Desire Paths of November

For the month of November I lived and worked in Zürich, a guest of the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology (ICST) at Zürich University of the Arts (ZHdK). (Thanks to everyone, but most especially Daniel Bisig, who was a gracious and accommodating host.)

This was an intense and productive period. In addition to work on my own project, I attended three conferences: STS Turns Aesthetic, The Diagrammatic Practice of the Micropolitical –

the Spatio‐temporal Expression of Play between Power, Knowledge and the Aesthetics of Existence and Post-Digital Cultures (the latter was actually in early December in Lausanne, but right after I got back) and had numerous formal and informal meetings with folks working in design, arts and in-between.

I rather like Zürich.

Sticking to my production schedule, I have at this point been involved in heavy development work on my system for more than one year. There are still a few technical hurdles to overcome, but 

I am making a concerted effort to turn my work away from technical development and towards the creation of interventions in public space. 

The November period ended with a public event entitled Stage Digital II - The Making of Atmosphere

(this was the second instantiation of the Stage Digital event which I participated in last year). 

I began with the desire path concept which I began working on this fall. The idea was to fold the ReOSC recording tool and the visualization component (previously composed with Unity3d) into one piece of software which would form the basis of a tool to collect and visualize the movement of people in space over time.

I had hoped to have a much longer working period to develop the concept (and particularly the aesthetics) much further, but the month was full of good and productive distractions and in the end I managed only the most basic implementation of the desire lines system. Still, what I have sets the stage for the work I want to do in the near future: I now have a tracking system and a basic spacial-memory; A way that I can augment architectural space with memory and recall. 

The presentation at Stage Ditial II also allowed me a chance to show this system to general public and, perhaps more importantly for my work, to students and faculty from ZhDK, ETH Zürich and EPFL working in theatre, scenography, performance and architecture and interdisciplinary research.

Finally, from the beginning one of the main design principles of my system has been flexibility with the data. I have built everything around OSC (Open Sound Control) and Syphon in order to permit the processing of the data by nearly any system. Although it was only an early test, I was pleased that it took about 10 minutes to configure the sharing of data wirelessly from my tracking installation to the ICST Dodecahedron. Within 30 minutes, Daniel had integrated that data into the behavior of several of the actors in their Max/MSP swarm simulation (for more on the dodecahedron, which is not my project, check out this blog post).

Artistic Research?

As a feral academic from the US living in Europe, I occasionally stumble into pockets of language or concept that are at once familiar and foreign. None have been as recently persistent in my universe as the phrase Artistic Research.

I am not, at the moment, attempting to suggest that anything is or isn't artistic or research, nor am I collecting examples (although I always love to see interesting work). I'm mostly just curious how widespread this idea is. I had not encountered it as a named category of work before I moved to Switzerland. 

As far as I can tell, Artistic Research refers collectively to two closely paired notions: 1. That research can be undertaken using methodologies which were not traditionally recognized by established academic research communities and that 2. Knowledge itself can be acquired, understood, described and contained in ways which are not traditionally recognized by established academic research communities.

From a research perspective it seems to be primarily about acknowledging methods and strategies previously ignored. To enable a lecture to also be a performance, or to permit painting, drawing or other non-verbal methods to exist alongside writing and reading. To attempt to elevate these "methods of understanding" to augment or replace the traditional research-object (IE a written document).

From an artistic perspective it seems to be primarily about adding a layer of methodology to "tighten" your work. IE to describe a research question prior to executing the work as an experiment. Artists do this anyway, but this is a kind of formalization of the process in an effort to make the outcome more generalizable. 

Across Europe, one major impetus for this seems to be the Bologna Accords, which mandated that all institutions  of higher learning in the  47 member countries fund and support research. With this event, we find a number of schools (in particular art, design and theatre schools) struggling to come to terms with what constitutes research and how this can become part of their practice.

A few more datapoints:

• I gave this talk on artistic research at the design school HEAD (Haute Ecole d'Art et de Design, Geneva) in the late spring. it was my own attempt to map the phrasing onto my practice.

• The grant I am working under (SINLAB) is part of the SINERGIA project and is hosted by the theatre school HETSR (Haute Ecole de Théâtre de Suisse Romande). In part  they provided us a home as a tactical way of integrating research into their curriculum (it is a struggle.)

• ZHdK offers "alternative" PhDs in collaboration with art schools which allow you to submit for final consideration either: A formal dissertation, a dissertation with an art object as a case study, an art object exclusively.

• Norway seems to be ahead of the curve, and has (among other things) hosted the Sensuous Knoweldge conference for nearly a decade. This conference is explicitly focused on the acquisition and retention of knowledge angle of AR. 

• The Journal of Artistic Research was created to archive this sort of work  (in part with support from the same individuals who architected the ZhDK PhD program). There is a companion tool for the creation of AR called the Research Catalogue.

• I recently attended the STS Turns Aesthetic conference hosted by ETH Zurich, which was largely about exploring this from an STS perspective: what happens when STS "turns" aesthetic, how can this particular practice absorb/observe/engage in artistic modes of exploration.

• ZHdK has been hosting an annual "performative practice" (link in German)  workshop

• There are a number of things happening which are not explicitly labeled Artistic Research but fall firmly into this camp, such as Knutpunkt,  an international conference about Nordic-style LARP which has been running for the last four years. 

Finally, it is worth noting (In as non-cynical a view as possible), AR also seems to be a strategy for acquiring funding, as it makes research "sexier" and makes art "more rigorous." This is acknowledged, but among practitioners there also seems to be a true belief that there is something new here.

I am trying to figure out if this is a widespread thing, a silly semantic exercise or an idea whose time has come (or all of the above.)