October’s stream: artistic research as sensing pathos

Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, 2007

2020

Since its beginnings in the 1990s, “artistic research” has become established as a new format in the areas of educational and institutional policy, aesthetics, and art theory. It has now diffused into almost all artistic fields, from installation to experimental formats to contemporary music, literature, dance or performance art. But from its beginnings—under labels like “art and science” or “scienceart” or “artscience” that mention both disciplines in one breath—it has been in competition with academic research, without its own concept of research having been adequately clarified. This manifesto attempts to resolve the problem and to defend the term and the radical potentials of a researching art against those who toy all too carefully with university formats, wishing to ally them with scientific principles. Its aim is to emphasize the autonomy and particular intellectuality of artistic research, without seeking to justify its legitimacy or adopt alien standards.

Qualitative Sociology Review, 2022

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Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença, 2021

This essay discusses methodological possibilities for conducting research using creative artistic processes as references. I ask: how can experimentation be valued, as well as notes of works in progress, and registers of flashes from life, without losing the rigor of theoretical discussions or an attentive look at urgent ethical and political needs of the present? Supported by Foucault, Hadot, Benjamin and others, I discuss topics from the work of Kiarostami, Clarice Lispector, Italo Calvino, and Pina Bausch. With these and other examples, including comments on a study in progress, I propose ways of reasoning poetically by fearlessly appropriating lessons from the arts.

Art as experience of the living body, an East/West experience, 2023

This book analyses the dynamic relationship between art and subjective consciousness, following a phenomenological, pragmatist and enactive approach. It brings out a new approach to the role of the body in art, not as a speculative object or symbolic material but as the living source of the imaginary. It contains theoretical contributions and case studies taken from various artistic practices (visual art, theatre, literature and music), Western and Eastern, the latter concerning China, India and Japan. These contributions allow us to nourish the debate on embodied cognition and aesthetics, using theoryphilosophy, art history, neuroscience-and the authors' personal experience as artists or spectators. According to the Husserlian method of "reduction" and pragmatist introspection, they postulate that listening to bodily sensations-cramps, heartbeats, impulsive movements, eye orientation-can unravel the thread of subconscious experience, both active and affective, that emerge in the encounter between a subject and an artwork, an encounter which, following John Dewey, we deem to be a case study for life in general. Ce livre analyse la relation dynamique entre l'art et la conscience subjective, selon une approche phénoménologique, pragmatiste et enactive. Il vise à faire émerger une nouvelle approche du rôle du corps dans l'art, non pas comme objet spéculatif ou matériau symbolique, mais comme source vivante de l'imaginaire. Les contributions théoriques et les études de cas sont prises à diverses pratiques artistiques (arts visuels, théâtre, littérature et musique), occidentales et orientales, ces dernières concernant la Chine, l'Inde et le Japon. Selon la méthode husserlienne de « réduction », en écho à l'introspection pragmatiste, les textes témoignent que l'écoute des sensations corporelles-crampes, battements de coeur, mouvements pulsionnels, orientation des yeux-mises en jeu par l'oeuvre, permet de dénouer le fil de l'expérience inconsciente, à la fois kinesthésique et affective, qui émerge dans la rencontre entre un sujet et une oeuvre d'art, une rencontre comprise, à la manière de Dewey, comme un cas d'école de la vie en général. Christine Vial Kayser (PhD, HDR) is an art historian and museum curator (emeritus). She is an Associate researcher with Héritages (CYU) and a member of the Doctoral School 628-AHSS. Her research relates to the capacity of art to transform representations within an individual and in the collective mind, through embodied, mnemonic, and affective processes, in a global, comparative (East/west context). She works at the crossroads of art theory, anthropology, and neuroaesthetics. Christine Vial Kayser (PhD, HDR) est historienne de l'art et conservatrice de musée (émérite). Elle est chercheur associé à Héritages (CYU) et membre de l'ED 628-AHSS. Ses recherches portent sur la capacité de l'art à transformer les représentations au sein d'un individu et dans le cadre collectif, à travers des processus incarnés, mémoriels et affectifs, dans un contexte global et comparatif (Est/Ouest). Elle travaille au croisement de la théorie de l'art, de l'anthropologie et de la neuroesthétique.

Practicing Art/Science. Experimenting in an emerging field, 2018

MA Dissertation | Central Saint Martins, 2018

This paper takes its departure from philosophies of subjectivity and agency that have emerged from poststructural discourses, and meditates on how their theories might reimagine the identities of artist and artwork alike, and the relationship between them. It begins by considering philosophy as, not only background context, but an artistic material, that can be pliable and instrumental to an artist. Introducing performative accounts of identity formation, from Michel Foucault through to Jacques Derrida, I reimagine my own subjectivity as interpellated by a network of sensitive relations, and begin to visualise my agency as ‘disturbances in the causal milieu’ (Gell, 1998). I then argue that these theories of agency are applicable to artworks, or fictional agencies, and not only human subjects. An expanded concept of the line (in a drawing, a sound, a gesture) is introduced to explore an artwork’s capacity to inhabit and exhibit ‘character’, which is contagious and transferable between agents, whether ‘artificial’ or ‘organic’. From there the paper becomes a platform to consider an experimental art practice, taking a novel I am writing as a proposition for such an art experiment, where the distinctions between the agencies of real maker and artificial character are blurred and challenged. This leads me to conclude in asking questions I may previously not have thought askable, such as: to what extent is something as close to home as the human mind, written; inscribed by ancient grooves of genetic memory, articulated by chains of DNA text and ventriloquisedby a culture of stories? And, is it possible to write a person? My research addresses how art, narrative and fiction might contribute to and extend contemporary studies of subjectivity and self-representation.

In this paper we argue that it is essential for artistic research to develop an epistemology and methodology that is responsive to modern society’s demands to move towards a decolonized and ethically grounded paradigm. The positivist belief in a value-free, ‘objec- tive’ science has already been decisively countered by a subjectivist turn. In this context, the artistic researcher can be a vanguard representative of an autoethnographic and po- litically aware counter-reaction in which the space for subjectivity in research in general is expanded – an expansion that goes 'beyond validity'. Rather than being understood as a non-academic and independent research discipline, we claim that artistic research is situated in a space principally de ned by four non-conformal elds of gravitation: the subjective, the academic, the experimental, and the eld of the art world. The complex- ity of this picture should not prevent the development of frames and methods for artistic researchers to use or depart from, while still maintaining an experimental perspective. Drawing on theoretical currents in the social sciences and cultural studies as well as method development in the artistic research eld, our argument builds on the conviction that artistic practices have always constituted a source of dissemination of particular kinds of knowledge. These non-discursive forms of transmission of knowledge constitute a foundation for artistic research.

New Asian Imaginations, 2011

The initial motivation to dwell on the topic of collective art making by using Artists Caravan's past projects as case studies, derives from a narcissistic, pragmatic and naive perspective to "know ourselves (Artists Caravan) better". During our research and analysis, we raised such questions as how do we position ourselves as art practitioners such that we can effect signi cant contributions to the betterment of Arts and the wider community, physically and geographically? Additionally, with our working methods of nomadic, collective art-making in public spaces, there is a constant shift of roles, position and concerns through the interaction with different communities and places. The development of these relationships is intertwined such that at the end of the day, we ask whose practice is it? Therefore, this paper explores Artists Caravan's philosophy as an arts collective, employing Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the body without organs (BwO) 1 as a means to explore our working paradigm of self, others and place in everyday life.