[-empyre-] Practice in Research & odd methods, rude mechanics

[Adrian Miles]

hi all 


On Friday, 18 January 2013 at 4:53 PM, Johannes Birringer wrote:

> And would Kathryn Bigelow need to defend Zero Dark Thirty? how would you (or Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D, for that matter)? or defend Stifters Dinge? or Lexia to Perplexia (Digital Rhetoric and Poetics: Signifying Strategies in Electronic Literature)? or, say, the fabulous video, 'Shadow Sites II' (Jananne Al-Ani), shown at the recent exhibition "Light from the Middle East" at the V&A in London?
> I am not sure how to defend these works.
> 
Such things only need 'defending' when they want to be offered up as research. Art is, to keep this rudely crudely simple, non instrumental to the extent that it can quite happily be only about itself. Whether that is formalism, or via Deleuzean intensities, or what ever terms you like. If you want to call it it knowledge then you need to recognise that it is non instrumental knowledge while it is art. (It doesn't have to serve or answer to any purpose outside of that which it proposes.)

Research on the other hand, particularly in the university context, is instrumentalised knowledge. It has to make contestable, evidenced based claims about something. (In these sorts of debates people seem to think that these claims must all be highly instrumental in a dumb sense, but this is a straw man argument. Just as a pure mathematician can do research into "Knot theory: different aspects of the topic." (http://www.math.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/about/our-research/postgraduate-research-topics/postgraduate-research-topics-in-pure-mathematics) so practice and project based research can investigate highly specific and possibly arcane topics only relevant to a very particular problem within a narrow field.)

So any of the items listed by Johannes only need to be defended if presented as research objects and/or outcomes in themselves, in which case you need to demonstrate and make contestable, evidence based claims. You can do this using evidence from the work, or as the work, or the work might provide a demonstration and proof of these claims, but leaving the work by itself is not research, it is art.

In Talan's comments about project based teaching, for example, I would imagine the role of the project is not just to be creative, or make art, or a project, but for the project to embody and explore key problems. I'd also think that how these are explored or realised in the project probably get documented outside of the project, whether that is through studio conversations, presentations, critiques, a brief accompanying essay, or some other device. These things are not supplements outside of the project but are what shifts the project (or the art thing) into a research practice.

And before I get treated as a troll or this as flame bait, art is and should be just as it is, and is under no obligation to do anything else apart from be. But if anyone then wants to also claim it as research, then more is needed. Finally, research here is not the same as the sorts of professional research anyone does to learn about something to then use that knowledge in a work. For instance a journalist researching a story, a writer researching some history to write a novel, or an artist researching biology to make bioart. Research in the sense intended by the university is a contribution to knowledge, but the examples just cited are merely the application of existing knowledge. 


-- 
an appropriate closing
Adrian Miles
Program Director Bachelor of Media and Communication (Honours)
RMIT University - www.rmit.edu.au
http://vogmae.net.au/


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