3.1 Methodology Problematic : Why it’s difficult.
Methodology is problematic for arts such as poetry. Spontaneous, intuitive, immediate, often un-anticipatable, and emotional, poetry does not seem a good candidate for enclosure within a rigid methodology. All systemic methods threaten to inhibit the fragile process of authentic inspiration, or to be built yet hold nothing: wind cages, light enclosures, wave locks.
Seeking consensus amongst diverse practitioners, distils method into aphorisms that guide approach to the work: listen to the inner voice, be true to your heart, speak honestly, strive for simplicity, express the inexpressible.
Such phrases are evidently contentious and problematic within the confines of academia. Their explanatory power is marginal. Too often they become the refuge of solipsistic refusals to listen to any criticism. Yet the history of art is based upon outsider exiles who voyage beyond received wisdom. Holderlin wandered in a schizophrenic daze over the alps muttering to himself, returning with fragments that continue to be analyzed and discussed today. This thesis is intended to navigate the delicately actuality of art-making and the demands of scholarship, providing an introduction to an artistic practise that straddles reason and irrationality, interface design and art, science and folklore, and heart, brain and body. It offers an epistemological challenge to the norms of how we consider knowledge to be generated and shared.
Proposed: Knowledge is the glistening atmospheres that envelops all matter. Language is demarcated at every interface. Recursive consciousness permeates all forms.
Labels: arts, methodology, research
[+/-] Art is often created without forethought and without plans: it arises spontaneously from a germinating synaptic-net of seeds. This insight is not true for all artists, nor is it true all the time; it is a contingent truth. Sporadic spontaneity does not negate the presence of fortuitous events which seed creative processes, but it does suggest a radical re-evaluation of the exclusive importance granted to planning and methodology in practice-based art-research. The origin of art must be honored; 'irrational' inspiration must be welcomed into research institutions or it will certainly go live elsewhere.
Once the inspirational impetus of a creative act emerges, then cognitive systems that have consciously practiced and prepared for creation leap like midwifes into activity; if they do not, the idea dies.
Many inspirations, however, seem to be utter garbage; they are swiftly killed off, discarded, forgotten. But perhaps the loss of an authentic impulse is often an error. Considered out of context in the cold light of logic's inhibitive force, inspirations invariably seem ridiculous. Here are a few ridiculous ideas: 'Machines will think.'(Babbage); 'Time and space form a continuum.'(Einstein); 'Urinals are art.'(Duchamp); 'Mist is sculpture'(Kapoor).
Too much logic kills truth, as does an excess of irrationality.
Revolutions in paradigms by their very definition challenge conventions (Kuhn); but they challenge them in ways that are consistent with the evolution of thought at that time in that place (Dawkins). Neural ecosystems (Edelman) suggest that ideas are as vulnerable as all lifeforms, both within and exterior to the human 'creator'. Radical creativity threatens reason; creativity is a mutation, a "shock to thought" (Massummi), no wonder it is often killed.
Labels: creativity, mutation, practice-based, research
[+/-] Practice-Based Research (image epistemology) : Quotations "...practice- based research... a strategy to separate what the possibilities of a visual practice might bring to the traditional text-based research of a university."[1]
"The marginalisation of creativity because of the fear of its untetherableness, permeates our institutions..."[1]
"...once language becomes developed it signals the demise of the object as a means of self-expression and articulation. This could in many ways account for the loss of significance in the position or status of objects as devices of communication or social evolution, as writing and language skills begin to replace their role....[]...Can/does the object ultimately speak for itself? "[2]
"What happens if a PhD Thesis cannot be articulated in a conventional format? What if some notions require other senses to be fully accessed, appreciated, and expressed? What if words alone tell only one portion of the story? Can a suitcase and its complex content be a research thesis?"[3]
"...Scarry insists on the vivacity of the artefact: it not only knows, but acts on that knowledge; it is not only made, but makes, coming to have the same power as its creator (Scarry, E. 1985 The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. 316)."[4]
References
1. Gothe, J. (2002) Finding other ways of speaking: towards visual communication as practice based research. Working Papers in Art and Design 2
Retrieved 03/20/07 from URL http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes/
research/papers/wpades/
vol2/gothefull.html
ISSN 1466-4917
2. Atha, C. (2004) The thing is: between the designer poet and the artist bricoleur. Working Papers in Art and Design 3
Retrieved 03/20/07 from URL http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes/
research/papers/wpades/
vol3/cafull.html
ISSN 1466-4917
3. Loi, D. (2004) A suitcase as a PhD? Exploring the potential of travelling containers to articulate the multiple facets of a research thesis. Working Papers in Art and Design 3
Retrieved 03/20/07 from URL http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes/
research/papers/wpades/
vol3/dlfull.html
ISSN 1466-4917
4. Tonkinwise, C. & J. Lorber-Kasunic (2006) What things know: exhibiting animism as artefact-based design research. Working Papers in Art and Design 4
Retrieved
research/papers/wpades/
vol4/ctfull.html
ISSN 1466-4917
Labels: practice-based, research, theory
[+/-] Emotion Creation as Pattern Creation Looking at art-research from a strictly scientific perspective, a rigorous observer might be tempted to challenge the efficacy and verifiability of claims that emotion, ethics and aesthetics are entwined both metabolically and metaphysically. An objective viewpoint might find grounds to challenge the idea that emotion is generated from perceptions of beauty, and computational systems that present beauty are in effect synthesizing emotion. So on what basis can these claims be made?
