same things, it will shrivel up. It needs to sustain a spirit of radical critique if it is not merely going to become another normalised academic pursuit. For that reason I always urge my students to grasp the incredibly open and flexible possibilities of design research to examine the most challenging and troubling architectural issues they can think of, anywhere in the world. Architectural design research can travel anywhere and take on any social, political, or economic issue without impediment, and so why not use this as an advantage? Following on from this point, there are three key questions that I believe all architectural design research carried out from now on will need to negotiate if it hopes to progress: 1. How should we define (and by implication protect) the very different and mixed forms of insight and knowledge that architects produce every day through their work, yet without ever letting this process become dominated by delusory claims of scientific objectivity or by financially driven technocratic forces? 2. What are the most effective modes or routes for us to pursue a thoroughly interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approach within architectural design research, so as to ensure that the investigations readily intersect with methods and materials that are potentially scientific, technical, historical, theoretical, social, anthropological, psychological, philosophical, economic, political, environmental, or narrative? 3. How does the design research carried out in academia relate to that which takes place in projects in architectural practices: is it something that is entirely separate from what professional architects perform, or is it exactly the same, or more likely perhaps somewhere in between? My edited book in 2013 expressed openly the wish that there would be numerous fascinating avenues opening up for architectural design research, involving many new routes of discovery that could not as then be predicted. Our hope was that

134

Chapter 9

with a good wind the Ashgate book series—which has recently been transferred to UCL Press—could help to demonstrate how architectural practice could be enriched through design research, especially when linked to innovative academic research. This symbiosis between academia and practice was seen as being much stimulated by the common need for all kinds of architectural design research to be synthesised through combinations of drawn, written, verbal, and performed work. I would claim that this kind of outcome is being achieved by the design-based PhD programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, which has not only grown in size up to around one hundred candidates but has also become far more disciplinary diverse in terms of those taking part—including now a lot of artists, sculptors, filmmakers, illustrators, musicians, and colleagues from other creative fields. To highlight the breadth and strength of this intellectual environment, what I will do now is to discuss in turn just two of the PhDs by Architectural Design completed in 2018 at the Bartlett: the first of these is by Natalia Romik, a Polish-Jewish artist and designer, and the other by Samar Maqusi, a Palestinian-Jordanian architect whose focus for a long time has been on Middle Eastern refugee camps. I tutored the former student in conjunction with Jonathan Hill, and the latter along with Camillo Boano from UCL’s Development Planning Unit. In discussing these two theses my aim is to show how these examples of architectural design research were able to touch upon serious ‘real-world’ social conditions while also suggesting new forms of professional practice and pushing academic knowledge about their topics in ways that are simply not possible—or indeed are unimaginable—for those in other disciplines. As a consequence, both doctorates resulted in what were highly innovative and provocative design research insights.

NATALIA ROMIK, “(POST-) JEWISH ARCHITECTURE OF MEMORY WITHIN FORMER EASTERN EUROPEAN SHTETLS” The thesis by Natalia Romik, who is herself of Jewish ethnicity, confronts the deeply sensitive topic of the ‘present absence’ of what formerly were shtetls—that is, the predominantly Jewish towns that were dotted throughout Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust during the Second World War, and were then afterward repopulated by non-Jewish citizens of those Eastern European countries (Kassow 2007, 121–39). Bridging from theory to practice, and from engagement in the actual terrain of Poland through to spectral lost Jewish communities, Romik produced an original interdisciplinary fusion between architectural design research and Jewish/Hebrew studies. As an application of open, fluid experimental design research, the originality of her study comes from its embrace of the creative possibilities of architectural design research to bring fresh approaches to what are seemingly intractable social issues, in this case those presented today by these former shtetls. Her thesis is made even more timely by the increasingly politicised atmosphere of a rightwards authoritarian turn within Polish politics and by recurring, and indeed growing, anti-Semitism there.



Design Research in Architecture, Revisited 135

Emphasising the role of creative intuition, what Romik did as an artist was to address through a range of “nomadic” projects the processes of architectural disappearance, urban remembrance, and functional change within the context of dramatic social upheaval in Eastern Europe. In alliance with fellow enthusiasts, nongovernmental organisations and official institutions, her artistic projects for the thesis spanned from subtle interventions that played upon mirror-cladding—which she called the Nomadic Shtetl Archive, JAD, and Hurdy-Gurdy—through to some actual renovation schemes that transformed derelict synagogues and Jewish pre-burial houses, such as that in the southern Polish town of Gliwice, into historical museums and cultural centres (figure 9.2). Her work on these “real-world” projects involved designing, alongside colleagues, not only the museum spaces themselves but also the exhibitions about Jewish culture that are now situated within them. In order to give a more comprehensible form to the intertwined layers of practice and discourse, and to the intersection between her diverse investigations into archival records and creative projects, Romik’s thesis adopts a design format that is inspired by the graphic layout of the classic Jewish Talmud. As such, it employs a polyphonic structure on its pages in order to give space for her projects to unfold—sometimes through the means of images, at other times through purely written texts. This use of a Talmudic format also facilitated the inclusion of the dialogues she had with her associates, with fellow travellers, with residents she had met face-to-face during her extensive periods of fieldwork in Poland, and with other figures from the past—now long deceased—whose voices or faces can only be known from Yizkor memory books or archival records of Jewish history (New York Public Library 2018). A significant part of her research involved compiling an oral history in which discussions with

Figure 9.2.   Visualization of The Cloud (2013), an installation designed for the Museum of Upper Silesian Jews in a renovated former Jewish pre-burial chapel in Gliwice, Poland. Courtesy of the SENNA Collective/Natalia Romik.

136

Chapter 9

current Polish occupants of houses in former shtetls talked about this forgotten Jewish past, these being recorded through a series of films and audio recordings. Romik’s doctorate hence takes on directly the issues of architectural disappearance, urban remembrance, and functional change within the context of the dramatic social upheavals now taking place in Eastern European nations. Her detailed archival research focussed on how the former shtetls had been designed and occupied until being decimated by Nazi German forces during the Second World War, and how, in the postwar era, these towns were repopulated by people of other nationalities who began to live in and reuse what had mostly been Jewish properties previously. Today the traces of the former Jewish occupants have all but disappeared, not only from urban reality, but also from public discourse and social memory. The core of Romik’s PhD research is thus concerned with discovering alternative channels to redevelop the abandoned architecture of the shtetls as they are today, especially in relation to buildings of Jewish heritage such as the ruins of synagogues, ritual baths, and so on. Above all, Romik used her thesis to propose a new approach to how to combine architectural design and architectural history and theory to address the urban conditions in the former shtetls, on the basis that architects need to deal with the consequences of historical processes as well as trying more pragmatically to stimulate urban renewal. To do so she devised, and tested out in the field, some methods of design that sought to apply—in practice—what are otherwise seemingly disembodied, philosophical concepts such as Jacques Derrida’s (1993) “hauntology” and “spectrology,” Walter Benjamin’s (1935) “aura,” Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s (1986) “nomadology,” and Slavoj Žižek’s (2006) “parallax view,” as ways to address the paradoxes inherent in the “present absence” of what were once shtetls. In dealing with the aftermath of such a harrowing event as the Holocaust, she felt that such concepts were key to formulating the pragmatic responses to the challenges of post-traumatic urban regeneration. Thus to unblock the process of redevelopment in these Polish towns, she argued that the designer has first to “defrost” a lost layer of architectural memory by the use of philosophical concepts, artistic interventions, and constructed projects that are able to reveal the layers of cultural memory accumulated within buildings. To achieve her aim, Romik assembled an interdisciplinary toolkit that could link urban, historical and social studies of the former shtetls with physical (i.e., architectural and artistic) experimentation with the abandoned buildings of their lost Jewish communities. In this way, her doctorate deliberately includes references to different academic practices and disciplines such as Jewish studies, philosophy, cultural studies, architectural design, vernacular studies, public art, urban studies, architecture theory and history, political science, and ethnology. Romik’s PhD study therefore offers a range of practical design methods to help synthesise the restoration of Jewish memory in countries like Poland with current processes of urban regeneration, with the intention of preserving traces of the past by integrating them into the reconstructions of former Jewish buildings. She consciously based this functional reuse of revitalised post-Jewish architecture on abstract art forms, thereby developing new visual channels that could reconcile or at least



Design Research in Architecture, Revisited 137

negotiate between urban memory and new activities. Her design interventions and artistic installations were thus designed to showcase the former functions of the architectural spaces—for example in her project for the Nomadic Shtetl Archive— while also embracing a transformative dialogue with the current users of these spaces (figure 9.3). To express the intersections between her different operational methods (architectural design, conceptual art, public intervention, and such like) and her theoretical investigations, Romik used several metaphors to highlight particular aspects of study. Every chapter of her thesis was hence centred upon particular artistic or architectural projects. Romik’s chosen instruments—which she conceived of as the “helpers,” or even “heroines,” of her thesis—orientated the flow of the discourse in the thesis, plus they also allowed her to introduce conceptual elements that emphasise and explain the meanings of each project. For instance, the crucial condition of “nomadism” was integrated into her discussion of the Nomadic Shtetl Archive: this was created as a mobile archive of Jewish memory with which she then travelled around, attached on a trailer to a car, on her visits to a number of former shtetls in southwest Poland during the course of 2016. Elsewhere, her text explored theories about “mirrors” and optical illusions when analysing the design of JAD, an instrument of urban protest that took on the expressive shape of a giant mirrored hand that could be wheeled

Figure 9.3.   Reflective photograph of the Nomadic Shtetl Archive in mid-2016 when it sat for a few days in the market square in Kock, Poland. Courtesy of Natalia Romik.

138

Chapter 9

around the former shtetls in Upper Silesia in order to highlight the worst sites of architectural decay. Romik also expanded upon notions of “walking” and “magic” in her chapter on Hurdy-Gurdy, which was a portable archive—also covered in mirrors, and worn like a marching drum—that she wore as she walked around the streets of Częstochowa, a particularly intense locus of anti-Semitic sentiment, in mid-2014. It is important to note that all these projects were in some sense “nomadic,” all of them employed mirrors and white magic, and all involved the act of walking. Although she discussed them in the thesis as if they were separate items, in Romik’s mind they were all still part of the same overall project. This unity of design is perhaps most clearly seen in a telling chapter about Jewish archives, given that each one of her creative designs was intended to test out a particular method to unclog social memory and to activate a richer potential for redevelopment. In the end Romik produced an astonishing range of architectural and artistic work, helping to bring those fields close together, while also writing what is widely acknowledged as the first in-depth spatial and urban analysis of what the pre-war shtetls were like: this is indeed an intellectual contribution that has been hugely appreciated by Jewish scholars from many academic fields.

SAMAR MAQUSI, “ACTS OF SPATIAL VIOLATION: CONSTRUCTING THE POLITICAL INSIDE THE PALESTINIAN REFUGEE CAMP” In addressing a very different contemporary issue, Samar Maqusi’s doctoral thesis sought to add a novel dimension to discussions about Palestinian refugee camps as sites of exceptional political practice, as is now well established in scholarly work such as by Giorgio Agamben, Michel Agier, Laleh Khalili, and Sari Hanafi. What Maqusi felt was missing in this debate was a precise and intensive architectural mapping of these camps on the ground in order to be able to argue or understand how such spaces operate as political exceptions. For its specific focus, her thesis thus tackled directly the political dimension of architecture and spatial practices—as exercised both by the refugees and their host-country governments—inside two selected Palestinian refugee camps, one in Jordan (Baqa’a, near to Amman) and the other in Lebanon (Burj el Barajneh, in Beirut). Extensive fieldwork and critical mapping of the spatial chronology in each camp was conducted throughout Maqusi’s PhD investigations. Her fieldwork thus mapped the forces that shaped the Palestinian camps from their beginnings at what she called the humanitarian relief scale—that is, a strictly defined rectangle of 100 square metres that was the official standard set by the United Nations for the individual housing plots within these camps—and thereby traced the gradual transformation over sixty-nine years of protracted refuge into a scale today that now transgresses the original 100-square-metre plot boundaries. Maqusi notes that this has stripped the camps away from their original humanitarian relief purpose and instead re-appropri-



Design Research in Architecture, Revisited 139

ated them as truly Palestinian entities. It is in this expansion beyond the 100-squaremetre plots where she argues that politics in the sense intended by Chantal Mouffe (2005) or Carl Schmitt (2007) now resides in the camp as form, scale, and practice—the latter is termed in Arabic as ta’addi (encroach, exceed, violate), which Maqusi reinterprets by using the evocative phrase of “spatial violation” (figure 9.4). The initial research question in Maqusi’s thesis was to ask why does the Palestinian camp look like it does today? In posing a question like this within a protracted space of refuge there is an obvious need to take the analysis beyond simply architecture. Maqusi thus investigated the various elements that form the complex relational web

Figure 9.4.   Mapping of the typical 1970s/1980s domestic additions, or “spatial violations,” within the Baqa’a camp located close to Amman, Jordan. Courtesy of Samar Maqusi.

140

Chapter 9

of the refugee camp as an “assemblage” in the Deleuzian sense, so that she could identify the elements that had the most direct impact on the architectural form and spatial scale of their urban layouts (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Any camp-space is of course more than a camp, and more than a space, from this another pressing question emerged as to how does the Palestinian camp look like this today? Maqusi’s careful mappings show how the camp-spaces in both Baqa’a and Burj el Barajneh are in a continuous state of construction and destruction, which means that space is an ever-operating factor that is highly visible and indeed conspicuous within the camps. From this Maqusi could recite a historical narrative in which the spatial evolution of the camp-spaces served as the orators of tales of forced departure, precarious conditions, and protracted dwelling for the Palestinian refugees, while at the same time also being the orators of tales of resistance, struggle and potentially “creative” acts. Again a major part of her research involved making films to record the stories, experiences and attitudes of Palestinian refugees living in these camps in a protracted state of stasis and dependency. Drawing upon Maqusi’s long-term working experience for United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, yet now coupled with her role as a Bartlett PhD Architecture Design student, her thesis also seeks to unravel the impact of host-government policies on the physical form of these camps, examining in particular the double-sided issues of control and vulnerability. Furthermore, in proposing an alternative way to analyse the Palestinian camp-spaces, her underlying goal was to suggest new tools for how to design/build spatial interventions that could enhance the self-determination of refugees, by increasing the ability of their campspaces to offer forms of resistance. In analogy to Michel Foucault’s (1980) concept of the dispositif, usually translated as “apparatus,” Maqusi argues that the camp-space carries a potential threat through the possibility of creative acts to counter injustice, enabling them to undermine and even negate the prevailing control structures that keep the Palestinian refugees within these camps. This threat is fundamentally worrying to the host governments in Jordan and Lebanon, and to the wider geopolitical forces involved. As such, these higher governmental structures try to apply their mechanisms of control beyond the actual camp boundaries—albeit always in relation to these camp boundaries—with this thereby creating yet another kind of “assemblage” that depends upon separating, exposing, and empowering or disempowering certain groups over others. The aim is to ensure that a condition of ambiguity and fear always remains present in the minds and subjectivities of Palestinians and non-Palestinians in regard to the camp-spaces, thus affirming the relentless need for the host governments to invent and implement further “modes of intervention” to avoid any chance of the host populations resonating with or mixing with the Palestinian refugees, since that might destabilise the forces of power in Jordan and Lebanon. After sixty-nine years of creating spaces within these Palestinian camps, as urban entities they have reached a massiveness that is no longer able to be concealed, let alone tamed—and yet their very obvious presences speak openly of injustice and resistance (figure 9.5).



Design Research in Architecture, Revisited 141

Figure 9.5.   Mapping of the high-level connecting slabs that were added to dwellings in Beirut’s Burj el Barajneh camp during and after the Lebanese civil war. Courtesy of Samar Maqusi.

As Maqusi’s research progressed, especially as her experiences inside the camp increased, the importance of this “negotiating power” became clearer when she was told of successful negotiations in Baqa’a camp and Burj el Barajneh camp with each of their respective host governments. The Palestinian refugees were granted certain concessions but only if in turn they accepted changes to tighten order and security— that is, to agree to remain hosted but only as docile guests. Yet the concessions were reached only after the camp-spaces had experienced a level of violence that compelled the host governments to intervene, in the form of symbolic demonstrations, protests about the removal of street shacks, the burning of tires on a public road, or at times violent confrontation with police or troops. As part of an event titled the “Space of Refuge” that Maqusi organised with colleagues inside Baqa’a in mid-2015, the Jordanian police treated the raising of a Palestinian flag inside the camp as a signal for potential unrest and tried to censor the act. In the end it was agreed simply to place a Jordanian flag alongside the Palestinian one and to hoist it before the latter. Political responses to such acts differed from one host country to another, and sometimes from one camp to another. What was revealed, and which motivated

142

Chapter 9

Maqusi’s various design projects—such as setting up a rooftop exhibition in Baqa’a that was shaped as a direct transplantation of the ultra-dense and labyrinthine layout of the streets in Burj el Barajneh, or by encouraging the provision of concrete porch steps known in Arabic as Attabat outside dwellings in Baqa’a to extend the residents’ house plots and to provide them with spaces in which to socialise with their neighbours—was the importance of spatial creation within the camps. Negotiations with the host governments, and with fellow residents, are very often achieved through these acts of spatial design. Maqusi’s thesis was hence able to show that the urban conditions and value systems within the two selected Palestinian camps need to be seen as an intricate “assemblage” in which the concept of “camp” and the concept of “space” is held in a dialectic interplay, with neither able to be defined without the other. Thus there is an important and nuanced entity called camp-space that in the end formed the focus for Maqusi’s study. Ideas of “camp” and “space” vary over time, and between social groups, and different subjectivities of residents/non-residents, and in relation to the differing policies of host governments (Deleuze 2007). Maqusi argues that without the crucial hyphen that joins them, the “camp” and its “space” would cease to exist as a functioning apparatus. Her thesis thus removes the Palestinian camps from their typically limited humanitarian discourse, and instead posits the camp-space as a new existential and material condition in which creative spatial acts can have real potency. The design projects that she enacted with residents in both Baqa’a and Burj el Barajneh were able to imagine new forms and possibilities beyond the usual predetermined formulations, also raising knowledge and awareness among Palestinian refugees of the latent power they hold by being able to engage on acts of spatial design within their proscribed boundaries. Indeed, many of the refugees who took part in Maqusi’s fieldwork have since been able to demonstrate this latent power by creating further concrete porch steps within the camp, and even designing temporary spatial interventions that are more artistically ambitious in nature.

CONCLUSION If these two doctoral theses by Natalia Romik and Samar Maqusi amply demonstrate how architectural design research is able to engage subtly and effectively with two extremely different contemporary problems, then the question arises as to how, in this now expanding field, one might be able to sustain the kinds of innovation in method and subject matter as achieved by Romik and Maqusi. In my view, this becomes the key question for those who are engaging upon or else supervising design research, and it thus suggests an emphasis upon intellectual freedom, creative experimentation, and a willingness to take on important subjects no matter how problematic or uncomfortable they are. In turn, this would seem to open up an ever-expanding horizon for architectural design research. For instance, given the urgency of environmental action today, given the clear threat posed by Anthropocene climate change, the issue of “sustainability” is



Design Research in Architecture, Revisited 143

but one issue that can be rethought greatly and pushed much further through design research. And there are of course many other serious issues, such as the impact of artificial intelligence, which also fall into view. The paradigm of design research is I believe now replacing the older artistic or professional conceptions of the architect—craft worker, master mason, Renaissance artist, entrepreneur, state-employed technocrat, and so on—with a new model of someone who is engaged directly in research-driven innovation, and often as part of a large design team. Through their design speculations and practices, architects can engage upon forms of research that produce their own particular kind of new insight and knowledge, in a process that is noticeably different from—yet equal in value to—that of natural scientists, social scientists, historians, geographers, humanities scholars, and so on. All in all, it offers the strongest hope for architects from all across the world to be able to adapt to the rapidly changing contemporary conditions of globalisation, thus allowing them to add to the remarkable contributions that have been created by those involved in architecture ever since its inception as an intentional cultural practice some 5,500 years ago.

REFERENCES Benjamin, Walter. 1935. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Walter Benjamin. 1999. Illuminations, 211–35. New York: Shocken Books. Biggs, Michael, and Henrik Karlsson, eds. 2010. The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Blythe, Richard, and Leon van Schaik. 2013. “What If Design Practice Matters?” In Design Research in Architecture: An Overview, edited by Murray Fraser, 53–70. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Broadbent, Geoffrey, and Anthony Ward, eds. 1969. Design Methods in Architecture. New York: George Wittenborn. Deleuze, Gilles. 2007. Two Regimes of Madness. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Nomadology: The War Machine. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. London: Routledge. Downton, Peter. 2003. Design Research. Melbourne: RMIT Publishing. Dunin-Woyseth, Halina, and Liv Merete Nielsen, eds. 2004. Discussing Transdisciplinarity: Making Professions and the New Mode of Knowledge Production. Oslo: AHO/Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Forty, Adrian. 2000. Words and Buildings. London: Thames & Hudson. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Vintage Books. Fraser, Murray, ed. 2013. Design Research in Architecture: An Overview. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.

144

Chapter 9

———. 2017. “Preserving Openness in Design Research in Architecture.” In Perspectives on Research Assessment in Architecture, Music and the Arts: Discussing Doctorateness, edited by Fredrik Nilsson, Halina Dunin-Woyseth, and Nel Janssens, 69–84. London: Routledge, 2017. Fraser, Murray, with Joe Kerr. 2007. Architecture and the “Special Relationship”: The American Influence on Post-War British Architecture. London: Routledge. Glanville, Ranulph. 1980. “Why Design Research.” In Design, Science, Method: Proceedings of the 1980 Design Research Society Conference. Robin Jacques and James A. Powell, eds. 1981. Design, Science, Method: Proceedings of the 1980 Design Research Society Conference. Guildford: Westbury House. Hardingham, Samantha, ed. 2017. Cedric Price Works 1952–2003: A Forward-Minded Retrospective. London: Architectural Association Publications. Hill, Jonathan. 1998. The Illegal Architect. London: Black Dog Publications. ———. 2003. Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users. London: Routledge. Jones, John Christopher. 1970. Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures. New York: Wiley. Kassow, Samuel. 2007. “The Shtetl in Interwar Poland.” In The Shtetl: New Evaluations, edited by Steven Katz, 121–39. New York: New York University Press. Koolhaas, Rem. 1978. Delirious New York: Towards a Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: Monacelli Press. Lawson, Bryan. 1980. How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified. London: Architectural Press. ———. 2002. “The Subject That Won’t Go Away: But Perhaps We Are Ahead of the Game. Design as Research.” Architectural Research Quarterly 6, no. 2, 109–14. ———. 2004. What Designers Know. Oxford: Architectural Press. Lawson, Bryan, and Kees Dorst. 2009. Design Expertise. Oxford: Architectural Press. Leatherbarrow, David. 2012. “The Project of Design Research.” In Design Innovation for the Built Environment: Research by Design and the Renovation of Practice, edited by Michael U. Hensel, 5–13. London: Routledge, 2012. Maqusi, Samar. 2018. “Acts of  Spatial Violation:  Constructing the Political Inside the Palestinian Refugee Camp” (PhD by Architectural Design). Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK. Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. London: Routledge. MVRDV. 2005. KM3: Excursions on Capacities. Barcelona: Actar. New York Public Library. 2018. Yizkor Books [online]. Available from: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/yizkor-book-collection#/?tab=about. Accessed 9 May 2019. Nilsson, Fredrik, Halina Dunin-Woyseth, and Nel Janssens, eds. 2017. Perspectives on Research Assessment in Architecture, Music and the Arts: Discussing Doctorateness. London: Routledge. Nilsson, Fredrik, and Michael Hensel, eds. 2016. The Changing Shape of Practice: Integrating Research and Design in Architecture. London: Routledge. Pask, Gordon. 1969. “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics.” Architectural Design 39 no. 9, 494–96. Rossi, Aldo. 1966. The Architecture of the City. New York: Graham Foundation; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Romik, Natalia. 2018. “(Post-) Jewish Architecture of Memory within Former Eastern European  Shtetls” (PhD by Architectural Design). Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK.



Design Research in Architecture, Revisited 145

Saarinen. Eliel. 1943. The City: Its Growth, Its Decay, Its Future. New York: Reinhold Publishing. Schmitt, Carl. 2007. The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Steadman, Philip. 2013. “An ‘Artificial Science’ of Architecture.” In Design Research in Architecture: An Overview, edited by Murray Fraser, 35–52. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Tschumi, Bernard. 1981. The Manhattan Transcripts. London: Academy Editions. van Berkel, Ben, and Caroline Bos. 2006. UN Studio—Design Models: Architecture, Urbanism, Infrastructure. London: Thames & Hudson. van Schaik, Leon. 2005. Mastering Architecture: Becoming a Creative Innovator in Practice. London: John Wiley. ———. 2018. Architecture in Its Continuums. Melbourne: UPO Publications. Verbeke, Johan. 2013. “This Is Research by Design.” In Design Research in Architecture: An Overview, edited by Murray Fraser, 137–60. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.

10 Artistic Research and Performance Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca

Despite ongoing struggles around both institutional validation and resistance to appropriation, artistic research in performance has flourished internationally over the last twenty years—including the production of an extensive and rich body of scholarship.1 From early texts reflecting on “what and how ‘knowledge(s)’ are constituted in performance” by key practitioner-researchers such as Phillip Zarrilli (2001, 31), to core texts such as Practice-as-Research in Performance and Screen (2009), the book resulting from the seminal PARIP project;2 from monographs such as Ben Spatz’s (2015) What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research to the important recent collection, Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact (Arlander et al. 2018), which arises from the activities of the “Performance as Research” Working Group within the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR).3 And indeed, since the early nineties, multiple working groups dedicated to artistic research in performance have been founded within the field’s various professional associations—functioning as key sites for the collective investigation of what performance as research is and might yet become, as well as giving rise to some of the area’s key publications. While not all remain active today, these groups include: the Artistic Research Working Group within Performance Studies international; the now disbanded Performance as Research Working Group at the American Society for Theatre Research; the aforementioned “Performance as Research” Working Group; as well as the “Embodied Research Working Group” within the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR/FIRT).4 Recent years have also seen substantial research funding being awarded to international projects directly concerned with artistic research in performance. For example, the three-year Erasmus Plus-funded Artistic Doctorates in Europe (ADiE) project, led by Vida Midgelow in the United Kingdom since 2016, brings together eight organisations from across the United Kingdom and Scandinavia to investigate 146



Artistic Research and Performance 147

best practice in relation to the supervision and support of artistic doctorates in dance and performance. In turn, How to Do Things with Performance? (2016–2020) based at the University of the Arts, Helsinki, aims to contribute to contemporary international conversations around the nature of the relationship between artistic research and other cognate fields such as performance philosophy and performance studies, with a particular focus on the agency of performance understood from a broadly new materialist perspective. The field encompasses a huge range of diverse practices and approaches to performance making including but by no means limited to: solo and collaborative, devised, immersive, digital and intermedial performance, playwriting, directing, dramaturgy, durational works, voice, performance for camera, video and film, environmental and landscape performance, translation, poetry and spoken word performance, community theatre, heritage, site-specific practices, culinary arts, and scenography. Among its many sub-sets of focus and expertise, artistic research in performance makes leading contributions to knowledge around actor and performer training (with the work of researchers like Paul Allain, Phillip Zarrilli, Bella Merlin, Ben Spatz, Elizabeth de Roza and Budi Millier); scenography and performance design (e.g., Dorita Hannah, Jocelyn McKinney, David Shearing); live art and performance art (e.g., Lois Weaver, Annette Arlander, Tero Nauha, Nicola Singh); voice and sound (e.g., Yvon Bonenfant, Elisabeth Belgrano); myth and memory (e.g., Laurelann Porter, Pil Hansen, Vida Midgelow); space and place (e.g., Dani Abulhawa, Ella Parry-Davies, Shana MacDonald; Mike Pearson); digital and intermedial performance (e.g., Sita Popat; Joanne Scott; Carol Brown); decolonization (e.g., Manola K. Gayatri; Rajni Shah). Recent years have also seen a particular growth of work as part of the wider “animal-” and “nonhuman turn” as well as in relation to ecology and landscape (e.g., Baz Kershaw, Dee Heddon, Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz). For example, we might think of Finnish artistic researchers, Essi Kausalainen’s and Annette Arlander’s projects investigating performing with plants, including the latter’s both playful and serious considerations of how to approach trees in particular as collaborators in performance. In turn, we might think of the increased role for nonhuman animals as collaborators in artistic research projects from David Weber-Krebs’ Balthazar (2011–present) to Fevered Sleep’s Sheep Pig Goat (2017).5 Given the richness of its history and the vitality and multiplicity of its present manifestation, charting the field of artistic research in performance is an impossible task. Or at least, it would seem foolhardy to imagine that one might exhaustively map such an extensive, dynamic and diverse terrain in anything like a fully comprehensive fashion given the speed and extent to which artistic research in performance has become a global conversation in recent years (Barton 2018, 6). As such, this chapter is itself a work in progress: an admittedly partial and situated attempt to offer one introduction among others to this dynamic field of activity which—I’ll suggest—is in the process of transforming the contemporary academy and the wider research landscape.

