The City as Place: Remapping Urban Space through Artistic Research

My practice-based research explores what is invisible in the visu-al realm in order to investigate immanence, haptic perception, and non-visual knowledge. I approach the non-visible realm through video, animation, writing, installation, experimental collabora-tion, and drawing. Through this context, I ask: what is at stake in the recent shift in Canadian academic institutions for artists to define their work as artist-researchers? While this shift does suit the practice of many artists (myself included) it also carries a dangerous edge, a subtle implication that applying ‘research’ to art practice entails a more rational, articulable, or self apparent explanation of the function and value of art. The coined term “researchify” exemplifies this erroneous rational order. I argue that this urge to “researchify” is a dangerous tendency, and artists must protect the unutterable lacuna within their process. The leap of perception in the art experience remains fundamentally within experiencing the art itself. Art is an encounter that exists through the act of making and/or through the viewer’s experience, acces-sible through phenomenological investigation. I apply the basic tenets of Gilles Deleuze’s fold, Giorgio Agamben’s lacuna, and Laura U. Mark’s immanence of irreversible time to eschew ra-tional over-determination.

Artistic Research: Being There Explorations into the Local, 2017

How does artistic research engage with the concept of "local"? In what ways can art practice be an intervention into traditional notions of history and culture? How does it engage with local and global identities? This book raises questions about transient art practices and site-specific works within communities, as well as art and research based experiences localized in urban and rural spaces, within the body and memory.

Research Methodologies talks series, Art Creativity Education and Culture Mphil Course, 2015

This session will focus on the recent contemporary art context characterised by a strong theorisation of practice defining a research practice of its own. The session will look at existing models of artistic (academic and independent) research, while introducing the dimension of participation in research and its impact. Within this paradigm we shall also consider: the ontology of the produced and/or embedded knowledge on the one hand, and the role of the artist as interface in society (and education) on the other.

International Journal of Education Through Art, 2010

Combining research and art in the public sphere can have an enormous impact on urban societies. In places like Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, where over the past decades globalization has radically altered the social landscape, new approaches to public art and modes of representation can begin to reflect complex individual everyday experiences in a way that census statistics and traditional public monuments cannot. In this article, The City of Richgate, a four-year research/creation project funded by a pilot programme for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, will be described and discussed in relation to contemporary art criticism and discourse. Specifically, debates between critics Claire Bishop and Grant Kester will be used to reflect on Richgate, and how aesthetics play a part in socially-engaged public art projects such as this one.

This paper will present grassroots urban creative placemaking as a co-produced and performative artform. It will conceptualise this activity as the logical extension of urban arts practice, from public/new genre public art (Lacy 2008) and participatory arts to a ‘new situationism’ (Doherty 2004). This is a polylogic performative artform with space/place the non-human actant (Whybrow 2011, Kwon 2004) to the human ones of creative process and urban creatives. It will position participatory art as lacking a meaningful collaborative ethos and practice, and a co-produced one as a new paradigm of art practice of social relatedness (Gablik 1991, Miles 1997) and place this practice within a placemaking taxonomy (Legge 2013 and authors working paper). The paper will problematize the notion of urban arts practice and the formal arts sector as a critical spatial practice (Rendell 2006, Petrescu 2006) and will extend geographers critical thinking on the co-production of art as constructive of new spatial configurations and emergent relations between users and space, impacting public life (Meejin Yoon 2009), whereby locating it in the socio-political of urban life, this practice has to be understood as an art form that dematerialises the art object and is concerned with creative and social processes and outcomes. It will present research findings of fieldwork case studies that work in the public realm and aside from the formal galleries/museums sector, in a community co-produced context. Specifically, Art Tunnel Smithfield, Dublin; W Rockland Street, Philadelphia; and in the UK, Homebaked, and Greyworld.

2018

The term ‘artistic research’ is generally referred to as research in the arts, or ‘art as research’. More distinctively, it is also described as ‘research in and through art’ (Wesseling 2016, 8), distinguished from other types of research in the arts and brings to mind the popular yet seldom consistently discussed categorical distinctions from Christopher Frayling (1993). With increasing discussions to identify, describe, and legitimise artistic research against the largely scientific traditions of ‘research’, there has since been a growing amount of literature on the subject. Despite this accessibility of literature on artistic research—many written in English and published in easily available or open access journals—they often remain as efforts isolated from each other. I highlight this as an opportunity for mapping key ideas and developments of artistic research within recent discourse. This essay attempts a brief yet condensed discussion on artistic research using six recent key texts on artistic research. Chronologically, they are single books from authors Graeme Sullivan (2005), James Elkin (2009), Henk Borgdorff (2012), Mika Hannula et al. (2014), Janneke Wesseling (2016), and Danny Butt (2017).

