Creative Practice, as Research or Otherwise

Singapore.
The post-lunch session of this first full day at ISEA 2008 starts for me with a bunch of papers grouped under the overall title of 'Transforming Media'. Janez Strehovec is the first presenter, and his interest is in new media art as research. He begins by noting the wide-ranging and diverse nature of new media art. Common to many new media artworks is the lack of stability for the artefacts that are being created - artefacts are no longer stable, material art works, but instead art is reconceptualised as process. This also undermines the 'artist as genius' stereotype.

This is especially interesting in the context of hybrid and augmented reality artworks, allowing for hybrid relaity, mobile screening which brings the virtualcloser to the physical, blurs cyberspace and conventional reality, and creates a 'nomadic cockpit' position for the individual. Perception is augmented, and tactile vision is becoming increasingly crucial.

Artworks, then, become would-be artworks; art is experience and process, it is not-just-art. This is also the art of in-between spaces, of temporary art projects, and can act as service art - a problem-solving and research activity. (Janez points to relevant quotes from Adorno, Benjamin, and Heidegger in this context.)

Such art-as-service is about reshaping its object, moving it, connecting it, incorporating it into new relations. This is related to other 'not-just' elements: not-just-art is related to not-just-science, not-just-technology, and not-just-politics. (In other words, perhaps the boundaries between these are blurring.) Such fields are often characterised by virtuosity - an activity which is both strongly individual, and cannot operate without the presence of others.

Janez now mentions a number of examples for art as research - the work of the Critical Art Ensemble, which take a critical approach to science, the bio-art of Polona Tratnik, the hypermedia art of Mark Amerika - and finishes by showing an interactive tactile media artwork which enables the user to engage with a piece of text projected on the walls around them.

The next speaker is Danny Butt, whose focus is especially on the assessment of creative practice as research. (This is also related to his new book Place, which is going to be launched here in a couple of days.) The question of creative practice as research is especially important today as academic research is increasingly tightly assessed for return on investment by government bodies (the upcoming Australian ERA scheme is just one example for this).

Universities generally support the three areas of teaching, research and service; the role of academic practitioners overall has been redefined in the context of these three aims, and the same is true for artistic practitioners in universities, then. Government schemes to assess the performance of universities against these goals are often operated using assessment against defined standards of quality, which is problematic for artists - there is a poor fit between the positivist conceptions of research and the more subjective artistic forms of exploration; external, expected evaluation and surveillance has been shown overall to be detrimental for creative practice; alignment with institutional protocols from other disciplines creates a risk of standadisation on ill-suited criteria; and for art, affect and meaning-creation is always taking place after the fact, so that goal-directed artistic exploration is not as easily possible as is goal-directed research in other disciplines.

At the same time, playing by the assessment rules can generate better funding for art at a time that the traditional 'policy shelters' for art and culture are declining and that growth in funding is related to innovation and transformation. Interdisciplinary art work is already positioned in relation to other disciplines who already are part of research assessment exercises; additionally, there is a potential for developing basic research infrastructure at universities which was largely absent in earlier periods. Finally, there is also a chance to shape a developing discursive field to the real needs.

Nevertheless, artistic practitioners do remain largely on the back foot in relation to assessment exercises. The argument relating to creative practice as research is no well established, so there should be no need to fear such assessment exercises; at the same time, however, the disciplinary knowledge embedded in artistic practice often remains undertheorised, and this is also related to a lack of an installed base of capable supervisors and a lack of shared research culture. Implicit knowledge continues to dominate the field, and there is still a strong division between artists, designers, and scientific researchers. Further, artists often do not engage in the practice of making knowledge-claims about their own work - this is left to third parties writing about their work.

If there are many scientific methods, then; if qualitative research points to embodiment, voice, and the acceptance of the subjective limits of cognition - then can we experimentally place creative practice at the centre of 'research' as a concept, to see how its methodologies address the tensions of that concept, rather than treating research as a paradigm to which creative practices must respond? This would counter the conventional approach of art positioning itself at the margins of research.

Next up is Lijia Ke; her interest is in traditional art in a digital context. Digital technology impacts in a significant way on traditional art, which - in the context of Chinese painting, consists of the major elements of colour (working with a severely limited palette of colours), layout (combining empty and painted spaces, and the subject of the painting (influenced by Chinese philosophy). She now shows some examples of how such traditional forms have been picked up in recent art. (Very difficult to blog this presentation...)

Technorati : ISEA 2008, creative practice, research
Del.icio.us : ISEA 2008, creative practice, research