148

Chapter 10

TERMINOLOGY AND DEFINITIONS There has been much debate (too much for some) about the ontological, epistemological, and methodological implications of the various terms that have been offered up to describe the field. That is, the question of terminology is by no means merely a matter of naming, but marks differing methodological approaches and modes of conceiving artistic research in performance. For example, the choice of terms can be understood to reflect distinct modes of relationship between performance practice and writing as in the case of the common differentiation between “practice-led research, the results of which can be fully communicated through written documentation,” as distinct from “practice-based research, the results of which cannot be fully comprehended without direct access to the creative products and processes of its incorporated practices (Candy 2006, 3)” (Barton 2018, 5, original emphasis). Clearly, the appeal to (surely ideal rather than actual) notions of “full” or “complete” comprehension and communication leaves many researchers describing their methodologies as operating between or across such supposedly discrete categories: inventing their own vocabularies to articulate complex relationships between process and “findings.” Likewise, as Barton (2018, 4) notes, the “as” in “practice as research” has been taken by some “to evoke a binary relationship between these primary terms” such that “practice” and “research” are still ultimately positioned as discrete entities. However, drawing from Schechner’s (2013, 38) discussion of the “as/is” distinction with respect to performance studies, one might alternatively suggest that the “as” invites us to focus our attention on the performative and often politically fraught ways in which some practices come to be seen as “research” while others do not, rather than thinking in terms of practices which intrinsically are or are not research by merit of some internal quality (of creativity, questioning, contextual responsiveness, shareability and so forth). What constitutes “research” is limited, conventional and context-specific; what “is” research in the UK now for instance is not the same as it was twenty years ago. What can be seen “as” research, however, either now or in the future is potentially unlimited and open to the extent that seeing as need not be construed as a process of identification (according to an existing model) but as a kind of encounter or reciprocal transformation (both of the practice and of the concept of research). Indeed, this might be where the radical potential of artistic research lies. What Is Artistic Research in Performance? What is artistic research in performance? “Is it a ‘methodology’ (Hannula et al. 2014), a ‘discipline’ or ‘species’ (Barrett and Bolt 2007, 1), a ‘paradigm’ (Jones 2009, 19; Bolt 2016) or ‘pre-paradigm’ (or ‘non- paradigm’) (Kjørup 2012, 36), an ‘anti-discipline’ (Kershaw and Nicholson 2011, 3), or a colonization of traditional research practice by artistic priorities (Klein 2010)?” (Barton 2018, 7). As leading contributor to artistic research debates Bruce Barton has recently suggested, artistic research in performance “remains a conspicuously elusive idea—at precisely the same



Artistic Research and Performance 149

time that it is passionately advocated” (Barton 2018, 2). Indeed, as with performance per se, the refusal to attempt to define artistic research in performance is indeed a feature of the field itself—made up as it is of what Barton describes as “good-natured and well-intentioned contrarians” (Barton 2018, 1). Nevertheless, in order to start somewhere, we might initially characterise contemporary artistic research in performance as a subfield within artistic research, encompassing a highly diverse range of research practices that conduct inquiry specifically through performance. Furthermore, we might also adapt Robin Nelson’s account of practice as research in the creative arts, in order to suggest that artistic research in performance “involves a research project in which [performance] practice is the key method of inquiry and where, in respect of the arts, a [performance] practice . . . is submitted as substantial evidence of a research inquiry” (Nelson 2013, 8–9, emphasis added). For Brad Haseman (2006), artistic research in performance is “research into performance . . . by means of performance” (148); it posits performance as both a method for knowledge-production and as a form of knowledge in itself. Indeed Schultis (2019) suggests that the real novelty of artistic research in performance in the wider context of academic research lies “not so much in its methods . . . but in its expressive outputs” (p. 340). That is, he suggests that while “many different types of research involve carrying out embodied actions,” the specific innovation of artistic research in performance “is to call into question the forms in which knowledge and understanding can be expressed” (Schultis 2019, 340, emphasis original). Artistic research in performance has been advocated for as an “umbrella concept” that might be used to refer to “a landscape of various approaches to knowledge production in performing arts” (Arlander 2009, 77). That is, while individual practitioners or companies might orient themselves and their research in relation to a specific methodological approach, such as “practice as research,” there is perhaps a growing sense of the value of more “congregate” terms—such as artistic research in performance—to allow for the location of shared characteristics across practices without meaning to erase their differences (Barton 2018, 6). As such, in the remainder of this article, I will adopt the terminological conventions recently proposed by Bruce Barton (2018): using “artistic research in performance” (hereafter ARP) to describe a range of practices, but also citing, as appropriate, the specific methodological terms used by the researchers I am referencing in brackets, for example, (sp. PaR), in the case of practice as research. As in other areas of artistic research, there is something of a sense of terminological exhaustion in the field at times: an exhaustion in the face of a seemingly endless proliferation of terms and acronyms produced to support our concepts of and capacity to distinguish between a variety of modes of relationship between “performance,” “research,” and “practice.” These include: artistic research in performance (ARP); Performance as Research (PAR); and practice as research (PaR) in performance; as well as practice research, practice-based research (PBR), research-based practice, practice-led research, performative research and so forth. Certain terms are more prominent than others in different national contexts—in the United Kingdom for

150

Chapter 10

instance, “practice as research” remains more common than “artistic research” in part on account of the role of the former terminology in the national research evaluation exercise known as the “REF.”6 However, as Barton (2018) has recently discussed, the benefits of a “congregate concept” such as ARP includes the extent to which it enables the consideration of “global commonalities among its constituent practices while respecting the distinctiveness of each” (p. 6). That is, for example, without wishing to lose sight of the specificity of particular national struggles, such a concept might also support a broader, international conversation about the legitimacy and value of artistic research relative to other forms in ways that allow for the consolidation of thinking, sharing of strategies, strengthening of solidarity and so forth. Barton (2018) speaks of his own “effort to enclose PAR within an embrace that also includes the many orientations towards knowledge discovery/creation with which it is often affiliated” (3). What Is Performance? The idea of performance has been widely theorised, particularly in and by thinkers working in the field of Performance Studies (Schechner 1988; Phelan 1993; Carlson 1996; McKenzie 2001; Schneider 2011) not only with respect to the performing arts but as an organising concept with theoretically unlimited application: “anything and everything can be studied as performance.” Even within the relatively narrow confines of the arts, “performance” is a notoriously slippery term used to categorise an enormously diverse range of practices—constantly undergoing shifting modes of relationship to other related categories such as dance, theatre, music, film, live art, and media art. At times in its history, strong distinctions have been drawn between theatre and performance—for instance in the context of the emergence of Performance Studies as a distinct discipline from the 1980s onwards, as well as in infamous statements by practitioners like Marina Abramović seemingly seeking to establish a strict distinction between the inauthentic representations of the theatre and the real actions of performance art. In turn, both “the performative turn” across the humanities and the growth of Performance Studies from Richard Schechner’s (1988) broad spectrum definition of performance—which positions performing arts practices on a continuum of activities that also encompasses sports, rituals and the enactment of social roles in everyday settings (among other things)—continues to focus interrogation on the relationship between performance and life, between the performative arts and performativity as a feature of social behaviour. Whether in terms of liveness, the presence of an audience, or of a (specifically human) actor, attempts to secure any essential and necessary conditions for performance are usually quickly subject to contestation in a manner that keeps the contemporary field of performance practice and research itself a lively and enlivening territory in which to work. In the brief presented to the authors of this book, the editors suggested that: “Even if fundamentally cross- and transdisciplinary, artistic research happens at the concrete level of specific artistic practices, emerging from particular disciplines,”



Artistic Research and Performance 151

including performance. However, we might question to what extent performance constitutes a “discipline.” Or again, it is perhaps worth noting that, historically, the field of performance has often liked to think of itself as inherently unruly with respect to disciplinary structures, as defined by its resistance to definition, or as an inclusive space for those practices that have been squeezed out or failed to find a home elsewhere. Specific artistic practices that might choose to align themselves with the category of “performance” can do so from a wide range of disciplinary positions, including those who come to performance from backgrounds in drama and theatre, literature and creative writing, dance and movement, fine/visual art and performance art, music and sound, film and new media. Despite this breadth of application, it has also been argued that the concept of performance regardless of “its allegiance to embodiment, prevents us from fully grasping the potential of embodied experimentation” (Spatz 2018, 210). As Ben Spatz (2018) has recently discussed, “The distinction between ‘performance as research’ and ‘practice as research’ is usually glossed as a regional difference with little conceptual substance.” However, in contrast, Spatz draws attention to the distinction of lineage between “practice” and “performance” —and indeed to argue for the greater radicality embedded in the notion of the former (Spatz 2018, 209). For Spatz, that is, despite the theoretical possibilities of the broad-spectrum definition of performance, the concept of “performance as research” rather than “practice as research” centripetally draws the field back to “theatre and theatrical dance” as well as “towards representation and the idea of the public,” rather than allowing it to more freely and fully pursue “a concern with embodiment and embodied practice” (Spatz 2018, 211) including even “the most intimate, private-seeming, inward-directed” activities (Spatz 2018, 212). The proposal is that the concept of practice (rather than performance) as research might lead the field more fully into conversation with activities such as martial arts, healing and ritual as well as other domains of performative social behaviour in ways that are promised but not yet often actually produced as a practical component of Performance Studies (Spatz 2018, 210). At the Boundary between Performance and Philosophy Paulo de Assis (2018) has been keen to insist that: “Artistic research is not to be confused with ‘research on the arts,’ or research on aesthetic matters, or research about the arts. Artistic research is not,” he argues “a subdiscipline of musicology, art history or philosophy. It is a specific field of activity where practitioners actively engage with and participate in discursive formations emanating from their concrete artistic practice” (p. 12). And of course this is correct according to the conventional ways in which philosophical aesthetics has been performed: often as if from a position of distance and authority outside the arts as object rather than source of knowledge. However, this is not to say that artistic research in performance could not be a subdiscipline of philosophy; and indeed the emergence of the field of Performance Philosophy is one site where such a practice is emerging. That is, my own particular

152

Chapter 10

interest as a contributor to this field is in how artistic research might shift the boundaries between the disciplines of Philosophy and Performance—challenging Philosophy to attend to the implications of its own performativity, and to rethink its tendency to philosophically disenfranchise or to assert itself in a position of epistemological authority in relation to the arts. The overlap of concerns here becomes particularly apparent in the writings of those like Estelle Barrett (2007) who suggests that “artistic practice be viewed as the production of knowledge or philosophy in action” (p. 13). This cross-disciplinary practice has historical precedent. While there are “artists” who conduct and present research in and as performance, there have also been researchers from across a wide range other fields such as anthropology and sociology, who have engaged with performance as both a method and form of research. This cross-disciplinary engagement was indeed a defining feature of the emergence of Performance Studies as a distinct discipline from the 1980s onwards, with figures such as Dwight Conquergood (1985) developing methods of “performance ethnography” and producing research output forms such as storytelling performance. In this particular chapter, I am going to focus on performance-based research produced by practitioners working in the arts; but even brief reference to this other area of practice raises interesting questions pertinent to existing debate about which research or whose research counts as “artistic” and on what grounds. This work also invites reflection on the varied, contextually specific nature of the relationship between the professional creative industries and the so-called amateur arts, or between the art world and community arts practices—boundaries that are perpetually being challenged and rethought by practitioners not least since the growth of “relational aesthetics” and “socially engaged” practice as dominant tropes within the artworld context, as well as in relation to the history of “applied theatre” (performance with and for particular communities and in relation to specific institutional settings such as schools, prisons, hospitals). The idea of writing, theorising or philosophising from rather than about performance practice has been under development for some time. Writing in the early noughties before ARP (sp. PaR) had really taken hold in the UK academic institutional context at least, Zarrilli (2001) emphasises the importance of practical questions and the practitioner perspective as a source of insight, in relation to his own specific context of actor training. As distinct from theories of performance— produced from a position outside of practice—Zarrilli (2001) places emphasis on the “reflexive theorising generated out of processes of practice” itself (p. 36). As he notes, many Asian “modes of embodied practice, such as Zen meditation, Zeami’s treatises on Noh acting, and Patanjali’s yoga have [already] evolved paradigms of embodiment and experience articulated from the ‘inside’ perspective of the practitioner” (Zarrilli 2001, 38 and 35). Zarrilli (2001) goes on to suggest how artistic research in performance—and particularly reflection coming from the “lived experience of the body generated in theatre/performance training” (p. 32)—has the capacity to make substantive con-



Artistic Research and Performance 153

tributions to our understanding of long-standing “philosophical” concerns, such as the mind-body problem: to foreground the ways in which “the mind-body issue is not simply a theoretical speculation but it is originally a practical, lived experience involving the mustering of one’s whole mind and body. The theoretical is only a reflection of this lived experience” (Yuasa quoted in Zarrilli 2001, 37). In turn, we might suggest that this account emphasises the need for philosophers not just to ask about the mind-body question—which is often still considered as supposedly universal—but to include their own particular bodies in that questioning, and to consider their own particular bodies as vehicles for that inquiry.

ARP AND THE PLURALISATION OF KNOWLEDGE Given that much ARP takes place within the context of academic institutions (or must otherwise engage with institutionalised criteria for research through relationships to funding bodies), questions of “institutional validation” have necessarily then been a major pre-occupation within the field (Barton 2018). For her part, my colleague Rachel Hann (2015) has suggested that we have now entered a “second-wave” of practice research, where concerns with institutional validation have given way to those of accessibility and quality. However, concerns with the perceived “value and legitimacy of performance as research” remain at the forefront for many (Arlander et al. 2018). As Pil Hansen (2018) emphasises, these debates are not simply “academic” or institutional, but clearly also political and ethical—insofar as they engage with questions of what counts as knowledge, who is recognised as producing it and according to whose criteria, how different knowledges are valued, long-standing issues of the relationship between power and knowledge and so forth. As Hansen identifies, researchers in ARP have put forward propositions that suggest that artistic research does not want to be merely included in established knowledge paradigms, or to be recognised as a valid site of research according to extant criteria, but to actually change or mutate the ways in which knowledge and research are understood and measured. No doubt, many within the field do want to see ARP receive greater institutional acceptance and recognition, but not—it seems—at any cost. As Hansen (2018) notes: Proposals are made for how the knowledge production of PAR approaches can be recognized independently of established knowledge criteria, in part by advancing what I read as an epistemology of enaction or interaction and a (n)ontology of emergence. With these terms I refer to the notion that phenomena are believed neither to exist ontologically in and of themselves nor to be accessible through objective methods of observation; they emerge relationally, through active and embodied engagement, which also is how they are accessed. In other words, the ontology is epistemological. Artist-researchers are, understandably, raising guards against more established knowledge paradigms in order to evolve research practices on these terms. (p. 33)

154

Chapter 10

Oftentimes, though, researchers might find themselves having to negotiate some complex tensions and incompatibilities between the dominant models of knowledge and epistemology that underpin institutional discourses, research councils and other funding bodies, and those of the philosophies with which they might be engaged through the research itself. Specifically there is a conflict between the broadly representationalist versus performative paradigms: wherein the former construes knowledge as a more or less accurate representation of an objective reality by a transcendent subject, and the latter posits the performative production of things by their ways of knowing and being known and therefore construes knowledge-production as an immanent material part of the same reality which it might seek to represent. For instance, the very notion of a “contribution to knowledge”—which seems to posit knowledge as some kind of cumulative stock (rather than as that which might be subject to forgetting) or as a sanctioned canon (rather than as that which remains relentless subject to contestation, including in terms of the very possibility of “knowledge” itself in any representational sense)—might be intrinsically problematic to research projects working with other philosophical paradigms. Similarly, researchers have developed differing stances relative to the demand to translate the plurality of modes of knowing that might be operative in an ARP project—such as embodied knowledge—into a discursive form. Haseman (2006), for instance, has called for a strong resistance to such obligations. As Barton discusses, Haseman points to the ways in which an understanding of ARP (sp. performance as research) as a performative paradigm leads to the insistence that “people who wish to evaluate the research outcomes also need to experience them in direct (co-presence) or indirect (asynchronous, recorded) form,” rather than “written up” in an article, for instance (Haseman quoted in Barton 2018, 10). Since its beginnings, ARP has emphasised the need for change in how we understand knowledge per se—calling for a shift from knowledge singular to knowledges plural, from “one essential way of knowing, to multiple epistemologies” embodied in specific contexts (Zarrilli 2001, 43). Knowledge is not reducible to a singular, representational knowledge “of ” or “about” X; it also encompasses knowledges for and in understood as “active modes of knowing to be deployed in the process of a practice” (Zarrilli 2001, 43). Rather than simply rejecting any extant approaches though, Zarrilli, for instance, has long since been insisting on the need for “openended dialogical question of how our knowledges ‘about,’ ‘for,’ and ‘in’ [performance] continuously inform each other, and are not simplistically dichotomized” (Zarrilli 2001, 43). In this respect, he suggests that one ongoing aim of ARP (and perhaps also performance philosophy) should be to open up the dialogue between practical ways of knowing developed within the performing arts—such as those embodied in particular “methods” of acting, forms of choreography and movement, or in heightened states of consciousness—and those developed in the context of philosophy, whether as practical phenomenology, practical ethics. And yet, this call for dialogue is underpinned by an underlying determination to unseat absolutist models of knowledge as “possession” (and their attendant division of communities into the



Artistic Research and Performance 155

“haves” and “have nots”) in favour of a “pragmatic, context/activity-specific” model in which “knowledges can only be provisional . . . and are relatively open-ended and ‘subjective’” (Zarrilli 2001, 43). In this respect, among its “contributions to knowledge” (and bearing in mind our earlier caveats about this very idea), artistic research in performance is transforming the very idea of what knowledge is—whether in terms of the emphasis on knowledges plural, the elaboration of myriad ways of knowing, or explorations of the relationship between knowledge and its “others”: in terms of “not-knowing, or not-yet-knowing” (Borgdorff 2010), unknowing, unlearning, intuition, unconscious awareness and feeling. Researchers in ARP have offered multiple perspectives on how performance creates knowledges and what kinds of knowledges it creates—oftentimes articulated in the terms of extant philosophies from Gilbert Ryle’s knowhow/know-that distinction to the terms of contemporary cognitive science. This pluralisation of knowledges has been discussed in a panoply of terms, including but by no means limited to: notions of “tacit, haptic know-how,” “liquid knowing” and “hard” versus “soft” knowledge (Nelson 2013, 60); and “situated knowledge” (Hunter 2009, 152), including ongoing concern with the question of how insights belonging to one kind of knowledge might be expressed or “translated into other media” without being diminished or distorted by the logics of another (Piccini 2002, 239). In turn, in this way, as much as discourses around artistic research may borrow from philosophers like Bergson, Deleuze, and Heidegger in order to consider how we might think immanently alongside the unknown (rather than seeking to capture the real according to extant representational categories), it is surely also that ARP has an outstanding capacity to reciprocally inform Philosophy in this regard and contribute to an interdisciplinary understanding of how to perform such thought in practice. Among these concepts of knowledge, Nelson’s model for practice as research (2006, 2009, 2013) has been particularly influential—including in terms of the use it makes of Ryle’s distinction between experiential “know-how” and propositional “know-that”; or, between tacit and explicit knowledge. Emphasizing the plurality and interpenetration of knowledges engaged and generated in and as ARP (sp. PaR), Nelson’s model draws from Ryle to differentiate (but by no means declare discrete) “close-up, tacit, haptic know-how,” “the know-what of shared and corroborated soft knowledge” and “the harder know-that of established conceptual frameworks” (Nelson 2013: 60). However, ARP has perhaps also particularly contributed to advancing understandings of “embodied knowledge”: how we think through the body and “derive knowledge from doing and from the senses” rather than from some disembodied mind (Barrett and Bolt 2007, 1) in ways that clearly intersect with feminist notions of “situated knowledges” in wider humanities research (e.g., Haraway 1988). Julian Klein asserts that the knowledge accessed via ARP (sp. artistic research): “has to be acquired through sensory and emotional perception, through the very artistic experience from which it cannot be separated. Whether silent or verbal, declarative or procedural, implicit or explicit, artistic knowledge is, in each and every case, sensual and physical, ‘embodied knowledge.’ The knowledge for which artistic research

156

Chapter 10

strives is a felt knowledge” (Klein 2017). Notions of affect have also been valuable to the field. That is, researchers have identified that the kind of knowledge that ARP enacts might be best understood as operating affectively more so than as signification: that performance is a form of knowledge that shares its insights through what it does rather than what it means, or better perhaps, that the best way to understand what performance means and why it matters is through attending closely to what it does affectively. Two points of clarification: First, given this emphasis on plurality, I would not argue that performance bears a model of knowledge that is unique or essential to it which one might therefore take to be intrinsically opposed to or distinct from dominant institutional ways of knowing (which are not monolithic either). There is nothing inherent to performance—no essential property—that makes it intrinsically resistant to orthodox approaches to knowledge-production. Nevertheless, this does not negate the capacity of ARP (albeit by no means guaranteed) to resist and transform as well as reproduce current institutional practices and norms. Secondly, it seems important to remain vigilant to tendencies to position ARP as merely illustrative of extant philosophical models of knowledge. For instance, current discourses frame ARP as a means of knowing performance, suggesting that performance practice can know performance differently relative to, albeit in conversation with, historical and theoretical ways of knowing. Given this emphasis on the embodied and experiential nature of knowledge, ARP has also increasingly registered the need for decolonial approaches to practice as research: to understand and address how indigenous and colonised knowledges are held in the bodies of practitioner-researchers in performance, and how processes such as cultural appropriation and ethnocentrism but also decolonisation might operate in and through body-based training and performance practices (Gayatri 2018; Shah 2018). Informed by anti-racist activists and thinkers such as Sara Ahmed and Tada Hozumi, artistic researchers are considering their own roles in reinforcing and dismantling how systemic oppression operates at the level of the body.7 For example, I don’t know how (to decolonise myself ) (2018)—a recent ARP project made by Rajni Shah with Alex Tálamo and Victoria Hunt (2018) uses collaborative performance making to “ask what it would mean to decolonise the body, when the body has been tightly choreographed by colonial value-systems.” The project starts from the premise that colonisation was, is and continues to be embodied and therefore foregrounds the value of a performance-based approach to consider “how it dictates our patterns of movement, even physically shaping the body, before we have begun to move” (Shah, Tálamo, and Hunt 2018).8 In this respect, just as there are growing calls for a (long overdue) decolonisation of the academy per se—including in terms of curriculum, pedagogical approach and both explicit and implicit reinforcements of geopolitical hierarchies of knowledges— ARP is specifically concerned with how this relates to embodied knowledge: which embodied knowledges are taught, by and to whom, and to whom their insights are credited.



Artistic Research and Performance 157

Performing Not-Knowing: Artistic Research as Unlearning The idea of performance practice not only as a source of knowledge but as a site of unlearning also has both a long tradition and a contemporary purchase within the field of ARP. For instance, Zarrilli’s (2001) early work on actor and performer training draws from both European and Asian practices to consider unlearning in the sense of performance involving a stripping away of habits, clichéd forms of perception and action—at times, though not always, in the context of pursuing or uncovering some perceived “authenticity” or presence beneath. As Zarrilli posits, diverse cultural knowledge practices from Zen to Stanislavskian and Grotowskian actor training seek to inhabit new ways of thinking and being through subtractive processes of unlearning: often very hard-fought, embodied attempts to undo those behavioural norms which are “woven intimately into the very architecture of our nerve cells” (Austin quoted in Zarrilli 2001, 40). That is, just as practical bodily knowledge is not straightforwardly gained “as if it were accumulatable or quantifiable” (Zarrilli 2001, 40), nor is it easily lost or undone through some kind of one-off de-conditioning or conscious decision. Rather, the emphasis in ARP is on the inextricability of learning and unlearning as two tendencies within an ongoing process. In terms of more recent discourse on the issue of not knowing, we might note Henk Borgdorff ’s assertion that the “primary importance [of ARP-aligned research] lies not in explicating the implicit or non-implicit knowledge enclosed in art. It is more directed at not-knowing, or not-yet-knowing. It creates room for that which is unthought, that which is unexpected” (Borgdorff 2012, 173). Or again, as Barton (2018) has discussed, researchers in ARP are highly attuned to the complexities and challenges surrounding such affirmations of tacit knowledge, not-knowing and unlearning—not least in terms of the demands for the “findings” of research to be more readily and widely accessible, including to those who might potentially benefit outside the academy. While there is a distinction to be made between the ineffable or the unknowable versus that which might be otherwise known or known through different means, appeals to forms of knowing that cannot be readily articulated and shared through writing and documentation do raise concerns. To be clear, the interest in “not knowing” and in forms of knowledge that are not readily assimilable into words does not amount to reinforcing a well-established tendency towards anti-intellectualism or a romanticisation of the “mysteries” of practice that still persist in certain portions of the performing arts industries and the training contexts that support them. The “Oh, I don’t know, I just do it” mode of response to questions around approaches to performance is not the model here. As Zarrilli (2001) argues: “Such denials trivialise the kind of pragmatic/intuitive knowledges ‘for’ and ‘in’ that practitioners develop, and allow actors to indulge the romance of an anti-intellectual position in which ‘not knowing’ and/or experience are reified” (p. 44). To some extent, this anti-intellectualism could be understood to be systemic— for instance in UK conservatoire contexts where actors in training are often encouraged to “get out of their heads” (or not to “over-think” their practice, according to a reductive definition of what thinking is and where it happens).9 Likewise, Zarrilli

158

Chapter 10

(2001) references US professional industry contexts where “as Hollis Huston argues, it can be commercial suicide for an actor making his living in ‘The Business’ to admit to a life of theory” (p. 44).

WHERE DOES ARTISTIC RESEARCH IN PERFORMANCE TAKE PLACE? On Blurred Boundaries between the Academy and the Art World Although perhaps never quite “at home,” artistic research in performance takes place in multiple locations and the nature of the relationship between these various spaces of research is shifting—not least in terms of the increasing porosity of the academic and artistic worlds. Looking at the United Kingdom, for example, artists associated with leading performance companies (such as Forced Entertainment; Fevered Sleep; Blast Theory; Split Britches) hold and are increasingly taking up academic appointments in universities, sustaining their professional practice alongside contributing the research culture of the institution. In a manner that is by no means unique to performance, these developments take place in the context of changes within the wider sector of arts education, wherein formerly independent and/or private conservatoires (such as drama schools) and art schools have been increasingly become part of universities.10 In these contexts, there tends to be a distinction between those professional practitioners who were already working at conservatoires and art schools prior to their integration into university structures—who might now find themselves subject to demands to re-position their artistic practice “as research” (according to institutional definitions and criteria for the latter)—and those practitioners who have already “come through” the practice as research system, as it were. While cultures vary widely from institution to institution (for instance, in terms of whether practitioners have “research” as well as teaching included as part of their contract of university employment), this can lead to established practitioners already in post within institutions seeking to undertake PhDs by publication (sometimes in order to secure their status within university research cultures) as well as early-career practitioners choosing to do PhDs partly in the knowledge that this will be an increasingly expected criterion for employment in higher education.11 Although it may struggle to disentangle itself from being contextually determined by them, not all ARP literally takes place within academic institutions. That is, as the press release for the recent How to do things with performance project suggests: “Artistic research partly steps outside the academic environment and gives research a material form through performing arts, introducing it into public spaces in the midst of society.” Performance is perhaps particularly well equipped to offer models for how to conduct research in public and indeed with a range of publics according to the growing, cross-disciplinary interest in methods of “inclusive” or participatory research. For example, UK-based company Fevered Sleep recently undertook the first



Artistic Research and Performance 159

iteration of a project called Sheep Pig Goat (2017) which they described as “creative research studio.” Such practices suggest ways in which spaces of research might be temporary and transitory, popping up in specific locations and then moving on. Other examples of this might include: “Mobile Art Studio” (MAS), founded and directed by Shana MacDonald—a transitory creative lab space that brings art out of the gallery and into public participatory spaces. Both “Studio” and “Laboratory” models are understandably popular—as a means to transfer the traditional sites of creative processes into the public domain. In the case of the latter, the choice of term clearly signals the experimental nature of artistic research, but also makes specific reference in some cases to the history of laboratory theatre.12 This concern with how to perform research in public comes in the context of the increasing emphasis on “impact” at least by UK research council funders: a growing demand that publicly funded research demonstrate its benefit to “non-academic” as well as academic communities—its value for and potential to have a transformative effect on the thinking and practice of professionals in the creative arts (from individuals to companies and institutions) as well as on wider communities to whom it might be of interest, whether from the general public, government, third sector, and so forth. In some quarters, there is resistance to this agenda which is seen as instrumentalising research or as rendering implicitly unfundable forms of research which might construe themselves as too academically oriented, “technical” or discipline-specific to be made “accessible” to a non-academic audience. There is also a sense in which some academics are simply unprepared, untrained or unsupported to approach the kinds of community engagement work that are increasingly expected of them as researchers. In contrast to which, professional performance makers often represent an exceptional (though perhaps still largely unacknowledged) source of experiential knowledge and understanding not only of engaging audiences in the outcomes of research but also of working with diverse publics as collaborators in the research process itself. Doctoral Studies in AR and Their Documentation A great deal of activity, of course, takes place in the somewhat “hidden” territory occupied by doctoral researchers conducting their PhDs across a range of international institutions. As the recent ADiE project notes, artistic doctorates in performance are “an established qualification in some contexts, yet just emerging in others” and even in institutions where there is a relatively long tradition of supporting artistic PhDs, “there are few established guidelines for the field and artistic researchers are constantly (re-)forming the path even as they travel upon it” in terms of the “real complexities that this mode of research engenders in terms of its facilitation, support and outcomes” (ADiE). In terms of the UK context at least, the last two decades have seen an exciting shift in who is doing a PhD as we see more professional performance makers taking the decision to do a doctorate, often having done several years (in some cases decades)

160

Chapter 10

of work in a professional context before deciding to pursue a doctoral project underpinned by that extant practical knowledge and experience. While individuals’ reasons for doing this will obviously vary, perhaps two dominant motivations are: (1) the opportunity to reflect on practice in greater depth, in a more supportive and critically challenging environment, and over a longer period of time than might be afforded in conventional professional contexts, and (2) the value of a PhD as a qualification with respect to securing a longer-term position as an artistic researcher within an academic context. Of course, while exciting in terms of the new possibilities they offer to the wider teaching and research environment, these new PhD projects are not without their problems and challenges for those undertaking them—largely centred around the question of what constitutes the distinction between (professional) “practice” and “practice as research” (or between art and artistic research). These include a feeling of intimidation and restriction with respect to academic conventions: the sense that the knowledge gained in the professional context is somehow less valued than that derived from scholarship, or that the ways of thinking that belong to practitioners’ processes are being measured relative to a new and not always explicit set of standards that belong to other forms of academic practice. There are tensions around the relationship between the researchers’ historical practice which may not have been explicitly undertaken in a research context (framing itself as a mode of inquiry or pursuing a particular research question, for instance) and the new work being done for the PhD which nevertheless can rarely be divorced from the past practice from which it emerged. Furthermore, among the core concerns being interrogated in the field include the question of to what extent and by what means performance’s knowledge can be shared (according to the requirements of dominant current definitions of what constitutes research). Questions of documentation and dissemination have been present in ARP since its earliest manifestations; and many in the field would agree “documentation and dissemination of PaR are vital if the practice is to function in its capacity as research” (Bucknall 2018, 71). According to Nelson’s oft-cited model, for example, “documentation and complementary writings” must form an essential part of any fully realised ARP (sp. PaR) project—serving as one key procedure through which the “know-how” of a creative practice is made manifest into forms of “know-that” (Nelson 2013, 70). As Nelson puts it: “My model for PaR, while fully recognizing the importance of close-up, tacit, haptic know-how, seeks a means to establish as fully as possible the articulation of ‘liquid knowing,’ and a shift through intersubjectivity into the know-what of shared and corroborated soft knowledge, in turn resonating with the harder know-that of established conceptual frameworks” (Nelson 2013, 60). Barton (2018) suggests that the requirement for research to meet criteria of “documentation, dissemination, and utility through transferability” presents particular challenges for the performing arts given “their reliance on embodied practice, interpretive subjectivity, and immediate experience” (p. 7). Indeed, he argues that Peggy Phelan’s (1993) now canonical ontology of performance as disappearance has “pro-



Artistic Research and Performance 161

vided both an enduring conceptual pivot for artistic practice and a dogged impediment in the process of securing ARP’s place in the academy” (Barton 2018, 7). That said, contemporary practitioner-researchers continue to take this idea to mark a site of resistance or as an opportunity to transform the institutional models of research rather than seeking to mold their practice to existing norms. This resistant, transformative strategy is risky, of course—whether in the context of PhD examination, applying for research funding, or being subject to forms of research assessment. But it is the kinds of calculated risks being taken by students such as Nicola Singh (2016) and Rajni Shah (2018)—to name just two recent doctoral projects in performance that I have had the privilege to come into contact with—that effect real change in institutional modes of thought and practice: offering new (albeit often “hidden”) models for what a PhD might look like or how knowledge might be performed. That these radical projects do indeed remain “hidden” (or “private,” to recall the issues raised by Spatz 2018 earlier) is precisely one of the risks they take (in resisting conventional modes of dissemination or refusing to offer up creative “products” for the purposes of evaluation). But it could also be that this is positively received as a productive challenge to publishers and other research platforms in terms of prompting them to invent new ways to support artistic researchers to reach relevant communities without compromising the specific quality of event through which that knowledge needs to be performed. For example, Rajni Shah’s (2018) doctoral project strikes me as radical to the extent that it exposed the tensions between the processuality of ARP and the demands that research make itself available to (“external”) examination, evaluation and review—specifically in the PhD context, but clearly with ramifications beyond that context too. In the two core practical projects that make up her PhD—Lying Fallow and Experiments in Listening—Shah essentially refuses to provide “the resolution of ‘a performance’” because, as she describes: “Instead of focusing on ‘performance,’ I wanted to examine those activities that held performance in place: listening, gathering, the act of invitation. I became fascinated by the work that is usually passed over or taken as ‘given’ when we, as artists, make and present theatre and performance, and the political and ethical impact of passing over that work” (p. 17). Lying Fallow, for instance, was concerned to investigate “the act of gathering—a gathering of bodies and a gathering of attention—that characterises being-in-audience” but without a “show or performance to gather ‘around’” (Shah 2018, 18). In this way, as Shah describes, the project “was in some senses ‘inexaminable’ because it included no element that the examiners could ‘observe’ as outsiders.” However, she ultimately agreed that Lying Fallow could be classified as “practice-based research” for the purposes of the PhD examination—despite her own preference to consider the project “100% practice” including its written component (Shah 2018, 14n., emphasis added). For her part, Nicola Singh’s 2016 doctoral project was submitted in the form of a “thesis by performance”: a text for performance in the context of a PhD viva. As Singh describes: this is “a thesis that can only be realized through live readings that present knowledge production as something done in and around bodies and their

