Long abstract:

Including artists in health care is a promising new trend. It is however, conceptually unclear what art-as-care could be, and even less how to evaluate the goodness of these attempts. Evaluative methods from biomedicine managed to establish' the effect' of art-as-care contributions, but seem to miss the mark on what it is exactly that different art forms may contribute. Moreover, Evidence Based Methods also tend to disturb the practices they want to evaluate rather than supporting them. In this presentation I present alternative methods based on ethnography to see how these might contribute to evaluating art-as-care, by designing non-intrusive methods and supportive methods. I explore how we might think of succesful art-as-care projects by analysing their sustainability, i.e. by establishing lasting relationships between artists, health care workers and scientists rather than one time events. This includes economic concerns about income for makers, but also the continuity of relationships through circularity (re-using the same) and translation (adapting an intervention).

Long abstract:

Genetic variation and mutation are inherent to all life on earth, and yet are often perceived as unnatural, just as disabilities often are. This citizen-researcher collaborative project is creating an artwork on plant mutations (floral fasciation), as a way to consider disability differently. In its final form, our project, Floral Fasciation, will be an installation featuring real fasciated flowers and physical and digital sculptural representations of them, complemented by animations inspired by the mutation process. The installation will put the research-creation process on display, featuring photo and video documentation, from studying and growing plants, to 3D modelling and animation. Through exploring the aesthetic possibilities opened by plant mutations, our project will provide an opportunity to reimagine human disability as a form of survival.

Emery, a disabled artist, will present this ongoing work as an artist talk and share her motivations for and experiences of creating it at the Access in the Making Lab under the mentorship of disability studies scholar Arseli. She'll present her creative process, reflect on her positionality as an artist collaborating with researchers, and the ethical dimensions of using art as an accessible form of knowledge-making and dissemination.

Our project is situated at the intersection of disability studies, and environmental humanities, and implements artistic research to address that complexity. It posits an accessible visual language for conveying themes from disability studies and contributes to a growing movement that recognizes disability as a lens and a method through which planetary decline and “shrinkage” (Dokumaci 2023) can be addressed.

Long abstract:

In this paper, I will frame my experience of undertaking a PhD in artistic research that had been assessed by a team from different disciplinary backgrounds- academic philosophers and visual culture theorists. The thesis revolved around embodiment, metaphor, and contemporary painting. I conversed with, have been taught by, and assessed by academics who hold high-level theoretical knowledge on the same subjects. The tension between theoretical knowledge and embodied experiences was palpable during these encounters. After the Ph.D. the same thread of inquiry expanded into collaborations with biological scientists in the field of creative visualizations of different processes. Such projects navigate interdisciplinarity from a different plane- visualization is an integral part of science, and exploration in phenomenology and felt experience has an instant appeal to many scientists. In the doctoral study, the friction revolved around the concern about assessing the artistic merit of the paintings made and the contribution to knowledge these entail. These frictions have been resolved through a more responsive and expanding painting practice that is increasingly more diverse in media and forms. In the artistic exploration of scientific concepts, the function of the artist turned out to be a mediator between knowledge systems. In the rigid academic institutional setting, creative and artistic expression and practice became a sensual and imaginative respite. In my paper, I will explore how I negotiated and collaborated with scholars from the humanities and natural sciences through a spirit of generosity inherent in all creative practice.

Long abstract:

The proposed contribution is a video collage that presents an experimental methodology for peer reviewing and support in interdisciplinary, collaborative contexts for artistic research.

The methodology was developed by a group of PhD candidates who conducted artistic research and participated in a six-month online workshop in 2022, organized by artist and anthropologist Elpida Rikou in the context of or.artspace and TWIXTlab, a laboratory between art, anthropology and the everyday in Athens. We were all at different stages of our doctoral research, which we considered a lonely process. We were also working in different fields. However, we all used artistic practice as a methodology.

Through a series of regular meetings, we discussed our individual research and writing progress, and developed alternative methods of peer review, outside the academic norm, to address some of the key questions each of us was facing. This process not only helped us cope with the challenges of being an artist in academic contexts but also advanced our work. We developed a framework for sharing our texts, works, and inquiries, while critically approaching them in a safe space. We discussed doubts, confusion, drives, desires, research goals, and methodological issues together, blurring the lines between the strictly academic context of review, personal dialogue, and practices of care.

This video presentation features excerpts from the recorded Zoom dialogues, along with notes and narration, and presents a transformative methodology of care and generosity for the development of academic artistic research.

Short abstract:

Putting vagueness at the very heart of artistic research makes it possible to reconsider how technology, far from being content with fostering tolerance, can mediate true generosity and be transformative by seizing rich democratic stakes.

Long abstract:

Similar to ocean tides that come and go on the shore, disciplines are competing territories that fill the space of knowledge delimited by a co(a)stline. As the waters rise, though, this notion of a co(a)stline must be re-examined. Where, why and how must we re-organize our shared co(a)sts politically, socially, scientifically and artistically ? If interdisciplinarity is about "giving up territory" (Arabella Lyon, 1992), how can this ebb dynamic be "given back" (Marcel Mauss, 2002) as a transformed (vague) territory?

