practice-led

Roy Ascott, diagram/presentation, Speculative Research

Research, has traditionally been defined in academia by non-artists, however the emergence of practice-led research gives artists the opportunity to define research within the field of art. Particular challenges that this presents, is that within the creative disciplines there is a tendency to pose unanswerable questions, questions that would not be relevant to other established disciplines. How then do we evaluate it? What are our methods? Ultimately the research is speculative, a similar challenge that philosophy also encounters, however there is nonetheless evidence, a long standing historical record that attests to the value, if not the need, in searching and articulating a series of responses, if but not to contribute to the cultural landscape.

"Art research is speculative, anticipatory and visionary. It involves thinking out of the box, seeking to move the mind, the senses, and the arena of action beyond the initial frame of inquiry. When involvement in art research is no more than an employment move to compensate for the collapse of the art market, or a servile academic repackaging of 20th century art strategies, it loses its distinction from humanities research, or simply hangs on the coat tails of scientific inquiry. Speculative research must produce its own protocols; the artist as researcher must engage with knowledge in new ways, creating new language, new frames of reference, new systems and behaviour. It must be non-linear, associative, risky, connective, transformative as well as intellectually, artistically and even spiritually challenging. The material, conceptual and spiritual infrastructure needed to support this emergence calls for research in creative agency, architectural form, and cultural organisms "

(Roy Ascott, presentation, Speculative Research)

How does making participate in the recuperation and genesis of (embodied) knowledge?

The place and form of making at the scale and pace of the individual body:
live, tactile, visceral invocation
time as a process and material
coupling reason and imagination
when language fails - conceptualization as violence to original experience
 
what is art research?
process, qualities, principles, constraints?