Critical & Reflective Inquiry: Theme - Artistic Research

Research is often framed as a means to an end, assumed to result in clear and articulate texts composed according to predetermined forms and standards. This class will introduce, examine, and cultivate practices in artistic research, where research as an open set of investigative acts and commitments constitutes in and of itself artistic work. We will focus on artistic research to reveal some alternative methods and contexts for acquiring, producing, and transmitting knowledge, learning from a global survey of socially engaged artists. In this sense, our work together will circulate several fundamental questions: 1) How and why might research become art? and 2) how and why might contemporary artists create and honor alternative systems of knowledge within a specific context? Students will trace what happens when intuitive, experimental, traditional, and mundane witnessing, studying, dreaming, remembering, feeling, documenting, dwelling, intervening, and conversing come to manifest a layered artistic project.

Through the quarter, students will create two artistic research projects based on research practices they learn from the artists we study yet rooted in their own interests and questions, life experiences, and academic aspirations.