The theoretical justification for understanding emotion synthesis as pattern creation is achieved by inverting an axiom of affective computation. One of the central premises of Rosalind Picard's Affective Computation (1998, MIT) is that emotion recognition is a pattern recognition problem. Picard emphasizes how multi- modal signals contribute to give a complete set of patterns from which emotional states can be inferred. Her fastidious quantitative research verifies that this hypothesis is valid. [Picard, 2003] .
My argument is simple: if emotion recognition is pattern recognition, then emotions are patterns: neurologically, conceptually, and metabolically within our bodies. Art which consists of visual and audio signals (unless randomized into pure noise) is pattern; therefore fluids patterns in dynamic disequilibrium (like the videos used in Thoems)are feasible emotion synthesis devices. Emotions are generated by seeing and hearing patterns; art makes patterns; art is thus emotional synthesis. This conclusion is validated by millenniums of artistic culture acting as a cathartic mechanism in all societies.
Now if a computer creates patterns, or displays audio-visual material that contains recognizable content then that constitutes emotional synthesis. I am not claiming that art is (or needs be) conscious or aware of its emotional state; but that art (like Kismet) is capable of evoking and emulating patterns which humans recognize and attribute as emotional states. Digital poetry (and computational art in general) therefore is potentially a valuable adjunct to scientific research into affective computation. By creating patterns, artists have developed a comprehensive intuitive implicit knowledge of emotion creation.
This viewpoint of emotion as pattern does not foreground the anthropomorphic taxonomies which have been developed by numerous commentators (LeDoux, Panksepp, Daiglesh) and thus nimbly avoids the controversy of what emotions are primary in humans. Instead, patterns are patterns until perceived by the human emotional classification apparatus. This implies that as artist-researchers, it is possible to explore patterns without naming what it is we are exploring. As John Cage said in conversation with Richard Kostelanetz, "We do very good work when we don't know what we are doing." [Cage, J., & Kostelanetz, R. (1978). For the Third Time. Manhattan Cable Television, Artists Television Network. Retrieved March 21, 2007, from http://www.ubu.com/film/cage.html.]
Labels: art, emotions, research, synthesis
[+/-] Art as Research in Academia: is it possible? Recently I showed an art-work-in-process informally to the chair of my grad department. His response: "It's pretty, but what's your thesis? This is not an MFA you are getting, this is a research institution."
Since his remarks clearly represent the current attitudes within post-secondary institutions which purport to be at the forefront of innovative amalgamations of art and science, this represents a crisis for art as research: the crisis for art as research is that it is not accepted on its own terms. Visceral, intuitive, aesthetic art is not considered epistemological research.
To accept art as research on its own terms, a substantiative shift in values will need to be undertaken at the systemic and personal level by members of academic research institutions. Reconciliation between the opposing poles of art and science must occur if any credible fusion is to emerge from academic art-research. The current contemporary emphasis on formal language and data analysis as the predominantly exclusive mediums for knowledge exchange requires an expansion to include image, sound and non-linear text as equal citizens within a community of epistemological tools.
Current emphasis on the thesis as the primary indicator of knowledge excludes a large proportion of art works which emerge spontaneously without any conscious thesis, or a thesis that emerges in retrospect. Authentic art is often so severely qualitative and intuitive that if it were to occur inside an academic research institute, it would risk being instantaneously ostracized at the margins of credibility or aborted before birth as being un-viable.
Challenging narrow definitions of what constitutes authentic practice, the PBS broadcast series "Art in The 21st Century" reveals a continuum of artistic practices heavily reliant upon states of 'unknowing'. Almost all of these practices would be considered indefensible if judged under the implicit set of criteria and guidelines currently utilized by academic research institutions. This exclusion of methodological approaches which are at the core of the mainstream contemporary art movement constitutes a problematic situation for artists within academic research institutes; they becomes fugitives in their own home. If research institutions only give lip service to the idea of multi-disciplinary fusions of art and science, and persist in applying systemic criteria to artistic work which were established for the domains of science and conventional scholarship, the roots of art in academia will wither.
Is art research? If it is, then fundamental modulations in the academic paradigm of research institutions is necessitated. If art is not research, then university research academias risk becoming the breeding grounds for sterilized, tame, mute pseudo-art that arises solely from rational cognition.
Labels: art, research, science
