methodology

Against method

Armin Medosch — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:59:04 +0200

WHO'S AFRAID OF ARTISTIC RESEARCH?

Lindsay — Sat, 03 May 2008 10:02:35 +0200

WHO IS AFRAID OF ARTISTIC RESEARCH?

Thursday 22nd May 2008 10am - 4.30pm
Dundee Contemporary Arts Seminar room

One-day symposium about the epistemology and context of practice-based research

Compared with the established epistemologies of the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences, the discourse surrounding practice-based research in art and design is relatively young and includes a range of diverse approaches. What practice-based research is or is not, is highly controversial. Does it mean that the researcher investigates his/her own (visual) practice, or rather, that visual practice is a means of investigation? Other questions arise in the context of 'normal science' and the knowledge economy: what are the goals of such research?, and what is the desired outcome? What are the connecting lines between art and science, between practice and theory?
And last but not least: why would an artist want to do 'research'?

Practice-based research can be understood as a process, evolving from and changing through the practice undertaken by the individual researcher. The challenge here is that research (still) can be undertaken in releative freedom. Entering the arena of ongoing discussion, negotiation and re-adjustment, and engaging in the discourse about methodology essentially contributes to constituting this freedom.

Speakers:
Laurence Rassel, artist/curator (constantvzw.org, Brussels) Simon Sheikh, curator/critic (Copenhagen, Malmö Art Academy) Dr. Dieter Lesage, philosopher (Berlin/ Erasmushogeschool Brussel) Prof. Nigel Johnson, artist/researcher (Dundee University)
Chair: Dr. Ken Neil, artist/researcher (Glasgow School of Art)

Screening:
A portrait of the artist as a worker (rmx.), Ina Wudtke, Berlin

Organised by: Lindsay Brown and Cornelia Sollfrank

For detailed information about the programme and the speakers, please visit the Visual Research Centre website at the address below.

The event is free, but advance booking is required: 01382-909900

Dundee Contemporary Arts · Nethergate 152 · Dundee DD1 4DX

Dreamscaping Notes.

Jordan Dalladay-Simpson — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:20:30 +0200

Taxi-to-Praxi notes: summarizing the morning session

jonasandersson — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:55:56 +0200

Armin Medosch: Collecting good points of practice

- Facilitating shared, open and free platforms
- How much work and/or investments are required?
- What drives people to participate?
- Drupal: every item of information a node

Jaromil: Proposal for ‘solid knowledge’

- Co-operation among people active in education
- Try to compile an ontology of possible knowledge paths
- What makes knowledge solid? 4 points for educational institutions;

Notions (actual items of knowledge) – these are increasingly getting available for all
Maieutical (Socrates, making ideas having birth in students) – still there?
Heuristics (the choices where to look, the direction of discovery) – how are these changing? For good, for bad? What to do about it?
Infrastructure – unevenly distributed

What is meant by solid knowledge? “Producing something that will be useful in 20 years”; something that has durability and is not based on short-term profit and/or exclusivity.
Questions of heuristics and infrastructure: How do I choose programming language – and why do I choose it? Why are certain languages neglected and others taken up?

Lindsay Brown: How does one find categories of knowledge to illustrate and generate methodology?

- Compiling other artists’ work as examples to be inspired by…
- …then incorporating this inspiration into actual experiments
- Thenextlayer.org as a means for this categorization;

Heterogeneous types of data (images, film, text etc.)
Enabling participation with multiple users
Ideal for re-edits and amendments

From Grounded Theory to Saucy Tales

Lindsay — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:54:27 +0200

I started my part-time PhD eighteen months ago, with subject interests in the philosophy of the sublime regarding perceptive experiences, and how this fed into a crossover of interior and exterior landscapes as regards architecture, electromagnetism and the home. Looking back, one main concern was the amount (or lack of) of value that was placed on individual experiential research. As an artist, I encountered many problems in the understanding of methodology, as the outcome of my studio-practice was still the art object. For individual practitioners, the move to the current research framework from a working method that encompasses studio-practice, can become problematic, as for many, the methodological process is bound up with intuition and resides in the object of production as a somewhat unexplainable quality. Artists that follow the premise that their research is practice, and therefore the outcomes are art objects, then face a kind of ‘Backward Thinking’ that can be counter-productive and goes against the momentum of practice itself.