2011

Practice as research as a political move to get more democratic access in aesthetics and art-making by explicitly articulating work from alongside, from outwith discourse, and making value for feelings and experiences that come from many diverse moments that are not said, not recognised in hegemonic systems. 1 Going public with art-making is a political act that performs politically. Practice as research focuses on the moment that the practice as making or rehearsal [ie installation 2 ] decides to go public, when the process of making is arrested into performance. 3 Arrest: a moment of decision, of temporarily generating knowledge from processes of knowing, of articulating value that has not been said within discourse-a moment of research that is kept as a practice by releasing the arrest into the process of performance. Once the made-art is in the public it enables a range of social, cultural, political action relevant to diverse groups within a democracy, but only if it is put back into process as performance. Only as process as performance can the not-said keep getting recognised within public systems of discourse. Once the not-said ceases to be part of an engaging performative process it becomes said, fits in, and is on the way to cliché and the banal, to being co-opted by a simulacrum that denies diversity, becoming enough. This textuality, this rhetoric of process, here of fitting, in itself is political and ensures that the made-art is working politically rather than simply being Political. Putting made-art into process as performance is the work of practice as research [ie constellation 4 ]: arrest/ fitting/ until as enough. 5 Art as research in action also has to feel when the process of performance is becoming enough, performing until the process stabilises, recognising that moment of until as enough when the not-said is said, and undoing that 12 Artistic Research in Action moment of arrest that makes the saying possible in the face of knowing the presence of many other not-saids unrecognised by systemic democracy. 6 These are also the work of the maker-as-critic, of the participant-maker, critique as practice. 7 Art as research in action is only possible if the not-said in made-art is engaged through strategies of criticism as practice, another element of practice as research. 8 Art as research in action needs a critical practice as research that keeps in process within the public sphere the performance of made-art from diverse groups. 9 Art as research in action is also critical practice as research: both have a rhetoric of performativity. 10 1 Practice as research is a political move to distinguish the art-maker from the Artist + respond to increasingly dis-unified aesthetics. i The art-maker works alongside hegemonic systems to materialise the 'not said', but also: introduces the not-said into the system and into public action through practice as research: by choices = research = arrest = art as research in action. Practice as research brings the not-said into political recognition at particular moments, ii with strategies that are not transferable but a stance that defines what it does not only as a political action but as a practice that performs politically. Art-making as a sustained embodied knowing, being in the moment: a practice iii draws from traditional knowledge, situated knowledge, enskilled knowledge, transmission often not recognised as valuable because it's in process. Not all process is a practice. Not all practice as making becomes articulated as practice as research. Research as an articulation of knowing that is making / making that is knowing. Practice as making is an aware and attentive rhetoric only articulated into public performance, into performativity, through practice as research: art-making as research in action. 14 Artistic Research in Action work of the critic, and critical work has to do what it tells, it has to perform the process of making and knowing-the textuality of practice as research. x Art-making in public action : critical work as a situated textuality. xi Lynette Hunter: A Logic of Participles: Practice, Process, Knowing and Being or Textuality of Arrest-thinking done by Lynette Hunter for CARPA II January 2011 presentation I'm pulling them all under 'practice as research' or PAR, because the philosophical claims made here have an impact on all of them.) has come about partly as a political move to distinguish the art-maker from the Artist. The Artist is someone tied to the strings of representation and discourse, the images of the powerful, the symbolic world of the subject. The art-maker is a person recognising their own non-autonomous labour, working on often unarticulated needs and values from worlds alongside the hegemonic, from positionalities. The art-maker sets aside the hegemonic, works alongside it. a Nevertheless, the art-maker also takes political action by introducing the things made, the madeart, into the systemic, moving from the installation of the rehearsal process of art-making to the constellation of public performance in whatever media. b The action adds to political rhetoric by containing within itself its own strategies of an undoing practice, doing to undo, as the practice of constellation recognises different needs and impels different installations. Artistic Research in Action iv Art-making itself is changing conventional ways of thinking about art, not only introducing new art objects into culture but also introducing new ways of thinking about the processes involved in making art. In the alongside work of 'installation' that contributes to dis-unified aesthetics, the key element is the making of difference. Installation here carries the signifying weight of the activity of art-making in process, not merely the 'setting up' of made-art in a space. In installation somewhat like-minded people, often with the same positionality, work collaboratively on making art, yet collaborative work means recognising the differences we make of others. j Difference does not exist before we make it, and when we make it we change our self phenomenologically. We experience the difference that we have made by a change in our body (body/ mind). 'affect' isn't something that happens to us, but something we do to ourselves when we feel the 'until' of différance, the radical aporia of the not self and not said. The process of making difference, of affect, releases the energy of change. Feeling change in our self leads to the process of valuing the difference we have made and often to recognising our changed body as something that has not yet been said. k This entire process is wrapped up in art-making, and combines various ways of knowing with the crafts of various media. Central to installation is also the feeling of 'when to stop' the process, the political choice made so that made-art enters the public and sociocultural fit. v This political process of art-making as research in action gathers together at the moment of arrest the split between the producer and consumer, rendering it as an engagement among makers and participants, so that each gives more attention to the other. The art-maker and critic can be hosted in the same person. The maker arrests the process of rehearsal, of installation, to include other participants, enters the public world through performance and become a participant-maker. The participant-maker, or critic, engages in the public performance and is continuously alert to the moment of until when the process of engagement slows and ceases. It is the critic who then has to undo that stasis, not to leave the pieces all over the floor but to release the energy of a different need. 26 Artistic Research in Action with modes of research, let's continue with Rancière to explore what we might consider to be 'practice': "It is on the basis of this primary aesthetics that it is possible to raise the question of 'aesthetic practices' as I understand them, that is forms of visibility that disclose artistic practices, the place they occupy, what they 'do' or 'make' from the standpoint of what is common to the community. Artistic practices are 'ways of doing and making' that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility." _ 63 Maria Kapsali: Re(de)fining Action: From Yoga Postures to Physical Scores

