Tag: research

Week 7, CRM

CRM

JP King Methods Artist Talk

36 Minute video to prepare for JP King workshop on tracking research.

READING NOTES

  • generalized specialist, artist/designer/educator, interdisciplinary challenge of defining self, interdisicplinary critique + respect for methodological origins
  • method – procedure, methodology – branch of knowledge that deals w/ methods of particular discipline
  • methodological toolkit map
  • “in artistic research the method can be seen as a sort of map that informs both the research and the one reading the research, why and in what direction the research proceeded as it did.” mika hannula, juha suoranta, and tere vaden
  • non-verbal answers to non-verbal questions, masters is attempt to translate artistic practice into verbal language
  • research question allows for applications to exhibitions, scholarships
  • flow charts, prints exploring questions, giving away and leaving on streetcars
  • photographic research, visiting sites
  • in drafting thesis – how to articulate process? determined subject matter ( waste+relationship) methodological toolkit, techniques (visual documentaion, sensory ethnography, documentary filmmaking graphic design, presentation), process how does it come together (flowchart, what if, collection, transformation, display, what if this becomes that?) diagram = opportunity to talk about transformation of material and value as those things move through different stages of creative practice
  • class monday, mapping process, idea of experimental system

POST-READ

thinking about my own work, how to map ideas about my own work, the challenges in trying to unite “how do disabled artists keep making” (how does a disabled artist keep making, practice of speculative present) (budgeting of time and energy) and the sensory experiments with fractals and interpenetration/being in the world. how to take the tools i use 1) writing, poetry, narrative, non-fiction 2) photography, video, glitching, distortion 3) print making, illustration, abstraction, ones that i want to use (collage, wax, textile, audio, tactility), come together in a methodology. thinking about the tone that comes with using flat graphic design aesthetic / infographics versus the concept map made by iris haeussler. mapping of frameworks. also the practical challenges i’ve faced in trying to use mapping in the past (cog software, mapping in apt on roncesvalles,), either becomes too much of a creative exercise/presentation or includes too much detail. get lost in trying to articulate too much information.

having a hard time rn and feeling very much like im falling into patterns from undergrad, as much as from the unique stresses of the times as retrograde of my saturn return. focusing on faith and knowing i will get through this time and to cram/execute to the best that i can manage w/o perfectionism.

Experimental Systems and Epistemic Things

Hans-Jorg Rheinberger – “Experimental Systems and Epistemic Things” – A science history text but one that has been adopted by design researchers and research-creation scholars. It does an incredible job of describing how tools and subjects of investigation can switch position as the researcher gains technical proficiency. 

READING NOTES

  • “The sub ject is, as it were, internally excluded from its object.” 2
  • Procedure does not mean here merely method or methodology. For every procedure already requires an open sphere (offener Bezirk) in which it moves. And it is pre cisely the opening of such a sphere that is the fundamental event in research 6(heidegger)
  • l’The Experiment as Mediator between object and Subject (Goethe)
  • “Thus when we have done an experiment of this type, found this or that piece of empirical evidence, we can never be careful enough in studying what lies next to it or derives directly from it. This investigation should conce_rn us more- than the discovery of what is related to it.”1
  • “the theoretician puts certain definite ques tions to the experimenter,
  • What does it mean to speak of experimental systems, in contrast to this clear-cut rationalist picture of experimentation as a theory-driven activity?
  • if a research question were well defined it would be unnecessary to preform it
  • procedure defined by ambiguity,
  • systems of manipulation designed to give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able clearly to ask
  • experimental systems-are vehicles for ma terializing questions.
  • epistemic objects – objects of inquiry, present themselves in characteristic vagueness, embody what one does not yet know
  • The difference between experimental conditions and episte~ic thing~, there fore, is functional rather than structural
  • if both types of entities are engaged in a relation of exchange, blending, and mutual transformatin, why then not cancel the distinction altogether? does it not simply perpetuate the traditonal, problematic distinction between basic research and applied science, between science and technology?
  • it helps to assess the game of innovation, to understand the occurence of unprecedented events, and with that, the essence of research

The Chimera of Method

Jeroen Boomgaard – “The Chimera of Method” (p. 57 – 72) – A text focused on artistic practice and research-creation with a more relevant discourse. It intersects with Rheinberger well in that Boomgaard also discusses how artists use objects to investigate objects and the flexible relationship between these. 

READING NOTES

  • resistance to art as research often focuses on the question of the method.
  • Popper wanted to provide science with a de pendable basis with his ‘principle of falsification’ (i.e. a theory can only be regarded as truly proven when it is in principle possible to prove that it is incorrect), Kuhn demonstrated that scientific principles are constructs (paradigms) which stand until they are replaced by another outlook…
  • method has something to do with power as well: it is a manner of doing research but also a manner of speaking and/or writing that by definition structures the research and furnishes it with its power base.
  • every artist determines that method for himself and the idiosyncratic character of the rules lends art the aura of freedom and arbitrariness.
  • How can an artist who wishes to gain a PhD deal with a scholarly approach that in one breath calls itself into question and in the next breath ad vocates a compulsory but individually customisable system of rules as a means of production for art? How can artistic research derive its own methodology from this?
  • The question of the method, which is often timorously avoided in discus sions about research in the arts, is in fact axiomatic
  • Artistic research renders something visible, or furnishes an insight or knowledge that another form of research cannot ac complish, and that ‘something’ resides in the fact that art plays a pivotal role in the research.
  • how a method of research focused on dissemination can be combined with the non-dis power cursive of the work of art
  • The mode of research – asking questions in order to find answers – is complemented by a working method which prescribes how the re search – the questions and the answers, the process and the outcome – is written up and disseminated.
  • When artistic research is chiefly defined as an investigation in and through the arts and when the textual component is also re garded as a justification of the research – a descrip tion of what was done as well as an appraisal in the light of existing studies or other art projects – then that textual notation functions as a precept that struc tures the research in advance.
  • their research proves to be incapable of escaping this formulation during the process
  • How can it be discussed, received and evaluated as research?
  • Hallmarks of research, such as text, diagrams, statistics, documents and reports, then form part and parcel of the work of art.
  • The work wants to be visible as a form of research, but primarily to be seen and discussed as a form of art.
  • Formulating a research ques tion which can be investigated with the aid of existing scholarly disciplines as well as by means of their own artistic production is a way of preventing one of the two approaches predominating.
  • The basic premise is that the academic re search and research through art can complement or even comment on each other, but they cannot con verge.
  • combine a closed form with an open end, and it can there fore prompt an investigative direction of travel, but can never take it to a conclusion.
  • causes the conclusions that were apparently drawn in the text to be suspended again, with the work of art’s complexity forcing open the hermetic methodology of science.

INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS

a priori: deductive, : relating to or derived by reasoning from self-evident propositions (MW)

axiomatic: taken for granted(MW)

discursive: marked by a method of resolving complex expressions into simpler or more basic ones (MW)