INTUITIVE RESEARCH, INTUITIVE TEACHING
Teaching Artistic Strategies: Playing with Materiality, Aesthetics, and Ambiguity
23 – 26 May 2022, Institute Arts and Design Education (IADE) X MAKE/SENSE PhD Program (IXDM), FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, Switzerland
“[…] art research, artistic research or art-based research are popular terms at the moment — but we may speculate what exactly is meant by them. If we follow international debate […], we may identify a whole range of concepts.” (Tröndle, M. and Warmers, J.: Artistic research as aesthetic science. Contributions to a transdisciplinary hybridisation of science and art; Bielefeld, 2012)
Ten years later, we still seem to be in a similar state of speculation among arts-based-design-informed researchers. What are the right researching methods and terms for my project?
Do you also sometimes feel overwhelmed by possible methods of researching and therefore teaching that come and go out of fashion? I do. From research oriented in natural science, as arts-based research started in the 1990s with artists like Eduarco Koc, moving on to anthropological research methods (Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright in their work Between Art and Anthropology (2010)) to social questions and arts driven research informed by methods of epistemology (A.Haarmann, Artistic Research. Eine epistemologische Ästhetik. (2019). The speculation and transformation of possible methods continue.
I go back in time in order to try to come up with an answer. Godfather of artistic research Julian Klein already said in 2011: “The proximity to scientific strategies and practices lies in the “not-yet-knowing” (Klein, J. Was ist künstlerische Forschung? In: kunsttexte.de/Auditive Perspektiven,Nr. 2, (2011).
In this workshop “Intuitive Research. Intuitive Teaching.” I want us to embrace and celebrate that state of not-yet-knowing and turn our possible confusion into a self-confident attitude. If the so-called experts might still not be knowing in which discourses to locate their research, let’s locate our research in fields and areas that feel right for us! I would like us to go into uncharted territory and rely more on our intuition, the frowned upon, but good old gut feeling. Let go of traditional-arts-based-research-confusions. Do not ask yourself, what are you supposed to do. Trust yourself, how do you want to research, what kind of teaching feels appropriate?