162

Chapter 10

contexts. The aim has been to reposition institutional and educational knowledge in an intimate, subjective relationship with the body, particularly the researcher’s own body” (Singh 2016, 3). Despite the growing demand that PhDs are made immediately available on institutional online repositories, Singh’s thesis does not exist in the form of a written text; “only an introductory statement and two appendices are available outside of a live reading” (Singh 2016, 3). Documentation strategies have clearly moved well beyond simply pointing a camera at processes and performances, adopting a broad range of multimodal approaches, self-reflexively wary of an over-reliance on video and indeed visual documentation versus the need to invent the form of documentation that best suits the nature of the knowledge it aims to share. These forms can vary wildly from the handmade and low-tech, to the invention of new forms of visualisation such as the “animated infographic films” created by a recent project “to invite viewers to enter the choreographers studio” and engage with it “kinaesthetically and empathetically” (Jürgens and Fernandes 2018). In this respect, researchers often seek performative (or enactive) rather than representational approaches to documentation and dissemination—considering not how to represent some absent original or “conclusive knowledge,” but how dissemination and documentation might be approached as specific sites in which knowledges might be enacted anew relationally, rather than as vehicles for the consumption of knowledge already produced and fixed (Hansen 2018, 38). Issues and conventions of documentation are also being creatively investigated and challenged at doctoral level—in contexts where students and supervisors continue to invent new strategies for approaching PhD examination. For example, the UK-based recent graduate, Yaron Shyldkrot (2019) takes a sophisticated approach to documenting and sharing the findings of his practice research inquiry into the decidedly unphotogenic practice of “theatre in the dark” via a hyperlinked text and online portfolio comprising “sound samples, videos, images, sketches, recorded reflections and thick descriptions.” As Shyldkrot (2019) helpfully suggests: “if the purpose of PR’s documentation is to make tacit knowledge explicit,” then it is not only that documentation needs to begin with the performance-making process itself (rather than belatedly at the end of that process), but that “it ought to be thought of through the lens of the practice: thinking about the document as another manifestation of techniques used in the practical work.” Writing and Publishing Approaches to the relationship between ARP and writing (specifically notions of “textual commentary”) remain alert to the risk of sustaining or falling foul of “linguistic imperialism” (Thompson 2011, 2). That is, for some, a concern remains that “[t]he work done by the artist is never enough on its own to constitute research, the argument runs. It is only once the artwork has been categorized and placed within the comparisons and contrasts enabled by historical, theoretical and aesthetic dis-



Artistic Research and Performance 163

course that it can be accepted as a contribution to knowledge” (Cazeaux 2017, 2). As Cazeaux reports, this concern is particularly articulated by artist Jon Thompson (2011) who suggests that “creative works, no matter how highly esteemed, cannot in themselves be regarded as outputs of research, They can only become so in association with explanatory or contextualizing text” (p. 2). And indeed, as Joanna Bucknall (2018) discusses, this is particularly at issue in the UK context in which neither the academy (in terms of doctoral projects, for instance) nor funding bodies allow for performance to function as “stand-alone research output or outcome” (Bucknall 2018, 54). In terms of written documentation, artistic researchers in performance will often find it productive to inhabit more than one “voice” in writing—whether in the context of doctoral researchers experimenting with how to present the written part of their thesis submission or for others exploring the variable rigidity of the conventions imposed on writing for publication in academic contexts. Here, as elsewhere, the boundaries between the academic and artistic are often uncertain and indeed are changing—in ways that can be productive but also destabilising. Journals vary, for instance, in the extent to which they might welcome forms of writing that performatively enact the ideas under investigation, rather than or in addition to using writing in a more conventional sense as a form of commentary on practice. In my experience of supervising doctoral projects in performance, students often struggle to accept the academic legitimacy of using “their own voice” as practitioners, relative to a voice that speaks according to the established conventions of citations or according to a vocabulary borrowed from a theoretical authority. It often remains a challenge to locate (and speak confidently in) a language or mode of writing for artistic research that has its own sense of “rigour”: that speaks with and alongside practice with a precision and care in relation to its contextual specificity, rather than overwhelming it with an imported conceptual framework or missing out on giving voice to the detail of the practice altogether in favour of demonstrating a parallel labor of scholarship. The notion of writing itself “as performance” is important here, insofar as it can allow researchers to treat writing as an integral part of their practice rather than as an external representation of it. This is not to disavow the potential benefits of the latter—either for the practitioner’s own understanding of their work or for its communication to others. However, artistic researchers’ use of writing as itself a performative form has already presented and continues to present some important provocations and creative challenges to academic writing—where questions of form and style (and how form and style enact ideas) are often still neglected relative to the idea of writing as the clear communication of content. Academic publishers will need to change their practices and ways of working if they want to serve as platforms for artistic research publications—including in terms of finding more flexible and pluralist approaches to questions of layout and formatting, and potentially rethinking economic models in order to allow for greater attention to the visual and design aspects of books in terms of color images, digital as well as print publication and so forth. As more and more performance makers

164

Chapter 10

undertake PhDs, for instance, and then seek to develop their projects for publication, academic publishers need to change to accommodate the new demands artistic research presents. At the same time, these developments are likely to have a reciprocal impact on academic researchers in performance who may well be prompted to rethink the role that images play in their work or to question—once more—to what extent academic conventions genuinely enable or restrict our ways of thinking and knowing performance. Academic book publishing has arguably been slower to adapt to this changing demand. While the PARIP project was published with an accompanying DVD, it still remains surprisingly uncommon for academic research publications (rather than textbooks) to have an online component or even a substantial use of images, despite the growing interest by artistic researchers in forms such as video articles. Daniel Sack’s Imagined Theatres (2017) project is an interesting case study in this regard.13 However, it remains the case that the most formally creative and performative examples of books and other forms of publication are those produced by independent publishers rather than mainstream academic presses. In the United Kingdom, Unbound and the Live Art Development Agency has played a leading role here: providing new models for how performance-based knowledge might be enacted in book form. There are already some publications seeking to provide platforms for the plural ways of thinking and knowing that operate in the field of artistic research in performance and indeed academic journals in the field are increasingly adapting their structures in order to include more substantive online projects and give greater space to audiovisual forms—whether as embedded into standard articles or published as stand-alone outputs such as video articles. These include the Journal for Artistic Research; the Interventions section of Contemporary Theatre Review initially conceived and edited by Theron Schmidt; the Journal of Embodied Research—a peer-reviewed videographic journal launched in 2017 which focuses on the “dissemination of embodied knowledge through the medium of video”;14 and the Performance Philosophy journal (particularly in its [Margins] and Re-View sections which have previously included sound pieces). From its inception, Performance Research journal included “Artists Pages” alongside more conventional articles, and has always made deliberate space for and given priority to visual thinking as well as the written word. Artistic research is also changing the publishing landscape in terms of the increasing demand for journals dedicated to “practitioner voices” such as the Theatre, Dance and Performance Training journal launched in 2010.

ARTISTIC RESEARCH AND PERFORMATIVITY However, a consideration of the relationship between artistic research and performance clearly cannot end with the question of the role that practitioners working within the performing arts have played in the development of artistic research. Rather, it must also consider the key role that notions of “the performative” and per-



Artistic Research and Performance 165

formativity have played and continue to play in the evolution of artistic research, not only for those working with performance practices (conventionally understood) but across the field more generally. This concern with performativity draws inspiration from a wide range of philosophical sources and contexts: from J. L. Austin to new materialism. For example, the importance of performativity for artistic research is enacted by the Austinian reference in the name of the aforementioned research project, How to do things with performance15—albeit that this project is more concerned with updating or advancing the discourse on performativity via notions of agential realism taken from new materialist thinkers. Judith Butler’s (1988) influential work on gender performativity and its characterisation of the performative as a tendency operating between the two poles of repetition and resistance in relation to norms has of course been hugely influential. In turn, Theatre and Performance Studies scholars (Parker and Sedgwick 1995; Reinelt 2002; Jackson 2004) have done extensive work to produce expanded accounts of the performative—building on but then moving considerably beyond the specific contexts of concern in Austin’s accounts of speech acts and their attendant focus on spoken utterance and the word, in order to consider what performance does as an affective and time-based art (Cvejić 2015). Influence has also been drawn from new attention given to performativity within the work of contemporary thinkers like François Laruelle (Nauha 2017)—whose critique of Deleuze and Badiou (for failing to do as they say including with respect to the supposed levelling of the epistemological hierarchy between philosophy and the arts) places new and pressing demands on contemporary aesthetics (re-visioned by Laruelle as “non-standard aesthetics”). In turn, for their part, researchers such as Brad Haseman and Barbara Bolt have proposed a consideration of artistic research as a performative paradigm (Bolt 2009, 2016; Haseman 2006). Bolt (2016) argues: [T]he performative needs to be understood in terms of the performative force of art, that is, its capacity to effect “movement” in thought, word and deed in the individual and social sensorium. These movements enable a reconfiguration of conventions from within rather than outside of convention. Seen in the context of other research paradigms— namely the qualitative and quantitative paradigms of research—I will argue that what is at stake are the possibilities that a performative paradigm offers a new perspective on research not just in the social sciences and humanities, but also in the sciences. (p. 130)

This is a paradigm which we might parse in Deleuzian terms, then: wherein research is conceived as that which produces encounter rather than recognition, and as that which forces (new) thought upon those who encounter it rather than being readily assimilated into existing knowledge and understanding. This is—of course—to ask a lot of both the producers and recipients (or co-producers) of artistic research and may, in the end, be an aim that such paradigms aspire towards in terms of degree than kind (or more accurately in terms of evaluating practices according to the degree or quantity to which they enact this mode of qualitatively new thinking).

166

Chapter 10

There are resonant parallels for this thinking, and the sense of a need for change in approaches to knowledge-production often motivating them, in the emerging field of Performance Philosophy, wherein increasing attention is being paid not just to what discourses like Philosophy say, but how they say it and what that saying does in specific contexts of embodied thinking. Indeed the titles of the various Performance Philosophy biennial gatherings (which moved from “What Is Performance Philosophy?” in 2013 to “What Can Performance Philosophy Do?” in 2015 and “How Does Performance Philosophy Act?” in 2017) have also sought to shift the emphasis of discussion away from questions of essence (or constituted identity) to those of performativity (and the ongoing process of identity constitution) in terms of how we might frame our considerations of the field and its associated methods.16 Bolt (2009) has also narrated the emergence of a performative turn within the creative arts—in which numerous modes of art making, including but also beyond the performing arts, have come to be described as “performative.” For her part, Bolt (2009) raises concerns about the expansive reach of this turn, suggesting that: In the uncritical application of the term across the creative arts, there is now a tendency to call any art production performative, whether it is a theatre production, a performance, a sculpture, a film or a painting. But can we make the assumption that just because a practice brings into being what it names (say a performance or photograph) that it is performative? Has the term performativity been reduced to hollow rhetoric that is evacuated of its original meaning and power? (n.p., emphasis added)

In response, Bolt (2009) goes on to argue that Theatre and Performance Studies (and indeed the creative arts more broadly) needs to “go back to the origin of the concept”—which she locates in the work of J. L. Austin. In contrast, my own inclination is less to reinforce some notion of performativity’s “original meaning”—for instance, as a practice that brings into being what it names, or such that Austin or Butler are reinstalled as the (philosophical) authorities that enable the identification of practices as performative “in the proper sense.” Indeed, it seems a bizarre contradiction to suggest that artistic research can only rigorously and “successfully argue for a performative paradigm in the creative arts” by remaining “true to Austin’s elaboration of performativity”! Such a model seems to risk calling for artistic practices to more faithfully construe themselves as determined by existing ideas of performativity rather than producing new understandings of performativity itself in and as performance practice. This is not to deny, or to dispute the value of seeking a specificity for understanding performativity—but to seek to position ARP as a source of this specificity as much as philosophy. In contrast, Bolt’s attempt to narrow the application of the notion of performativity problematically reintroduces false distinctions between the representational and the performative—for instance, by way of dichotomies between theatre and performance. Her use of Mike Parr’s performance work is problematic in this respect, of



Artistic Research and Performance 167

which it is suggested: “The performance did not represent something that existed in the world, it did not express an inner essence nor did it produce an artifact that could be bought and sold on the art market. It produced real effects in the world” (Bolt 2009, n.p.). This is contra a more immanentist and materialist approach wherein all practices (actions, words, concepts, etc.) are considered performative albeit in different ways and to varying degrees. According to the latter, all things produce material effects in the world, all things act on and in the world including the supposedly immaterial process of thought itself. Concepts such as gender and race, for instance, clearly function as material realities no matter how much we also know that they are “just ideas.” They are ideas that have—as Harvey Young (2013) has put it with respect to race—got under our skin and “into our blood” (Young 2013, 68), and are repeatedly manifest in the body, daily, not just as “projections” onto it. Even artistic works that appear to re-present an existing world—that conceive themselves as representations or seek to reproduce or capture some reality—inevitably also involve production. Or, as Deleuze puts it, every imitation involves a becoming in a manner that refuses any strict distinction (or fundamental difference in kind) between representational and non-representational art. Likewise, in terms of audience—in terms of perception or reception, as it were—all works can be more or less approached in terms of what they mean (or are understood to stand for, representationally) or in terms of what they do: affectively, performatively and so forth. It may well be that some modes of practice appear to demand this performative engagement more than others or appear to resist representational readings more than others, but the capacity to “read” even the most resistantly asemiotic material surely remains, just as performative affects may well sneak in under the radar of even the most representationalist approaches to the production of meaning. Now it might be objected that this account is merely another instance of an unhelpful conflation of “performance” and “performativity.” And indeed, Performance Studies (at least Schechner’s brand of it) does suggest that all art forms—including ostensive objects like paintings and sculpture—can be considered “as performance,” in a manner that aligns to some extent with bringing a process philosophy (like Bergson’s or Deleuze’s) to bear on these forms. All art becomes event, process, durational: what was per/conceived as relatively static object or subject can be seen anew as ongoing process, flux, or change; what was considered in terms of a relation between an object and a subject can be seen anew as a constitutive process through which the appearance of such entities are temporarily produced (and re-produced). And here, whether in terms of seeing “as performance” or “as process” (sub specie durationis), I do not mean to suggest a purely conceptual decision or the application of a theoretical “lens” to aesthetic analysis. Rather, this “seeing as” is in itself an embodied practice or performance—for instance (as artistic researchers “avant la letter” like Allan Kaprow have proposed) according to the cultivation of new modes and speeds of attention (see Cull 2011).

168

Chapter 10

HOW IS ARTISTIC RESEARCH IN PERFORMANCE UNDERSTOOD AND THEORISED? ARP has been understood and theorised with reference to a wide range of philosophical and theoretical resources from phenomenology (e.g., Zarrilli 2004; Ehrenberg 2019) to cognitive science (e.g., Zarrilli 2001; May 2015). As Clive Cazeaux (2017) has usefully traced, there is a long tradition of assigning epistemic or metaphysical power to art in the history of philosophy—from Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, to Heidegger, Deleuze and Badiou—in a manner that provides resources to the articulation of artistic research. In this respect, it is no coincidence that ARP has particularly located theoretical resources to support its concerns from materialist and processbased philosophies of immanence such as Bergson, Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari (e.g., Assis 2018; Fleishman 2012; Midgelow 2012; Spatz 2015) and more recently Laruelle (Nauha 2017). If performance is a “time-based art” (albeit that the performative paradigm calls into question the extent to which this is in any way particular to the performing arts), then its affinity to philosophies that foreground temporality and duration will come as no surprise. But it is also that Deleuze’s call for an immanent philosophy born of encounters with the arts, rather than the application of philosophy to them, resonates effectively with the location of artistic research within a wider performative turn foregrounding “the performative force of art, that is, its capacity to effect ‘movement’ in thought” (Bolt 2016, 130). The Deleuzian concept of the encounter (beyond recognition), provides a useful framework to articulate the ways in which performance makes us think—albeit that we need to remain alert to the reification of this model in ways that risk trapping us back in the vicious circles of the application paradigm. That is, the concept of encounter must itself remain open to transformation and change—including by artistic research, rather than the latter merely serving as illustration of a fixed definition of the former. More broadly, there is—it seems for many—a fundamental sympathy here between, for instance, the temporal emphasis of performance and both Bergsonian and Deleuzian thought: a broadly shared worldview in terms of the primacy of material processes relative to products, or of movement to things moved; the emergent or bottom-up nature of creative production; the performative production of (always only relatively stable) identities rather than tracing performance back to an origin in an essential authorial self. (While I do not mean to suggest some kind of ontological consensus—for instance on the question of how dual tendencies towards difference and repetition, novelty and sameness are reconciled—we can, nevertheless, perhaps detect a degree of common orientation). And just as the Bergsonian idea of time as invention and change—the relentless production of novelty—continues to present a radical challenge to the task of philosophy (particularly insofar as it might continue to understand itself as somehow intrinsically bound up with the written word), so the idea of artistic research in performance as in a state of “perpetual emergence” rather than arrival, completion or fixity throws up not unconsiderable problems to how ARP articulates, comprehends and (re)presents itself.



Artistic Research and Performance 169

Nevertheless, recent writing in the field also suggests that the very specificity of ARP’s contribution to shifting research paradigms lies precisely in capacity to offer new solutions to the apparent tension between knowledge-production and the perpetual motion and becoming of that which we might seek to know. As Barton (2018) concludes: The suggestion that ARP has the potential to enhance and expand the epistemological horizons of legitimate knowledge discovery/creation is, by now, a familiar one, yet also one that warrants both regular repeating and persuasive qualification. Such qualification is found, I believe, in the recognition that both the processes and the products of ARP are animate, their value located in, accomplished through, and measurable by qualities of movement (shift, emergence, effort, force, e/affect, etc.), rather than by the distance traveled or the destination reached. These observations do not, necessarily, in themselves solve the “hard sell” of research validity, but they do offer a conceptual framework for the kinds of specificity to which ARP practitioners can productively attend in their efforts towards articulation. (p. 16)

As in other areas of theatre and performance research, new materialism is becoming an increasingly influential theoretical paradigm in ARP contexts—for example, as foregrounded by How to do things with performance? According to its self-description, the aim of the project was “to investigate how ‘performance’ can be understood . . . as a new materiality, as a presence . . . in an international and multilingual context where words, documentations and practices are understood differently but shared online.” Specifically, the project also identified a motivating purpose as being “to update the theory of performativity in relation to new materialism”—moving beyond the question of how one might do things with words, to how matter (understood non-reductively as complex, self-organising process) might act or perform—including in the case of supposedly “inanimate” objects. But if new materialism is informing how artistic research is theorised (in the conventional sense of operating as a theoretical framework for an analysis of practice) it is also that it is being used as a material for practice itself: for instance according to the notion of “expanded reading” and feminist pedagogy explored by UK-based artist-researcher, Harriet Plewis which foregrounds the role of bodily knowledge and understandings in the engagement with (philosophical) texts. In her project, Reading Room: Meeting the Universe Halfway (2017), Plewis and her collaborators (including Singh) sought to turn Barad’s book “into a room.”17 In this respect, it is not only that new materialism might help us to understand ARP (in ways that can position Philosophy in a legitimising role), but that also, vice versa, ARP can offer understandings of new materialism.

NOTES 1.  To provide some early clarification, I need to note that I am not using the term “artistic research in performance” to refer only or primarily to music performance. Rather, as I will

170

Chapter 10

explain further in what follows, I am using the term “performance” in the sense broadly assigned to it through Performance Studies including in relation to the performing arts in a wider, interdisciplinary sense.   2.  PARIP was a UK-based research project based at the University of Bristol, led by Professor Baz Kershaw with a team of researchers including Ludivine Allegue, Angela Piccini, and Caroline Rye. The project ran from 2000 to 2006 and has been described as “one of the earliest and most influential research projects” in performance as research (Barton in Arlander et al. 2018, 4). While the phenomenon we might now agree to characterise as “artistic research in performance” clearly has no single point of origin, the PARIP project nevertheless marks a particular milestone insofar as it might be considered “the first major research initiative/enquiry for performing arts as research” (Kershaw in Arlander et al. 2018, xiii). PARIP was an ambitious project that produced a series of important workshops and large-scale conferences, a series of DVDs, a book, and a rich body of online resources. I worked as a Project Officer for PARIP in 2005—primarily working on the organisation of its final conference event. The website for the project is accessible here: http://www.bristol. ac.uk/parip/index.htm.  3. The “Performance as Research” Working Group within the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) held its first meeting in 2006 and was initially led by Baz Kershaw and Jacqueline Martin (Barton 2018, 1). The group meets annually at the IFTR conference and includes a publications subcommittee, working to support the production of publications like Performance as Research (2018) cited earlier.   4.  Barton (2018) discusses a number of other relevant groupings he has been involved in, including “the Practice-Based Research Study Circle at the Nordic Summer University in Northern Europe” and the “Articulating Artistic Research” Seminar at the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR) (Barton in Arlander et al. 2018, 6).   5.  This is clearly a highly partial list, reflective of an institutionalised Eurocentric perspective, which I hope to do more to address in future work on this and other topics within my research.   6. The REF (or, Research Excellence Framework) is the process of research assessment undertaken in the UK by four higher education funding bodies in order to allocate funding for research. It was first carried out—in its current format—in 2014, replacing the previous Research Assessment Exercise (or, RAE). For more information, see https://www.ref.ac.uk/ about/what-is-the-ref/.   7.  With thanks to Ben Spatz for pointing me to this work, interested readers can follow up on the “cultural somatics” practice of Tada Hozumi here: https://selfishactivist.com   8.  More information about the project is available here: http://performancespace.com. au/2018-experimental-choreographic-residency/.   9.  With thanks to PhD researcher and Laban practitioner-researcher, Juliet ChambersCoe for discussions around this topic and for sharing her reflections on many years of teaching in UK conservatoires. 10.  For example, Guildford School of Acting, where I am based, became part of the University of Surrey in 2010. 11.  Clearly a sense of fluidity between the boundaries of the artistic and academic worlds is not new. In terms of performance for instance, Harding and Rosenthal (2011) have discussed Richard Schechner’s success at traversing and bringing into dialogue his work across multiple spheres in the US context: as an experimental artist-practitioner, director of the avant-garde company The Performance Group, editor of the journal The Drama Review (TDR) and lead-



Artistic Research and Performance 171

ing figure in the emergence and subsequent institutionalisation of Performance Studies as a distinct discipline. 12.  See for example Ben Spatz’s Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow (2016–2018) project “Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Song-Action.” 13.  Edited by Sack, Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (2017) has taken multiple forms: as a book, a website and a series of live readings. See http://imaginedtheatres. com for the online aspect of the project. 14.  See the Journal of Embodied Research, https://jer.openlibhums.org. 15.  The title of the group is clearly a reference to the famous series of lectures delivered by J. L. Austin at Harvard in 1955 titled “How to do things with words,” as well as to the subsequent book of the same name. 16. These conferences are organised by and for the Performance Philosophy research network: an international and interdisciplinary community of researchers concerned with the intersection of performance and philosophy, broadly construed—including substantial numbers of artistic researchers. The concerns of the field overlap with those of artistic research in performance, particularly with respect to the sense of the need to pluralise our understandings of what counts as thought and knowledge, and to seek alternative modes of knowledge sharing beyond the standard formats of academic conferencing. For more information about the network and its activities, see: http://www.performancephilosophy.org. 17.  As Plewis (2019) describes: “Over 8 weeks, 5 artist collaborators built an environment in the Eagle Building, Sunderland that offered up a ‘reading’ of philosopher-physicist Karen Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Existing as an experiment in expanded reading, this co-devised event attempted to both honour and go beyond an eyes-on-the-page approach to negotiating words and ideas. It was an opportunity to encounter Barad’s radical thoughts in a new way, privileging sensing, listening, and moving, and teasing out the cuts between nature and culture, toucher and touched, onlooker and object. It was a workshop-exhibition that, in its final week, invited visitors to spend time with/in the space and become co-readers of it. It marked the first step in my evolving investigation of expanded reading and collective exhibition-making.”

REFERENCES Arlander, Annette. 2009. “Artistic Research: From Apartness to the Umbrella Concept at the Theatre Academy, Finland.” In Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies, edited by Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter, 77–83. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Arlander, Annette, Bruce Barton, Melanie Dreyer-Lude, and Ben Spatz, eds. 2018. Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact. London: Routledge. Assis, Paulo de. 2018. Logic of Experimentation: Reshaping Music Performance in and through Artistic Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Barrett, Estelle. 2007. “Introduction.” In Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Inquiry, 1–15. London: I.B. Tauris.
 Barrett, Estelle, and Barbara Bolt, eds. 2007. Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Inquiry. London: I.B. Tauris.


172

Chapter 10

Barton, Bruce. 2018. “Introduction I. Wherefore PaR? Discussions on a ‘Line of Flight.’” In Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact, edited by Arlander, Annette Arlander, Bruce Barton, Melanie Dreyer-Lude, and Ben Spatz, 1–19. London: Routledge. Bolt, Barbara. 2009. “A Performative Paradigm for the Creative Arts?” Working Papers in Art and Design. Available at: https://www.herts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/12417/ WPIAAD_vol5_bolt.pd. ­­———. 2016. “Artistic Research: A Performative Paradigm?” Parse Journal no. 3, 129–42. Borgdorff, Henk. 2010. “The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research.” In The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, edited by Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson, 44–63. London: Routledge. ­­———. 2012. The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Bucknall, Joanna. 2018. “The Daisy Chain Model: An Approach to Epistemic Mapping and Dissemination in Performance-Based Research.” In Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact, edited by Arlander, Annette Arlander, Bruce Barton, Melanie DreyerLude, and Ben Spatz, 50–74. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December): 519–31. Candy, Linda. 2006. “Practice Based Research: A Guide,” in Creativity and Cognition Studio Report, v. 1.0, November 2006: 3. Carlson, Marvin. 1996. Performance: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Cazeaux, Clive. 2017. Art, Research, Philosophy. London: Routledge. Conquergood, Dwight. 1985. “Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance.” Literature in Performance 5, no. 2, 1–13, DOI: 10.1080/10462938509391578. Cull, Laura. 2011. “Attention-Training: Immanence and Ontological Participation in Kaprow, Deleuze and Bergson.” In On Philosophy and Participation, edited by Laura Cull and Karoline Gritzner. Performance Research 16, no. 4, 80–91. Cviejić, Bojana. From Odd Encounters to a Prospective Confluence: Dance-Philosophy. Performance Philosophy, [S.l.], v. 1, p. 7–23, April 2015. ISSN 2057-7176. Available at http:// www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/article/view/29. Date accessed October 14, 2019. doi:https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2015.1129. Ehrenberg, Shantel. 2019. “Foregrounding the Imagination: Re-Reflecting on Dancers’ Engagement with Video Self-Recordings.” In Performance Phenomenology: To The Thing Itself, edited by Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly, and Matthew Wagner. Performance Philosophy book series. 133–63. London: Palgrave. Fleishman, Mark. 2012. “The Difference of Performance as Research.” Theatre Research International 37, no. 1, 28–37. Gayatri, Manola K. 2018. “PAR and Decolonization: Notemakings from an Indian and South African Context.” In Performance as Research. Knowledge, Methods, Impact, edited by Annette Arlander, Bruce Barton, Melanie Dreyer-Lude, and Ben Spatz, 170–84. London: Routledge. Hann, Rachel. 2015. “Practice Matters: Arguments for a ‘Second Wave’ of Practice Research.” https://futurepracticeresearch.org/2015/07/28/. Hannula, Mikka, Juha Souoranta, and Tere Vadén. 2014. Artistic Research: Methodology. Brussels: Peter Lang.



Artistic Research and Performance 173

Hansen, Pil. 2018. “Research-Based Practice: Facilitating Transfer across Artistic, Scholarly, and Scientific Inquiries.” Performance as Research. Knowledge, Methods, Impact, edited by Annette Arlander, Bruce Barton, Melanie Dreyer-Lude, and Ben Spatz, 32–49. London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn): 575–99. Harding, James, and Rosenthal, Cindy. 2011. The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Haseman, Brad. 2006. “A Manifesto for Performative Research.” Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy: Quarterly Journal of Media Research and Resources 118: 98–106. Hunter, Lynette. 2009. “Situated Knowledge.” In Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies, edited by Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter, 151–53. Houndsmills: Palgrave. Jackson, Shannon. 2004. Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Simon. 2009. “The Courage of Complementarity: Practice as Research as a Paradigm Shift in Performance Studies.” In Practice-as-Research: In Performance and Screen, edited by Ludivine Allegue, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw, and Angela Piccini, 18–33. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jürgens, Stephan, and Carla Fernandes. 2018. “Visualizing Embodied Research: Dance Dramaturgy and Animated Infographic Films.” Journal of Embodied Research 1(1), 3 (27:41). DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/jer.4. Kershaw, Baz, and Helen Nicholson. 2011. Research Methods in Theatre and Performance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kjørup, Søren. 2012. “Pleading for Plurality: Artistic and Other Kinds of Research.” In The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, edited by Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson, 24–43. London: Routledge. Klein, Julian. 2010. What is Artistic Research? https://www.researchcatalogue.net/ view/15292/15293. Klein, Julian. 2017. “What Is Artistic Research?” Journal for Artistic Research. https://jaronline.net/what-artistic-research. May, Shaun. 2015. Rethinking Practice as Research and the Cognitive Turn. London: Palgrave. Midgelow, Vida Lesley. 2012. “Nomadism and Ethics in/as Improvised Movement Practices.” Critical Studies in Improvisation 8, no. 1; https://doi.org/10.21083/csieci.v8i1.2001. McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge. Nauha, Tero. 2017. “A Thought of Performance.” Performance Philosophy 2, no. 2, 272–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.2276. Nelson, Robin. 2006. “Practice as Research and the Problem of Knowledge.” Performance Research 11, no. 4: 105–16. ­­———. 2009. “Modes of Practice-as-Research Knowledge and Their Place in the Academy.” In Practice-as-Research: In Performance and Screen, edited by Ludivine Allegue, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw, and Angela Piccini, 112–31. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ­­———. 2013. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies and Resistances. Houndmills: Palgrave.
 Parker, Andrew, and Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1995. Performativity and Performance. London: Routledge.

174

Chapter 10

Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London/New York: Routledge. Piccini, Angela. 2002. “An Historiographic Perspective on Practice as Research.” PARIP: Practice as Research in Performance 2001-2006. http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip/t_ap.htm. Plewis, Harriet. 2019. Loving Attention: Towards a Methodology of Expanded Reading: A Performative Case Study in Feminist Pedagogy as Exhibition Practice, unpublished PhD thesis submitted to the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, UK. Reinelt, Janelle. 2002. “The Politics of Discourse: Performativity Meets Theatricality.” SubStance, Special Issue: Theatricality 13, no. 2/3: 201–15. Sack, Daniel. 2017. Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage. London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard. 1988. “Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach.” TDR 32, no. 3 (Autumn): pp. 4–6. ­­———. 2013. Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge. Schultis, Brian. 2019. “Directions for Performance Philosophy and Practice as Research.” Performance Philosophy 4, no. 2. Shah, Rajni. 2018. We Are Capable of So Much More: Experiments in Listening. PhD, Lancaster University. https://doi.org/10.17635/lancaster/thesis/234. Shah, Rajni, Alex Tálamo, and Victoria Hunt. 2018. “I Don’t Know How (to Decolonise Myself ),” Performance Space, http://performancespace.com.au/2018-experimental-choreographic-residency/. Shyldkrot, Yaron. 2019. How to Keep the Audience in the Dark: Dramaturgies of Uncertainty and Theatre in the Dark, unpublished PhD thesis submitted to the University of Surrey, UK. Singh, Nicola. 2016. On the “Thesis by Performance”: A Feminist Research Method For the Practice-Based PhD. Available at http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/36132/1/singh.nicola_phd.pdf. Spatz, Ben. 2015. What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research. London: Taylor & Francis. ­­———. 2018. “Introduction III. Mad Lab—Or Why We Can’t Do Practice as Research.” In Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact, edited by Arlander, Annette Arlander, Bruce Barton, Melanie Dreyer-Lude, and Ben Spatz, 209–23. London: Routledge. Thompson, Jon. 2011. “Art Education: From Coldstream to the QAA.” In The Collected Writings of Jon Thompson, edited by J. Akerman and E. Daly, 476–90. London: Ridinghouse. Young, Harvey. 2013. Theatre and Race. London: Palgrave. Zarrilli, Phillip. 2001. “Negotiating Performance Epistemologies: Knowledges ‘About,’ ‘In’ and ‘For’.” Studies in Theatre and Performance 21, no. 1, 31–46. ­­———. 2004. “Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor’s Embodied Modes of Experience.” Theatre Journal 56, no. 4, Theorizing the Performer (December): 653–66.

