Artistic Research: Contexts, Approaches, Applications

Subject is not scheduled Not scheduled

Code Completion Credits Range Semester
940UV ZK 5 winter

Subject guarantor

Name of lecturer(s)

Learning outcomes of the course unit

This pilot, interactive, organized as a part of the Dean's program for doctoral students, presents two aims: in direct cooperation with course participants, to create a work discussion and testing space in which it will be possible to investigate individual approaches, of so called arts research and the potential for their use in one's research project. Participants will be able to prepare contributions (diverse in format) for the international conference Performance Philosophy in Prague (the first three meetings in the Winter semester will be devoted to a selection of topics and the preparation of abstracts and in the Summer semester it will be possible to work on the contributions themselves.) As well the course will offer space for considering potential approaches in the student's own doctoral thesis.

Mode of study

Considering the topics, the course will also offer a contextualization of arts research in presentation and group readings of resources writings and monitoring artistic results.

Prerequisites and co-requisites

This course is primarily intended for graduates of the doctoral study course "Reserch and Publishing Methods, but is open to other doctoral study students. The maximum spaces available is 10.

Course contents

In the contextualization of arts research we will touch upon, in varying degrees the following topics:

  1. The cleft between research and art. What do we actually wish to link together and why? Function and issues in the duality of subject-object, interior-exterior, the visible-invisible, arts-research. The rise of the concept of embodied thought, a living body (Body and Flesh), chiasmus, rhizome, nomadic thinking. What possible field may arise from the joining of two fields? Where are the pitfalls of the over-enthusiastic joining of research and the arts?
  2. The artistic piece and questions of reproductability and imitation. The topic of the original and the copy, authenticity and repetition. Topics of creative distance, linking, summary, proximity in disengagement. How to research the topic involved? The position of the artist to the subject, himself and the context. Diffraction. Decentralization.
  3. Heteronomy and ambivalence as a starting point. Arts research arising from tension between irreconcileable stances, metaphors of polyphony, multiplicity, solidarity, which do not have a meta-level. House of Lore.
  4. Defining the particulars of the arts research field, a new home, new manner of unity. Artistic mode of aesthetic comparison, semiotic and transparent modes. New formats for recognition and presentation, communicating, potential unification.
  5. Arts research originating in particular case studies. Ethnography and typology. Political and social dimensions of arts research. Identity politics

In the Summer semester 2017/2018 the course will continue with foreign guests with whom the students will have the opportunity to get to know during the Artistic Research conference: Is There Some Method?

Topics will accommodate the doctoral projects of the registered students and the preparation of contributions to the Performance Philosophy conference.

Recommended or required reading

Teemu Maki, Not only for knowledge, Artistic research – Is there some Method. Praha: NAMU, 2017 (in print).

Kent Sjostrom, Perspective Taking in Artistic Research, Artistic research – Is there some Method, Praha: NAMU, 2017 (in print).

Julian Klein, The Mode is the Method, Artistic research – Is there some Method. Praha: NAMU, 2017 (in print).

The bilbliography will be provided to the students electronically.

Assessment methods and criteria

To sit the exam, along with class participation it is necessary to complete these assignments during the course: research, an abstract, 2 partial writings in class based on critical readings of the writings (individual, and in pairs).

Further information

No schedule has been prepared for this course

The subject is a part of the following study plans