Advancing Artistic Research
How is artistic research situated today and how can it be advanced in different social, academic and art worlds? Encompassing a variety of art and design practices from the fine arts, media arts, performing arts, music, theatre, circus, dance, design, architecture, and contemporary craft, artistic research aims to acquire and communicate knowledge and an understanding about specific materials, environmental, and social phenomena.
Merging practical knowledge with theoretical and methodological approaches from the fields of art and music history and theory, performance studies, media studies, curatorial and museum studies, communication sciences, philosophy and sociology of art, as well as interdisciplinary fields such as the environmental humanities, feminist and gender studies, science, technology, and social studies, artistic research processes and outputs are oriented toward different academic and non-academic publics. With this flexible set of skills for research creation, artistic research expands traditional knowledge and educational frameworks, adding new layers of insight and abilities at the intersections of theory and practice, academia and society. Given this interdisciplinary and intersectional sensibility, artistic research is in a unique position to confront uncertainty. The dire grievances brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis, exacerbated by the devastating violence in the Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Columbia, Iran, Ethiopia and beyond, demand more than utopic gestures or technological optimism. Challenged by the significant tensions of our times, artistic researchers are tasked with applying diverse forms of embodied knowledge to craft new tools for (post)crisis conviviality and radical kindness.
The 13th International Conference on Artistic Research sought to recognize the uncertainty of our times and engage with future-oriented responses to current social, cultural, ecological and economic challenges through manifold means of high-level practice and reflection in the arts.
Initiated and co-organised by the Society for Artistic Research, the 13th International Conference on Artistic Research was a networking event within the international field of artistic research. Taking place from 30 June through to 3 July 2022, for the first time in Germany at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the conference consisted of a twenty-four-hour online event and three days of live, on-site events, which attracted more than two hundred international researchers and seventy contributions, including workshops, online talks, research presentations and keynote lectures. The conference was structured around three main thematic clusters that brought together the state-of-the-art in artistic research to creatively respond to current global crises: Mend, Blend, and Attend. The conference was accompanied by the artistic program, ‘Spooky Actions at a Distance’, consisting of four group shows and five performances and interventions. This series of events was the first comprehensive public presentation of practice-based research in art and design in Weimar, and a milestone for the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
In its conceptual development, the conference explicitly followed three policy documents as guidelines for excellence in artistic research: the Frascati Manual with its criteria for novel, creative, uncertain, systematic, transferable and/or reproducible research (OECD 2015); the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research (SAR et al., 2020); as well as the recent recommendations of the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat 2021) on postgraduate qualifications at universities of art and music. Along these lines, the conference offered a unique platform to encourage discourse and exchange, and to test out the stipulations of the Frascati Manual and Vienna Declaration with the aim of advancing an understanding of artistic research and stimulating new collaborative capacities and interdisciplinary scholarship. Using these guidelines, the conference committee, made up of members of the executive board of the Society for Artistic Research, the Faculty of Art and Design of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, enabled conference participants to share materials and methods, demonstrate latest technologies, reflect on participatory approaches to working with different audiences and collaborators, and present the results of longer-term projects beyond the scope of singular exhibitions or performances.
This publication offers a glimpse into the conversations, topics and practices of artistic research presented at the 2022 SAR conference. Consisting of 15 extended abstracts, 20 full papers, 3 contributions by keynote speakers, and documentation of the conference’s artistic program, the publication not only includes the event’s key contributions, but also outlines new encounters in reporting, visualising, and disseminating the conference’s processes and outcomes, capturing important highlights and insights that reflect the breadth of artistic research as a field of inquiry. Our aim with this publication is to make these research expositions accessible beyond the context of the conference participants and wider artistic research community, and to increase the impact of the Society for Artistic Research.
At the same time, the project serves as an overview; a contribution that transfers the current state of international artistic research into a comprehensive presentation and at the same time functions as a pilot project for the conception and design of future conference volumes in the field of artistic research.
Three attractors
To confront the multiple crises of our times, action is required. For this reason, we chose three verbs as themes for the conference: Mend, Blend, and Attend. These three areas of focus were used to facilitate the selection of positions presented. Rather than assigning the contributions to the three, we consider them to be attractors: forces that draw variations and attention into their proximity. Within this framing, we pick up the share, dare, care threads from the 2021 online conference in Vienna to honor their legacy.
Mend
Covid-19 drastically deepened and at the same time exposed the racial, ethnic, class, and gender inequalities of societies across the globe. How can artistic researchers deal with the ruptures and damage and develop new practices of mending, in order to design an altogether different future? What practices of grieving and repair might help us move forward? How can rupture, and ‘wear and tear’ be acknowledged as part of a historical fabric? And how can new practices of mending contribute to concepts and communities of repair and remediation?
