Artistic Research and the Knowledge Claim
Ever since the early days of artistic research, the difference between this and other kinds of research has been discussed. The difference, according to one common argument, is that since the artistic researcher is exploring the artistic process in the making, the research is performed from an inside perspective.[7] This may even be seen as one of the defining ideas of the epistemology of artistic research: there is a difference between knowledge that has been acquired from observing an artistic practice and knowledge that is the result of practicing art. If the artistic researcher is researching from an inside perspective, the vantage point for other kinds of research would then be from an analytical perspective, observing from the outside. These metaphors are crude representations of what goes on in research and, similar to what was noted above, they serve to support the unfortunate conceptual drawback of creating a dichotomy between the inside and an implied outside, which is neither entirely correct nor particularly useful for the development of interdisciplinary research, for example. The often cited categories (and their variations, such as those proposed by philosopher and theorist Henk Borgdorff (2007) that cultural historian Christopher Frayling (1993) put forth in his article “Research in Art and Design” – research into art, research for art, and research through art – are loosely pointing in the same direction: they are distinct research modalities resulting in supposedly distinct results. However, these categories are rarely stable, nor are they exclusive: any research practice in music, artistic as well as scientific, is likely to touch on all of these modalities.
In order to explore the idea of artistic research from an inside perspective it is not enough to merely consider the perspective of the researcher. Exploring internalized how-to knowledge and the belief systems that surround the practice demands stable and transparent methods for revealing the processes in action. This is discussed by researcher Fernando Galdon and Professor of Design Innovation Ashley Hall, who conclude that "[t]his type of implicit knowledge creates a problem around how we can be sure that tacit knowledge is communicated and acted upon in a manner consistent with its generation" (Galdon and Hall 2022: 919). As their paper is written from the perspective of design education, it may be used as a critique of the notion of an inside as a qualifier unique to the artistic researcher. Furthermore, if only the researcher/artist has unique access to this perspective – that only they, by definition, produce research from the inside – any argument put forth from this inside perspective may be assigned a parochial nature difficult to contest.
Much has been written about these topics during the years in which the field of artistic research has been developing. In his contribution to the Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, philosopher Sören Kjørup argues that
if artistic research is supposed to be different from all other kinds of research, it is natural to focus on the artist as the researcher, and what is specific for the artist is her or his privileged access to her or his own creative process. (Kjørup 2010: 25)
This "privileged access" could be seen to harbor a possibility for revealing a kind of knowledge that is sometimes mediated by symbols and concepts but which is primarily founded on unmediated experience, a somewhat paradoxical situation where the goal is to bring forth that which is by nature hidden. Naturally, one of the recurring themes in the early discussions on the identity of artistic research was, and still is, how to understand its nature and what kind of relation it should have to other kinds of knowledge. How can something that evades conceptualization be represented in any way as stable? How may this unmediated experience be useful to the artistic researcher and to others? These questions are still of relevance in artistic research and form the centers of inquiry from which this discipline is most often criticized.[8] These questions also rely on the fact that the artist, with their privileged access, knows how to gain access to the experience, often referred to as tacit knowledge, and that this is the source for methodological developments, and eventually, the expression of meaningful knowledge. How to determine how this may be approached within the field of artistic research in sound is the primary focus of the discussion of this paper. I will approach this topic through Bergson's ideas on intuition in the context of my practice as a musician.