Introduction to Artistic Research

This course combines artistic practices and critical discourse with state-of-the-art dissemination strategies as the basic framework of artistic research. It includes investigations into the variety of formats for publishing, presenting, exhibiting and expositing artistic projects by documenting them as processes of knowledge production.

The term artistic research commonly refers to an open form of research in and through the arts. In its core, artistic perspectives and experiences are bundled in insights, which might find different appliances, one of them being artistic practice itself.

Artistic research can include inter-, cross-, and trans-disciplinarily collaborations, thus one of the main characteristics is that it can both generate and be based on creative acts, besides encompassing methodologies from other fields of research to create art or apply artistic methods to other non-artistic contexts.

As artistic practice is considered a mode of thinking that produces new and original knowledge in open-ended, indeterminate ways, methodologies of artistic research are situated in a specific context and investigate all its possible relations, through creating, articulating, revising, reflecting, and sharing -- in a process- rather than product-oriented way.

This and the often-proclaimed proximity to scientific research allows for manifold possibilities to reflect and question conventional divisions of labour in academic and non-academic knowledge production and the very role of the artist in society today.

The course will provide special insight into the relationship between practices in contemporary art and their thematic integration or expansion. It will explore different modes of dissemination in various contexts and frameworks found within and outside the academic environment.

Upon completion of this course, students can:

• describe different ways of understanding and interpreting artistic research paradigms and navigate between them
• explain and contextualise their own artistic practice within the wider field of artistic research
• show confidence to relate to their own artistic practice as a form of knowledge production
• relate to the possible impact and value of their artistic practice for different audiences and society as a whole
• compare different dissemination strategies that go beyond conventional or generic presentation formats of the art world and experiment with them

The course can expand into both, theoretical and practical exercises: lectures, screenings, guest presentations, field trips, group discussions and readings may be employed. Specifically the course will make use of the Research Catalogue and the videostudio of the department in relation to documentation and dissemination.

Specific conditions

Approved compulsary assignments are valid in the current semester.

This course is offered to international master’s students. Language of instruction is English.