Blend
In view of the increasingly complex social, technological and environmental challenges faced, artistic research offers a potential alternative; a decidedly open, hybrid and fluid means of dissolving disciplinary boundaries. How can artistic research foster diverse and forward-looking encounters, sensitive interactions, and reflective collaborations? In turn, how can we create productive interferences, friction and interplay between different techniques, methods and methodologies? And what new practices of interdisciplinary blending result from knowledge transfer during such troubled times?
Attend
Proposing a research culture of ‘attending to’, we are interested in citational practices that swerve the cannon and recalibrate the gravitational pull of historical hierarchies often embedded in knowledge production. What would it take to recognize overlooked presences? How can we attend to unacknowledged influences of artists, places, events, and things that escape or have been denied citation? With this attractor, radical attention was placed on the various forms and formats of attending to one another, through an exploration of practices such as peer-reviewing, data-sharing, knowledge transfer and non-linear forms of publishing in artistic research.
Conferencing as conversation
Organising any event during a pandemic is akin to building on unstable ground: one has to tread with due care. And no matter how thoughtful the planning – an unforeseen shift of matter might nix the work, and one will have to start all over from scratch. The concept of the conference thus integrated hybridity from the very beginning, including an online event of a twenty-four- hour long conversation’ which offered a variety of successive presentations accessible from different time zones. However, when the planned date approached in early spring, the number of Covid-19 cases began to rise and quarantine and social isolation measures were again put in place. As a result, the conference was postponed to the summer, leading to no small amount of additional coordination work, and demanding a high degree of flexibility from all participants, contributors and team. In consideration of the outgoing attractors, the shift in formats was necessary to lower the health risks for everyone involved. Even at the very last minute, staff, speakers and moderators fell ill and were unable to travel. In order to mitigate this level of uncertainty, the conference was designed to be decentralised and partly online.
Online Long Conversation
For twenty-four-hours an online ’long conversation’ enabled artistic researchers worldwide to create impulses in a succession of presentations spread across the different time zones. The expanded-dialogue format allowed for a large number of people to experience a variety of positions, and actively participate in discussions. This experimental moderation method followed the logic of a collective collage, based on the surrealist method cadavre exquis, in which collaborators co-create a composition in sequence. The ‘long conversation’ asked of the presenters to moderate the discussion of the speaker immediately prior to them before launching into their own presentation. Encouraging a mode of ‘attending’ to the research of others, the long conversation simultaneously integrated insights into one’s own presentation, thus interweaving call and response elements of presenting. The twenty-four-hour online format also offered a low threshold in terms of access, and opened up the conference to artistic researchers who did not have the means or opportunity to join on site in Weimar.
Transition
An hour-long hybrid transition session linked online and on-site parts of the conference, wrapping up the long conversation and kicking off the on-site gathering. Conference committee members met for the first time in person on stage for a round table conversation about the past, present and future of artistic research and its impacts on society, the artworld and interdisciplinary scholarship.
On-site
The second part of the conference fostered a decidedly different pace and atmosphere, celebrating the intensity of physical co-presence. This three day gathering was among the first opportunities for artistic researchers to come together again as a community after the pandemic. A decentralised spatial concept accommodated workshops, sessions, and SAR special interest groups under consideration of health restrictions, group sizes, and airy spaces. Performative walks and interventions established connections and resonances between the respective venues.
‘Spooky Actions’
‘Spooky Actions’, the artistic programme presented by students and alumni of the PhD Programme Art and Design at Bauhaus-Universit.t Weimar, combined various event formats over the course of several weeks. It made the broad spectrum of approaches and positions of practice-based artistic research in the environment of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar visible. The project focused specifically on diversity and variety, which was reflected both in the number of positions shown and in the design of formats.
The leitmotif of the events was the phenomenon of ‘spooky action at a distance’, a concept stemming from quantum physics. It describes the entanglement of particles that while light years apart, are somehow still able to transform their properties in unison with one another, as if t connected through a mysterious communication channel. Elements of ambiguity, borderlines and connectedness at a distance related the different formats to each other.
After the pandemic experiences of distance , decentralisation and remoteness, we may have become better accustomed to the idea of non-locality and the strange ambiguity of knowledge creation that comes with it. Through exhibitions, screenings and performances, ‘Spooky Actions’ invited visitors to discover approaches to artistic and design research within a decentralised spatial framework. It explored (post-)pandemic ways of relating to one another and the world around us, looking to new rituals and practices of co-presence and unexpected channels of communication. ‘Spooky Actions’ combined the hyperlocal (site-specific performances) with group exhibitions, to the more diffusive experimental formats of digital space.
At the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, a curious and open attitude toward research in art and design is not without precedent, it enjoys a long tradition. The structured doctoral programme in art and design is particularly significant in this regard. With this practice-based study programme, the Faculty of Art and Design plays a pioneering role. It offers a double qualification with an equally practical and academic graduation. ‘Spooky Actions’ aims to make the doctoral programme and, beyond that, the artistic and design research at the university visible through interconnected formats at several locations.