Website How to do things with performance: https://www.uniarts.fi/en/newsroom/mitentehdä-asioita-esityksellä-tutkimushankkeelle-suomen-akatemian-rahoitus

11 Artistic Research as “Participant Perception” Reflecting on the Project “Computer Signals” from an Arts-Inspired STS-Perspective Priska Gisler

Translation by Chris Walton, Berne University of the Arts

CONVERSATIONS IN THE COLD It’s ice-cold this morning, the temperatures surely way below zero. I can now see the coast of the Kongsfjord on the west of Svalbard in Norway. Shivering, I look out over a barely moving sea, blocks of ice shifting slowly around, and then there’s a small jetty. I know that close by yet several metres underwater is the research station RemOS1 recording the cyclical behaviour of organisms. My thoughts are already in Spitzbergen—though I’m not actually there. On this extraordinarily cold February day, Hannes Rickli and his team meet me in the Zurich workroom of their project.1 Thanks to an audiovisual installation of their research group, I’ve succeeded in being “in” Spitzbergen for a moment. The installation takes up almost a whole wall in the workshop. The space—Hannes Rickli occasionally calls it his “lab”—is in a somewhat outlying building of the Zurich University of the Arts. Hannes Rickli is an artist-researcher. He’s got a writing room nearby, he explains, it’s private and emerged out of what used to be his studio. Here in the lab, he says, is where the collaborative work takes place with concrete materials, the images and sounds. It’s not the first time that I have spoken with Rickli about his work, but today we’re going to have a conversation that will quite explicitly deal with artistic research and biology, video projections, data transformation and work processes, and it’s due to take several hours—a whole morning, in fact. The room is about thirty square metres in size and isn’t exactly overcrowded. On one wall of the workshop there is a kind of pin board for notes, drawings, and different printouts. On a second wall there’s a bookshelf that is laden with work materials 175

176

Chapter 11

and a small collection of books with the group’s work. Next to the bookshelf are a fridge and a coffee machine. I imagine that the workroom of a research station on Spitzbergen would be similarly sparsely furnished (though those researchers are stuck once they’re on their expedition; they can’t simply come and go like Rickli’s colleagues do during our conversation). The fourth wall is made completely out of glass. Opposite this wall is where the installation already mentioned is running on nine monitors (see figure 11.1). During our conversation in his lab, Rickli explains that in their research they wanted “to sit in the equipment of biologists.” Since he started out with his longterm artistic research projects, he has been using the method of participant observation to explore “the possibilities, materialities and infrastructures of sensually imperceptible operations in research processes, and to document the physical traces of this research” (Rickli, 2017, 92).2 His is a search for traces of a different history of working processes in the natural sciences, one in which many uncontrollable actors collaborate. He’s not doing this alone: doctoral student Valentina Vuksic, art and media scholar Birk Weiberg, and interaction designer Jan Huggenberg currently make up Rickli’s core artistic team. There is also an interdisciplinary collaboration and a close exchange of information with science philosophers Gabriele Gramelsberger and Christoph Hoffmann from Science Studies. The group also talks regularly

Figure 11.1.  Installation RemOS1 Archive (Audio- und Videostreams 15.09.– 15.10.2012) in the lab of the project “Computer Signals” in Zurich, 25.09.18, 13:07:20. ©Hannes Rickli.



Artistic Research as “Participant Perception” 177

to the historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. The biologists who also belong to the collaboration are the research group run by Philipp Fischer in the Helmholtz Community at the Biological Institute of Heligoland, and the Hofmann Lab run by Hans Hofmann in the Section of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin.3 As we will see in more detail later, it is significant for the Rickli group that Philipp Fischer’s ecological research is founded on the technology of remote sensing, and also brings together existing technologies (sea cables for the Internet, consumer cameras, etc.). Hofmann’s investigations on the social behaviour of African cichlids are based both on empirical experiments and on computational biology, bioinformatics and genomics. This chapter specifically focuses on the collaboration between “Computer Signals” and the Heligoland research group.4 This is because the underwater observation station of Fischer’s research group itself became an object of research for the artistresearchers. I shall here take a closer look at this point of contact between both research groups from the perspective of an art-inspired science and technology studies (STS) scholar. Whereas Fischer’s research practice situates his operations in a longestablished scientific tradition, Hannes Rickli moves in the field of artistic research, which only began to establish itself and become institutionalised in Continental Europe in the late 1990s. Collecting information on the behaviour of fish is the core concern of the research group of Fischer. Fischer is attached to the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, and besides is also investigating questions of fish acoustics, being especially concerned with underwater observation and scientific diving. In this context, he played a decisive role in developing a system based on optical stereometry, which can measure the occurrence and spread of fish in shallow coastal waters (Schulz et al., 2015, 30). For example, as is shown in a recent paper, his research group is endeavouring to find combinations of classical and digital sampling methods to enable them to gain a deeper knowledge of ecologically sensitive environments. Current underwater technologies are used to create daily temperature, salinity and water turbidity profiles over the course of a year, and to carry out stereo-optical measurements of the macrobiotic communities to which fish also belong (see Fischer et al., 2017, 259ff.). Hannes Rickli’s research group is focussed on the same place and the same equipment used by Fischer’s biologists, but they are neither doing the same kind of work, nor are they observing the biologists. The artists are interested in observing less closely regarded infrastructural procedures within research processes, and also in issues of documentability of the resulting physical traces. Rickli describes his research as situated in the arts but with close ties to STS, specifically to the natural sciences. As he wrote in the summary of his most recent research application, he is concerned to see how “the potential of artistic procedures” can be used to address “issues in Science and Technology Studies” in order to discuss and reflect on alternative forms of depicting processes in the sciences, economics and society more generally (Rickli 2016a, 2).

178

Chapter 11

In the present chapter, I would like to investigate Rickli’s aim and ask whether— and, if so, to what degree—the artistic research in the project “Computer Signals” can succeed in discussing and furthering the concepts and comprehension of Science and Technology Studies, a discipline that is interested in analysing “the role of knowledge and technology in societal ordering processes” (Niewöhner, Sörensen, and Beck 2012, 9). In this context, I am equally concerned with reflecting on the degree to which artistic research can profit from knowledge of the field of STS, and can be affected by it. In Rickli’s workshop in Zurich, I can glimpse the aforementioned research station on Spitzbergen. Actually, I could even track their daily cycles of work. The research station and the workshop together offer me an opportunity to pose questions about working processes and data-gathering procedures, and also to shed light on the artistic/research procedures focussed on them. To do so, they allow me to follow them across their workspace. For this reason, I have sifted through all the available documents of “Computer signals,” which they kindly placed at my disposal, including articles, the research grant application, Internet entries, and views of exhibitions; I pondered the work of the natural scientists who are involved, and entered into a dialogue with the participants in the project. This chapter intends to report on places of research, on data gathering and data processing operations, and ultimately on the methods of artistic research in order to shed some light on one of the various ways artistic research has become possible and is practiced today. As we will see concepts such as “the lab” and “participant observation” come to play a special role in this.

PLACES OF RESEARCH The previously mentioned “infrastructure” that lies beneath the waves near the coast of Spitzbergen in Norway, and is the object of interest of both research groups, is called RemOS1—Remote Optical System (see figure 11.2). Every half hour, a stereometric pair of photographs is taken in this linked-up, underwater observatory, enabling us to observe the flora and fauna of the underwater landscape. The behavioural biologists are focussed on both the fishes themselves and on the research apparatus that allows them to observe these fishes (Rickli, 2017, 84). Fischer’s research team are aiming to get long-term data on environmental changes in the habitats of marine organisms. Weiberg explains in conversation that they use stereometric procedures to gather three types of numerical data, referring to the size, number, and species of the organisms. At some point during the course of “Computer Signals,” images and sounds of the undersea station in Spitzbergen were compressed into the artistic work I had seen in that cold February morning in Zurich. When I ask why the screens are hanging here in the workshop/lab instead of, say, in a museum, I am given an answer whose complexity is revealed only at a second glance, as it were: the monitors are hanging here so that they can be shown. At the same time, they are here so that people can



Artistic Research as “Participant Perception” 179

Figure 11.2.  RemOS1, Diving Workshop, Biologische Anstalt Heligoland, 14.03.12, 12:56:51.

watch the pictures. Obviously, there are hours and hours of images—a lot of material in general. Nine monitors are holding thirty hours of synchronized recordings each, and sometimes it happens that Rickli is in his workshop and sees completely new things. Also, for this reason, the workshop is called a lab, a lab that assists the artistic research team to adjust to working over a long period of time. It gives their work continuity: “I think of it as an experimental system.”5 And it also, one might add, provides evidence and presence for the remote scene. Thus, we see that one initial aspect of activity in this artistic research project touches already on an important concept in STS. This concerns a specific space for data gathering, namely the lab. According to Karin Knorr-Cetina, a researcher in the social studies of science, a laboratory undertakes a reconfiguration of the natural and social order (Knorr-Cetina 2002, 45ff.). The science lab means that researchers don’t have to engage with an object in the place where they find it, anchored in its natural environment. The lab enables them to mobilise objects. A research group can thus go above and beyond natural cycles of appearances—they don’t have any compelling reason to engage with the cherry tree when it blossoms, but can instead let it blossom when they want, thus defining their own temporalities (Knorr-Cetina 2002, 46). The advantages of a laboratory include the fact that natural objects (animals, stones, substances such as blood) are taken away from their place of origin into a different

180

Chapter 11

space where they can be observed permanently and repeatedly. The laboratory situation means the objects are prevented from running away, from liquefying or decomposing. In temporal and spatial terms, the lab no longer binds one to difficult, given circumstances, and one can instead examine things thoroughly, calmly, or hurriedly according to what one’s needs are. In a recent article, Hannes Rickli (2017, 100) has demonstrated that research infrastructures are increasingly promoting the division between workplace and the place of observation, and that they are making it more and more possible to be “in real time in ‘another place,’” steering and controlling the actors virtually. In other words, unlike the classical notion of what a laboratory is about, the objects under observation don’t have to be transferred to the lab along with the necessary environment. Instead, specific technologies and infrastructures enable the researchers and the objects of their curiosity to carry out their work in their established places. As a result, little more than information from the point of collection is sent back to the researchers. Thus, the previously mentioned experiments or experimental systems are essentially part of a global development that on the one hand brings with it an ever-increasing degree of energy consumption, but on the other hand enables a science to emerge that brings with it a new concept of the laboratory. It seems as if the world is gradually becoming a laboratory whose technologies and infrastructures enable pieces of nature to be measured and processed already where they exist or take place. RemOS1 on the inhospitable coast of Spitzbergen is an excellent example for this. Measurements and observations of nature begin to permeate each other more and more. “Computer Signals” is drawing attention to such developments when it comes to what the biologists do. However, their own approach to the laboratory has a different starting point from that of the natural science projects: they make the material conditionality tangible and experiment with producing different articulations of RemOS1 by enabling reflection on them. In this regard, our initial question can be given a first positive answer, namely that artistic research can indeed function as STS research. Reflecting on it by means of the concept of the laboratory (or the concept of the experimental system) helps us to categorise corresponding developments and disciplinary differentiations. In the following, a few ways this is done by the artistic research team will be outlined.

METHOD: OBSERVING AND PARTICIPATING Something rather extraordinary stands at the outset of the group’s project. On the basis of their previous collaboration, the biologists had allowed them to introduce a “strange machine” into their work (Rickli 2016a, 145).6 With this, along with the group’s “own sensors, we were able to ‘eavesdrop’ not just on nature, but on the electrical and electronic emissions of the observational and measuring devices such as the power supply, photo cameras, on-board computers and so on” (Rickli 2017, 91).



Artistic Research as “Participant Perception” 181

To this end, Valentina Vuksic inserted probes into the biologists’ equipment before it was taken to Spitzbergen. An autonomous mini-computer (Gumstix) enabled it to record signals via soundcards (see figures 11.3 and 11.4), and “to send the data together with the images” of the stereometric cameras to a server of the Zurich University of the Arts (Rickli, 2017, 93). To be able to “sit” inside the devices and to “eavesdrop” on what happens are conditions that Rickli and his team have made preliminary aspects of their method of “participant technical observation.” This takes its cue from the “participant observation,” a method practised in the social sciences and adapted for their specific artistic research needs. With this ethnographic method, researchers usually go into the field themselves in order to seek conversations with the individuals they are observing, and in order to get to know and to understand their practices and how they act (see, e.g., Girtler 2001). The researcher’s empathy is a core aspect of this, enabling them to imagine themselves into the situation of the people in the field, their thoughts and actions. A “participant technical observation,” one imagines, would shift the focus onto the materiality and the presence of devices, and signify an endeavour of the researcher to imagine himself or herself in their place. In other words, the focus

Figure 11.3.   RemOS1, Diving Workshop BAH Heligoland, 09.03.12, 14:02:39: Philipp Fischer and Valentina Vuksic discuss the placement of electromagnetic sensors in the stereometric-image-box. ©Hannes Rickli.

182

Chapter 11

Figure 11.4.  An electromagnetic sensor and the stereometric-imaging-camera on the right, belonging to RemOS1, 12.3.2012. ©Hannes Rickli

here lies not on interpersonal interactions, but on the “fluid emissions” between the devices and their environment. And indeed, with its procedures in “Computer Signals,” the group is endeavouring to bring specific devices into an underwater observatory in order to trace, on the spot, how the biological research group gets its data (figure 11.5). This participant technical observation deals with questions, for example, about how software manifests itself physically, or how infrastructures perform when they are installed in a place. To be able to record the state of devices, making this information accessible, and then gaining knowledge about how they function—whether smoothly, defectively or divergently are among the issues that the research group wishes to investigate. In the course of their technical observations, the team was also able to identify a series of technical problems and other external factors that had an effect on the measurement series (e.g., algae, organisms that as an early element of so-called succession settle on the camera and the surfaces of the observational devices). Thanks to their series of images, they succeeded in making visible how these factors played a role in the data procured by the biologists. Rickli and his group point out that this reflects Karen Barad’s concept of “intra-activity” (Barad 2007; Rickli 2017, 96f.). Unlike one’s intuitive assumption, even sophisticated laboratory setups cannot record data



Artistic Research as “Participant Perception” 183

Figure 11.5.   RemOS1 placed under water in the Kongsfjorden research station, Kongsfjorden, Ny Ålesund, Svalbard, 9.3.2013, 15:30:12. ©Philipp Fischer

from “untouched” nature, uninfluenced by tides or storms. The biological activities are thus inevitably bound up with cleaning processes. The data collection of the artistic researchers ultimately also depends on permission to access the images produced by the biologists. These are then prepared in “artistic” form, arranged, enlarged, and the like, in order to place them up for discussion at some point with a broader audience than the purely scientific public. Bit by bit, I also experienced in the Zurich lab what the nine monitors of the artistic installation enable us to perceive. On monitors 1 and 2, you can see the stereometric images of the biologists. These scientific images are gathered together as small thumbnails on monitor 3, which offers the images produced over twelve and half days. Monitor 4 shows a picture of a controllable webcam that had the experimental assembly before it. A flat box, monitor 5, depicts the dates and times of the photos, and under it hangs a set of headphones that let you hear the electronic and mechanical events. The next monitors show the streams of existing webcams displaying the state of things in the water in close-up (monitors 6 and 7) and from far off (monitor 8). Monitor 9 offers an overview visualisation of the development of the weather from camera 8, over a period of seven days and nights.

184

Chapter 11

DATA COLLECTION I: RECORDING—LISTENING IN Later that morning, Valentina Vuksic will join our conversation. She was responsible for organising the interventions in the underwater equipment of the Heligoland research group. In her doctoral studies Vuksic is pursuing her interest in the physical, subsidiary locations of digital technologies. As an artist and an IT specialist, she works for example with telephone adapters. These are a kind of sound pickup system. They record electromagnetic fields and reproduce their oscillations as electrical signals. These can then be treated as audio signals. I mention the word “hacking,” and Weiberg confirms that induction coils are indeed also used as a tool in security research. But the group informs me later that “Computer Signals” is currently not specifically concerned with this concrete aspect of their equipment. Rather, these physical objects are unavoidable components of a critical engagement with technological systems (which in the act of transmission become social systems too) that goes far beyond. Thus, their real focus is on the infrastructures themselves. Vuksic adds that her telephone adapter is just a potted induction coil with an audio jack for the output. The induction coil is able to recreate, wirelessly, an electrical signal from the oscillations of a nearby electromagnetic field, and it’s a technology that’s been well known for a long time and is utilised for many different purposes. “The telephone adapter is robust and convenient for us, nothing more.” But what can one do and experience with this recording device? When I inquired for more information, I was told the following: they wanted to trace acoustically as much contextual information as possible for scientific image production. Subsequently, we listened to different sounds that—for me at least— were difficult to decipher. There were four types of sound: the electrical sound of the power supply, the (electromagnetic) sound of the on-board computer, the (electromagnetic) sound of the camera and, finally, a kind of background noise that was the (mechanical/acoustic) sound of the scientist’s own webcam. Referring to these sounds is problematic; shortly afterwards, I can remember them only vaguely, and find it even more difficult to report here what I actually heard. There was a hissing, and there were click sounds that (so Rickli explained) were made by the shutter of the camera and the data upload of the images to the Institute in Heligoland, via the on-board computer. While I was concentrating on the sounds, I was trying, either consciously or unconsciously, to discern anything related to the sounds of the sea or streams of water—my ears tried to hear the possible movement of fish or any other kind of “nature.” Afterwards, however, I stood corrected: the recording devices were not focused on nature, or the occurrences of the environment. They were intended only to record electronic and anthropogenic sounds—the clattering of the buoys or the boats, the sound of an animal only when it pervaded occasionally via the contact microphone. But it became clear to me how crucial it is to the group to acquire knowledge of something that is rarely heard, namely: the inner life of the infrastructures that they are investigating. They are not concerned



Artistic Research as “Participant Perception” 185

with hearing the same thing as the biologists in just a different fashion. They want to take the biologists’ act of detecting—which at some point will be formulated in numbers and measurement readings about fish behaviour—and make the role played here by technology, IT, and environmental resources recognisable and an object of possible reflection. The recordings I heard in the group’s lab make sense to me as an unusually sensual means of depicting a mode of practice. The fact that something was “done” here, both with and by the infrastructure, seems to me in retrospect noteworthy; in other words, while the infrastructure was busy carrying out its activity by producing images, it was at the same time an object being subjected to external influences of nature. The activity carried out by the device, its materiality and also its own vitality (which is a result of its possibilities of variability) are given immediate expression thanks to the sonic7 recordings of the artistic research group. The “attempts to erase one’s traces and to reduce contingency” (Alexandru Bulucz in Rheinberger 2015, 43) in biological research are here turned on their head and thereby made perceptible.

DATA COLLECTION II: CO-OBSERVATION AND INSIGHTS The extraordinary acoustic “eavesdropping” of RemOS1 by “Computer Signals” can draw our attention to something else too. The biologists have to ensure that their device functions as smoothly as possible under extreme, isolated conditions (figure 11.6). Given the distances and the context, it can easily take weeks or months before repairs are possible. Perhaps this is also why one particular focus of their research is their actual equipment (see Rickli 2016b, 146). Rickli shows me one of his publications that contains a chronology of the images produced by the biologists. However, outside the context of an artistic research project, one would not get to see these images like this. Usually, the scientists themselves do not show them to a public. And only when one has the corresponding information can one recognise that the device tends to break down occasionally—the lack of images is indicated in black colour. We can also recognise on these pictures that the chronology shows how they become greener—because the algae infestation becomes greater over time. These series of images thus provide us with information about how the device functions. While I become aware of the device’s operation by the presence of acoustic signals (such as when it starts up, when it moves and when it shuts down), the images offer me different insights: the pairs of stereometric images (taken by the biologists), seen chronologically, enable us to see the impact of nature on them (Rickli 2016b, 148) and its concomitant impact on the production of knowledge. Whereas black gaps can be traced back to the lack of synchronisation of the two cameras and the flash and similar events, different levels of brightness point to sea disturbances and to marine snow. But algae and other organisms also populate the camera lenses and alter the photos made.

186

Chapter 11

Figure 11.6.   Underwater situation of RemOS1, Kongsfjorden, Ny Ålesund, Svalbard, 24.6.2013, 13:58:20. ©Philipp Fischer

DATA PROCESSING I: TRANSLATING TO UNDERSTAND In the course of the research process, Fischer and his team are concerned to publish the results of their work in scholarly articles in renowned journals and to exchange information at conferences and symposia, thus contributing to the state of debate in their field. RemOS1 delivers stereometric images of different water layers from different depths, which are then reproduced in scientific articles, while the data collected by the device is cumulated, statistically assessed and depicted in graphs or diagrams and extensively discussed and classified in the text. We can gain insights into the reception channels of the biosciences via the underwater situation in the Arctic seas, the fishes and other fauna and via the different steps in data collection, data processing and data analysis. Besides organising and participating in workshops and conferences or writing articles and books, Rickli and his team will above all place an emphasis on their artistic work, by means of which the results of his research will be published in renowned exhibition halls. One result of the “eavesdropping” with his “strange machine” that attracted my attention is a media installation I saw during my visit to his lab. Furthermore, the group will also play a part in discussions about the state of artistic



Artistic Research as “Participant Perception” 187

research—discussions that are becoming ever more urgent, especially with regard to the significance of long-term work (over several years), interdisciplinary exchange and the search for a practice and nomenclature for these novel forms of knowing. While still hearing the hisses or clicks in my mind, and still being aware of the installation on the wall, we look more closely at the images. Rickli now puts what we see and hear in a different context. With regard to exhibiting, he is concerned with the process of translation of what is recorded into what is reproduced. In an exhibition, the opposite takes place of what happens in the black box in Spitzbergen. RemOS1 makes photographs that by the scientists are ultimately turned into numerical data. However, in the exhibition, the situation of the underwater station can be simulated and expanded. The images are reproduced and also shown to the public, he explains. I’m standing in Zurich and see not just what was photographed in rough conditions in the Arctic Ocean off Spitzbergen. I can see (and remember hearing) the recording, the act of photographing itself—an activity that normally disappears into the cameras of the scientists, only to be brought forth again by the biologists on their computer screens to be observed and studied, albeit in a mediated state. Now I can experience both forms of media capture—the images and the experience of how they were made—standing in front of a monitor or leafing through a publication.

DATA PROCESSING II: PERCEPTION AS TRANSFER Long after having left the lab of the research group “Computer Signals,” I ponder their procedures of artistic research as the images, sounds, numbers. My own experiences now turn into words as I sit at my PC. What steps have been decisive in order to better understand their activity from the perspective of STS? I visited the art research group at a site where they engage in their activity, and I delved with them into their images and sounds. I also focused in part on their hands—or, perhaps more precisely, on what the researchers were doing, as Rheinberger (2014, 317) suggests, when I wanted to get a better idea of the How of their work instead of the What. I also looked at their images and endeavoured to understand them, and had Vuksic play me acoustic recordings. I tried to decode those sounds. Some of these activities continue to reverberate in me while I try to remember the exact noises that Rickli and his team were able to derive from their equipment. After a while, I come to realise that the activities of this research group, can be described as practices of transference. By this I do not mean a translation of research activities from the natural sciences in a form suitable to a broader public. To these artistic practices of transference the oral reports, the images themselves and the writings of the research group bear witness—as do the conversations in which I participate. Pickups, receivers, and sensors are designations for the “audio sensors” that are used in RemOS1, and to which Vuksic refers as “transducers.”8 What is more, I also understand that what I am able to comprehend is less a matter of “technical observation”—even though I have tried to understand what happens here on the technical level. The

188

Chapter 11

artistic research procedures mean that the access point open to me is closely interwoven with an aesthetic practice that itself proves to be knowledge-generating.

ARTISTIC RESEARCH AS RECONFIGURING KNOWLEDGE What became clear to me while talking to the team is that they turn the method of “participant technical observation” into “participant perception.” It is participant in the sense that knowledge is generated and made tangible in close collaboration both as a team and with biologists—a knowledge that either flows back into further work, enables its critical reflection, or enables to emerge aspects hitherto unrecognised or disregarded. Their perception is participant also in the sense that they work with and through the devices and bring forth new perceptible things; and also because new knowledge emerges that is again shared with other people and made comprehensible to them. The possibility of taking a closer look into different types of observation and perception has also led me to take a more precise look at the sites of their research: after I wrote the first draft of this text and sent it back to Rickli’s team, I was invited again to visit their lab—this time at the height of summer, when the temperatures could hardly have been hotter. After another animated conversation, we went into the cellar. Alongside archival materials in drawers, exhibits tucked away in racks and tools, there was a table with a computer. I was told that this storeroom was used as an experimental space, four loudspeakers were distributed throughout the room, enabling one to listen to recordings of RemOS1 and Cichlid #3, Texas Soundscape, check out their various channels, make experiments, and process them afterwards. Whereas for the Heligoland biologists, the world (or at least Spitzbergen, situated one thousand miles away) over time has become their laboratory, I saw here that the living environment of the artists in fact becomes their “laboratory.” In their papers, the biologists are able to take the processes and behavioural patterns that they observe, and express them in sophisticated language in the form of quantities, probabilities, statistics, formulas, and the like. What they observe lies far removed from all this. The artistic research group, on the other hand, is concerned neither with being able to comprehend every detail of the biological research, even if they meanwhile understand a lot about it, nor with communicating it. Instead, they are seeking to comprehend material processes and the use and exploration of infrastructures by the natural scientists in generating their results. This form of artistic research desires to apply and expand the concepts of STS; in this regard, the data collection activities, methods and sites of research seem to have special significance for the working processes of “Computer Signals.” At the same time, observing these aspects makes evident that concepts of STS such as “the laboratory” or “participant observation” can be applied when we aim to reflect on artistic research. “Computer Signals” engages specifically with data collection equipment in order to make visible acts of recording, or to make unnoticed, “fleet-



Artistic Research as “Participant Perception” 189

ing emissions” visible, audible and debatable. In so doing, they are able to throw a glimpse into who and what is involved in the production of modern infrastructures and scientific knowledge. Artistic research also generates new material. It experiments with the recordings that are sent to the server in Zurich and stored in the lab of the research group, subsequently to be made visible and tangible as an installation. Don’t data also determine the infrastructures of today’s world? Don’t they also increasingly permeate the world of art? At least here, in this artistic research group a struggle is underway against the disappearance and loss of an aesthetic dimension in scientific data, of materialities and infrastructures themselves; consequently, new aspects of their power of cognition become visible. While I rack my brain whether this means the differences between the artist’s studio and the scientist’s lab are now annulled, I recall Rickli’s writing room, which demonstrates at least as clearly that there can be a need for reflection that might be filled by reading, thinking, and else.

SERENDIPITY Time and again, after my return to my own desk, I visualised the moment when I went into the cellar along with the research team. Mentally, I was then brought forward, to the United States, to Austin, Texas, more precisely. Vuksic told me about the happy instance when they realised that the contact microphone that they had placed in the refrigerator of the Hofmann Lab in Austin had not just recorded its own sounds. Thus, I stood with the team in the cellar laboratory that day, at record high temperatures, and took delight in the fact that their recording technology, which was designed to capture only the device’s own movements, had also taken into account something else: the weekly fire drill through the walls of the refrigerator; and we now listened together to the traces of its emphatic, warning voice.

NOTES 1.  I would like to thank here Hannes Rickli, Valentina Vuksic, Birk Weiberg, and Jan Huggenberg for their openness and the time they took to talk to me and to try to explain their complex research project to me so extensively. Furthermore, many thanks go to Chris Walton for the wonderful help with the translation. 2. All oral communication and the publications about the research project “Computer Signals” have been in German, were translated by Chris Walton, and the translation was approved by the members of the team. 3.  For more information about the research project, see http://computersignale.zhdk.ch, 9 July 2018. 4.  The Hofmann Lab will not be discussed further here, and will only appear again, briefly, at the end of this text. 5.  This is a hint, of course, to Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s (2001) concept and book.

190

Chapter 11

6.  Rickli here refers to a quotation from Lyotard: “[Art] today comprises the exploration of the unsayable and the invisible, to which end one constructs strange machines that enable us to perceive and make tangible what ideas cannot say and what materials cannot make tangible” (Lyotard 1986, 70; translation by Chris Walton). 7.  Vuksic has offered the following remarks: “The sonic is a distinct category between the acoustic and music, and is concerned with sounds that don’t emerge from a resonant body, but through technical processes. Wolfgang Ernst, Sonic time machines. Explicit Sound, sirenic voices, and implicit sonicity, Amsterdam 2016. An audible sound is here observed from a psychological/physiological perspective. There is no semantic attribution as is the case with music, but the composition and functioning of the technical processes means a cultural conditioning takes place” (see Wicke, 2008), translation by Chris Walton. 8.  Thanks to Vuksic I learned also about Karen Barad’s conceptualisation of transducers as “souls”: “I argue that the piezoelectric crystal is a material instrument, the ‘‘soul’’ of an observing apparatus, through which not simply signals but discourses operate. Examining the coupling of this instrument to an array of apparatuses, I use the piezoelectric transducer as a tool to explore the relationship between the material and the discursive. This relationship is at the center of the philosophical framework I call agential realism” (Barad 2007, 189–91).

REFERENCES Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2016. Sonic Time Machines: Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Fischer, Philipp, Max Schwanitz, Reiner Loth, Uwe Posner, Markus Brand, and Friedhelm Schröder. 2017. “First Year of Practical Experiences of the New Arctic AWIPEV-COSYNA Cabled Underwater Observatory in Kongsfjorden, Spitzsbergen,” in Ocean Science 13, 259–72. Girtler, Roland. 2001. Methoden der Feldforschung. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 2002. Wissenskulturen. Ein Vergleich naturwissenschaftlicher Wissensformen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1986. Philosophie und Malerei im Zeitalter ihres Experimentierens. Berlin: Merve Verlag. Niewöhner, Jörg, Estrid Sörensen, and Stefan Beck. 2012. “Einleitung. Science and Technology Studies aus sozial- und kulturanthropologischer Perspektive.” In Science and Technology Studies. Eine sozialanthropologische Einführung, edited by Stefan Beck, Jörg Niewöhner, and Estrid Sörensen. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2001. Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge. Eine Geschichte der Proteinsynthese im Reagenzglas. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. ———. 2014. “Experimentalanordnungen in Wissenschaft und Kunst.” In ArteFakte: Wissen ist Kunst. Kunst ist Wissen. Reflexionen und Praktiken wissenschaftlich-künstlerischer Begegnungen, edited by Hermann Parzinger, Stefan Aue, Günter Stock, 307–19. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. ———. 2015. Die Farben des Tastens. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger im Gespräch mit Alexandru Bulucz. Frankfurt am Main: Edition Faust.



Artistic Research as “Participant Perception” 191

Rickli, Hannes. 2016a. “Computersignale. Kunst und Biologie im Zeitalter ihres digitalen Experimentierens II”, SNF-Forschungsplan Computersignale II, Institute for Contemporary Art Research IFCAR/ZHdK. ———. 2016b. “Der unsichtbare Faden. Zu Materialität und Infrastrukturen digitaler Tierbeobachtung.” In ZMK Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 2 July 2016, edited by Lorenz Engell and Bernhard Siegert, 137–54. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. ———. 2017. “Der unsichtbare Faden.” In Kunst Wissenschaft Natur. Zur Ästhetik und Epistemologie der künstlerisch-wissenschaftlichen Naturbeobachtung, edited by Marcus Maeder, 83–112. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Schulz, Jan, et al. 2015. Aquatische optische Technologien in Deutschland. Meereswissenschaftliche Berichte. Warnemünde, Leibnitz-Institut für Ostseeforschung. Wicke, Peter. 2008. “Das Sonische in der Musik.” In PopScriptum 10, Das Sonische—Sounds zwischen Akustik und Ästhetik, Schriftenreihe, edited by Forschungszentrum Populäre Musik der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, see https://www2.hu-berlin.de/fpm/popscrip/themen/pst10/pst10_wicke.htm, 12 April 2019.