Backward Thinking occurs when a researcher is forced to stop the flow of their study, to reflect upon and theorise about the intuitive methodologies contained in the object artwork. This is not to say that reflection and theorising are not palpable to an artistic PhD, but that the staccatory movement and removal of focus from a mainly forward journey is. To really question my methodological approach, and to try to understand the experiential aspects of research on a much deeper level, it made the utmost sense to incorporate my swimming habit into my study. By placing myself in this performative position and becoming on occasion, the artwork so to speak, I was able to view my methods and methodology (ie: making and production of artwork) as a process rather than an outcome. The situating of research within the particularity of a life is rather, in the most rigorous sense of the term, improvised around an experientially-rooted set of themes that are intensified over time through a combination of affirmation, concentration and repetition. This in turn, leads to a mode of research that is radically unmethodological while, at the same time, being almost obsessively methodical.¹

This was the first step in releasing my shackles from a seemingly restrictive research framework. With a greater understanding of methods and categories, the placing together of seemingly opposing or random methodological approaches, could actually allow me to produce a creative study that gave freedom from the massively textual heavyweight of the theoretical thesis, rather than restrict it. In my explorations of HMS Saucy, a sunken wreck in the Firth of Forth that will be the focus of my study, I can by contextualising myself within methodological approaches rather than a history of art or philosophy, play the role of the expert whilst maintaining artistic freedom. The thesis then takes the form of data such as graphs, interviews, measurements, recordings and creative writing, rather than an ‘academic’ text. By combining methodologies such as Grounded Theory and Reduction, I am using the generation of theory from data to open up my exploration, yet making experiments and frameworks that can reduce it respectively. In effect I will produce a myth of my own making, a unique version of truth in relation to one specific site. The actual physical thesis then is a methodology in itself, and will take the form of a Frame-Tale, a collection of books that individually tell a story, but collectively show a bigger picture. The contextualisation will thus be my transfer report, and will appear as the guide-book or instruction manual for the less technically inclined.

In my short presentation at Taxi to Praxi I will talk more about my subjects of study, my interest in categorisation and how this led to Saucy Tales. I will also talk about how in producing data for research, a platform like TNL is an essential method in my process. I will end with a question, over whether or not a categorisation methodology such as Grounded Theory (which means a theory uniquely intrinsic to the subject) would be of any use in working out a generalised theory of Open Source.

Peters, G, The Aestheticisation of Research in the Thought of Maurice Blanchot, International Journal of Education and the Arts, Vol 4 No 2, 2003

Methodocity

Lindsay — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:03:07 +0200

Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

Lindsay — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:24:03 +0100

Crit

Lindsay — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:06:50 +0100

An excerp from a valuable conversation on practice-led research and what that means in relation to process and the notion of an artwork.

Armin: Your notion of research: I think that your notion of what an artist does and what art is, is perhaps a tiny bit regressive. With your EM research you tap into very interesting things but then you still seem to have those separations in mind, between your research and your "art". Many artists have already shown that this distinction is maybe obsolete. The research is the art, the art is the research e.g. http://www.artscatalyst.org/projects/makrolab/MAK_index.html Your practice, swimming in cold waters with a neoprene suit, researching sunken boats and copper coils, walking up to former or still working military installations, this is the action already. You don’t need to make performances in swimming pools to make your point.

Lindsay: I produce artworks all the way along the process, some of which alter the course of the investigation (such as antennae or other makeshift technologies), but I do occasionally have 'outcomes' where I am analysing what I have done in my investigations by way of making an imaginative installation or a theatrical underwater performance (which I loved doing). Whatever this may mean, it is only a stopping point along a road that continues with process. In retrospect, this also provides a point in the research where one can gain essential feedback from an audience, providing valuable data as one would with a peer review.

Armin: The notion of an artwork itself is outdated when nowadays it is all about that process, thinking and methodology. Just documenting the research is in a way enough. You could still make something a little bit more conceptual, but speaking from a theoretic principled point about contemporary art practice to highlight your research in one way or the other, rather than thinking that this is research "only" and now on top of that you also have to produce "the work" or the "project". Perhaps you could explore this more open notion of the relation ship between art=research or practice=research or research=art whereby you could replace the = through various other logical operators.

Lindsay: You are right in pointing out the difficulties in the relationships between research, practice and artwork and I feel that I have come a long way already in understanding how I work myself as an artist. However this is the very reason that I have decided to hang all my research onto a wrecked ship, this way I do not have to continually be generating a framework that could perhaps be perceived as a separate 'artwork'. Also in retrospect I should perhaps be careful about the terms I am using; project for me is much like ‘book’ on TNL, it is simply a container to keep information in to enable it to be presented as a coherent study, or perhaps as a small self-contained narrative section of a bigger picture.

