Output details

Creativity, imagination, values - why we need artistic research

This peer-reviewed article emerged from directing and chairing the strand ‘Art as Research’ at the SLSA2010 Textures conference in Riga. The output should be assessed within the context of Mey’s broader research activity: Mey conceived the publication of selected papers in Acoustic Space, edited the issue and wrote the editorial (available in documentation box). Her own article addresses the value of research in art with a particular view towards the rapidly expanding field of – and ensuing discussions about – ‘practice-based’ PhD programmes in Europe and across the world. Using a case study approach based on three different PhD projects on art in public that Mey had supervised to completion at University of Ulster, her paper draws on the established differentiation between research in, through and on art to provide some clarification on the notion of artistic research. It proposes to explore and employ the interrelationship between practice, theory, poiesis and aesthesis to map out research endeavours in the field. Returning to their original meanings, this approach marks a decisive departure from the hegemonic triangulation of practice, theory and poiesis that underpins current pedagogic approaches to inquiry in the field of art and design and beyond. By taking into consideration our ability of sense perception and the role of a heightened awareness (extended to registering consciously-embodied experience), a common ground for experiential research and experimentation in the arts is being created with the potential for connectivity to other domains of investigation, for instance the natural sciences. The proposed approach makes an initial contribution to overcoming the potential for unproductive segregation inherent in the notion of ‘practice-based research’ from other forms of inquiry and, by connecting the quadrangle to the concept of ‘resonances’, suggests hospitable openings in which the specificity of research in and through art can reach out across disciplines.