12 A Laboratory for Performance Practice The Case of MusicExperiment21 Veerle Spronck

Although classical music will be played in the Handelsbeurs in Ghent tonight, the concert hall does not look like what one might expect for this occasion. There is no stage, nor are there clear rows of chairs for the audience. Instead, a range of objects is scattered throughout the space. Two pianos, each on one side of the hall. Small poufs for the audience to sit down on are spread around, in a seemingly random manner, facing in various directions. Three big screens are up on the walls. In the corner, there is a small table with a record player on it. Next to it sits a woman, listening carefully. When I sit down on one of the poufs, it is still not clear where exactly I need to look when the performance starts. This performance was one of the many artistic events that are part of the ERCfunded research project “Experimentation versus Interpretation: Exploring New Paths in Music Performance in the Twenty-First Century,” or in short MusicExperiment21 (ME21). Between 2013 and 2018, a group of artistic researchers at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent experimented in order to create a new attitude towards performance practices of Western-notated art music. They researched and at the same time experimented with shifting the role of the musician from interpreter to operator. In Western-notated art music, musicians are often considered interpreters of the score, which in itself is seen as the actual musical work. The ME21 team investigates how this traditional understanding of musical interpretation is historically situated. The term interpretation in relation to musical performance namely has “no currency before 1800 and came into parlance only during the nineteenth century, with the growing separation of the roles of composer and performer, in a parallel wave to that of the emergence of the ‘work-concept’” (Assis n.d.; also see Cook 2013; Goehr 1992; Haynes 2007). Understanding music as a “work” had a large impact on the organisation of music as a social practice. As Lydia Goehr (1992) writes: 192



A Laboratory for Performance Practice 193 Given developments more or less around 1800 in musical practice . . . the work-concept emerged as the dominant concept by which all activities would be arranged. Henceforth, there would be composers of works, commissions of works, scores of works, performances of works, experiences of works, reviews of works, copyright laws introduced to protect works, and halls built to house the concerts of works. The manifold changes to all these modes of production, happening concurrently with changes to the concepts of both music and work, placed the musical work-concept at the center of a practice as never before. (p. xviii)

Understanding music as “works” thus structures the whole organisation of music as a social practice in a hierarchical manner: a composer creates a score and subsequently the musician is interpreting it. ME21 moved beyond this understanding and developed an alternative view: the music as a network, an assemblage.1 This resulted in practical changes in the role of the musician, Paulo de Assis (2018) explains: Consequently, this view also argues for a new kind of performer, emancipated from authoritative texts and traditions, and open to critical reconfigurations of past musical objects, which ought to be questioned rather than uncritically reproduced and consumed. More than an executant or an interpreter, the performer becomes an operator, activating unexpected assemblages of forces and materials, and overcoming the distinction between performer and composer. (pp. 19–20; also see D’Errico 2018)

Importantly, as artistic research project, ME21 not only examined and questioned the notion of interpretation, but also shifted to a mode of experimentation to explore these new paths for musical performance. Adopting the role of operator, the ME21 team set up a series of experiments in the form of performances. Here, the notion of experimentation “is not used in relation to measurable phenomena, but rather to an attitude, a willingness to constantly reshape thoughts and practices, to operate new redistributions of music materials, and to afford unexpected reconfigurations of music” (Assis 2018, 9). The aim was to generate new and unusual events. During the five years in which the project took place, the research team developed several series of musical experiments and organised international conferences that crossed the borders between music and philosophy. In this chapter, I will investigate ME21 as a laboratory for artistic research. In doing so, I build upon work in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in which scholars empirically examine how experimentation takes place and knowledge is constructed in the scientific laboratory (cf. Knorr Cetina 1999; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Rheinberger 1997). They research the everyday practices of scientists: what they do and how their work is materially situated. I analysed MusicExperiment21 in a similar fashion. Between March and November 2017, I visited the Orpheus Institute multiple times to attend meetings, presentations, conferences, and concerts during which I wrote field notes. Additionally, I conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with four core members of MusicExperiment21: Paulo de Assis (principal investigator, composer, pianist), Lucia D’Errico (doctoral researcher, composer, guitarist), Paolo Giudici (philosopher, photographer, conference manager), and Juan

194

Chapter 12

Parra (postdoc, composer). Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork, I will reflect on how theory and practice are interrelated in this project. Additionally, I will analyse what the artistic projects in ME21 do to the materiality of music and the role of the performer. First, however, I will enter the laboratory and further explain the organisational and practical structure of ME21: who were the people involved, which projects were carried out, and what output was generated.

A TRANSDISCIPLINARY LABORATORY: DOING COLLECTIVE ARTISTIC RESEARCH ME21 had three strands: (1) Artistic projects; (2) Musicological perspectives; and (3) Epistemology, philosophy, and aesthetics. The first strand dealt with the design, development, and realisation of experimental artistic projects, the second one with the musicological perspectives on the artistic projects, and the last one focused on current discourses in epistemology, philosophy of science and aesthetics that relate to artistic research. In practice, these three are not easily delineated, but instead deeply entangled—the two theoretical strands influenced the artistic projects and vice versa. Similarly, although the researchers were originally divided over the three strands, in practice they started to work as one transdisciplinary team. The ME21 core researchers have been Dr Paulo de Assis  (Principal Investigator),  Dr Michael Schwab,  Dr Juan Parra Cancino, Lucia D’Errico, Paolo Giudici, and Dr Jan Michiels. The team includes composers, performers, musicologists, philosophers, and artists with very different backgrounds. In their team meetings, I observed how they worked as a collective on the common problems that are central within ME21. As Paolo Giudici describes the work of the team: We work as an assemblage. The ME21 “collective.” However, this is not merely a conceptual thing; it is also practical. We are a kind of small lab and we do our own thing, but all our tasks come together and hold each other in place. One is cleaning the tubes, and the other is doing experiments. (Paolo Giudici, personal interview with author, 26 June 2017)

This view, in which some team members are cleaning the tubes, is by no means cynical. Rather, it underlines the practical and collective nature of this research project. This way of working is not yet very common in music, as Paolo Giudici explains: “You have an orchestra, but even in there you do not really create performances as a collective. In ME21, “performing” is carried out in a distributed way and I think that this way of thinking is quite innovative” (personal interview with author, 26 June 2017). This collective way of working connects the central objective of the project to the way in which it is carried out. If the performer is no longer understood as interpreter of a score, but rather as an operator, the result is a different social structure of musical practices (Assis 2018, 31). Performance, execution, interpretation, and composition



A Laboratory for Performance Practice 195

all merged in the daily practices of the ME21 team. Consequently, in addition to more traditional outcomes of ERC-research projects (such as monographs, chapters and articles), ME21 resulted in concerts, events, and online expositions of artistic projects.2 This aspect is what this chapter is focused on: ME21 is an artistic research project in which practical musical experiments and the organisation of them formed an important part of the research. In their everyday practices, the team constructed actual events, performances and concerts that led to new (theoretical) understandings. So, rather than examining the outcomes of the project, I bring into view the socio-material process through which ME21 took a variety of shapes. The ME21 laboratory was thus not only situated at the Orpheus Institute as an academic institution, but also in concert halls, behind pianos, at guitars, in design programs on laptops, in art galleries, and so on. Moreover, the conceptual space of ME21 builds on a variety of disciplines. Theoretical concepts from fields such as philosophy, history of science, and STS were mobilised to rethink the nature of musical performance. The creation of a transdisciplinary platform where these dialogues between fields could be held was an important aim of the project. Every other year, the team organised a conference on Deleuze and Artistic REsearch (DARE) at the Orpheus Institute. Paolo Giudici, who coordinates the DARE conferences, explains: These conferences are not a representation of an existing community. They are a call for a community that is in formation. This was, in my opinion, a challenge that was very important to work on in organising the DARE conferences. Perhaps it is not so much about what is realised and presented in each single one, but about the trajectory of creating a community. (Personal interview with author, 26 June 2017)

These biannual conferences helped the project to create a transdisciplinary community and platform between music and philosophy. However, the ME21 team did not only mobilise concepts between fields to fuel discussions and create a new community of researchers. The DARE conferences were in constant dialogue with the artistic projects within ME21. Concepts discussed during conferences could become part of performances, while performances were part of the conference program as well. The team, namely, was experimenting in practice: they created series of performances. These performances, the artistic projects, were at the core of ME21. The team worked on several collective artistic projects, of which the following five have had strong impact and resonance also outside the team: •  Diabelli Machines •  RaschX: Schumann’s Somathemes •  Con Luigi Nono. Unfolding waves •  NietzscheN: The weight of music •  Schönberg’s Memory Wheel3 These artistic projects are not singular events. Instead, they consist of series of instantiations. An instantiation can be a performance, a concert, a text, an exhibition,

196

Chapter 12

and so on. The series of instantiations, together with all their embracing reflection and activities, define the artistic project. These instantiations are events in themselves (they have an audience, take place in music or art venues, or are published), yet they should not be mistaken for mere outcomes of the project. The ME21 team could add, remove, or change the use of concepts, layers, and materials with each instantiation in a series. Consequently, their serial character allowed the artistic projects to take up a double role within ME21: they were both method and outcome at the same time. To better understand how these projects worked as both method and outcome, I will have a closer look at one of the artistic projects, analysing Raschx: Schumann’s Somathemes.

RASCH X: “TO PRODUCE A PERFORMANCE THAT GOES BEYOND PERFORMANCE” Raschx: Schumann’s Somathemes is a series of performances in which the ME21 team started from two materials: Schumann’s Kreisleriana op. 16 (1838) and the essays Roland Barthes wrote on the music of Schumann. In particular, the series revolved around the text “Rasch” (1979) which Barthes dedicated to Schumann’s Kreisleriana. Although these materials were the starting points of all the instantiations in Raschx, other materials were added to every particular performance: from photos and videos to other texts or live-electronics.4 Here, I will take a closer look at two instantiations of Raschx: Rasch24: The Somatheme, which is a text written by Paulo de Assis (2017, 15–42) and published in an edited volume on artistic research in music and Rasch25: vers la nuit, which is a performance that took place in the Handelsbeurs in Ghent during the biannual DARE conference in 2017. I will interrelate these two instantiations in order to analyse how the artistic projects of ME21 shift material practice in the field of musical performance. How are practice and theory put into dialogue? And subsequently, what do the instantiations do to the ways in which music is socially and materially organised?

RASCH24: INTERRELATING THEORY AND PRACTICE The twenty-fourth instantiation in the Raschx series is, quite surprisingly perhaps, not a concert but something that takes the form of a regular academic text. It was written by principal investigator Paulo de Assis and forms the first chapter of the edited volume Artistic Research in Music: Discipline and Resistance (Impett 2017). The text begins with a reflection on concepts and how to use them. Concepts, following philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, are not ready-mades



A Laboratory for Performance Practice 197

waiting to be used. Instead, they need to be invented, fabricated and (re)created (Assis 2017, 15–16). In Deleuze’s understanding, concepts are thus always connected to a concrete problem, event or experience (Assis 2017, 16). In this text, Assis reflects on and further develops one particular concept: the “somatheme” by Roland Barthes. This concept is invented by the French philosopher and semiotician in his text Rasch (1975) and defined as “the figures of the body . . . whose texture forms the musical signifying” (Barthes, 1985, 307, as quoted in Assis 2017, 16). The concept, simply put, has to do with the physicality of music. It addresses the bodily dimension of musical language: music as an art form that is necessarily physical. Assis explores the background from which the concept emerged and starts with Barthes at the piano. The somatheme, Assis (2017, 17–18) argues, focuses on the praxis of playing music and develops an understanding of the bodily practice of playing music. There are limits to the scientific fashion of writing about music, especially when it comes to the physical-ness of music making. With this concept, Barthes attempts to take the performer and her body seriously; he tries to address the materiality of the body in musical performance. But why is this text one of the instantiations in an artistic project? What does this concept offer to musical performance and the understanding of it? The somatheme can be understood as an invitation to rethink: it provides an opportunity to reformulate the body of the musician. Within the Raschx series, the ME21 collective takes up this invitation and further defines and articulates the somatheme in a multiplicity of performances. Importantly, there is no precise definition, because the concept does not belong to the articulated world. Rather the opposite: “somathemes fundamentally belong to the world of pulsions, drives, and desire” (Assis 2017, 31). The way of working within ME21 thus suits the concept very well, because it does not force it into written language, into words. Instead, the musician-researchers work with the concept. Performances and events are part of ME21 just like an academic article is, and therewith they offer an alternative form in which the unspeakable bodily-ness of music can be explored and researched. Building on the understanding of Deleuze, the concept is constantly reinvented and (re-)created in the series of instantiations. Consequently, and almost paradoxically, it becomes more defined and articulated. Not by capturing it in text, but through performing. The concept of the somatheme was thus advanced through the musical performances that the team carries out. In turn, it also helped the team to have a focus that goes beyond the score: the body of the musician (and that of the listener) and its relations to the material instruments become visible as vital elements of musical performance. The concept allows the network of what a musical work is—or might be—to expand. But what does this mean? What type of performances did this bring forth?

198

Chapter 12

RASCH25: THE MUSICAL WORK AS MATERIAL EVENT In order to reflect on that, let us travel back to the Handelsbeurs in Ghent where this chapter started. As soon as the audience members pick their poufs and sit down, the screens start showing footage. A text by Roland Barthes appears. It reads: There are two musics (or so I’ve always thought): one you listen to, one you play. They are two entirely different arts, each with its own history, sociology, aesthetics, erotics: the same composer can be minor when listened to, enormous when played (even poorly)— take Schumann.

The pianist (ME21’s Paulo de Assis) takes his place behind the piano on the right side of the space and starts to play Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana. The performer, however, is not the central point of attention tonight. The three screens are constantly flickering with images: from texts, quotes, to pictures of the score, and a mouth that is attempting to speak: quasi-parlando. Although the full score is played tonight, the focus seems to be different. The physicality of Assis as pianist becomes very visible as he walks from one instrument to the other. From where I decided to sit down, I can watch him play from close-up for half the concert. I see his concentration, his hands on the keys, the physical effort he makes to play. As he, halfway through, stands up and moves to the other piano, he walks through the audience. Consequently, everyone is forced to shift perspective and find a new way to watch again. People look around, switch focus and re-evaluate their own position constantly during this event. They glance at the screens, look at the woman who is still carefully and in full concentration listening to the vinyl player, and follow the pianist around as he changes positions. A clear orientation point is missing tonight. Instead, as audience member, you have to attune yourself to a variety of happenings that all take place simultaneously. At the end of the concert, the performer stands up and leaves the space. On the screens, we suddenly see a piano that continues to play, however, without someone playing it. By offering no clear ending to the performance, the audience is left in confusion. Moreover, since the pianist does not return to the space, the audience is not sure whether to applaud at all. Apart from a few despairing claps and dazed glances, the audience remains silent. Although the concept of the somatheme helps to outline the physicality of the performer as part of the musical work, it is clear that this physicality is by no means the focal point—replacing the position of the score. What emerges is not a new performer-based hierarchy of the musical work. Rather, this is a performance in which the social structure of music is re-organised: the pianist is not the central figure of attention, which is illustrated by him suddenly leaving. Rather, the performance looks like an assemblage of music, video, light, the vinyl player, and the bodies of the listener, audience members and the performer. It is by no means a regular performance. Paulo de Assis helps to put this performance into perspective when writing about another instantiation in the Rasch series:



A Laboratory for Performance Practice 199 Clearly, this was not a performance “of ” Kreisleriana, though all of its pitches, rhythms, dynamics, and formal “proportions” have been played. . . . It was also not a performance “about” Kreisleriana, as it had no pedagogical intention of revealing to the audience anything it didn’t know before (even if that happened as a side effect). And it was also not a performance “after” Kreisleriana, for the simple reason that the full score was played in an intended mainstream, modern mode of musical interpretation. (Assis 2018, 10)

Instead, in Rasch25, Kreisleriana as musical work is developed as new network of musical materials. The musical work in question is quite literally reassembled out of diverse materials. Rather than putting the historical and hierarchical comprehension of the score central, other materials are integrated into the performance. What emerged is a performance in which the musical work is a network of a variety of things. As Assis describes: I take a work from the past on my desk, and if there is a recording or if someone wrote about this I consider this to be part of the work. I try to find a way to include these non-musical materials in the performance. If this is your aim, it does not make sense to play the piece the same way it was played two hundred years long. So you start looking how you can stretch the music, break the music, make insertions in the music. (Paulo de Assis, personal interview with author, 27 June 2017)

This way of working changes the ontology of the musical work: from historical and hierarchical to networked and ever-expanding. “Instead of reproducing something, we try to project something into the unknown; we propose an alternative to relate to the musical past” (Lucia D’Errico, personal interview with author, 4 April 2017). Therewith, each performance is not an iteration of the score, but a newly assembled network of musical materials. The performer’s role, consequently, is not to merely interpret the score, but to create a new configuration in which the score is only one of the many musical materials.

TOWARDS A NEW ONTOLOGY OF MUSICAL WORKS ME21 was, for five years, a curious laboratory in which its team experimented in and with musical performance practice. Relating back to the question posed in the beginning of this chapter, I can now reflect on what ME21 does to the understanding of the materiality of music and the role of the performer. The project namely resulted in different insights: theoretical, methodological, and practical. First, ME21 shifts the theoretical way in which musical works are understood. Traditionally, over the last two hundred years, the “musical work” was a fixed, hierarchical notion that structured the social practices of music. In this project, the researchers explored the idea that musical works are in fact mobile entities that include an ever-growing body of actual things (see Assis 2018, 41–70). This resulted in the development of a performative understanding of musical works: each work is a

200

Chapter 12

different thing depending on who studies it, works with it or performs it. The ME21 collective thus developed an ontology of musical works in which they are understood as an assemblage of actual things and virtual connectors. This theoretical insight has methodological consequences, as understanding the musical work as an assemblage changes the responsibilities of the musician who performs notated art music. Rather than interpreting the score, it becomes the musician’s task to critically (re-)assess and reflect on the music she performs. Consequently, the musical practitioner moves from interpreter to operator: a role that fuses composition and performance and emancipates the performer from traditional social structures in Western notated art music (see D’Errico 2018). Finally, it is the socio-material structure of the ME21 collective itself that is important to address as well. In the field of artistic research, many projects are still carried out individually. This project has shown how artistic research can be done in a collective and transdisciplinary way. In the everyday practices of the team, the borders between practice and theory faded and their collective efforts resulted in insights that are significant in a wide variety of fields—from philosophy of science to musicology and sociology. What was created over the span of five years was an artistic research laboratory, a testing ground, for a new way of working in musical performance practice.

NOTES 1. Therewith it is also relating to Goehr’s (1992, xxix) quest to “dismantle” the musical work and the conventionalised understanding of musical performance/interpretation that become too rigid. 2. For a complete overview of publications see: http://musicexperiment21.eu/publications/. 3.  Next to these collective artistic projects, doctoral student Lucia D’Errico worked on a project (Powers of Divergence) and postdoc Juan Parra (Multiple Paths: Towards a Performance Practice in Computer Music) as well. 4.  For an overview of the instantiations and for more information, see the Research Catalogue page dedicated to Raschx: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/64319/64320.

REFERENCES Assis, Paulo de. n.d. On Interpretation: Music as Text. [online] Music Experiment 21. Available at: https://musicexperiment21.wordpress.com/programme/1-on-interpretation-music-astext/. Accessed 22 April 2019. ­­———. 2017. “Rasch24 The Somatheme.” In Artistic Research in Music: Discipline and Resistance, edited by Jonathan Impett, 15–42. Leuven: Leuven University Press. ­­———. 2018. Logics of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance through Artistic Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press.



A Laboratory for Performance Practice 201

Cook, Nicholas. 2013. Beyond the Score: Music as Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. D’Errico, Lucia. 2018. Powers of Divergence: An Experimental Approach to Music Performance. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Goehr, Lydia. 1992. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Haynes, Bruce. 2007. The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music for the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Impett, Jonathan, ed. 2017. Artistic Research in Music: Discipline and Resistance. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Knorr Cetina, Karin. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

13 Artistic Research and Musical Performance Mieko Kanno

In the context of Artistic Research having developed rapidly in the last two decades, I address in this chapter what Artistic Research is for classically trained musicians working in the performance of twentieth and twenty-first century art music.1 I approach this topic from two perspectives.2 First we look at past examples and reflect on the conditions that may have influenced our understanding about Artistic Research in Musical Performance. The discussion aims to unravel assumptions we make about music as art and research. Second, we examine the current cultural perspective on concepts such as creativity and skill in Musical Performance. This perspective illustrates in particular how society and education mingle to shape art and research in music, and indicate where next challenges may lie.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: ART AND RESEARCH IN INDIVIDUAL MUSICIANS Both artistic and research activities have existed in music for centuries. The histories of musical performance, musical composition, organology, and studies on music show that each field developed alongside the others, and that the borderlines between them have always been porous. The period immediately prior to the appearance of Artistic Research, from the 1960s to the 1990s approximately, provides examples in the field of musical performance where artistic and research activities coincided in individuals and clusters, and the legacies of which affected clearly our conceptions of Artistic Research in music. Three types are briefly considered in this context: Historically Informed Performance (HIP), the activity of pianists David Tudor and Glenn Gould, and the field of Music Theory and Analysis. 202



Artistic Research and Musical Performance 203

HIP is a movement the beginning of which can be traced to the early part of the twentieth century. Arnold Dolmetsch pioneered the revival of performances of early music on original instruments, including research into the reconstruction of the instruments. HIP has been a project, right from its inception, that combines a number of fields in Music: Historiography, Musicology, Performance Practice, Organology, to name the most prominent fields. Consequently, an important feature of HIP has been that many of the performers are people with multiple skills and interests working across multiple fields, such as Gustav Leonhardt, Frans Brüggen, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, William Christie, Paul Hillier, and John Butt. What characterises their approach is that research informs the practice in an effective manner.3 Their extensive archival research, for example, gives rise to discovering compositions that have not been performed since the time when they were composed; new interpretations of existing works; and reimagining the sonorities through reconstructions of period instruments; all becoming incorporated into musical performance and communicated with the excitement of a discovery. In their case, research is essential in enabling reflection for the renewal of art music as performance. David Tudor was a pianist and composer. Although he never presented himself as researcher, the extent to and the rigour with which he examined and experimented with the material for performance has often been noted as something well beyond the remit of a performer. The fact that he left all his scores, letters, and memos for posterity has enabled several studies on his creative process. Martin Iddon and James Pritchett, for example, demonstrate independently how Tudor’s performance strategy for Variations II by John Cage has influenced the latter’s composition (Iddon 2013, 175–87; Pritchett 2004). Tudor presents a case of a musician whose creativity comes in a form that is unusual for a performer. I say “unusual,” rather than “different” or “extensive,” because what constitutes the creativity of a performer is often set by the expectations of the musical practices of the time. The musical creativity of Tudor is comparable to that of Glenn Gould—another pianist who has been studied frequently—whose interviews and recordings have captured the imagination of many artist-researchers. It can be considered that, though their approaches are very different, Tudor and Gould have contributed to the new definition for “the work of the performer”: they create the music as if from scratch, rather than represent it in performance, which John Rink (2018, 89) has considered as “a different sort of work” from the standard understanding of the term in music. In including the field of Music Theory and Analysis as a case in this context, I am focussing on the work of pianist-scholars such as Charles Rosen, Peter Hill, Jonathan Dunsby, and Roy Howat. They are perhaps better known for their scholarly work than for their performances, but these pianists are first-class artists. While their scholarship represents very “scientific” examples in musicology, the interface between art and research is very permeable in their practice as pianists. Their scholarly insight derives from their being excellent pianists: scholarly inquiry, for them, is a means of examining hypotheses that arise from the act of playing the music, and the results of the inquiry inform the playing; the further act of playing gives rise to

204

Chapter 13

further hypotheses, now better informed and focussed than before. They have created a musical equivalent of the model used in laboratory-based research, where the process circulates via different stages (conceptualisation, modelling, experiment, and reflection) into a spiral. They have initiated a particular kind of research methodology, effecting a new network between the sub-disciplines in Music: thereafter Music Theory, Historical Musicology, Aesthetics and Performance intermingle. Their intradisciplinary network also suggests an operational model for musician-researchers in the development of inter-disciplinary framework today. The reader may have already noticed that these cases are predominantly about keyboard players. While there are many nuances and exceptions to the norm, the pedagogical tradition for pianists has tended to emphasise primarily the acquisition of knowledge and skills as a singular artist, in contrast to the equivalent tradition in orchestral instrumentalists for whom the acquisition of knowledge and skills as a group member has formed a significant part of their professional training.4 The scholarly tradition in music has likewise been predominantly based on individual basis until recently. While the idea of group research is increasingly taking hold today, it can be seen that the lone artist model has enabled, in the first instance, a fusion between artistic and scholarly activities for keyboard players and paved the way for Artistic Research in music.5 However, I have been selectively depicting only stellar attractions on the landscape. The landscape consists of many other features too. Between the artistic performance and scholarly research as two extreme points of a continuum between art and research, there are many degrees and shades that combine and mix these two elements. There are excellent artistic performances with only a fragment of research; there is excellent research the performance element of which is of little artistic significance. Nicholas Till (2013) cites an interesting example of a cross-over between the practice and research from the seventeenth century, when he discusses artistic practice as research. He questions whether art and research share criteria between them: With artistic practice as research, emphasis is placed on the aptness of the research questions, the rigour of the methodology, the thoroughness of the contextual research and the acumen of the theoretical conclusions that are adduced. Process rather than product; generalisable knowledge rather than specific aesthetic experience. While these are essential to the definition and evaluation of practice as research, they may be less relevant to creative practice that is not defined as research. On the other hand, the question of aesthetic quality is often deliberately evaded in the evaluation of practice as research. Indeed, practice as research can lead to some dull artistic outcomes. But perhaps this doesn’t matter: Peri’s opera Euridice (Florence, 1600) is groundbreaking as a technical demonstration of the possibilities of sung drama, but it is dry and, dare I say it, “academic” in comparison with Monteverdi’s Orfeo (Mantua, 1607), a passionate masterpiece that showed the true artistic potential of Peri’s more cautious first steps. But Orfeo, which is based on the same fable as Euridice, almost certainly wouldn’t have happened without Peri’s earlier experiments. (Till 2013)



Artistic Research and Musical Performance 205

Peri and Monteverdi represent two facets of a significant development in the history of opera, and may also be considered to epitomise the relations, including the tension between art and research that is of significance to Artistic Research today. Where is the boundary between art and research in the changing “economies of cultural knowledge” (Impett 2017, 223), in terms of production and consumption, for musicians today? The preliminary assumption is that both art and research produce knowledge. It has not changed since the time of Peri and Monteverdi. What has changed is the context in which we produce musical knowledge through art and research. The changing cultural and societal context affects the means through which musicians produce their knowledge.6 On the one hand, knowledge production itself needs close attention in relation to art; on the other, the societal values about art and research need attention because they have critical impact on the means of knowledge production used by musicians.

CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE: KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND MUSIC INSTITUTIONS Since Artistic Research is considered a discipline in academia in the present context, it seems appropriate to look at relevant issues in the education sector. It has to be said that, while activities in Artistic Research in music have much in common with those in the culture sector such as commissions, performances, and recordings, the field has maintained much closer links with the education sector because of its framing of activities as research. To date, research councils worldwide liaise more frequently with the ministries of industry, economy, education, or welfare rather than with the ministries of culture. Resultant ramifications for Artistic Research run deep. Changes introduced to the higher-education sector and to the third-cycle education, in particular through the Europe-wide Bologna Process, have had much impact on the study expectations as well as the concept of knowledge production in music.7 Opportunities for musicians to continue study and research beyond the master’s levels have become more widely available. What remains to be a recurrent, thorny issue relates to the value given to musical skills in research discourse. We shall review the environment in which musical craftsmanship is learned and developed at the higher education levels. There are two kinds of music education: music conservatoires or equivalent units which specialise in the fostering of professional musicians on the one hand, and institutions (or departments) specialising in music sciences or musicology on the other hand. The division of labour between “doing” and “thinking,” and a different sense of social responsibility for “doers” or “thinkers” is clearly discernible in their ethos. In Europe, the two types of institutions receive different levels of government funding: conservatoires receive approximately 1.5 times more than the university music departments do.8 In terms of curriculum, the two types of music education

206

Chapter 13

increasingly overlap: for example, in Nordic countries and in the United Kingdom it is possible to do a musicology doctorate in a music conservatoire, and also possible to do a performance doctorate in many of the university music departments. However, they retain their emphasis in ways that reflect their own past and institutional backgrounds. The European conservatoires receive more funding precisely because of the need to provide specialist training—that is, the training of musical skills. This training leads to expertise; however, such expertise is understood as craftsmanship rather than insight. The “knowledge production” of these experts is seen as art and not research. This is the point about which much debate in Artistic Research has already taken place. My contention, being supplemental to the existing discussion, is that we are yet to appreciate craft with a view to fully recognising its powers in contemporary society, becoming part of the cultural and societal discourse. What does craft mean today, and what do we do with it? Craft is about skilled work, and in Europe it is historically associated with guilds. In the early Medieval period, craft practitioners were engaged in exchange of goods including services. Craft acquired much skills and knowledge in the growing exchange culture worldwide, leading to patronage by the time of Medieval Europe. But the days when craftsmen were seen as pioneers are long gone. Since Industrialisation, craft has often been considered little more than manual labour. Despite occasional revivals such as “Arts and Crafts” at the turn of the twentieth century, craft has rarely featured in the consciousness of Western civilisation in the last couple of centuries (De Landa gives a pertinent description of this shift).9 But craft is a universal phenomenon. Many Asian countries continue their appreciation and maintenance of craft traditions to this day. It is worth noting that the craft traditions in Asia include tangible as well as intangible cultural traditions such as performing arts, as seen in the schemes of the Living Human Treasure.10 Intangible culture is a less prominent idea in the West, still a growing area of cultural consciousness as in the Intangible Cultural Heritage movement promoted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. As well as the anthropological, ethical, and societal values the movement highlights, intangible culture has a close link to the idea of a dynamic community with emphases on agency and action. Intangible culture is a structuring environment that generates practices and representations: it highlights a potential for generating actions, rather than the principles that govern the generated products. This is where craft and intangible culture agree in their relation to the community as an environment for knowledge generation. It is also the point at which it suggests the reasons for craft attracting less interest in societal and cultural discourses in the West, due to the lesser significance attached to the concept of intangible culture so far. It may be construed why craft is considered as a given in most discussions in Western society, except for the experts of that craft. Efforts to reintroduce craft into the cultural discourse of the West have arisen in the last few decades, largely from philosophy, anthropology and sociology, and now from Artistic Research. Although very few mention craft explicitly, the topic of the



Artistic Research and Musical Performance 207

body as a site of knowledge that influences the potential for action is widespread. It can be traced back to gender studies of Judith Butler (1990, 1993) with discussions about gender and identity, where the conditioned body triggers conditions for action; Pierre Bourdieu (1972), whose positioning of the concepts of practice and agency has brought a shift in the way we think about human actions; Alfred Gell (1992) explored the role of technical dexterity in ethnographic art in bringing about a captivation on the behold (which he called “the technology of enchantment”); The Craftsman by Richard Sennett (2008) discussed the history and cultural sociology of craftsmanship in a wider context; and Tim Ingold (2007, 2010) promoted the centrality of bodily movement in between “points” in the discourse of making artefacts. But we still have a limited exposition of the skills set of musicians as integrated part of musical discourse. The reason may be the diversity of manners in which musical expertise manifests itself as insight within the discourse;11 we are yet to gain a clear understanding about the specific manners through which the expertise yields access to knowledge. While some Practice-Led or Artistic Research in music has touched upon the presence of craft as important component in music-making (such as Laws 2012 and McCaleb 2014), it is still some way from recognising it as a game-changer in the pursuit of knowledge in music. Work in higher education institutions is seen increasingly in terms of impact and research for society. In the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the United Kingdom in 2014, which was one of the largest-scale research quality assessment schemes in the world in recent years, a degree of uncertainty was observed about the role of craftsmanship. While the primary REF criteria were significance, originality, and rigour, the interpretation of these criteria was considered to have varied greatly when it came to assessing artistic outputs as research.12 One of the key challenges was about how to acknowledge craftsmanship in this context; in other words, how practical expertise affected the significance, originality and rigour of knowledge expressed as art. This is another example of craft being implied or taken for granted in the production of knowledge and impact, but not integrated as part of the discourse. In academia we are yet to challenge assumptions we make about craft. The collective claim that music is a discipline where expert skills play a significant role, and further, that there are insights and innovations that can only be attained through craft, is an ongoing development. Meanwhile, practical expertise in art as the driver for innovation is not uncommon in the cultural sector. Many “artist-in-residence” programs around the world have hosted musicians to create innovative articulations of research as art.13 Philanthropic individuals and organisations provide time and space for many musicians from around the world to develop innovative artistic projects through programs such as the creative residencies at the Banff Centre, Canada.14 The public’s trust in the notion that “music is good”—as Bruno Nettl famously put it (1983, 15–19)—remains high. Another type of knowledge production with musical expertise is in the commercial sector. The artistic work of Robert Henke may provide an example of this kind. While being the founder and technical expert for Ableton Live, he has been

208

Chapter 13

active as a musician specialising in live electronics, and his recent artistic work reveals aspects of why Ableton Live excels in the field of live performance software. It is not only the technical expertise that makes the software so popular; Henke’s installation work in light and sound demonstrates his musical expertise as a leading computer music artist, suggesting a symbiotic relation he has maintained throughout his career between his artistic creativity and technical/commercial production.15 My last point is that Artistic Research is not in a void without societal impact. On the contrary, it can be said that the seeds of Artistic Research have come from outside academia. What characterises Musical Performance as Artistic Research is that the distinction between the general categories of basic research and applied research is positively blurred. There is a whirlpool of activities in between—hence many finely graded definitions such as practice-based research, practice-led research, researchinformed practice, practice-informed research, and practice as research—and, while some kinds of research yield more directly to applications outside themselves, others take much longer. The value of research cannot be assessed in one scale, and the same applies to Musical Performance as Artistic Research. Though, what we may still learn from the outside is the ways in which the expertise of the artists communicates, via knowledge production, to the idea of “excellence.” In Western classical music in particular, musical performance has a strong tendency towards goal orientation, typically expressed with phrases such as “achieving excellence.” It has led music studies to examine this uphill endeavour. The research has placed much emphasis on documenting the accumulative, sometimes roaming, sometimes difficult, sometimes transformational developmental paths, and the ethical and psychological decisions the “experts” make on their way to achieving a successful performance (e.g., Ericsson, Charness, Feltovich, and Hoffman 2006; Schön 1983; Williamon 2004). While it has shed insight on “how competent musicians go about their business” by observing them, the research has been directed towards understanding what happens in the course of creating performances and has seldom concerned itself with the critical question of why the said methodology works. What seems missing is to acknowledge the creativity of the expert. Hence, we may try to understand why it happens in the way in which it happens, so that findings will acknowledge creativity as knowledge production rather than leave the inquiry at rationalising certain occurrences as part of a credible process. The fact that some methods work (while others don’t) suggests that right methods are instrumental in carrying out necessary tasks. We wish to understand the instrumentality within the process as creativity and how the practitioner interfaces the context, material, and process—however elusive such a goal may seem; we wish to come closer to understanding why expert skills and knowledge intermingle as craft, stimulate creativity, and bring about excellence. We could then start putting together the findings into the discourse of music-making as possible strategies for knowledge production.16 That is where pedagogy becomes so close to Artistic Research. Yet, there is still an outstanding issue. My final contention is that excellence is not a fixed idea in musical performance. It keeps transforming itself—hence the dual perception of



Artistic Research and Musical Performance 209

surprise and inevitability in a truly moving musical performance. If we accept that classical music is a living, evolving culture, then we might find it more acceptable that the renewal of excellence in musical performance relies on the unity between musical skills and creativity. The same might apply to music as art and research; and to Artistic Research in music.