We examine how the practice of vaguing — doing vague research through the prism of artistic research in STS — can be leveraged as a research approach exacerbating generosity. While tolerance is generally seen as leniency toward divergent opinions — with its usual technological mediation through inclusiveness —, generosity involves much more, namely, to welcome the Other in her radical otherness. How can we rethink technology as a way to mediate generosity far beyond mere tolerance and how can artistic research become transformative in this respect? Here we want to explore two crucial issues: how this practice generates new forms of legitimacy in a context where legitimacy traditionally stems from hyper-specialisation; how it can reassess generosity as a democratic negotiation mediated by technology.

We illustrate this method with three artistic works embodied by the authors: the joint experience of migration, and theft of personal data ("C-bateau") ; weaving as a subversive interdisciplinary gesture ("t-IA-ssage"); the technological mediation of time as a fundamental political experience ("It's time").

Short abstract:

The paper explores the information sharing of artist-researchers as a component of the conditions of possibility for artistic research and academic work. I describe ongoing doctoral work bringing together Information Science and research-creation and suggest that this is a generative connection.

Long abstract:

In the Canadian context research-creation (RC), is an emergent and contested category that joins creative and academic research procedures and processes. Artist-researchers create knowledge through unpredictable, dynamic, experimental practice [1]. Though RC approach is far from new (there is much overlap with practice-led or processed-based research) it is fairly recent under this term and in these institutional contexts. As such, the literature is also developing and shifting.

Information Science (IS) examines information-related artifacts, agents, contexts, and practices. IS scholars have questioned academic norms and sociomaterial concerns about the nature of information and information phenomena, including information sharing. Information sharing is used as an umbrella concept that covers a wide range of collaborative behaviors—from sharing, to accidentally encountering information, to collaborative query formulation and retrieval [2]. This field offers insight to the hidden labour of collaborative academic work, communities of practice, and expertise.

By drawing attention to the process of research, RC has the potential to reveal aspects of research that may otherwise be obfuscated, e.g., process, non-textual scholarship, and relationality. Examining information sharing of artist-researchers provides an opportunity to probe the knotted process of “legitimizing” institutional recognition of methods, approaches, and practices in academic settings. In turn, drawing on RC could inform IS to explore embodiment and non-linear documentation.

References

1 Loveless, N. (Ed.). (2020). Knowings and knots: Methodologies and ecologies in research-creation (First edition). University of Alberta Press.

2 Talja, S. (2002). Information sharing in academic communities. New Review of Information Behavior Research, 3, 143-59.

Short abstract:

How do spatial practices exercise their dissent towards institutions? What are the actions they embody and the projects they carry out? The contribution explores critical potential of oppositional practices in their relation with institutions, by presenting the ethnography of Stalker in Rome.

Long abstract:

The research looks at oppositional spatial practices and their relationship with institutions. Asking whether their spatial interventions can exercise a transformative power and a critical potential, it looks at how selected collectives have carried out their “dissenting” projects. Those practices are oppositional since they aim to deform the institutional system they encounter, yet face constant compromises and negotiations to make their projects happen. The research is positioned at the crossing of feminist studies and STS methods of inquiry, and it has followed the effects of the practices, actions, and their narrations. Institutions are defined as endlessly in motion: they are artefacts and are not naturally given. The observed practices have a programmatic intent of interfering with the institutional dimension they wish to deform. The research has followed ethnographically selected practices acting across spatial and architectural domains and has traced the spaces of possibilities created by these deformations. The contribution will present the work of Stalker, a collective active in Rome since 1995. The collective is ungraspable by intention and manages to enter and exit institutions constantly:they do so, through actions, walks, installations and performances. They walk to establish a new set of relationships and to question traditional urban methods; they join the socio-ecological struggles of local activists practising embodiment as a political and ethical choice, and they explore urban wilderness exercising abandonment as an act of care. The paper will discuss the results of a two-year embodied ethnography and question this method of inquiry as an approach to knowledge.

Long abstract:

What should we make of objects created to overlap the knowledge communities of art and science? What should we make of curators who go to great lengths to show us the aesthetics aspects of projects zoned scientific or the technical aspects of artisanal craft? And what can this tell us about those communities and the way they organize people and things to produce knowledge? The interdisciplinary area of metabolism offers some possible approaches explored through the case study of the Metabolic Arts Gathering in Copenhagen, Denmark. Theses gatherings took place at the Medical Museion, but centered around artistic practice, though they drew on cutting edge science and STS/humanities contributions to this highly interdisciplinary area. While our analysis of these events is in its early stages, this paper will offer some initial thoughts about collaborative methods and their potential accomplishments, as well as highlighting some of the precursors to artistic research situations and the artists early collaborative choices.