Outline of a general artistic design research program
Friday 15 December, 2017
Lars Hallnäs, The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås
Keywords
Abstract
As “artistic research” is establishing itself as a field of academic research, a branch of academic research, it is only natural that we ask what it is all about. Not only from the outside trying to understand this “new” member of the academic research family, but also from within the field itself discussing directions, defining new research programs, mapping out sub fields and sorting out ideological matters. Results is clearly a key issue here. What is common here, irrespectively of the artistic subject in question, is that the result comes in the form of suggestions. Methods, techniques and programs are not propositions stating facts, but suggestions about ways, and directions, of working. If that is the characteristics, and nature of result content, what is the bearer, what is it that brings forth the result? In all three cases it makes perfectly sense to think of the bearer in terms of text providing for general presentations, descriptions, explanations and discussions. But what is missing in such a more general presentation is what suggestive and convincing examples bring forth; expressional implications. If it is a performance, an intervention, a painting, a piece of music, a film, a theater play, a building, a text etc that display methods, techniques, programs by example, then it is in the design of the performance, the intervention, the piece of music, the film, the theater play, the building, the text etc that the result, with respect to expressional implications, resides.

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