Artistic research as pedagogic approach, a strategy rather than a method: how can you teach curiosity and uncertainty? Creating a space for experimentation, where students go on a journey with you. How do you frame an enquiry? Criticality, reflexivity and reflection. Knowledge is situated and anchored by hegemonic frameworks. Epistemological approaches are situated in a canon. There needs to be an awareness of place, aesthetics and ethics and strategies of foregrounding the political choices of ethics and aesthetics. Why are you choosing this form of representation? She personally believes ‘never story’. What if we think about the image, start with the image as starting point rather than the centrality of story? Although we are in the business of vocational training, creating skills for industry – this is not actually contradicted by artistic research. For the last 3 years she has run a project in ‘BRIKS’ countries using the CILECT network to look at the cultural specificity of images. There is no shared semiotics. They used research strategies that were playful, problem solving and involved intuition to solve problems in the field with students and other filmmakers. The benefit of artistic research in film practice brings an energy. This is an energising practice that she finds exciting.

 

Introductory remarks. He is a documentary filmmaker (for BBC2 as well as in a gallery context). He is professor in documentary practice at LCC and responsible for REF. Explains the importance of this for UK Universities: funding, peer esteem and university rankings. LCC has recently joined CILECT. He is pleased to be back at SKH as he premiered one of his films here showed as part of the Inviting Invisible Evidence network. Asks the audience what labels they would be comfortable to use to describe what they do – filmmaker? Artist? Theorist? Educator?

 

For the UK it’s a difficult political moment right now. In research there is a domination of the arts by a language inherited from the sciences and humanities. Interesting cultural moment right now to stand on the ground in practice. How do we articulate our practice as research, image as enquiry, what kind of question are we asking, that will lead to communication? Potential for robust research, but what we could do better for research literacy, is to be more authentic in their own terms. Some filmmakers will say the material they work with is another person, a subject working with a subject. What does that imply for the ethics of making, the social responsibilities, the ethics of documentary film practice. Who makes their living from this? Who benefits from this? UAL has setup a centre for creative computing. Artists need to have an intervention in coding, in the broader social agenda of who controls new developments in technology. UAL is very diverse in the student body, but progression is not equal. Something weird is going on. The role of research has to ask these specific questions. What kind of an environment are we creating in our universities? All staff sound liberal when you talk to them, but look at the results – differential discrimination. So important for us to link ethics and aesthetic – who are we choosing to portray and how do we show them? Traditional African story – ‘If the Hunter is always the storyteller we will never hear the lions story’. We have the chance to make a difference through research.

 

Andrea B – questions identity of whether we call ourselves artist, researcher, filmmaker etc – it’s about what we actually do that is important. It’s not weird that students are not progressing well in liberal institutions – these very places are institutionally racist, homophobic, classist etc. It’s nice that Pratap thinks research could be part of the solution, but it is also part of the problem because it perpetuates the status quo.

 

Manuel suggests as a starting question – Where does research take place in our institutions?

 

Michael from Belgium – all staff are supposed to be research active in his institution, but the problem is time. Because of amount of teaching hours. So the government has funding available to do research outside of teaching hours. But staff still find it problematic – they don’t know how to do research, how to get this funding.

 

Manuel – in order to have spaces for research, there needs to be funding, where does it come from?

 

Speaker from Helsinki – uncertainty challenges the tradition of education. He thinks this is a big challenge for staff who want safety.

 

Andrea B – perhaps there are different senses of uncertainty. In terms of Frascati- it is a type of research in which you are certain about the enquiry and methods, but not the outcome. How can you raise the level of uncertainty that is part of the artistic process. The EU Research Council, which is one of the core funding bodies for the EU, have a panel for artistic research. Artistic research experts can sit on the main EU panels if they have generated a critical body of research in their national context. This has important implications for national funding and the importance of support for research if your country wants a seat at this table.

 

Jyoti – legacy issues from previous centuries that artists have an emotional language and scientists have an imperical language. Artists have been always doing research. It’s about expressing it in terms of systemic procedures. We need to beware of thinking we don’t need to justify ourselves, we can just explain artistic research in terms of intuition.

 

Andrea – interesting exercise to look at historic works of art as artistic research, for example Mary Kelly’s ‘Post partum Document’ or

 

 

Examples of other projects they are doing include oral history and collaborations between scriptwriting and music composition, cinema of autonomous struggles (typo in ppt slide) which had 3 associated symposia. They have also been working with astrophysicists to visualise their findings, which cannot be photographed. The students were given information about the exoplanets and their names and made models/ vfx/ films to speculate on what they might look like. This benefits the scientists as they have no images to show when they disseminate their research.

 

13.55 – 14.15: Case study 2
Bilkent University, Dept. of Communication and Design, Ankara, Turkey.
Presenter Funda Şenova Tunalı, PhD
In 2018, Bilkent University, Department of Communication and Design adopted a new core curriculum to offer its students innovative and coherent education where the boundaries between theory and practice dissolve through artistic practices and research. The BA graduation project courses (Visual Communication Project I-II), and the MFA program in Media and Design were at the center of this change to enhance artistic experience and research. COMD situates itself in the wider range of communications to acquire an interdisciplinary nature.

The idea for this was the gap between 1st and 4th years. The HOW was there, but the WHY was missing.

This university teaches in English. In order to be recognised they are bound by Bologna agreement. When developing the curriculum they wanted a mix of studio process and theory. This has resulted in more variety in the kind of film practice that comes out. More questioning about what they are doing, their choice of media.