NOTES   1.  The words start in upper case when referring to the subject as a discipline, otherwise they start in lower case for general usage, throughout this chapter.   2.  A number of pertinent discussions about the first principle for Artistic Research in Music have already taken place, and it seems appropriate to acknowledge them wherever relevant, rather than revisiting the question again. Principal early literature on the topic includes: Borgdorff (2012); Coessens, Crispin, and Douglas (2009).  3. Robert Donington’s The Interpretation of Early Music, first published in 1963, is a representative example of this kind of research aimed at performers.   4.  This observation is also the starting point for Helena Gaunt and Heidi Westerlund’s book Collaborative Learning Higher Music Education (2013, especially 1–2), which explores pragmatically new modes of learning to address the gap between the traditional lone learning style and the group work in profession.   5.  Group or collaborative artistic activity as research is relatively new. The hurdle has been set by the education system (where the work for a research degree needs to be individualised) rather than by the nature of collaborative work. Robin Nelson (2013) illuminates the challenges he has met in recognising a joint work by two theatre performance artists as research at the PhD degree level.   6.  The decline in the levels of public funding for the arts (as in the UK and the Netherlands), the disappearance of “apprentice models” in music industry, and the quicker pace in the artistic production (such as the scheduling practice in symphony orchestras) are three most visible and affective changes in the last few decades, resulting in the shift of emphasis in the skills set.   7. The project “Polifonia” by the Association Européenne des  Conservatoires (AEC) is one such initiative which monitors and develops the consequences. https://www.aec-music. eu/polifonia.   8.  For example, the Higher Education Funding Council of England provides institutionspecific funding (or exceptional funding) for specialist institutions which covers music conservatoires. They receive discretionary funding in addition to the basic funding the government provides for higher education institutions. See for example the document which sets out the method for the last review of this funding https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/23356/1/HEFCE2015_10.pdf.   9.  De Landa (1997, 71–99), chapter “Geological History: 1700–2000 A.D.” 10.  The Living Human Treasure scheme in Japan for example dates from 1950 and recognises individuals with an outstanding degree of knowledge and skills in performing elements of the intangible cultural heritage where, the “heritage” includes practices and expressions. A notable characteristic is its emphasis on practice and the knowledge within the action: a potter may be recognised as a Living Human Treasure because of her practice and skills, rather than her products being recognised as national treasures.

210

Chapter 13

11. Percussionist Steven Schick discusses the diverse forms of expertise he has found amongst himself and the few other percussionists who have also played Michael Gordon’s XY, which is considered to be a very challenging piece requiring the highest level of expertise. In the concluding paragraph, he ponders: “I began the discussion of XY by saying that this was a piece that required an expert percussionist. But what kind of expertise is not, by definition, transferable to other performers . . . ? What kind of performance practice results when two performers use two different sets of skills to solve the same problem, when expertise is a floating raft rather than a firmly anchored platform? . . . Perhaps expertise in percussion playing implies the ability to create and individuate a new set of skills for every problem. Is adaptability . . . the real expertise of the percussionist?” (Schick 2006, 78–79). 12.  An early discussion took place at a colloquium organised by the Royal Musical Association hosted by the University of Manchester, on 24th June 2015. The issue has been taken further with increasing momentum. 13.  The National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) Art Program, established in 1962, is one of the high-profile examples of the kind, with an emphasis on the value of artistic expression in recording and communicating the administration’s work in art forms. Many of the “residents” have done more than artistic descriptions of NASA’s work, such as Laurie Anderson, for whom art and science provide an evolving framework for creativity. 14.  The library of the Banff Centre allows a glimpse into the work of the former creative residents, ranging from Bill Viola (media art) to Rachel Podger (Baroque violin). 15. http://roberthenke.com. 16.  Hakkarainen (2013) expresses eloquently the need to pursue collective creativity in order to register expertise which tends to be individualised.

REFERENCES Borgdorff, Henk. 2012. The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1972. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge. ———. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. Coessens, Katleen, Darla Crispin, and Anne Douglas. 2009. The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto. Leuven: Leuven University Press. De Landa, Manuel. 1997. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books. Donington, Robert. 1963. The Interpretation of Early Music. London: Faber and Faber. Ericsson, K., Anders, Neil Charness, Paul J. Feltovich, and Robert R. Hoffman, eds. 2006. The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gaunt, Helena, and Heidi Westerlund, eds. 2013. Collaborative Learning in Higher Music Education. Farnham: Ashgate. Gell, Alfred. 1992. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.” In Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, edited by Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, 40–67. Oxford: Clarendon Press.



Artistic Research and Musical Performance 211

Hakkarainen, Kai. 2013. “Mapping the Research Ground: Expertise, Collective Creativity and Shared Knowledge Practices.” In Collaborative Learning in Higher Music Education, edited by Helena Gaunt and Heidi Westerlund, 13–26. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Iddon, Martin. 2013. John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Impett, Jonathan. 2017. “The Contemporary Musician and the Production of Knowledge.” In Artistic Research in Music: Discipline and Resistance, edited by Jonathan Impett, 221–38. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge. ———. 2010. “The Textility of Making.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (2010): 91–102. Laws, Catherine, ed. 2012. The Practice of Practising. Leuven: Leuven University Press. McCaleb, James Murphy. 2014. Embodied Knowledge in Ensemble Performance. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Nelson, Robin. 2013. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nettl, Bruno. 1983. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Pritchett, James. 2004. “David Tudor as Composer/Performer in Cage’s ‘Variations II’.” Leonardo Music Journal 14: 11–16. Rink, John. 2018. “The Work of the Performer.” In Virtual Works—Actual Things: Essays in Music Ontology, edited by Paulo de Assis, 98–114. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Schick, Steven. 2006. The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams. Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press. Schön, Donald. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books. Sennett, Richard. 2008. The Craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Till, Nicholas. 2013. “Opus Versus Output.” Times Higher Education, 7 March 2013. Williamon, Arron, ed. 2004. Musical Excellence: Strategies and Techniques to Enhance Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

14 Fantasies Finding Realities The ConNext Network as a Case Study of the Evolution of an Artistic Research Dimension in Conservatories Bernard Lanseky, Shu Chen Ong, and Abigail Sin

The evolution over the past twenty years in concepts and activities now identified as artistic research in music has been extraordinary, both in the development of a discipline in itself and in its impact among conservatories. In the 1990s, artist-engaged research in conservatories was seen—both from the inside and outside—as an additional pursuit (at best) and an aberration (at worst). Today, however, it becomes almost too ubiquitous, driven as much by agendas of necessary inclusion as by intrinsic passion allied to critical engagement. Arguably, this transformation has resulted in part from different cultural approaches globally, emerging from what was originally an interesting range of geographic insularities which has evolved subsequentially through a mixture of crosspollination and debate. Rather than a broader survey of this complex development, this chapter looks specifically at evolutions across ConNext, a small network of eight higher music education institutions from across the globe which, since 2014, have been meeting and collaborating regularly together to share and debate latest innovative evolutions in practice in higher education. In offering what is essentially primarily a firsthand, personal perspective on perceived trends and practices in ConNext schools, this chapter charts a journey from initial considerations of artistic research in the conservatory environment around 2000, through to consequent manifestations in symposia in Australia, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Belgium, Canada, and Norway, exploring the development of research centres and forums in these institutions as well as the introduction of curriculum dimensions into mainstream music programs, where relevant. An important element in these seemingly independent developments has been increasing interactions between the partners, as well as the possibility of sharing experiences of external influences. 212



Fantasies Finding Realities 213

Having been immersed in senior institutional administration in two of the ConNext schools (first Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London until 2006, and subsequently the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music in Singapore to the present), I have been a fairly consistent observer—and an occasional provocateur and contributor—to the field’s evolutions internationally. My two co-authors—Shu Chen Ong and Abigail Sin—offer perspectives more exclusively from the present: both are recent graduates, educated initially in Singapore before respectively undertaking further studies in the United States (Stanford University) and the United Kingdom (Guildhall followed by the Royal Academy of Music in London), and growing up therefore as research first found foothold in conservatories. This multifaceted perspective seems appropriate: where in the 1990s the quest seemed still inclined towards singular truth, it is clear that multiplicity has increasingly emerged as a driver for artistic research. In the spirit of current artistic research presentations, this chapter offers a somewhat subjective and comparatively unorthodox framing, with Mozart’s Fantasy in C Minor K475 as a central metaphor for this historical development.

ARTISTIC RESEARCH IN MUSIC UNFOLDS ITS CONTEMPORARY DEFINITIONS As a new field still being defined itself, it is hardly surprising that the term “artistic research” continues to mean different things in different contexts. For this chapter, our definition is drawn from the introduction by Jonathan Impett (Director of Research at the Orpheus Institute) for the Institute’s recently released Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Artistic Research in Music: An Introduction1—a possibly unorthodox source, but one that fittingly acknowledges the times, arenas and ways in which we are considering artistic research today. His introduction proposes that artistic research in music involves the pursuit of knowledge in relation to—and through—creative practice. As a process, it urges that the artist-researcher reflects on their relation to their craft. It requires that they interrogate the creative process, its product, and its sharing—each being as important as the other. These fundamental layers of self-reflexivity make artistic research inextricably personal. In addition, artistic research is grounded in a contemporary recognition of multiplicity in perspectives, knowledge domains, and contexts. The choice to map this chapter to the form of a musical work stems from a similar understanding that the presentation of artistic research should itself hold experimental and subjective dimensions. By doing so, we aim to offer different resonances, both for experiencing the musical work in a contemporary context, as well as historical exposition of the very field itself.

214

Chapter 14

INTRODUCING CONNEXT Now five years old, ConNext currently includes nine partners from four continents, built out from Pentacon, originally a five-partner collaboration formed in 2009–2010: 1. The Royal Conservatoire in The Hague (“The Hague”), then embracing Orpheus Institute (“Orpheus”) in a partner relationship. 2. The Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University, Australia (“Queensland”). 3. The Schulich School of Music of McGill University, Canada (“Schulich”). 4. The Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London (“Guildhall”). 5. The Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki (“Sibelius”). From its outset, research was a critical point of focus for Pentacon, encompassing not only what we now know as artistic research, but also other elements recognised as increasingly important for conservatories (e.g., teaching and learning; community relevance; cross-disciplinary research). The group’s formation approximately marks a halfway point of the period under consideration in this chapter, analogous perhaps to the establishment of a key signature (although arguably incomplete) in K475. As shall be demonstrated, this midway point, while incomplete, did however define a substantial moment of recognition, enabling a common focus amidst sometimes conflicting tendencies. Joining the group by invitation in 2014 to form ConNext were two further schools—the Norwegian Academy of Music (“Norway”) and the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, National University of Singapore (“YST”).2 ConNext defines itself as a movement which embraces change as a given to be engaged in proactively, brings a guerrilla force and piloting spirit, and embraces a trusting openness. One direction for change that partners agreed on from the outset was embedding a culture of research and reflection in conservatories; artistic research was thus a natural point of focus, steered greatly by the full inclusion of Orpheus which was originally linked to Pentacon via its close affiliation with The Hague. With this membership, ConNext’s spectrum of higher education institutions spans an undergraduate-focused conservatory (YST), independent European institutions (Norway, The Hague, Guildhall, Sibelius), university-based conservatories or music schools (Queensland, Schulich), and a dedicated artistic research institute focused on doctoral and post-doctoral studies (Orpheus).

MOZART’S FANTASY IN C MINOR K475, AS METAPHOR The idea of mapping this discussion to the form of Mozart’s C Minor Fantasy K475 stems from an initial presentation of similar shape for the Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music (PGVIM) International Symposium held in Bangkok in 2017.3



Fantasies Finding Realities 215

An annual international research symposium incorporating rich experimentation, improvisation, cross-arts presentation and cutting-edge technologies, it was hosted in an essentially undergraduate institution in Southeast Asia—not something many Western participants in the field may have anticipated twenty years ago. In a similar vein, Mozart’s Fantasy must have brought surprising experimental elements to its era. Its boldness, innovation, and evolution through time offer an apt metaphor for transformations in artistic research, both more broadly in conservatories and more specifically in the interactions between conservatories comprising ConNext. On a more individual note, during the period under consideration in this chapter, contemporary explorations of the Fantasy as well as conceptual and technological evolutions in performative possibilities have informed my own lecture-recital performances of this work. Structurally, this chapter’s sections are bookmarked by excerpts from the manuscript of the Fantasy. For these, we credit the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg, which made the facsimile available via CD-ROM.4

OPENINGS (ADAGIO): 1995–2005 Within the conservatory world, a significant stimulus for what we know as artistic research evolves out of a general consideration of research’s role for practice-based music institutions, following Bologna Declaration discussions in the European Union. To some extent, this questioning was paralleled in Australia, where conservatories were being embedded in universities. These two geographically distinct contexts offered an interesting mix of commonalities and differences in the pursuit of fresh definitions of research potential. This initial period was truly a time of searching and improvising, not unlike how the Fantasy’s intense opening call to arms (built around C) is tinged immediately with chromatic uncertainty, with textural and chromatic explorations equidistantly on either side in B Major and Db. For both centres there was no clear sense of key—any momentary stability was short-lived and exotic, though not without strong elements compelling curiosity and interest.

Figure 14.1.   The opening of the Fantasy’s Adagio.

216

Chapter 14

Figure 14.2.   Building curiosity with tantalizing but short-lived hints of stability.

Following the Bologna Declaration5 in June 1999 (and anticipatory transformations in certain national frameworks earlier in the decade), it became increasingly clear that conservatories needed to embrace research in some form to be fully integrated into the higher education sector. In the United Kingdom (and indeed elsewhere, e.g., in Flanders), this trans-European initiative (again, also often preempted at a national level) was closely linked with the conversion of postgraduate certification to Master’s-level recognition. Alongside inherent challenges in such conversion, core artistic research elements came to the forefront: the need to focus on the performing experience itself at least as much as on the material performed; and the central role of the artist as well as subjectivity (albeit needing to be linked with scholarship). The Guildhall Master’s in Music program, introduced in the late 1990s and then led by Darla Crispin6 and myself, provided early demonstration of a research approach with critical self-evaluation as a core element. The program incorporated an extended self-reflective account and a six-week Introduction to Research lecture series as part of a compulsory module. In these early forays in Guildhall, Peter Renshaw—an expert in creative and lifelong learning—was an important influence, interfacing research-oriented dimensions, the conservatory, creative practice, and the community. His role later extended to a broader institution-wide research brief, articulating some research policies and mentoring a range of younger Guildhall faculty, including among others Helena Gaunt. From early on, Renshaw recognised the larger social, political and artistic resonances of such change. His connections with Christopher Frayling (then at the Royal College of Art, London) and with national and international organisations such as the Arts Council of England, Paul Hamlyn Foundation and International Society for Music Education (ISME) were pivotal in steering direction. Guildhall’s situation was common across many schools: an individual institution negotiating with its external validating agency (City, University of London) to reach a solution for including research dimensions in a performance degree. Often, developments were driven by the passions of individuals who, in a quickly expanding



Fantasies Finding Realities 217

landscape, steered people and resources in a range of different directions. In certain European contexts, conversations were either directed at national-level conservatory platforms or generated following government directives. In consequence, approaches across the sector ranged from the more artistic to the more musicological and scientific. Among the institutions that would form ConNext, the tendency, at least initially, was towards the artistic, experimental, and collective.

TEXTBOX 14.1 GUILDHALL SCHOOL OF MUSIC AND DRAMA Today, Guildhall’s research activities reflect its belief that the arts and artists can and should play a dynamic and positive role in shaping society.7 Its research projects emphasise practical outcomes that have a tangible, beneficial impact on wider society, such as in healthcare and teaching. This crossdisciplinary outlook has led to collaborations with care homes, opera houses and app developers, involving both practitioners and non-practitioners in the process and outputs of their research. Its recent Reflective Conservatoire Conference shone a spotlight on the concept of artistic citizenship and social engagement, examining present and possible future issues in higher education and professional arts organisations.8 In its current position statements, Guildhall seems seldom to use the term “artistic research” to describe its activities. Its research questions and goals stem from broader concerns than an individual artist’s practice, and this is also reflected in the scale of the impact that they seek. It is certainly successful in its aim of fostering an engaging and inclusive environment for research in and through the arts.

Where conservatories generally focused on student experience (being essentially teaching and learning environments), Orpheus opened up space for performanceoriented researchers to connect and reflect on rapidly evolving insights and practices. In retrospect, Orpheus’s establishment here as a research-devoted centre can be seen as bold, brave, and prescient, even as it was logical given evolutions in the Flemish context at the time. As with Peter Renshaw, Orpheus’s principal advocate, Peter Dejans, was more a provocateur and administrator than a field researcher. In both cases, the advocacy required significant political nous, a well-articulated vision, an instinct for challenging conventions, and a high personal investment of passion; the sector was fortunate that its key players all held such attributes in abundance, albeit (as in the Fantasy’s first section) sometimes with conflicting goals as well as outcomes which were initially

218

Chapter 14

quite confrontational towards the conservatory mainstream. Both Renshaw (with the Arts Council of England and local and national government agencies) and Dejans (connected to Flemish conservatories, adjacent universities as well as national and Europe-wide government agencies) sought revolutionary change in practices by establishing connections beyond music while working hard to secure like-minded partnerships within their sectors. With such strategic vision and tenacity, their ambitions found greater resonance relatively quickly and successfully.

TEXTBOX 14.2. ORPHEUS INSTITUTE Orpheus was founded in 1996 with a primary focus on artistic research in music, defined on its website as “research embedded in musical practice and primarily guided by artistic objectives.”9 Since 1999, the Orpheus Institute has issued its own publications to share research findings and reflections with other artist-researchers and the wider community. In 2004, the Orpheus Institute launched docARTES, a four-year doctoral program10 in practice-based research organised with eight other partner institutions,11 including fellow ConNext member The Hague. In 2007, the Orpheus Research Centre was founded, providing a base for around thirty artist-researchers to develop both individual and collaborative research projects. In 2012, the project MusicExperiment21, hosted at Orpheus, received a major grant from the European Research Council (for 2013–2018), an important affirmation of artistic research in music that led to the organisation of research at Orpheus into “clusters” of research.12 Orpheus places the artist’s perspective and priorities in practice front and centre. Its projects emphasise music-making, as well as re-examining and redefining its definition, processes and methods, and outcomes. Its approach to “standard repertoire,” historically informed performance issues and new music fit under a broader attitude of experimentation, where traditional notions of the music-maker’s role should not be taken for granted. The diversity of Orpheus’s research output reflects its belief that the means of sharing information is itself part of the research process.

Given the Bologna Process’s ambitions for integration and cross-border recognition, such multiplicity clearly needed some curation. It is therefore unsurprising, in retrospect, that research quite quickly became a point of focus for the European Association of Conservatoires (AEC) under the presidencies first of Ian Horsburgh and later Johannes Johansson. The AEC then, under the management of Martin Prchal (who is now also highly active in ConNext), unquestionably gained increased impetus as a consequence of Bologna.



Fantasies Finding Realities 219

Short-term conversations began through Music Institutions with Doctoral Arts Studies (MIDAS), a gathering of doctorate-conferring organisations seeking to collectively define performance-oriented research paradigms in the post-Bologna landscape. Most of the European ConNext institutions (Orpheus, Guildhall, The Hague, Sibelius) were represented in MIDAS from the outset, working alongside such schools as the University of Gothenburg and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, for the first time towards some collective sense of direction. A critical player here was Henk Borgdorff (like Renshaw, with a background in philosophy), who steered the conversation into highly conceptual territory, recognising that different research fields asked different questions, framed arguments using different vocabularies and formulae, and favoured different means of presentation from each other. While early meetings were provocative (I remember particularly stimulating conversations in Gothenburg and Glasgow), they yielded few immediate conclusions. Further, the absence of any real disseminating instruments (such as international publication forums) meant that much of the stimuli, while arguably impactful, left little trace that could gain public visibility at the time.13 Where European conservatories’ relative autonomy meant that they found a range of different solutions to the research challenge, Australian conservatories needed to fit into university- and national-level research criteria. European conservatories often focused on establishing student-oriented curricula, whereas Australian institutions emphasised staff development and measurement in institutional appraisal at least as much. Likewise, European schools were working together to frame a possible future for performance-oriented research, whereas Australian institutions often faced pressures to fit into or transform externally imposed systems, often with funding implications attached.14 Of the Australian conservatories, Queensland was clearly more experimental in its visions than most, under Simone De Haan (1996–2002), Peter Roennfeldt (2003–2008), Huib Schippers (2009–2012) and Scott Harrison (since 2013)—the directors also seeing virtue in staying abreast of contemporary European trends. Already at the turn of century, there were close affiliations between Queensland and Guildhall, including a significant shared operatic commission and co-production in 2001 of Andrew Schultz’s Going into Shadows (figure 14.4). Attached to the production from the outset were a range of research elements (published outcomes, creative spin-offs into outreach activity, and teaching and learning experiments). In

Figure 14.3.   Growing potential and hints at direction, still with no solidification.

Figure 14.4.   The cover and contents page for the Going into Shadows publication. The content summary of the publication surrounding Andrew Schultz’s Going into Shadows itself shows the breadth of perspectives being articulated, spanning the composer’s contextual framings, related teaching and learning experiments, as well as external perspectives (including those of a music analyst, a critic, and the research center leader). The project’s evident ambition and cohesion was quite a controversial pushing of contemporary conservatory norms.



Fantasies Finding Realities 221

retrospect, this entire collaboration might today be recognised as an early example of multifaceted artistic research building out from a central performance project—the diverse directions and contributors are reflected already in the following cover page. Shortly after, Queensland held an international symposium and festival, Jammin’, alongside an international forum, CONNECTing with . . . , which drew attention to emergent trends in research particularly in conservatories. The keynote address,15 delivered by Peter Renshaw, brought formally into the Australian arena many key points then being espoused in the United Kingdom and Europe. Emulating his approach in the United Kingdom, Renshaw drew resonances from recent state- and national-level education department publications as he called for research outcomes to connect with the community, urged practitioners to critically reflect on their practice, and expressed ambitions for creative (rather than re-creative) and collaborative evolution. While Jammin’ and CONNECTing with . . . took the feel of an improvised carnival more than a symposium, the reflectiveness and impact was evident.

TEXTBOX 14.3. QUEENSLAND CONSERVATORIUM GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY The Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre was founded in 2003 to promote innovative music research yielding strong artistic and social outcomes. Today, its activities are divided into three focus areas, exploring musicians’ potential impact as creative practitioners, as activists in the wider community, and as educators and partners in promoting holistic well-being. The projects run by the Music and Communities and Music and Livelihoods include a range of social groups (e.g., prison inmates, mental health patients, rural marginalised populations) as active participants in their research processes, as well as potential beneficiaries from the project outcomes. These projects demonstrate the unique potency of the arts and the active social responsibility that musicians have in their respective communities. The Music and Creativities focus group shines a spotlight more specifically on artistic practice. Its flagship projects explore how performance and composition can embrace new means of producing and disseminating music (and research), while examining the resulting implications for (re)negotiating one’s artistic identity and practice. Notions of what constitutes an instrument or a score, who and what qualifies as a music-maker, and how and where we experience music are called into question and redefined by experiments in artificial intelligence, improvisation and new technologies.

222

Chapter 14

What was perhaps most exciting here, at least among the schools that would become some of ConNext’s core members, was that the need to develop a conservatory research profile was met with a desire to explore revolutionary approaches to the challenge. The parameters defining valid artistic research at the time were arguably more philosophical than musical or scientific. These were exciting times: people felt they were onto something intrinsically interesting and potentially game-changing, though nothing was fixed and tragically too little was recorded or disseminated at the time.16 The nature of debate was perhaps not unlike that of the Florentine Camerata’s birth four hundred years earlier, where theory was leading practice. Yet as then, the speed with which practice then evolved to transcend theory was spectacular. Those seeking more conventional precedent would have been right to be outraged.

COMPOUND BINARIES: 1995–2005 Concurrently, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries also saw emerging interest in practical dimensions of music-making in UK universities (particularly in London, Sheffield and Oxford), which had previously favoured explorations of more “fixed” dimensions of music (e.g., musicology, score analysis). This period saw some rather innovative and challenging performance practice publications, leading to more broad-based and unusually impactful visibility. While traditional modes of research dissemination—particularly the written word—remained the norm, explo-

Figure 14.5.1 and 14.5.2.   “Arrival” in D major compound binary.



Fantasies Finding Realities 223

rations turned towards more ephemeral dimensions of music beyond the score, such as performance practice and the experience of listening.17 An important example demonstrating both this expansion into new territory and the continued recognition of the need for traceability, was the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) initiative (2004–2009).18 While many principal authors in the area had some conservatory or performative affiliation (and were later to have ConNext influences), research commentary still tended to come from external voices rather than from artists themselves. CHARM’s emergence helped create mainstream recognition that performance could be a viable field for research, and to introduce vocabulary for expression that would find resonance in the future artistic research landscape.19 Two further tendencies also began to emerge among conservatories: the absorption of more traditional musicological or quasi-scientific research approaches; and the development of more traditional means of dissemination for conservatorygenerated research outcomes (e.g., publishing presses, international symposia, embedded research centres). Within ConNext institutions, the latter was perhaps more impactful, although both did manifest. Just as the Fantasy momentarily establishes a key after twenty-six bars—albeit a foreign one of D major—these movements at least offered a momentary illusion of stability drawn from a previous world, but with clear potential for impact in the emergent one. Within ConNext, the school with perhaps the longest-standing research profile was Sibelius. Unusually for Europe Union conservatories, Sibelius offered doctoral programs, referring to outputs as artistic-based research already in the 1990s.20 If this made the link to research more straightforward, it also made it slightly more complicated to offer new emphasis or emergent approaches with existing fields already firmly in place. Evolution has unquestionably taken place but gained new momentum slightly later than in some of the other ConNext institutions, where the door opening to artistic research involved fresh ground with research dimensions.

TEXTBOX 14.4. SIBELIUS ACADEMY, UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS HELSINKI Sibelius’s research outputs are chiefly concerned with shaping arts education and sustaining a healthy arts ecosystem in wider society. There are three distinct research centres under the banner of the University of The Arts Helsinki, focusing on arts education, historical research and artistic research respectively. The university-wide Centre for Artistic Research21 sets out a broad, inclusive vision, with projects ranging from music technology and artificial intelligence to music as a means of social advocacy. While most of these projects are practice-led and involve artistic practice in their investigative activities and outputs, desired impacts are very diverse in terms of targeted community audiences.

224

Chapter 14

PIÙ ALLEGRO: 2005–2008 Any illusion of a simple evolution, incorporating already-established research paradigms to interrogate the newly ordained field of practice-based research, was necessarily short-lived due to several factors. The first factor, as in the next section of the Fantasy, was essentially a call to arms from performers themselves to have a greater say in the process, and have the performer’s “inner voice” (subjective and at times individualised) represented as centrally as any externally shared, more “objective” dimensions. A second factor was emerging technological evolutions, which opened up unprecedented opportunities for capturing and disseminating insights. While the written word (with occasional illustration) had held sway for hundreds of years, concepts could suddenly be expressed using integrated audio and video for greater precision and detail—offering potential to reflect the complexities of real-time performance more truthfully than before. Such complexities were further gaining explicit recognition due to developments in cognitive science, a third factor contributing to rapid changes in practice-based research. Contemporary cognition studies lent weight to the fundamental drivers of artistic research in music, exploring aspects of human subjective experience including language, memory, attention, emotion. Such books as David Huron’s Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (2006) and Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music (2006) brought together analyses of cognition, the sensory/ emotional/personal experience of making and listening to music, as well as creativity, offering an ideal springboard for considering dimensions of artistic practice. Further technological offshoots in cognitive science such as artificial intelligence and machine learning have subsequently enlivened discussion, calling into question ideas once deemed self-evident, such as creativity, the need for humanness, and artistic standards—all with clear implications for artistic research. These factors are all evident to varying degrees in a pivotal output by the pianist Stephen Emmerson from Queensland. His work, Around a Rondo (2006), stands as an encyclopaedic account of the preparatory process and performative experience of Mozart’s Rondo in A Minor K511, with the outcome represented as a CD-ROM. Emmerson’s driving principle was that serious performance involves so much research and reflection that charting it becomes unrealizable due to the diversity of

Figure 14.6.   Quick shifting tensions in harmony at Più Allegro.



Fantasies Finding Realities 225

inputs, multiplicities of presentation, and the time to articulate a full narrative involved. CD-ROM technology enabled a more collage-like multi-platform approach, with which he undertook a singular experimental charting of his working process as a performer. If the challenges then involved adapting to the relatively new format of the CD-ROM, this very speed of technological development has ironically, just fifteen years later, rendered the format effectively obsolete. More generally, technology through the last two decades has influenced how we conceptualise, create, present, share and store knowledge in ways that are deeply pertinent for artistic research. With easily accessible digital tools for creating audio and visuals as well as posting one’s work, ideas can be formulated more richly in ways that better accommodate sharings of personal experience—beyond traditional modes such as written word and journal publications, which inherently pose limitations and barriers to entry. Digital platforms for information storage and transmission, from the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP, founded 2006) through to Dropbox (founded 2007) and Google Drive (2012), have afforded a substantially greater volume and quality of collaboration between researchers based in ConNext organisations and beyond. The early stages of the period under consideration, before such functionality became available or more readily harnessed, risked being easily lost from the reach of modern searchability. More recently, a number of studies (including this one) have found it necessary to attempt to document traces of this experienced history.

ANDANTINO (MINUET): 2008–2011 Gradually—at least within the European and Australian arenas—consensus and openness began to emerge. Under Johannes Johansson and Martin Prchal, the

Figure 14.7.   Illusory stability in the Andantino section.

226

Chapter 14

AEC’s commitment to artistic research became invaluable in encouraging broader engagement both among and beyond conservatories. While this may have originally resulted extrinsically from the focus on research following Bologna, important music education leaders in Europe (particularly those from ConNext institutions) responded with great intrinsic curiosity. Much like Mozart’s quasi-minuet, though this emergence may have seemed purely normal or necessary, more subtle influences were coming into play.

TEXTBOX 14.5. ARTISTIC RESEARCH AND MOZART’S FANTASY While Mozart’s Fantasy offers a useful metaphor for shaping this chapter, its own story also reflects pertinent opportunities, approaches and challenges in artistic research. Its manuscript was discovered surprisingly in 1990 and acquired by the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg the same year (Wolf 1992). Recognising the significance of the acquisition, the Mozarteum released facsimiles from the manuscript in a CD-ROM alongside historically informed performance, musicological analysis and interpretative commentary.22

The Fantasy reflects this clearly, as the arrival of a key signature creates a sense of normality, while concealed dissonance as well as textural and rhythmic transformations (including the parsing of a wind serenade) shows this normality to be potentially illusory. So too in Europe, artistic research infiltrated the conservatory world alongside beneficial inclusivity initiatives which were quickly accepted (e.g., The Hague’s initiatives in staff development, curriculum, community engagement, cross-arts, improvisation and health). This cross-pollination across fields offered fresh horizons and better consideration of audiences and context. Yet it also came with potential risks: that sociological dimensions would be more widely understood than artistic-focused dimensions; and that the diversity of valued outcomes would blur boundaries for the field.