Armin: The next point concerns a notion that you pointed out already in an earlier conversation, the fact that you can only collaborate once you have "my project off the ground, my methodology worked out, my background reading finished and my paper started". But then you are basically done so what would you like to collaborate about? I think it is much more interesting to talk about emerging methodologies than about an already established methodology in retrospect. What is there left to discuss then?

Lindsay: This may indeed be due to differing views on what collaboration actually means, but for me, the collaboration is the process as well as the dissemination of gathered information. For a true collaboration to occur then, a collaborator must be involved in this process. You are, at the moment, not entirely involved in this process; you are only involved in the dissemination of the written notes (in whatever form that may take) online. It is necessary therefore, for me to organise myself and my subject of exploration (the ship) into some sort of coherent state. My transfer paper will be a piece of reflective writing about my process to date and my ways forward. Getting this in motion will enable me to upload my future ideas so that we can draw parallels to work on a combined methodology (book)? We will therefore be collaborating on the methodological process and potential theory generated from information exchange, rather than a single entire project.

Working Backwards Through a Methodology

Lindsay — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 19:40:29 +0200

It is almost one year since I started my practice-led PhD, and in that time my eight-page proposal has reduced to five hundred words and grew again like an unwieldy hedge that needs constantly maintained by clipping. This first year has also been spent avoiding the issue of how, as a practicing artist, I can fit my non-verbal language and ways of researching into a recognised framework, where my hypothesis or questions are still not clear. This problem was more than apparent when I came to write my (unsuccessful) Arts and Humanities application for funding; I was basically taking the questions that had occurred at the end of my Masters degree and transplanting them into an application as something to work toward, rather than something to work from. This backward-thinking problem faces many artist researchers, where the more accepted format of working towards a set of goals to prove a theory goes against how they work as artists in real life, where more often than not, the artwork as an ‘end product’ is produced first.

As the term practice-led suggests, it is the practice that leads the research, not the theory; in my artistic investigations that means that experiences guide my thinking, some methods I use to gain experiences are swimming, diving, making, photographing and debating with peers. Fundamentally my life is my practice, yet I would disagree that I work within a ‘praxis’ framework where according to Freire ‘praxis’ is a ‘synthesis of theory and practice in which each informs the other.’ The point is, I do not have a theory, or my theory is not apparent in an obvious way. What I have is a set of subjects that I am interested in, the investigation of these subjects and the processes of how I am interacting with them, is uncovering some sort of hypothesis. In this sense I was glad to find out about Grounded Theory where ‘Grounded Theory is a systematic generation of theory from data that contains both inductive and deductive thinking,’ where ‘one goal of a Grounded Theory is to formulate hypotheses based on conceptual ideas. Others may try to verify the hypotheses that are generated by constantly comparing conceptualized data on different levels of abstraction, and these comparisons contain deductive steps…Grounded Theory does not aim for the "truth" but to conceptualize what's going on by using empirical data.’ (Glaser & Strauss 1967).

According to one version of this theory the aim, as Glaser in particular states, is ‘to discover the theory implicit in the data,’ therefore ‘all is data’. In other words anything that can help the researcher to generate concepts can be classed as data; in my research this would also include interviews with myself, as my own experiences and reactions to my study of experiential subjects is important information. By coding the data at different stages of the research, core variables can be identified, which can then be compared and interwoven with relevant future data. The codes can simply be words, adjectives and adverbs that best describe the concepts in the notes. Memoing is the next stage where the writing-up of ideas about the given codes and their theoretically coded relationships as they emerge during coding, collecting and analysing takes place. Memoing is a creative process where the memos are also used as an outlet for ideas that recognise preconscious processing and therefore accommodate serendipity.

Another interesting view encompassed in this theory is the one regarding literature. According to Glaser and Strauss, the reading of literature in the same subject area can influence the researchers views by giving them pre-conceived notions of how the theory should develop. In saying this, it is not meant that the researchers should not read, but the idea of a traditional literature review at the start of the process should be avoided. The literature comes in at a later stage, and is simply viewed as more data to make code comparisons with.

For a more in-depth but understandable explanation go here
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/arp/grounded.html#a_gt_intro