Artistic Research

Artistic Research: Charting a Field in Expansion provides a multidisciplinary overview of different discourses and practices, exploring cutting-edge questions from the burgeoning field of artistic research. Intended as a primer on artistic research, it presents diverse perspectives, strategies, methodologies, and concrete examples of research projects situated at the crossroads of art and academia, exposing international work of significant projects from Europe, Asia, Australia, South and North America. The book includes chapters on diverse fields of thought and practice, addressing a common thread of questions and problematics. The comprehensive editors’ introduction offers a much-needed extensive overview of practice-based artistic research in general. This book is ideal for graduate students across philosophy, cultural studies, art, music, performance studies and more.

This expanded second edition of Reclaiming Artistic Research explores artistic research in dialogue with 24 artists worldwide, reclaiming it from academic associations of the term. Embracing artists' dynamic engagement with other fields, it foregrounds the material, spatial, embodied, organizational, choreographic, and technological ways of knowing and unknowing specific to contemporary artistic inquiry. The second edition features a new text by the author and four new artist dialogues to reflect on the changing stakes of artistic research in the wake of the global pandemic, a widespread reckoning with social justice, the growing role of artificial intelligence, and the urgent reality of climate change. LUCY COTTER (*1973, Ireland) is a writer, curator, and artist. She was Curator of the Dutch Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, 2017, and Curator in Residence at Oregon Center for Contemporary Art 2021–22. The inaugural director of the Master Artistic Research, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, Cotter has lectured internationally, most recently at Portland State University. She holds a project residency at Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation 2023-24.

This edited volume maps dialogues between science and technology studies research on the arts and the emerging field of artistic research. The main themes in the book are an advanced understanding of discursivity and reasoning in arts-based research, the methodological relevance of material practices and things, and innovative ways of connecting, staging, and publishing research in art and academia. This book touches on topics including studies of artistic practices; reflexive practitioners at the boundaries between the arts, science, and technology; non-propositional forms of reasoning; unconventional (arts-based) research methods and enhanced modes of presentation and publication.

Creative research methods can help to answer complex contemporary questions which are hard to answer using conventional methods alone. Creative methods can also be more ethical, helping researchers to address social injustice. This bestselling book, now in its second edition, is the first to identify and examine the five areas of creative research methods: • arts-based research • embodied research • research using technology • multi-modal research • transformative research frameworks. Written in an accessible, practical and jargon-free style, with reflective questions, boxed text and a companion website to guide student learning, it offers numerous examples of creative methods in practice from around the world. This new edition includes a wealth of new material, with five extra chapters and over 200 new references. Spanning the gulf between academia and practice, this useful book will inform and inspire researchers by showing readers why, when, and how to use creative methods in their research. Creative Research Methods has been cited over 500 times.

The new practice of art-based research uses art making as a primary mode of enquiry rather than continuing to borrow research methodologies from other disciplines to study artistic processes. Drawing on contributions from arts therapies, education, history, organizational studies, and philosophy, the essays critically examine unique challenges that include the personal and sometimes intimate nature of artistic enquiry and the complexities of the partnership with social science which has dominated applied arts research; how artistic discoveries are apt to emerge spontaneously, even contrary to plans and what we think we know; how truth can be examined through both fact and fiction as well as the interplay of objective and subjective experience; and ways of generating artistic evidence and communicating outcomes. Offering examples from all of the arts this volume will be welcomed by researchers and students in many fields.

The increasing interest in artistic research, especially in music, is throwing open doors to exciting ideas about how we generate new musical knowledge and understanding. This book examines the wide array of factors at play in innovative practice and how by treating it as research we can make new ideas more widely accessible. Three key ideas propel the book. First, it argues that artistic research comes from inside the practice and exists in a space that accommodates both objective and subjective observation and analyses because the researcher is the practitioner. It is a space for dialogue between apparently opposing binaries: the composer and the performer, the past and the present, the fixed and the fluid, the intellectual and the intuitive, the abstract and the embodied, the prepared and the spontaneous, the enduring and the transitory, and so on. It is not so much constructed in a logical, sequential manner in the way of the scientific method of doing research but more as a “braided” space, woven from many disparate elements. Second, the book articulates the notion that artistic research in music has its own verification procedures that need to be brought into the academy, especially in terms of the moderation of non-traditional research outputs, including the description of the criteria for allocation of research points for the purposes of data collection, as well as real world relevance and industry engagement. Third, by way of numerous examples of original and creative music making, it demonstrates in practical terms how exploration and experimentation functions as legitimate academic research. Many of the case studies deliberately cross boundaries that were previously assumed to be rigid and definite in order to blaze new musical trails, creating new collaborations and synergies.

'Art Practice as Research' presents a compelling argument that the creative and cultural inquiry undertaken by artists is a form of research. The text explores themes, practice, and contexts of artistic inquiry and positions them within the discourse of research.

This book presents the recent positions, theories, and methods of artistic research in jazz, inviting readers to critically engage in and establish a sustained discourse regarding theoretical, methodological, and analytic perspectives. A panel of eleven international contributors presents an in-depth discourse on shared and specific approaches to artistic research in jazz, aiming at an understanding of the specificity of current practices, both improvisational and composed. The topics addressed throughout consider the cultural, institutional, epistemological, philosophical, ethical, and practical aspects of the discipline, as well as the influence of race, gender, and politics. The book is structured in three parts: first, on topics related to improvisation, theory and history; second, on institutional and pedagogical positions; and third, on methodical approaches in four specific research projects conducted by the authors. In thinking outside established theoretical frameworks, this book invites further exploration and participation, and encourages practitioners, scholars, students, and teachers at all academic levels to shape the future of artistic research collectively. It will be of interest to students in jazz and popular music studies, performance studies, improvisation studies, music philosophy, music aesthetics, and Western art music research.