TEXTBOX 14.6. ROYAL CONSERVATOIRE IN THE HAGUE Research at The Hague23 is divided into three distinct areas, exploring the rapidly evolving world of music education, experimentation in historical and contemporary artistic practice, and new means of communication of and



Fantasies Finding Realities 227

through music. While several of these projects feature interdisciplinary collaboration, the institution’s projected research values prioritise the training of professional musicians. Each of these research areas and their associated projects have practical outcomes that shape The Hague’s curriculum development and student/staff activity, re-evaluating how musicians engage with audiences and society. The Hague’s research output database includes many students’ research projects, pointing to an environment that fosters analytical and reflective engagement with one’s own artistic practice and means of communicating with a wider audience.

A further example of this cross-pollination was ever-closer connections between UK conservatories and universities in relation to practice-based and artist-led research. In 2009, CHARM researchers won a second phase of funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and embarked on a new research program focusing on live music performance and the creative process under a new name: the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP). While the link to artistic research was becoming ever more vivid, written description was still being prioritised over performance when being captured in proceedings. As an example, the 2013 PSN Conference in Cambridge involved two outstanding presentations: Emmerson’s “To bE” presentation, an hour-long performance collage exploration charting the history of two keys (B minor and E major) and Anthony Rooley’s similarly framed exploration of the madrigal world. Neither of these made it to the consequent publication reflecting the event.24 CMPCP promoted dialogue and cross-disciplinary collaborations between performers, educators and performance studies researchers, including notable partnerships with Guildhall and the Royal College of Music.25 The CMPCP also created an international Performance Studies Network (PSN)26 to foster a community of researchers and practitioners through an email forum and online resource guide, as well as international conferences. Among the CMPCP’s outputs were a five-book series titled Studies in Musical Performance as Creative Practice—with contributions from several ConNext partner authors including Darla Crispin and Helena Gaunt—published by Oxford University Press in 2017–2018 and launched at the Reflective Conservatoire conference at Guildhall in February 2018. While the focus primarily remains on commentators from outside the practice, there is also evidence of greater proactive engagement involving artists themselves.

PIÙ ALLEGRO: 2011–2014 The period that followed saw a sudden surge in momentum. Artistic research, as it became more self-assured, found new points of connection and allegiance both

228

Chapter 14

Figure 14.8.   New energies in a second Più Allegro.

beyond music (with natural and cognitive scientists, other art forms, business, medicine, design and environment, politics and philosophy); and beyond the axis of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain (with new horizons including Norway, Southeast Asia and Canada). In truth, Southeast Asia’s contribution had begun slightly earlier, with the establishment of the Southeast Asian Directors of Music Association (SEADOM) in 200827 and with YST’s 2009 Performer’s Voice Symposium.28 Performer’s Voice was developed and led by Dr Anne Marshman around 2007, bringing together scholars and performers from North America (including Richard Taruskin; Elizabeth Le Guin; and Aiyun Huang, then at McGill), Europe (John Rink; Helena Gaunt, David Dolan and Paul Roberts from Guildhall; Peter Dejans and Alessandro Cervino from Orpheus; as well as Hubert Eiholzer, former Orpheus adviser) and Australia (Stephen Emmerson and Huib Schippers from Queensland; Jennie Shaw). The second SEADOM Congress (arguably the first purely for Southeast Asian institutions) was held at YST immediately prior to Performer’s Voice, with Johannes Johansson as its keynote speaker introducing more recent European research paradigms to willing listeners who subsequently stayed to experience the international symposium. The mix of internationally recognised names, regional school leaders, and presenters and performers from around the world alongside undergraduate students was arguably without precedent. Unsurprisingly, the conversations offered extremely provocative and stimulating multiplicities of perspectives about performance processes and the role of the performer. Those few days in late 2009 did much to identify YST as a place offering fresh perspectives both regionally and internationally. Subsequent Southeast Asian developments have included not only the triennial Performers(‘) Present symposium at YST but also the establishment from 2014 of the highly experimental PGVIM International Symposium in Bangkok.29

TEXTBOX 14.7. YONG SIEW TOH CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC Established in 2003 as a primarily undergraduate institution, YST has been steadily and substantially increasing its commitment to embed artistic research



Fantasies Finding Realities 229

tenets in its outlook and activities, building on the significant impact of the 2009 Performer’s Voice symposium (of which proceedings were published in 2012 by Imperial College Press). The subsequent triennial Performers(‘) Present symposia attracted substantial interest from scholars and practitioners globally and more specifically from Southeast Asia, with workshops and performances by faculty, students and guest ensembles taking place alongside symposium presentations. This ethos fostered the creation of several student-led initiatives, such as the Voyage Alumni Festival in 2018,30 a week of multidisciplinary performances, events and discussions entirely curated and produced by students; and CogSci Connects in 2013,31 the first Asian cognitive science conference convened by Tara Venkatesan, then eighteen years old and a student in YST’s Young Artist Programme. In 2015, YST, in collaboration with IRCAM and Queen Mary University of London, hosted the international workshop, Mathemusical Conversations, which focused on mathematical and computational research in music performance and composition.32

In 2013, Martin Prchal approached YST and Norway to join the Pentacon schools in taking forward ambitions for evolving innovative practice in leadership, teaching and learning, research, technology, and engagement. The expanded group first met in June 2014 in Belgium, working with consultancy team True Colours33 towards what became a shared leadership training for potential innovation in conservatories. Where Pentacon had begun boldly and ambitiously, ConNext was deliberately more quiet and reflective, encouraging fresh voices (particularly those of students and more junior faculty) as well as steps towards change. At ConNext’s core was an emphasis on listening, enabling, and partnership, so that each institution’s quest for evolution would be inspired by others while also authentic to its own context. For the first few years, apparent progress was slow, materialising more in embedded cultural change than in visible network-wide activity. While the core group remained quite closed, ambitions to open up particular shared experiences more broadly to the world grew. In retrospect, the differing speeds of change across the ConNext institutions finds parallels in differing levels of connection with ConNext in conversations and activities. The two institutions showing perhaps the most overt changes are the two new partners, both of which have evolved considerably in their practices in ways traceable directly to ConNext values. As an example, Norway has substantially evolved its links to Orpheus and The Hague in relation to artistic research activity, co-leading many recent initiatives in the field.

230

Chapter 14

TEXTBOX 14.8. NORWEGIAN ACADEMY OF MUSIC The Norwegian Academy of Music has four Research Centres focusing on music education, music performance, artistic research, and music and health care. The featured projects for the Arne Nordheim Centre for Artistic Research explore new artistic practices through experimenting with new technology, or by renewing and recreating historical performance practice.34 Its website has a searchable database35 of wide-ranging projects by staff and PhD students, including folk music, contemporary music, music technology, historically informed performance and more. Research outputs are similarly diverse, from recordings and online resources to books developed and published in-house by NMH Publications. Amidst such diversity, examining the act of music-making and the role of the artist remain the driving forces of each investigation. Norway’s increasing public profile in artistic research was also evident in its hosting of the 2018 PSN Conference.

A further ConNext-inspired manifestation was the partners’ multiple contributions to McGill’s first Musical Chairs symposium, which beyond an overt chamber music focus challenged the nature of research training globally. For YST, its clearest public manifestation of ConNext’s influence on artistic research was the 2016 Performers(‘) Present,36 where all plenary sessions were inspired by contributions suggested by ConNext partners. The Performers(‘) Present symposium also showed a notable volume of undergraduate engagement, a transcending of borders that clearly expressed ConNext ideals.

TEXTBOX 14.9. SCHULICH SCHOOL OF MUSIC AT MCGILL UNIVERSITY The highlighted research projects at Schulich encompass a broad range of topics including hip-hop classifications, compositional responses to dialect and folksongs, and an acoustic simulation facility to study performance and reception. Music theory and musicology projects also feature prominently in student research projects. While McGill’s website does not present its research priorities with some of the trendier buzzwords and deliberately public-facing methods as do some other ConNext institutions, many of its research methods are quite experimental and involve non-traditional means of disseminating outcomes. Not all projects stem directly from an individual’s artistic practice;



Fantasies Finding Realities 231

some conduct research about music and music-making, rather than through music-making. However, its projects arguably all generate outcomes that speak to and would benefit other researchers and practitioners.

CODA: 2014–PRESENT As artistic research in music has become more established, not only in deed but even also in name, we arguably reach some sense of conclusion at least regarding its early history. It is however, as with the Fantasy (which Mozart published as introduction to his Sonata K457), merely the end of a beginning. Just as the Fantasy found written form probably only after earlier improvisation, it is only later that this field’s gestational history can be first articulated. What will follow in time, as with the sonata, is more likely to find immediate publication or international forums than did initial stages of the artistic research movement; particular movements in direction are also likely to gain more rapid acceptance. Yet perhaps also as with the sonata, there is a risk of forms (without due care) becoming formulae, so that what we accept as appropriate research or demonstrable outcomes—ways for framing how we share what we “do” when we perform—become less open to experimentation than as over the past two decades. For ConNext, the first hint of the coda—where artistic research became more overtly a shared enterprise—could be traced to the attendance of four Deans or Directors of the network’s institutions at Orpheus’s From Output to Impact Symposium in November 2014.37 As a keynote, the OECD’s Head of Centre for Educational

Figure 14.9.   Ending with the beginning; the end of a beginning.

232

Chapter 14

Research and Innovation, Dirk Van Damme offered a compelling case, from a non-musical perspective, for the profound potential societal value of education and research in the arts.38 The fact that, over three years later, such a useful piece advocating for the broader value of artistic research has been viewed relatively rarely on more public platforms39 points to two current limitations in enabling impact: the need for greater advocacy beyond insider audiences, and the risk that more innovative dissemination means (e.g., multimedia) have still yet to gain equivalent status to more conventional (often written) means (e.g., books, journals, articles)—even within a field such as music where one would anticipate immediate acceptance. A further manifestation of greater connectivity between and beyond ConNext institutions was in Norway’s hosting of the PSN Conference in July 2018, bringing together representation of virtually all ConNext institutions with the key PSN players. This close connection was seen not least in the summary panel makeup where, other than John Rink, the remainder of the panel (Mieko Kanno, Sibelius; Bernard Lanskey, Singapore; Crispin and Øivind Varkøy, Norway) were ConNext representatives.40 More broadly, the establishment of the European Platform for Artistic Research in Music (EPARM)41 for disseminating outputs has been valuable in representing output transcending the printed word. Beyond this, shared staff and faculty development has begun to be a priority, exemplified for example by a first “summit” hosted by Orpheus in November 2018 (with the vast majority of the focus group coming from ConNext institutions). As the final cadence to the coda (and harking back to our opening definitions where we began), it has been gratifying to witness ongoing episodes of the recent Orpheus MOOC,42 an output which offers considerable hope for the future. It exposes a multiplicity of shared approaches, originally accessible to a smaller number of “pioneers” and now to a broader audience, among whom future generators in the field no doubt lie. More importantly, it effectively represents a field still with porous boundaries, and also more numerous portals of perspective. Established amidst recent rapid changes in dissemination technology, artistic research ought to be the envy of more traditional research fields, many of which we are capable of partnering. What are the opportunities? To be open to new ideas, new sonic horizons, new technologies, new imaginations, new resonances, new worlds, new listening environments and fresh opportunities for new audiences to listen with deeper awareness. It is pleasing to see more major work flowering as the collaborative fantasy becomes ever more real.

NOTES 1.  “Artistic Research in Music—An Introduction,” Ku Leuven, accessed 25 March 2019, https://www.edx.org/course/artistic-research-in-music-an-introduction. 2.  Most recently (at the end of 2018), the Haute École de Musique Genève (“Geneva”) and the Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California (“Thornton”) were invited to join ConNext as well. 3.  See symposium schedule at http://www.pgvim.ac.th/sym/schedule2017.php.



Fantasies Finding Realities 233

  4.  “CD-ROM: Mozart—Fantasy and Sonata C-Minor,” Mozarthaus Salzburg, accessed 25 March 2019, https://www.mozarthaus.biz/en_dvd___cd-rom:-mozart-fantasy-and-sonatac-minor.htm.   5.  “Ministerial Conference Bologna 1999,” European Higher Education Area and Bologna Process, 26 October 2016, accessed 25 March 2019, http://www.ehea.info/cid100210/ ministerial-conference-bologna-1999.html.   6.  In relation to ConNext and artistic research, Crispin’s interactions have been particularly pivotal, framing first Guildhall’s postgraduate research engagement, before moving, after a period at Royal College of Music in London, to subsequent appointments at ConNext members Orpheus and Norway (where she currently leads the Arne Nordheim Centre for Artistic Research.  7. “Research Projects,” Guildhall School of Music & Drama, accessed 25 March 2019, https://www.gsmd.ac.uk/about_the_school/research/research_areas/.  8. “Conference programme,” Guildhall School of Music & Drama, accessed 25 March 2019, https://www.gsmd.ac.uk/about_the_school/research/whats_on/reflective_conservatoire_conference/conference_programme/.   9.  “About us,” Orpheus Institute, accessed 25 March 2019, https://orpheusinstituut.be/ en/about-us. 10. “About docARTES,” Orpheus Institute, accessed 25 March 2019, http://www. docartes.be/en/about-docartes. 11. “docARTES Partners,” Orpheus Institute, accessed 25 March 2019, http://www. docartes.be/en/about-docartes/partners. 12. “Orpheus Research Centre,” Orpheus Institute, accessed 25 March 2019, https:// orpheusinstituut.be/en/orpheus-research-centre. 13.  See https://konst.gu.se/digitalAssets/1322/1322713_the_debate_on_research_in_the_ arts.pdf for a summary of the key perceptions Borgdorff was sharing across the field, energising momentum in the period around 2004–2005 and immediately beyond. 14. The following article, authored out of Queensland, gives a more comprehensive account of the Australian context through the period: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324909354_Two_Decades_of_Artistic_Research_The_Antipodal_Experience. 15.  Peter Renshaw, “Remaking the Conservatorium Agenda,” Music in Australia—Knowledge Base, accessed 25 March 2019, http://musicinaustralia.org.au/index.php/Remaking_the_ Conservatorium_Agenda. 16.  Unusually for the time, Renshaw’s materials were often published, at least through small or new routes (e.g., the emergent Guildhall Press) while much of the thinking has since become available through online archives (particularly in Australia) or through later publication (e.g., subsequent publications by Borgdorff, Crispin, and Gaunt). 17. Examples include: Jonathan Dunsby (1996); Nicholas Cook (1998); John Rink (1997); Eric Clarke (2005). 18. “The AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music,” Charm—AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, accessed 25 March 2019, http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/index.html. 19.  CHARM was established to promote the musicological study of performance as documented by recordings, as opposed to the traditional approach of studying music as a written text realised in performance. Its research projects treated recorded performances as texts in their own right, drawing upon a range of approaches including spectrographic and computational analysis methods, to investigate musical performance and perception. This pioneering

234

Chapter 14

work laid out much of the initial language and established new paradigms for discussing musical performance, elevating the status of performance—and performers—in the dialogue with traditional musicology. 20. “Research publications,” Sibelius-Akatemia, accessed 25 March 2019, http://wwwarchive.siba.fi/en/web/guest/art-and-research/research/research-publications. 21.  Centre for Artistic Research,” Uniarts Helsinki, accessed 25 March 2019, https://sites. uniarts.fi/web/cfar/home. 22.  “CD-ROM: Mozart—Fantasy and Sonata C-Minor,” Mozarthaus Salzburg, accessed 25 March 2019, https://www.mozarthaus.biz/en_dvd_cd-rom:-mozart-fantasy-and-sonata-cminor.htm. 23.  “Research,” Royal Conservatoire The Hague, accessed 25 March 2019, https://www. koncon.nl/en/research. 24.  Both presentations are not captured in the archived selection for the conference, which comprises mainly text and slides—see http://www.cmpcp.ac.uk/events/psn-conferences/psnconference-2-april-2013/. 25. “Introduction—AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice,” AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP), accessed 25 March 2019, http://www.cmpcp.ac.uk/. 26. “PSN,” AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, accessed 25 March 2019, http://www.cmpcp.ac.uk/performance-studies-network/. 27.  “SEADOM,” Southeast Asian Directors of Music, accessed 25 March 2019, https:// www.seadom.org/. 28.  “Performers Voice,” Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, accessed 25 March 2019, https://vimeo.com/performersvoice. 29.  See 2019 symposium site at http://www.pgvim.ac.th/sym/about.php. 30. See summary article at https://www.ystmusic.nus.edu.sg/yst-stories/voyage-marks15-years. 31.  “Students host first Asian cognitive science meet,” National University of Singapore, 8 January 2013, accessed 25 March 2019, http://newshub.nus.edu.sg/headlines/1301/ cognitive_08Jan13.php. 32.  See https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/10046 for a compilation of invited talks given at the workshop. 33.  See website at http://www.truecolours.be/en. 34. “About NordART,” The Arne Nordheim Centre for Artistic Research, accessed 25 March 2019, https://nmh.no/en/research/nordart/about-nordart. 35.  “Projects,” The Arne Nordheim Centre for Artistic Research, accessed 25 March 2019, https://nmh.no/en/research/nordart/projects. 36.  “Performers(‘) Present—Past Symposium Media,” Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, accessed 25 March 2019, https://www.ystmusic.nus.edu.sg/performerspresent/past. 37.  “Proceedings of the 2014 ORCiM Seminar From Output to Impact,” Orpheus Institute & Norwegian Academy of Music, accessed 25 March 2019, https://www.researchcatalogue.net/ view/155614/155615. 38. Dirk Van Damme, “The Knowledge Triangle in the Arts: How Research, Innovation and Education Interact,” accessed 25 March 2019, https://www.researchcatalogue.net/ view/155614/156664.



Fantasies Finding Realities 235

39.  The video is available on popular public video hosting site YouTube at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Qu325cmQwlg. As of March 2019, the link had only been viewed 107 times. 40. “Programme,” Performance Studies Network Conference, accessed 25 March 2019, https://psn2018.org/programme/. 41.  See 2019 conference site at https://www.aec-music.eu/events/european-platform-forartistic-research-in-music-eparm-2019. 42.  “Artistic Research in Music—An Introduction,” Ku Leuven, accessed 25 March 2019, https://www.edx.org/course/artistic-research-in-music-an-introduction.

REFERENCES Clarke, Eric. 2005. Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cook, Nicholas. 1998. Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dunsby, Jonathan. 1996. Performing Music: Shared Concerns. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huron, David. 2006. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Levitin, Daniel. 2006. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. London: Penguin. Rink, John, ed. 1997. Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolf, Eugene K. 1992. “The Rediscovered Autograph of Mozart’s Fantasy and Sonata in C Minor, K. 475/457,” The Journal of Musicology 10, no. 1 (Winter): 3–47, accessed 25 March 2019, https://www.jstor.org/stable/763559?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.

15 Philosophy AS Artistic Research Artist-Philosophers Arno Böhler

PART I: PHILOSOPHY AS ARTISTIC RESEARCH1 How to begin if one advances a concept of thought that acts on the assumption that every thought has a history of its own? Thoughts come to us. They are approaching, ripening in us. Often it takes years to grasp or formulate a thought clearly and thoroughly. There are cases in which this never happens. Philosophy as artistic research is a concept of philosophy in which poiesis,2 the process of letting something materially come into being (be-coming), is considered the core performance of philosophy. When Marx criticised pre-Marxist philosophies that they have just interpreted the world, but not changed it, this claim is very much in line with arts-based-philosophy. Because if arts-based-philosophers are concerned with the genesis of, for instance, new social assemblages, this new species of philosophers is, like artists, interested in the material becoming of such new social forms in time and space. They want to stage them, at least the genesis of their becoming, by virtue of calling their future appearance into being, artistically, generatively, inventively. Since such a staging of future be-comings never takes place in the future but here and now, the doing of aesthetics, operative in arts-based-philosophy, can be called a radical Empiricism (see, for example, Deleuze [1994, 47] and James [2012, 30–31]). It is no positivistic Empiricism which would analyse just already given empirical facts ready at hand, but an artistic Empiricism of virtual be-comings, which are on their way to happen, perhaps. One never knows beforehand whether the empirical constitution of a virtual genesis will once indeed have taken place in the future or not. 236



Philosophy AS Artistic Research 237

THE PROMISE OF ARTIST-PHILOSOPHERS: NIETZSCHE’S POST-SOCRATIC INVERSION OF PLATONISM To induce the arrival of arts-based-philosophy as an untimely form of performing philosophy, Nietzsche was forced to incubate the conceptual persona of the artistphilosopher—namely, somebody willing and able to actually perform philosophy as artistic research, thus taking care of the genesis of a new performative way of doing philosophy in alliance with the arts. An approach, which has been kept alive in contemporary initiatives like Adishakti3 (Veenapani Chawla, Vinakumar K. J.) Performance Philosophy (Lagaay and Cull), Philosophy on Stage (Böhler and Granzer), senseLab (Massumi and Manning), Soundcheck Philosophy/Expedition Philosophy (Totzke and Gauß), to mention just some.4 In this struggle of an emerging new field of doing philosophy in alliance with the arts, Plato’s philosophy—the philosophy of “the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced” (Nietzsche 1989, 154)—plays a crucial role because it was Plato who historically invented the antagonistic relation between art and philosophy—a model which still prominently captures our European heads today (see also, Böhler 2017; Heidegger 1991, 200–210; Whiel 2012; Whitehead 1979, 91). Plato’s life itself is a telling example of what is at stake in today’s reversal/inversion of Platonism. It is said that Plato, in his first career, was an artist, a playwright (Erler 2007, 44f; Riginos 1976, 39–51). Only after he had met Socrates did he decide to put an end to his artistic persona by burning all his artworks in order to become a follower and disciple of Socrates. To become a Socratic philosopher, Plato obviously thought that he had to give up on his former existence as an artist. Both conceptual personae were apparently no longer able to live together in peace in his person. He had to choose. He was to become either an artist or a Socratic philosopher. The relation between art and philosophy thus became antagonistic in Plato himself and through him. From now on, Socratic philosophers assumed in a Platonistic manner that one has to exclude—probably even displace—one’s artistic desires to materially generate artefacts for the sake of becoming a serious, real and decent Socratic philosopher. It was clearly no option in the context of Plato’s image of thought to be and become both—an artist and a philosopher: artist-philosophers, philosopher-artists, artistic researchers. However, it is more than obvious that with Plato himself this distinction was never clear cut. This is because, even after having given up on his first career as an artist, the skills Plato had acquired in his first life survived in his second career as a Socratic philosopher in the midst of his philosophical oeuvre. There he still argues in the dramatic form of dialogues, creates fictional characters and gives us a clear and eloquent description of the material setting within which the discussion takes place: on the market square, outside the city walls of Athens, under a tree, and the like (see Puchner 2010, 47). For sure, one rarely finds this dramatic style in the writing of philosophers today, probably because these days most of them do not look back on a first career in the arts. They became pure scientists who, unlike Plato, no longer

238

Chapter 15

perform a cross-over of philosophy and art but pure logic, pure rational analysis, refined and cleaned from any artistic or mythological aspect . . . What a mess!5

ARTS-BASED-PHILOSOPHY: A RESEARCH FORUM FOR CROSS-DISCIPLINARY STRATEGIES BETWEEN ART AND PHILOSOPHY While Plato assumed that he had to get rid of his existence as an artist in order to become a Socratic philosopher, Nietzsche, on the contrary, precisely assumed that he had to overcome the conceptual persona of a merely Socratic (scientific) philosopher in order to become an artist-philosopher. This is in fact one crucial aspect of Nietzsche’s famous reversal/inversion of Platonism. He had to, metonymically, replace the still ascetic figure of the Socratic (scientific) philosopher with his newly invented aesthetic concept of the artist-philosopher (see. Böhler 2017; Mahr 2007, 939; Smith 2018; Vuarnet 1976). This is precisely the historical constellation which lies at the base of research festivals like Philosophy On Stage or Soundcheck Philosophy. They are attempts to actually experiment with new forms of cross-disciplinary strategies by way of which new alliances between art and philosophy are conceptually and artistically staged in performances, lecture-performances, interventions, and the like, to keep Nietzsche’s promise of a productive friendship between art and philosophy alive in contrast to the antagonistic model Plato had invented into the history of our European culture until today.6

A CRITICAL REMARK ON PLATONISTIC TRAITS IN THE DISCOURSE OF ARTISTIC RESEARCH TODAY In the discourse on artistic research it has been repeatedly argued that science, philosophy, and the arts follow different rule systems. Such positions consequently claim that one should not mix up one with the other, but treat them as well-defined regimes with their own “inner” systematic logic. A philosopher should respect the set of rules constitutive of the regime of philosophy, while an artist should respect the set of rules constitutive of the field of art. Even if one revolts against well-established rules, one has to create a paradigm shift in one’s respected field of work. In such a context, the fields of art, science, and philosophy are obviously treated as if there would not exist any lines of flights, in which one discipline always already inhabits aspects of the other. But is this not a simplified conception of the relation between the arts, philosophies, and the sciences? Does somebody, who is doing art, indeed not think philosophically at all? And philosophers, are they really not practicing art at all while they philosophise?



Philosophy AS Artistic Research 239

For sure, there are different practices one performs if one is acting in the regime of art or in the regime of philosophy. But does it really make sense to treat these different regimes as if they were self-identical systems, existing separately in themselves? As if they would not have been differentiated in relation of one to another? As if their identity would not have been developed by virtue of a certain genealogy, which has given each of these disciplines a distinct, historically generated identity? In opposition to such views, Philosophy as Artistic Research claims that there have always been cross-disciplinary strategies in philosophy, in which philosophising became a sort of art and art became a sort of philosophy. The history of European philosophy clearly proves this claim. Philosophers regularly developed performative practices while they were researching an idea. Without such performative practices—like thinking in the form of a dialog (Plato), writing in aphorisms which make philosophers dance (Nietzsche), developing a technique of text-montages which allow one to find and express one’s thoughts (Wittgenstein), researching an écriture féminine (Cixous, Ronell), or even not writing at all, but teaching orally at the market square (Socrates) or living in a box (Diogenes)—without such performative interventions philosophers would not have been able at all to express what they were searching to think. And artists like Shakespeare would probably have never become the cosmopolitan artists which they actually were if they had not philosophised in their art-pieces by asking, for instance, Hamlet’s famous question “To be or not to be?” which usually is a typical ontological problem coped with in the history of philosophy over thousands of years. Even the cellar regions of a body and the constellations of drives in a certain grouping of bodies have to be taken into account, if one does perform arts-based-philosophy. This is because the act of thinking, even the taking place of a transcendental reflection, is always a mode of situated knowledge, bodily performed within a sensible empirical context. Thus, claiming that the field of philosophy would be entirely different from the field of the arts is obviously a clouded, over-simplistic and confusing conceptualisation of the factual proportion between A (art) and P (philosophy). One is never entirely a philosopher and not at all an artist, or entirely an artist and not at all a philosopher while doing art or philosophy, because their respected fields already inhabit bridging connections in which art and artistic practices show up in the midst of philosophy, and philosophy shows up in the midst of the arts.

PHILOSOPHY AS ARTISTIC RESEARCH: ARTS-BASED PHILOSOPHY Like in Plato’s own philosophical opus, philosophy as artistic research welcomes art to enter the realm of philosophy again. There, philosophers do not have to burn and destroy their artistic personae while doing philosophy. On the contrary, they are invited, even called to implement artistic practices into their philosophical research practice (Alliot 2014; Assis 2018; Badura et al. 2015; Granzer 2016; Haarmann

240

Chapter 15

2019; Lagaay and Cull 2014; Mullarkey 2017; Ronell 2005; Street, Alliot, and Pauker 2017; Totzke and Gauß 2015). Even the conceptual persona of the Socratic philosopher does not have to be rejected entirely if one becomes an artist-philosopher. It can still live and survive within an artist-philosopher, but in the context of arts-based philosophy it will be just one layer and way of performing philosophy among others. Artist-philosophers will still reflect, contemplate, analyse and argue the logical value of propositions. But they claim that the Socratic way of doing philosophy, which is the usual academic way of performing philosophy today, is just one way of doing philosophy. There are others, even more primordial and elementary ways of accessing be-coming, such as the generative approach of doing aesthetics, considered in the first part of this text. In contrast to a platonic, antagonistic view of the relation between art and philosophy, philosophy as artistic research thus promotes a cross-disciplinary perspective on the regimes of philosophy and art. It attempts to deliver a research platform for artist-philosophers/philosopher-artists ready and willing to literally exist in between the regimes of philosophy and arts. They are called to actually generate lines of flight, bridging both disciplines in a chiastic crossover of both regimes. Artist-philosophers and philosopher-artists are therefore ontologically bi: an in-between of art and philosophy. They are fully neither one nor the other, but something popping up in between of both regimes, like a queer Hermes, bringing the news of a hybrid form of doing art and philosophy by virtue of actually performing untimely relations, alliances, concepts, artefacts between them, thereby necessarily disrupting the inherited antagonistic model of the Platonist conception of the relation between art and philosophy.

PART II: A NEW IMAGE OF THOUGHT: DOING ARTS-BASED PHILOSOPHY December 2012. I am sitting at my computer and writing a research proposal for the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) “Artist philosophers: Philosophy AS artistic research,” in the framework of the program for artistic research (PEEK). The proposal centres on the question: what happens to philosophy when it begins to understand itself as an artistic research practice? This, my foremost theme of research, has a long history. It has kept fascinating me for many years. Tenaciously. Insistently. Still. Just as if it were—freely paraphrasing Kafka—“a research question, made for me.” Even if I found myself quite personally in the wake of this question, it gave me the distinct feeling of having come across something that was of general, even historical interest: for to me the formula philosophy as artistic research seemed to announce a new concept of thought. One which had long been approaching in the history of philosophy on dove feet. Silently. Subliminally. Unnoticed. A kind of footnote or side note that for a long time never disturbed the course of European intellectual



Philosophy AS Artistic Research 241

history and which now, after centuries of incubation time, is waiting to be thought and grasped by us. In that case, is it not the development of the history of ideas to which “my” idea of thinking philosophy as artistic research is indebted? One captures a thought when one thinks it oneself. Is part of a conceptual field in which one thinks, with which one thinks, when one is thinking. Does not Deleuze (2003) mean exactly that when he writes in his book about Bacon that painting and music are not about the “reproduction or invention of forms, but about the capturing of forces” (p. 56)? One always already quotes a heritage, Derrida (1988, 9) and Butler (2011, 27) claim, when one actually performs thinking. If the idea of conceiving philosophy as artistic research is owed to a historical development, who then is the subject of “my” thought? Although the thought is thought by me, it originally is the result of a history in which many others were involved who worked at its formulation. Thinking a thought then would be a thinking through of thoughts we owe to others, not just to ourselves. No monologue, but a polylogue. A response towards a given genealogy in its making. When one is thinking, one is an active momentum of a historically generated field. The field changes wherever thoughts are being thought. Genealogies are re-considered in thinking. Thinking takes place in factual vicinity to thanking, Heidegger (1968, 139) writes in What Is Called Thinking . When one is thinking, one adds something to the field. One feeds-back, feeds a field. Genesis! A research proposal usually begins with a description of the state of the art. Does this not mean that if one oneself researches, one is first haunted by the questions of one’s ancestors? Is Derrida (1994, 10) not right in defining thinking as hauntology? As being haunted by others whose address one responds to while actually performing the act of thinking oneself? Has not the “first person position,” therefore, actually always already been a “second person position or third or . . . ”? The problem one examines is older than oneself. One responds to a handed-down problem when one thinks oneself. The same holds true for the usage of language: when one speaks oneself, one quotes a certain heritage of language. Trivially put: I myself did not invent the words and grammar I am using when I myself am talking. The language I speak survives me.

