Examination arrangement

Course content

This course combines artistic practices and critical discourse with state-of-the-art dissemination strategies as the basic framework of artistic research. It includes investigations into the variety of formats for publishing, exhibiting and expositing artistic projects by documenting them as processes of knowledge production.

The term artistic research commonly refers to an open form of research in and through the arts. In its core, artistic perspectives and experiences are bundled in insights, which might find different appliances, one of them being artistic practice itself.

Artistic research can include inter-, cross-, and trans-disciplinarily collaborations, thus one of the main characteristics is that it can both generate and be based on an epistemology that is singular to the creative act, besides encompassing methodologies from other fields of research to create art or apply artistic methods to other non-artistic contexts.

In as much as artistic practice is considered a mode of thinking that produces new and original knowledge in open-ended, indeterminate ways, methodologies of artistic research are situated in a specific context and investigate all its possible relations, through creating, articulating, revising, reflecting, and sharing -- in a process- rather than product-oriented way.

This and the often-proclaimed proximity to scientific research allows for manifold possibilities to reflect and question conventional divisions of labour in academic and non-academic knowledge production and the very role of the artist in society today.

The course will provide special insight into the relationship between practices in contemporary art and their thematic integration or expansion. It will explore different modes of dissemination in various contexts and frameworks found within and outside the academic environment.

Learning outcome

Upon completion of this course, students can:

• Describe different ways of understanding and interpreting artistic research paradigms and navigate between them
• Explain and contextualise their own artistic practice within the wider field of artistic research
• Show confidence to relate to their own artistic practice as a form of knowledge production
• Relate to the possible impact and value of their artistic practice for different audiences and society as a whole
• Compare different dissemination strategies that go beyond conventional or generic presentation formats of the art world and experiment with them

Learning methods and activities

The course expands into both, theoretical and practical exercises: lectures, screenings, guest presentations, field trips, group discussions, readings may be employed. The course concludes with a public presentation of artistic research projects of the course participants.

Specific conditions

The course will be cancelled in case of not enough students have signed up.

Approved compulsary assignments are valid in the current semester.

Compulsory assignments

• Participation in course activities
• Report on student project
• Oral presentation

Further on evaluation

• Assessment of artistic progression by presentation or submission of work produced in the course or documentation hereof.
• Documentation: Sufficient visual, audiovisual, written or other documentation of activities, proces and results in order to represent development of the work and/or project in the course.
• Postponed evaluation will be held in the next semester.

Specific conditions