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Short abstract

Artists and artistic researchers are expected to collaborate in interdisciplinary or non-artistic settings. But how to collaborate well? I explore how artistic research as generous practice, turns collaboration into an ethical practice which allows for moral playfulness and experimentation.

Long abstract

Over the past decades, artistic research – research in and through art practices – has become institutionalized within higher art education and beyond as a recognizable and justified form of knowledge production. Artistic researchers increasingly are called upon to collaborate with scientists, engineers, societal stakeholders, and policymakers – especially around topics of societal concern. While debates on the epistemological status of artistic knowledge linger on, artistic researchers in practice rather struggle with challenges dealing with their normative position within collaborative and/or interdisciplinary contexts.

To collaborate as an artistic researcher (especially in non-artistic contexts) entails a lot of ethical work – work that often remains invisible or implicit. Part of this ethical work includes dealing with (emerging) expectations about what comes to counts as “good work”, which includes assumptions about the conditions of working together, specific norms of how to work together, and ideas about the possible value an artistic outcome of such collaborative processes could have (Van de Werff, 2025). Based on empirical examples of the artistic research group What Art Knows, I explore how such implicit norms and values can be turned into artistic material for collaborative experimentation. Through shared exercises, I propose an attitude of generosity – including a radical openness and a moral playfulness – which allows for tracing immanent and emergent values and concerns or shifting roles. Generosity does justice to collaboration as messy, ethical practice.