242

Chapter 15

“The earliest matter I became serious about is the relation between art and truth: and even now I stand before this dichotomy with sacred horror” (Nietzsche 1988, 500, translation mine). The subject Nietzsche broaches in this late posthumous note from summer 1888 as a resumé of his entire path of thinking is a concern that pervades his entire philosophical work from its earliest beginnings until its late period: That the relation between art and truth has become problematic from a philosophy-historical point of view. That a new definition of this relation is necessary. That he himself in his thinking was only just learning to understand that problem—by which he was haunted all his life—in its questionableness. When I read this posthumous note, it became clear to me that “my” approach of conceiving philosophy as artistic research spelled out a problem founded in European philosophy’s history of ideas, and which already in the nineteenth century compelled Nietzsche to develop an arts-based concept of thought in which philosophy approximated an artistic practice. The central problems I faced writing my research proposal “Artist-Philosophers. Philosophy AS Artistic-Research” were questions such as the following: •  How does the image of philosophy change when philosophy is conceived and practised as artistic research? •  What methodological consequences ensue for philosophising if, apart from scientific-discursive methods, artistic practices are also integrated into philosophic research? •  How is the entanglement of the two disciplines philosophy & art to be thought of, which Nietzsche already welcomed in the nineteenth century in the hybrid figure of the artist philosopher? (see Nietzsche 1980, 29[17]). •  Which promise reposes in a crossover of the arts and philosophy? •  What images of thought, which forms of art are made possible by the entanglement of the two disciplines? •  Does the bundling of both research practices possibly even announce the Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future which Nietzsche saw approaching us in Beyond Good and Evil (see Nietzsche 2002)? •  In the course of answering this problem, is it possible to develop a transdisciplinary research milieu at the interface between philosophy and art that lends a place to this new image of thought where a new mutual relation of both disciplines is materially put to work? •  What could a research festival look like that sets out exemplarily to realise such a becoming flesh? As a title for the research festival, I had in mind Philosophy on Stage: Artist Philosophers. Nietzsche et cetera.



Philosophy AS Artistic Research 243

I was not able to say why. But the questions I dealt with while developing my research project were connected with that which Spinoza called an active feeling. Active feelings are those which increase our desire to be and act (potentia agendi). Our élan vital (conatus) is affected, receives new momentum, the life forces are stimulated, one becomes wide awake, focusses on the complexity of the problem one has in mind; on insights possibly throwing light on the investigated problem. In short: one develops an appetite for a problem. “La beauté est une promesse de Bonheur,” says Stendhal.7 Should artistic research be a kind of “Gay Science”? A sensual-aesthetic research practice which not only writes about aesthetic phenomena while research is being done, but accepts feelings of pleasure and aversion coming up during research as relevant research data, which cannot be displaced and neglected anymore as a significant part of doing artistic research. What kind of research is it that gives a voice to bodily affections and emotions? Can feelings be an argument? Seriously. What does it mean to let oneself be affected by research questions and research performances, and to take these affections seriously as a constitutive part of artistic research? Are feelings not acknowledged as a legitimate argument in decision processes in many situations in life? Should artistic research in this case be nearer to our living environment than “purely” scientific research methods which generally downgrade affections to private feelings, as if in feeling one did not quote a historically generated heritage we share with others wherever someone feels something in one’s lived-body? Arts-based-philosophy is doing aesthetics with one’s body and its bodily environment, and not against it? “I have kept a close eye on the philosophers and read between their lines for long enough to say to myself: the greatest part of conscious thought must still be attributed to instinctive activity, and this is even the case for philosophical thought” (Nietzsche 2002, 7f.). In this passage Nietzsche challenges the possibility of entirely isolating and separating the sphere of thought from the plane of our corporeal beingin-the-world. Because, for him, thinking is too intimately entangled with the driving forces of our corporeality, and guided into certain directions by them—in secret. “Therefore, I shall treat the nature and powers of the affects, and the power of the mind over them, by the same method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies” (Spinoza 1994, 143). When one researches artistically, one cogitates, sorts, reflects, analyses problems rationally, but one also follows one’s own intuition, and now and then even obeys

244

Chapter 15

one’s instincts, if one thinks and researches artistically. Is not this moment of research commonly suppressed methodically when one thinks about research scientifically? One is afraid oneself. One is glad oneself. Does this not mean that one carries out a culturally shared practice in one’s own lived-body? Why do we attribute feelings to the sphere of the private and the subjective, although they are ways of self-awareness we share with others in our being-in-the-world? Who is interested in such a privatisation of feelings? Especially when feeling, one is not only in oneself because one feels one’s own beingwith, being with others when one feels oneself. Structurally, every feeling is a commotion, says Jean-Luc Nancy in Corpus (2008): an ec-static mode of being-withothers, being one among others. It is the outstanding experience to ek-sist, accessed via one’s own lived-body, that actually takes place in feeling. The orgiastic intoxication: one is outside oneself, wholly with the others, feels them, the others, with one’s own lived-body. As soon as one gets outside oneself, one senses the world in a Dionysian, that is to say, artistic manner. Paul Klee (2014, 7) claimed that art does not simply depict the visible but makes it visible. Exactly in this sense, philosophy as artistic research makes matters hitherto unthought thinkable. One does not yet have a thought, one is searching for it. In search of thoughts, one necessarily gropes in the dark. This constitutive blindness represents the experimental character of a concept of thought that understands itself as artistic research. “ . . . one has to have chaos in oneself yet in order to be able to give birth to a dancing star” (Nietzsche 2006, 9). In the laboratory of thought, where thinking is still an art, one first wrestles with thinking a thought. The thought announces itself, clandestinely, subliminally, virtually, as a kind of “dark herald/forerunner” (Deleuze 1994, 119) of an idea emerging for the first time, due to the significant mixture of a concrete problem waiting to be viewed, captured—that is, to be thought. Thinking as artistic research has to do with the incubation time of thinking. There is a breeding ground of thinking where the shape of a thought initially becomes apparent. Where are the thoughts just about to come into being? If Hegel in the first book of his The Science of Logic (Hegel 2010, 45–48) poses the question what the initial steps of science have to be, then the answer of an arts-based concept of thought is that one has to start with a thought’s incubation time, where the creation, shaping, and eventually the realisation of a thought is still in the mak-



Philosophy AS Artistic Research 245

ing. Arts-based thinking thinks thoughts in statu nascendi. Even before they are consciously ap-perceived by myself (Manning 2009; Massumi 2002; Spinoza 1994, 152). There is a power (virtus) that updates the virtual possibilities of thinking by bringing forth new thoughts. In this case events of thinking are realised (Deleuze 1990, 3; Massumi 2002). “Creating ever new concepts is the object of philosophy. Because the concept has to be created, it refers to the philosopher as the one who potentially holds it or commands the power and competence to do so. One cannot object that creation rather holds true for the sensual and the arts, to such an extent art lends existence to spiritual entities, and to such an extent philosophical concepts also are ‘sensibilia’” (Deleuze 1994, 5). Arts-based thought does not just use sensitive maps in the brain while it is thinking. It creates sensitive maps in the brain while it is thinking, indeed with the brain with which it thinks in relation to others. Conceived thus, the creation of concepts also is a sensual-material process, and philosophical concepts “sensibilia.” “There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes; we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our objectivity, be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this—what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?” (Nietzsche 1989, 119).

NOTES 1.  This is a revised and enlarged version of an article written for The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy and the Network page of the Journal for Artistic Research, 2019: Arno Böhler, “Philosophy AS artistic research: Philosophy On Stage” jar-online.net.doi:10.22501/ jarnet.0014 2.  In Greek philosophy poiesis means “letting something come into being.” 3.  Adishakti Art Research: http://adishaktitheatrearts.com/, date accessed 20 February 2019. 4.  The network performance philosophy, for instance, counts more than 2,500 members: https://www.performancephilosophy.org/. 5. On mythology in the context of arts-based-philosophy, see Aurobindo (1956) and Schelling (2007). 6.  Video recordings of the Research Festivals Philosophy on Stage #1–#4 online: https:// homepage.univie.ac.at/arno.boehler/php/?page_id=841, date accessed 6 December 2018. 7.  Nietzsche uses this formulation by Stendhal in On the Genealogy of Morality in order to bring into play an affirmative conception of art against Schopenhauer’s pessimistic definition (see Nietzsche 1989, 104).

246

Chapter 15

REFERENCES Alliot, Julien. 2014. “Avital Ronell, or How to Transform Philosophy into an Artistic Performance?” http://tpp2014.com/avital-ronell-transform-philosophy-artistic-performance/, accessed 20 February 2019. Assis, Paulo de. 2018. Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance through Artistic Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Aurobindo, Sri. 1956. The Secret of the Veda. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press. Badura, Jens, et al., eds. 2015. Künstlerische Forschung. Ein Handbuch. Zürich: Diaphanes. Böhler, Arno. 2017. “Immanence: A Life . . . Friedrich Nietzsche.” Performance Philosophy Journal 3, no. 3: 576–603. Philosophy on Stage. The Concept of Immanence in Contemporary Art and Philosophy. Butler, Judith. 2011. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. 1994. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: North Western University Press. ———. 1994. Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge. Erler, Michael. 2007. Platon. Basel: Schwabe. Granzer, Susanne. 2016. Actors and the Art of Performance: Under Exposure. London: Palgrave. Haarmann, Anke. 2019. Artistic Research. Eine epistemologische Ästhetik. Zürich: Diaphanes. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2010. The Science of Logic. Translated and edited by George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1968. What is Called Thinking? San Francisco: Harper & Row. Heidegger, Martin. 1991. Nietzsche. Volume I: The Will to Power as Art. San Francisco: Harper & Row. James, William. 2012. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Auckland: Floating Press. Klee, Paul. 2014. Creative Confession and Other Writings. London: Tate Press. Lagaay, Alice, and Laura Cull, eds. 2014. Encounters in Performance Philosophy. New York: Palgrave. Mahr, Peter. 2007. “Philosopher-Artists, Artist-Philosophers? A Double Review with Four Footnotes.” In das offene werk. 1964–1979, edited by Peter Weibel, 939–44. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Manning, Erin. 2009. Relationscapes. Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation. London: Duke University Press. Mullarkey, John. [John Ó Maoilearca]. 2017. “Laruelle, Immanence, and Performance: What Does Non-Philosophy Do?” in Performance Philosophy 3, no. 3. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008. Corpus. New York: Fordham University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1980. Nachgelassene Fragmente 1869–1874. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. ———. 1988. Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1985—Anfang Januar 1889. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.



Philosophy AS Artistic Research 247

———. 1989. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” In On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage. ———. 2002. Beyond Good and Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Puchner, Martin. 2010. Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Riginos, Alice Swift. 1976. Platonica. Leiden: Brill 1976. Ronell, Avital. 2005. The Test-Drive. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Schelling, Friedrich. 2007. Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Smith, George. 2018. The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy. London: Routledge. Spinoza, Baruch de. 1994. The Ethics and Other Works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Street, Anna, Julien Alliot, and Magnolia Pauker, eds. 2017. Inter Views in Performance Philosophy: Crossings and Conversations. London: Palgrave Macmillian. Totzke, Rainer, and Eva-Maria Gauß. 2015. “On Performative Philosophy—10 Impulses for Discussion from [soundcheck philosophie]” in Performance Philosophy no. 1, 74–94. Vuarnet, Jean-Noël. 1976. Le Philosophe-artiste. Paris: Édition Lignes. Whiel, Reiner. 2012. “Nietzsches Anti-Platonismus und Spinoza.“ In Affektenlehre und amor Dei intellectualis. Die Rezeption Spinozas im Deutschen Idealismus, in der Frühromantik und in der Gegenwart, edited by Violetta L. Waibel, 333–50. Hamburg: Meiner. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1979. Processes and Reality. New York: Free Press.

Index

Abramović, Marina, 83, 150 Abulhawa, Dani, 147 aesthetics, 3, 19, 37, 40, 42, 69, 113, 127, 151–52, 165, 194, 198, 204, 236, 240, 243; technoaesthetics, 88 affect, 3, 5, 13, 16, 18, 21–23, 35, 42, 69, 83–84, 88–89, 105–106, 108–110, 110n11 156, 165, 167, 169, 209n6, 243, 245 Agamben, Giorgio, 138 Agier, Michel, 138 Agre, Philip, 118 Ahmed, Sara, 156 AI, see artificial intelligence Aldape Muñoz, Juan Manuel, 147 Allain, Paul, 147 Allegue, Ludivine, 170n2 Alliez, Éric, 15–16 Allsopp, John, 53 Aloi, Giovanni, 85 Amacher, Maryanne, 119 Anker, Suzanne, 85, 90 anthropology, 98, 104, 128, 133, 152, 206; post-anthropology, 92 Archimedes, 78 architectural design research, 8, 128–34, 142

architecture, 2, 8, 22, 103–106, 109–110, 119, 128–143 Arlander, Annette, 147 art history, 3, 5, 14–16, 23, 34, 72, 151 Arthur, Brian, 120 artificial intelligence (AI), 82–83, 92, 94, 118, 120–21, 133, 143, 221, 223–24 artistic research, 1– 10, 14, 27– 29, 31– 38, 40, 42, 46, 49, 63, 68, 71, 76, 79, 98–99, 102, 106–108, 111n12, 113–18, 121–22, 124, 126, 128, 146–53, 155– 60, 163–66, 168–69, 169n1, 170n2, 170n4, 171n16, 175–81, 185, 187–89, 193–96, 200, 202, 204–209, 209n2, 212–18, 221–32, 233n6, 236–44 Assis, Paulo de, 9, 63, 70n3, 151, 193–94, 196–99 Attali, Jacques, 114 Austin, John Langshaw, 165–66, 171n15 Bacon, Francis, 241 Badger, Gina, 27 Badiou, Alain, 165, 168 Bailey, Shawn, 84 Barad, Karen, 169, 171n17, 182, 190n8 Barrett, Estelle, 152 Barth, Theodor, 40–41

249

250

Index

Barthes, Roland, 36–37, 40, 196–98 Barton, Bruce, 148–50, 154, 157, 160, 169, 170n4 Baudrillard, Jean, 78 Bäumel, Sonja, 83 The Beach Boys, 113 Becha, Mo, 105 becoming, 7, 13–119, 23–24, 109, 167, 169, 236, 242 Belgrano, Elisabeth, 147 Benjamin, Walter, 40, 136 Benyus, Janine, 93 Bergson, Henri, 18, 155, 167–68 Berio, Luciano, 115 –16 Bermingham, Ann, 27 Berners-Lee, Tim, 52 Beuys, Joseph, 88, 90 bioart, 2, 8, 71, 75, 81–90, 92–94 biology, 66, 71–72, 76–77, 87, 91–94, 175–78, 180–83, 185, 187–88; neurobiology, 94 Biserna, Elena, 102 Boano, Camillo, 134 body art, 83–84 Bologna Declaration, see Bologna Process Bologna Process, 205, 215–16, 218–19, 226 Bolt, Barbara, 165–68 Bonenfant, Yvon, 147 Borgdorff, Henk, 28, 31, 43n1, 157, 219, 233n13, 233n16 Bos, Caroline, 131 Boulez, Pierre, 116 Bourdieu, Pierre, 207 Boyle, Robert, 34– 36, 38 Broadbent, Geoffrey, 128 Brown, Carol, 147 Brown, Louise Joy, 82 Brüggen, Frans, 203 Bucknall, Joanna, 163 Burden, Chris, 88, 90 Butler, Judith, 165–66, 207, 241 Butt, John, 203 Cage, John, 117, 203 Calvino, Italo, 7, 23–24 Campe, Rüdiger, 49

Castaneda, Carlos, 17 Catts, Oron, 89–90 Cazeaux, Clive, 163, 168 Cervino, Alessandro, 228 Chambers-Coe, Juliet, 170n9 Chowning, John, 116 Christie, William, 203 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 71 Cixous, Hélène, 239 Cocteau, Jean, 30 Collins, Harry, 120 Collins, Nicolas, 121 Conquergood, Dwight, 152 constructivism, 65 Cotter, Lucy, 40 creative writing, 151 Crispin, Darla, 216, 227, 232, 233n6, 233n16 cultural studies, 98, 136 curatorial practices, 2, 14, 85 Cusack, Peter, 102–104, 108, 110 D’Errico, Lucia, 63, 70n3, 193–94, 199, 200n3 da Costa, Beatriz, 86, 90 dance, 66, 147, 150–51 Davis, Joe, 87 de Freitas, Nancy, 36, 49 De Haan, Simone, 219 de Roza, Elizabeth, 147 de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, 42 Dejans, Peter, 217–18, 228 De Landa, Manuel, see Delanda Manuel Delanda, Manuel, 21, 206, 209n9 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 7–8, 12, 14– 24, 74–79, 82–83, 92–93, 106–107, 109, 136, 140, 155, 165, 167–68, 195–97, 241, 245 Derrida, Jacques, 110n12, 136, 241 Derycke, Luc, 70n3 Dewey-Hagborg, Heather, 84 Di Scipio, Agostino, 121 Diogenes, 239 Dolan, David, 228 Dolmetsch, Arnold, 203 Dombois, Florian, 9, 27 Donington, Robert, 209n3 Drucker, Johanna, 48

Duchamp, Marcel, 90 Dunin-Woyseth, Halina, 132 Dunsby, Jonathan, 203 Eckel, Gerhard, 59, 61, 66–67, 70n3, 70n10 Eiholzer, Hubert, 228 Elo, Mika, 40, 43n5 Emerling, Jae, 7 Emmerson, Simon, 122 Emmerson, Stephen, 224, 227–28 epistemology, 31, 32, 38, 153–54, 194; art epistemology, 2 Ernst, Wolfgang, 190n7 ethics, 13, 76–77, 81, 83, 84–85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 102, 153–54, 161 206, 208 Evaristti, Marco, 85 experimental system, 48, 51, 72–76, 78 179–80 experimentation, 8, 13, 15, 23, 28, 33–34, 48, 55, 71–73, 93, 101, 123, 132, 136, 142, 151, 193, 215, 218, 226, 231 Export, Valie, 88 expositionality, 7, 27–28, 32– 34, 36–37, 39– 42 film, 16, 30, 147, 150–51, 166 Fischer, Philipp, 177–78, 181, 186 Fliescher, Mira, 31 Forty, Adrian, 129 Foucault, Michel, 82–83, 140 Frayling, Christopher, 216 Futurism, 65 Gaunt, Helena, 209n4, 216, 227–28, 233n16 Gayatri, Manola K., 147 Gell, Alfred, 207 Gibbons, Michael, 4 Gioti, Artemi-Maria, 61, 65–66, 70n3 Giudici, Paolo, 193–95 Glanville, Ranulph, 128 Goehr, Lydia, 192–93, 200n1 Goodman, Steve, 109 Gordon, Douglas, 21–22 Gordon, Michael, 210n11

Index 251 Gould, Glenn, 202–203 Gramelsberger, Gabriele, 176 Grill, Thomas, 121 Grotowski, Jerzy Marian, 157 Guattari, Félix, 4, 7–8, 14–15, 18–20, 22–23, 74–76, 78–79, 83, 92–93, 106, 109, 168, 196 Hakkarainen, Kai, 210n16 Hamilton, Richard, 21 Hanafi, Sari, 138 Hann, Rachel, 153 Hannah, Dorita, 147 Hansen, Pil, 147, 153 Harding, James, 170n11 Hargest, Tana, 84 Harnoncourt, Nikolaus, 203 Harrison, Scott, 219 Haseman, Brad, 149, 154, 165 Heddon, Dee, 147 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 168, 244 Heidegger, Martin, 155, 168, 241 Henke, Robert, 207–08 Hensel, Michael, 132 Hermann, Thomas, 110n11 Hill, Jonathan, 132, 134 Hill, Peter, 203 Hiller, Lejaren, 115 Hillier, Paul, 203 HIP, see Historically Informed Performance Historically Informed Performance (HIP), 9, 202–203, 218, 226, 230 historiography, 6, 203 history of art (see art history) Hoffmann, Christoph, 176 Hofkirchner, Wolfgang, 70n3 Hofmann, Hans, 177 Holdridge, Lin, 37–38 Holert, Tom, 32 Horsburgh, Ian, 218 Howat, Roy, 203 Hozumi, Tada, 156, 170n7 Hsieh, Tehching, 83 Huang, Aiyun, 228 Huggenberg, Jan, 176, 189n1 Hui, Yuk, 53 Hunt, Victoria, 156

252 Huron, David, 224 Huston, Hollis, 158 Iddon, Martin, 203 Ikeda, Ryoji, 119 Impett, Jonathan, 213 Ingold, Tim, 207 jagodzinski, jan, 6 Jeremijenko, Natalie, 86, 90–91, 93 Jiankui, He, 81 Johansson, Johannes, 218, 225, 228 Jones, John Christopher, 128 Joseph, Ella, 30 Kac, Eduardo, 86–88, 90 Kafka, Franz, 240 Kanno, Mieko, 232 Kant, Immanuel, 168 Kapoor, Anish, 21 Kaprow, Alan, 88, 90, 167 Kausalainen, Essi, 147 Keniniarz, Verena, 72, 76, 78 Kershaw, Baz, 147, 170n2, 170n3 Khalili, Laleh, 138 Kirkegaard, Jakob, 119 Kirkkopelto, Esa, 31–32 Kittler, Friederich, 114 Klee, Paul, 244 Klein, Julian, 31–32, 155 Knight, Jason, 77 –78 Knorr-Cetina, Karin, 179 Koenig, Gottfried Michael, 123 Koolhaas, Rem, 21, 131 Krauss, Rosalind, 38 Kubisch, Christina, 119 Kubler, George, 73 Kuhn, Thomas, 74 Kurtz, Steve, 76–77, 88 LaBelle, Brandon, 101 Lacan, Jacques, 13 Lacey, Jordan, 104 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 39 Lanskey, Bernard, 232 Lansner, Anders, 66–67, 69 Laruelle, François, 165, 168

Index Latour, Bruno, 48 Laval-Jeantet, Marion, 84 Le Guin, Elizabeth, 228 Leatherbarrow, David, 130 Lemke, Thomas, 82 Leonhardt, Gustav, 203 Levitin, Daniel, 224 literature, 16, 23, 37, 99, 151 Loock, Ulrich, 101 Lowry, Sean, 36, 49 Lyotard, Jean-François, 76, 118, 190n6 MacDonald, Shana, 147, 159 Machover, Tod, 122 MacLeod, Katy, 37–38 Maderna, Bruno, 115 Malaspina, Cecile, 70n3 Malino, Frank, 87 Mangin, Benoît, 84 Manovich, Lev, 118 Maqusi, Samar, 134, 138–42 Marclay, Christian, 119 Mareis, Claudia, 9 Marshman, Anne, 228 Martin, Jacqueline, 170n3 Marx, Karl, 236 materialism, 15, 20, 108–109; new materialism, 107, 165, 169 Mathews, Max, 115, 122 McKinney, Jocelyn, 147 McQueen, Steve, 21 media theory, 113 Melville, Stephen, 38–39 Menezes, Marta de, 83 Merlin, Bella, 147 Merrill Squier, Susan, 85 Mersch, Dieter, 47 Meta Bauer, Ute, 9 Michiels, Jan, 194 Midgelow, Vida, 146–47 Millier, Budi, 147 Miranda, Eduardo, 121 Mitchell, Robert, 85, 90 Monteverdi, Claudio, 204–205 Mouffe, Chantal, 139 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 213–15, 224, 226, 231



Index 253

Munster, Anna, 85 music performance, 4, 9, 66, 114, 117–18, 125, 192, 194–96, 198–99, 202–205, 208–209, 227, 229, 230 music technology, 2, 8, 113–22, 125–26, 223, 230 music theory, 98, 202–04, 230 music, 2–6, 8–9, 98–101, 105–106, 110, 113–26, 130, 150–51, 169n1, 190n7, 192–200, 202–210, 212–19, 221–32, 241; electronic music, 8, 115, 123 musicology, 3, 5, 98, (computational) 123, 151, 194, 200, 203–206, 217, 222, 226, 230, 233–34n19 Myers, William, 86 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 39, 244 Nauha, Tero, 147 Nelkin, Dorothy, 85 Nelson, Robin, 149, 155, 160, 209n5 Neoclassicism, 13, 22 Nettl, Bruno, 207 Neuhaus, Max, 99–103, 108, 110 new materialism, see materialism Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 47, 168, 237–39, 242–45, 245n7 Nilsson, Fredrik, 132 Noë, Alva, 118 Nono, Luigi, 115 O’Doherty, Brian, 40 Obrist, Hans Ulrich, 21 Oliveros, Pauline, 117 ontology, 13, 17, 21, 31, 38–39, 52, 92, 110, 119, 126, 148, 153, 160, 168, 199–200, 239–40 organology, 5, 202–203 Orlan, 78, 83–84 Oswald, John, 121, 127n10 painting, 34, 38–40, 85, 110n12, 166, 241 Paiuk, Gabriel, 56n1 Parr, Mike, 166 Parra Cancino, Juan, 193–94, 200n3 Parry-Davies, Ella, 147 Pask, Gordon, 128 Patanjali, 152

Pearson, Mike, 147 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 85 performance studies, 5, 146–48, 150–52, 165–67, 170n1, 171n11, 227 performance, 2, 8, 83–84, 87–88, 103, 146–71, 236, 238, 243 performative turn, 150, 166, 168 Peri, Jacopo, 204–205 Phelan, Peggy, 160 phenomenology, 15, 23, 154, 168, Philip, Kavita, 86 philosophy, 2–3, 9, 15–17, 24, 75, 78–79, 82, 86, 92, 90, 98, 113, 118, 133, 136, 151–56, 165–69, 171n16, 190n8, 193– 95, 200, 206, 219, 222, 228, 236–45; art philosophy, 5; biophilosophy, 86, 92–93; music philosophy, 8, 117; performance philosophy, 147, 151, 154, 166, 171n16 photography, 29–31, 166, 187 Piccini, Angela, 170n2 Pirrò, David, 59, 61, 66, 70n3, 122 Plato, 9, 237–40 Plewis, Harriet, 169, 171n17 Podger, Rachel, 210n14 politics, 13, 15–16, 20, 29, 42, 53, 77, 81, 87–88, 91–92, 102, 106–110, 114, 121–22, 124, 133–34, 136, 138–41, 148, 153, 156, 161, 216–17, 228; biopolitics, 82 Popat, Sita, 147 Popper, Karl, 33 Porter, Laurelann, 147 postmodernism, 12 Prchal, Martin, 218, 225, 229 Price, Cedric, 131 Pritchet, James, 203 psychology, 98, 133, 190n7, 208 RC, see Research Catalogue Rendell, Jane, 132 Renshaw, Peter, 216–19, 221, 233n16 Reodica, Julia, 83 Research Catalogue (RC), 7, 10n2, 27–28, 34, 46– 54, 56, 66, 200n4 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 8, 36, 48, 72–75, 77–79, 177, 187, 189n5

254

Index

Rickli, Hannes, 9, 175–82, 184–89, 189n1, 190n6 Rifkin, Adrian, 130 Rink, John, 203, 228, 232 Rintz, Julia, 31 Roads, Curtis, 122 Roberts, Paul, 228 Roennfeldt, Peter, 219 Romik, Natalia, 134–38, 142 Ronell, Avital, 239 Rooley, Anthony, 227 Rosen, Charles, 203 Rosenboom, David, 115, 121 Rosenthal, Cindy, 170n11 Rossi, Aldo, 131 Rutz, Hanns Holger, 121–22 Rye, Caroline, 170n2 Ryle, Gilbert, 155 Saariaho, Kaija, 124 Saarinen, Eliel, 130–31 Sack, Daniel, 164, 171n13 Sahlén, Martin, 65 Schaeffer, Pierre, 115, 119 Schaffer, Simon, 34 Schechner, Richard, 148, 150, 167, 170n11 Scherchen, Herman, 116 Schick, Steven, 210n11 Schipper, Casper, 56n1 Schippers, Huib, 219, 228 Schlüter, Fritz, 104 Schmidt, Theron, 164 Schmitt, Carl, 139 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 245n7 Schultis, Brian, 149 Schultz, Andrew, 219, 220 Schumann, Robert, 196, 198 Schwab, Michael, 3, 9, 47, 56n1, 59, 61, 66, 70n3, 72, 76, 194 Science and Technology Studies (STS), 2, 9, 37, 177–80, 187–88, 194, 195 Scott, Joanne, 147 sculpture, 59, 67–68, 83–85, 89, 166–67 semiotics, 15–16, 18–19, 85; asemiotic, 167 Sennett, Richard, 207 Shah, Rajni, 147, 156, 161

Shakespeare, William, 239 Shapin, Stephen, 34– 37 Shaw, Jennie, 228 Shearing, David, 147 Shyldkrot, Yaron, 162 Simondon, Gilbert, 53, 56, 82–83, 89, 92 Singh, Nicola, 147, 161–62, 169 Smalley, Denis, 119 Smith, Marquard, 12, 14 Smithson, Robert, 29 Soane, John, 21–22 sociology, 103, 128, 152, 198, 200, 206– 207, 226; sociology of art/music, 3 Socrates, 237, 239 Sommer, Lucia, 77 sonic studies, see sound studies sound art, 8, 98–104, 106, 108–109, 117– 19, 121, 125, 151 sound studies, 2, 8, 98–99 sound, 58–59, 61, 66–69, 70n10, 77, 98– 110, 114–15, 117–19, 121–22, 124–26, 147, 151, 162, 164, 175, 178, 184, 187, 189, 190n7, 208, Spatz, Ben, 146–47, 151, 161, 170n7, 171n12 Spinoza, Baruch, 18, 23, 69, 70n13, 243 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 157 Steadman, Philip, 128 Stelarc, 77–78, 84 Stendhal, 243, 245n7 Stjerna, Åsa, 106–110, 110n11 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 115 Straebel, Volker, 70n3 STS, see Science and Technology Studies Stubbs, Phoebe, 70n3 Suarez, Mauricio, 70n3 subjectivity, 6, 13, 17–18, 20, 23, 82–83, 140, 142, 160, 216 Tabor, Philip, 132 Tálamo, Alex, 156 Taruskin, Richard, 228 Tenney, James, 115 Thacker, Eugene, 84, 92 theatre, 6, 22, 88, 99, 147, 150–52, 159, 161–62, 165–66, 169, 209n5 Theremin, Lev, 113



Index 255

Thompson, Jon, 163 Till, Nicholas, 204 transversality, 2, 4 Tremblay, Pierre Alexandre, 118 Tschumi, Bernard, 131 Tudor, David, 117, 126n2, 202–203 Upitis, Alise, 27 urban planning, 8, 103–104, 130 Van Berkel, Ben, 131 Van Damme, Dirk, 232 Van der Heide, Edwin, 104–106, 108, 110, 110n9 Van Eck, Cathy, 121 Van Schaik, Leon, 132 Varela, Francisco, 75 Varèse, Edgar, 115 Varkøy, Øivind, 232 Verbeke, Johan, 132 Vickers, Paul, 107 Viola, Bill, 117, 210n14 Vuksic, Valentina, 176, 181, 184, 187, 189, 189n1, 190nn7–8

Waisvisz, Michel, 117 Wallin, Jason, 6 Walton, Chris, 175, 189nn1–2, 190nn6–7 Weaver, Lois, 147 Weber-Krebs, David, 147 Weiberg, Birk, 176, 178, 184, 189n1 Weintraub, Linda, 86 Westerlund, Heidi, 209n4 White, Neal, 70n3 Willett, Jennifer, 77–78, 84 Wilson, Mick, 33 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 13 Wishart, Trevor, 119 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 239 Xenakis, Iannis, 116 Young, Harvey, 167 Zarrilli, Phillip, 146–147, 152, 154, 157 Zeami, Motokiyo, 152 Zemyatin, Yevgeny, 113 Žižek, Slavoj, 136 Zurr, Ionat, 78, 89–90

About the Contributors

Prof. Dr. Arno Böhler, Professor of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria. Prof. Dr. Marcel Cobussen, Professor of Auditory Culture and Music Philosophy at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Dr. Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Reader in Theatre and Performance, University of Surrey, UK. Dr. Luc Döbereiner, composer-researcher at the Institute of Electronics Music and Acoustic, Graz, Austria. Prof. Jae Emerling, associate professor of modern and contemporary art in the College of Arts and Architecture at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, US. Prof. Murray Fraser, Professor of Architecture and Global Culture, The Bartlett School of Architecture, London, UK. Dr. Priska Gisler, Director of the Institute for Intermediality, Bern University of the Arts, Switzerland. Prof. Dr. Jonathan Impett, Director of Research at the Orpheus Institute (BE) and Associate Professor at Middlesex University, London, UK. Prof. jan jagodzinski, University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

257

258

About the Contributors

Dr. Darren Jorgensen, Senior Lecturer, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. Prof. Dr. Mieko Kanno, Professor of Artistic Doctoral Studies at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, Finland. Prof. Bernard Lanskey, Dean of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, National University of Singapore, Singapore. Dr. Cecile Malaspina, Associate Researcher at the CNRS lab Sphere (Science, Philosophy, History) Paris 7 Denis Diderot, Paris, France. MA Shu Chen Ong, Lecturer, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, Singapore. Dr. Juan Parra Cancino, post-doctoral researcher, Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium. Dr. David Savat, Lecturer, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. Dr. Michael Schwab, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Artistic Research, Society for Artistic Research, Switzerland. Dr. Abigail Sin, Piano Lecturer, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, Singapore. BA Veerle Spronck, doctoral researcher at the Philosophy Department of Maastricht University, The Netherlands.