Periskop – Forum for kunsthistorisk debat, 2020

This special issue of Periskop arrives during a pandemic, as planetary cracks deepen and social injustices, structural and systemic discriminations (racism, sexism, trans-and homophobia, ableism, classism and so on), inequalities, climate disasters, displacements, and wars continue to unsettle our present. In times like these, this special issue asks: How can we reclaim artistic research? And how are artistic research practices engaging in the co-creation of other worlds in response to different forms of social crises and planetary destruction? We open this volume with a quote by bell hooks, from her essay "Theory as Liberatory Practice" (1994), because, similarly to how she came to theory out of an urgency to relieve pain, we are turning to artistic research as a site for creating other forms of knowledges and to carve out spaces for experiences that have previously been excluded in response to this immense destruction.

Biography: Frank Millward explores the intersection between fine art, music and theatre making, and how technology is making the arts fertile ground for artistic research. An accomplished composer, multimedia artist, teacher and academic, Millward makes visual art and connects it with sound. His research focuses on the way technology has transformed possibilities for interactive performance, and how an interdisciplinary approach can lead to the creation of new knowledge. Abstract: This paper considers how metaphors, such as those used in the title of this work, are shaping university approaches to artistic research in a deregulated educational environment. This idea is explored through lexicons developed around 'finding' and developing an 'original voice' when adding to new knowledge in undertaking a research higher degree. Terms such 'creativity' and 'innovation' are being made interchangeable as research outcomes are assessed in terms of their economic value. The discussion looks at business models used in the development of commercial concepts and products and how these are being translated to apply to artistic research. A start-up practice commonly used is to 'get the product / concept out there' even if 'under done' in order to see who is interested or if the product / concept can be developed in user experience feedback scenarios. This resonates with the idea of 'perpetual beta', extending and interacting in collaborative engagement with various communities. The testing and feedback process, which includes 'like / not like' with comment trail, are now part of a developing research with social media consultation process. How are such models impacting on artistic practice-based research? Where is the position of the 'original voice' within such narratives and how are the outcomes of artistic research to be judged when work is developed within such frameworks? What are the wider political implications for the position of creative arts research, the claim to new knowledge and the fundamental relationship that artistic practices have with specialist and non-specialist communities and the idea of 'perpetual beta'?