ARTISTIC RESEARCH AS A MODE OF DOCUMENTATION (2023)
(MOVING) IMAGES AS A MEDIUM OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION
TEACHING
SYNOPSIS
The seminar turns its focus to artistic research as an aesthetic mode of inquiry, and to the sphere where art and science meet. What happens within the seminar is a process: it draws on the tacit knowledge and the skills of artists and puts them to work beyond the art system itself. Documentary practice, and visual anthropology in particular, is full of such experiments with film, photography and installation. These are image-based methods, not illustrations of a knowledge already in hand. In the seminar we explore artistic ways of working and their connection to theory, in order to generate new, problem-oriented knowledge.
Two questions guide the seminar. How can we approach knowledge that rests on experience? And how do we come to reflect on our own position as researchers — to see research as a collage, assemblage or even montage of method, medium and field?
The seminar moves through these questions with examples from film, photography and audio-visual installation. Each session starts with a textual reference. Readings from media and cultural studies and from visual anthropology, on the transdisciplinary hybridisation of art and science, prepare the ground for the session and for the work that closes the module. Each session also screens works that treat (moving) images as a medium of knowledge production. From these the collage, as a method, takes its material: every participant curates still fragments out of what was shown and arranges them anew, developing a collage that reflects the sessions. At the end of the semester a panel brings these collages together: each participant presents theirs in correspondence with a textual reference.
The seminar also includes an excursion to the Bauhaus Dessau — a place where art, craft and research were once brought into a single programme, and a fitting site for the questions this seminar pursues.