KTH Symposium on Art, Design & Science Rolf Hughes, Ph.D Professor in Design Theory & Practice-Based Research Konstfack, Stockholm Senior Professor in Research Design Sint-Lucas School of Architecture Brussels & Ghent, Belgium rolf.hughes@konstfack.se
The world has problems, but universities have departments. G.D. Brewer "The Challenges of Interdisciplinarity."
What is knowing? For the artist? How does the artist know what she knows? Can she communicate this to those outside her community of practitioners? If so, what might be the most appropriate form/ performance/language for doing so? art + research = (...)
A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. Kenneth Burke Best would be to think in a form one had invented. Paul Valéry
artistic research neither/nor or both/and logic = a third space (of possibility). i.e. a monstrous category, one that deliberately destabilizes (existing categories) through its continually unreconcilable hybridity. (Compare the paradoxical literary genre of the prose poem)
And yet...
artistic research = the integration of new research objects and methods in order to design & communicate extended systems of inquiry.
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768 The Age of Wonder
Oophaga vicentei Oophaga pumilio, 2010 Bio-art By bringing up a hybrid, fertile frog and simultaneously writing down reflections from my everyday life, I am exploring hybrid disciplines in an attempt to understand the hybrid concept. Exhibited at The Swedish Museum Of Natural History, Stockholm, Sweden 10/05/20-10/07/07 www.nrm.se Linda Shamma Östrand interdisciplinary 9
Living Architecture: Rachel Armstrong FUTURE BUILDINGS WILL BE CULTIVATED RATHER THAN BUILT FROM COMPONENTS BY INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGIES.
If the dominant science in the new Age of Wonder is biology, then the dominant art form should be the design of genomes to create new varieties of animals and plants. This art form, using the new biotechnology creatively to enhance the ancient skills of plant and animal breeders, is still struggling to be born. It must struggle against cultural barriers as well as technical difficulties, against the myth of Frankenstein as well as the reality of genetic defects and deformities. If this dream comes true, and the new art form emerges triumphant, then a new generation of artists, writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses, might create an abundance of new flowers and fruit and trees and birds to enrich the ecology of our planet. Most of these artists would be amateurs, but they would be in close touch with science, like the poets of the earlier Age of Wonder. Freeman Dyson When Science and Poetry were Friends in The New York Review of Books (August 2009). Review of The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes.
It is an international, online, Open Access and peerreviewed, academic journal for the identification, publication and dissemination of artistic research and its methodology. The journal's most innovative feature is the Research Catalogue (RC), which is a searchable, documentary database of artistic research work and its exposition. The RC is an inclusive, open-ended, bottom-up research tool that stimulates and challenges the formation of artistic research as a discipline. The Society for Artistic Research, an independent, non-profit association, has been set up to publish the Journal of Artistic Research (JAR). A forum, a mailing list as well as further information on JAR can be found at www.jar-online.net
Potential Expositional Strategies Create relations or a narrative connecting your works Contextualize your work(s) with other works (past and present) Indicate the debate within which your research functions Present processes of making/performing or concepts Be didactic (teach) Indicate collaborative aspects and differences that are created Highlight transdisciplinary or intermedial aspects Present what the research investigates and contributes Create an aesthetic experience, or translate one experience into another, etc.
www.jar-online.net www.researchcatalogue.net Dr. Michael Schwab Editor-in-Chief, Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) michael.schwab@jar-online.net
The world has problems, universities have departments.
Thank you.