What does it mean to think with things? To entwine one’s mind with the more than human entities that dwell within vital terrains, urban or otherwise? To use a commonly accepted definition of creative research,  Christopher Frailing, in his paper on research in art and design, suggests that for an activity to count in either sense as [R]esearch[1], the subject or object of research must exist outside the person or persons doing the searching And the person must be able to tell someone about it [2]. While it is clear that posthuman entities can easily be argued to exist outside of the person searching. What is often more ambiguous is the ability of the searcher to tell someone else about it. Or for the research to be accessible to others independently of the searcher? Barbara Bolt furthers this conversation by suggesting ‘that artistic (design) practice is the production of knowledge or philosophy in action.’ [3]

Creative research practice emerges from a shift away from humanist philosophy, think Descartes and towards a posthumanist philosophy, think Deluzian philosophy of matter. It involves a critical shift in thinking, from thinking humans are the most important and only agent for change in the world – post-enlightenment. Think about the things within the world as agentic. In summary, the material works as inert, and the material world is living and active.This shift incorporates how we think about the world, what knowledge is, and how we come to know. In enlightenment thinking, which has long held sway within academia – the belief is in the scientific methods and qualitative data, with knowledge even about the art only generated or communicated by writing things down. The shift to in thinking in Posthuman philosophy enables us to understand that we can think alongside or converse with things and systems previously understood to be dumb or inert. In addition, it expands the site and process of knowledge creation to include the body and the things we know in the body. It is both Feminist and Decolnialist in its approaches to knowledge and thinking in research. Many practitioners use embodied methodological processes for knowledge creation or exploring the relation between themselves and the material life worlds, they practice.

You may already be beginning to understand why much of this shift includes practitioners working outside of traditional artist mediums and why many contemporary practitioners, such as myself, are engaging with climate change issues, environmental humanities, and matter of the living world. Think of artists who work alongside clay, cloth, oil, and trash. All matter becomes in some sense a co-labour with the artist within creative practice. Take someone like Olaf Eiliason, who, in his 2021 exhibition entitled Life, the artist blurs the boundary between art and Life by blurring the line between galley and landscape, living and non-living. [3] In the artist’s words, “Life lives and breathes through the experiences of its visitors, both human and non-human. I welcome everything visitors bring with them to the artwork – their expectations and memories, thoughts and emotions. Katrin Heimann’s micro-phenomenological interviews offer unique access to these experiences and create an expanded understanding of what the artwork does and is.” You can see that such creative practitioners view their works as living things in the process of becoming, being made with humans and more than human collaborators.

What this looks like in practice is often unique to the practitioners and how they prefer to work or what materials they collaborate with, whether their adjacent is political or climate change-oriented. Are they interested in cities, mining, rural terrains, portraiture, collecting or something else? What is central within the practice is the acknowledgement that the knowledge lies within the artist’s body or the medium of the work. While it is generally accepted that research, by practice, takes place in a series of broad areas. Frailing[5] after, Herbert Read suggests three fundamental research areas: Research into art and design, research Through art and design and research for art and design. Research into art and design largely falls into what most people would call artistic research – historical research, research into themes, artists’ periods, and methods of others. It is most commonly seen in the field of art and design history. Research through art and design, where knowledge is often tacit or embodies knowledge in the research that emerges through the creative practice. Nevertheless, knowledge emerges within the practice process. The final area, research for art and design, is by far the most debated but is well established as in design, the research undertaken to produce the artwork or design. Or those where the knowledge is embodied within the final knowledge. Making it difficult to execute the final stipulation for research. How does one tell someone else about it? I suggest that research for art and design is where the most creative knowledge is lost to time.

The embodied ways of encountering or working with the medium produce the results. It is that woolly space between theory and practice where great art emerges. Nonetheless, this knowledge is essential and highly generative of new ways of thinking. For example, the field of dance has long grappled with this issue and has developed the role of the repetiteur for reproducing great works of art in ballet. This person works with the ballet master or sometimes has danced a ballet several times and is tasked with translating its nuance to a new generation of dancers. This role suggests that the nuance of the work of ballet is embodied and can only be translated from one person to another. Beyond even a recording or a musical score, the expression and movement of body knowledge here are of critical significance in recreating a work.

The difficulty in knowledge translation does not diminish the value of the knowledge generated. In today’s world, we have many more ways of storing and communicating than we did during the Enlightenment. The ways of transferring that knowledge are ever-expanding in creative research.

If you would like a more detailed discussion, leave a like.

Wishing you a creative, year ahead

Brigs

Barret has much to say on this matter, you may also want to read :

Barrett, Estelle, Barbara Bolt, and Dr Barbara Bolt. Practice as Research: Context, Method, Knowledge. I.B.Tauris, 2007.

---

[1] Frailing divides research in research with a little r, what artist and designers do everyday in the course of their making and research with a big R, what is formally defined as research – search with an intended outcome. His paper aims to bring those two R’s closer together in formulating how artistic practice is research.

[2] Frailing, ‘Reseach in Art and Design’, 1.

[3] Barrett and Bolt, Practice as Research.

[4] You can find out more about this exhibition  on his website – https://olafureliasson.net/exhibition/life-2021/

[5]  Frailing, ‘Reseach in Art and Design’, .

[6] Image is from the following link .https://olafureliasson.net/exhibition/life-2021/