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Emerging Matters and ArC

EMERGING is a research project that addresses artistic production within the scope of academic research. It aims, on one hand, to map the formation and development of artistic research carried out within Higher Artistic Education in Portugal, and on the other, to provide the foundations for a collection of academic art emerging from artistic research production in Higher Artistic Education, such as theoretical-practical doctoral theses or artistic works within post-doctoral projects.

The proposal for the ArC collection thus arises from a desire, a circumstance, and a revelation. The desire to find more visible means to facilitate research in advanced artistic training, and the circumstance of having over 60 entries of theoretical-practical theses in Portuguese university repositories, forming an impressive empirical base to showcase the artistic research ecosystem in Portugal. Furthermore, the quantity of theses and post-docs registered is higher compared to other similar European artistic institutions, which also motivated the need to bring this reflective work to the forefront.

ArC is the result of a collection by a multidisciplinary team in visual arts, who, organized into groups, from institutions and respective research centers, analised the theoretical-practical thesis documents published between 2011 and 2022. Based on a theoretical framework drawn from the readings of Barbara Bolt, Candy & Edmonds, Gray et al., we begin with the definition of art-based research, epistemic objects, and the production of artifacts within the Portuguese infrastructure that supports artistic research training and development (the institutions supervising doctoral programs in the arts and their respective research centers).

As a result, the question of what artistic research is, and how it manifests itself in higher artistic education, only arose after institutional reforms at the third-cycle level, which primarily took place in Europe following the implementation of the Bologna Treaty. Examples of artistic research models and their ecosystems then began to emerge in various artistic circuits, with artistic practice as both a methodological process and a result. Since 2011, schools and faculties in Portuguese universities have legitimized research whose production is represented by the artist's individual practice and reflections extending into the space of their relationship with the academy itself. The establishment of Research Centers or individual art scholarships awarded by the Foundation for Science and Technology began to pave the way for an institutional infrastructure for artistic research.

The Framework of ARc

Questioning what artistic research is and how it manifests itself, when considering it within the framework of art-based research, begins with the problem of the existence of an artifact (Candy and Edmonds, 2018), whether it is a sculpture, a drawing, video, artist’s book, photography, or website, among others, framed within the results of the research. We adopt the position of an art based research, which presents both the process and the result through artifacts produced, which can play a significant role in the transfer of knowledge within the artistic sphere and other fields of knowledge, as Gray et al. (2018) affirm about “epistemic things”, which emerge during the display (not the exhibition) of the ongoing work of academic artistic research.

Mapping Epistemic Objects in Potential: Now and Then

The mapping of ARc was organized into three typologies that are not rigid but often overlap. Discourses, Iterations, and Materializations are visible parts of the project’s results, which allowed us to gather the possible set of elements proposed here, based on what the EMERGING team defined as what could speculatively be epistemic objects - derived from the multimodal analysis of PDF documents of doctoral theses and post-doc reports. The temporal boundary presented (2011-2022) is just a starting point, as it is based on the empirical data collected for the project. At this stage, the ARc platform presents an initial core of 28 authors, a selection that does not yet reflect all the entries that were analyzed by the EMERGING team. However, the ARc platform is designed to be expanded as new entries are published in the respective university repositories, therefore fully functioning as a tool for sharing and disseminating these investigations, the epistemic objects that constitute the collection, and respective authors, as well as providing methodological support to future researchers in artistic and related fields. This will be a future challenge, but also an opportunity for the team to work on and design a new collaboration.

The ARc Platform: What Are Discourses, Iterations, and Materializations? Instructions for Use

ARc presents three possible typologies for reading potential epistemic objects: Discourses, Iterations, and Materializations. A relationship that was not without its conflicts, as the plurality of discourses reveals the deviations, contours, settlements, appropriations, parallelisms, symbioses, incorporations, refinements, or challenges to the formats of theses and academic research rhetoric. In terms of navigation, the platform offers two distinct modes. The first is a spatial, exploratory mode in which the user can freely explore, zoom in or out, and move through the space, selecting concepts and the respective authors emerging from the three constellations: ‘Discourses,’ ‘Iterations,’ and ‘Materializations’. Navigation on the platform becomes an exercise of discovery and ‘reverie.’ The second, more classic and structured mode, features a top menu organized in a tree structure. In this menu, the user can select ‘Discourses,’ ‘Iterations,’ or ‘Materializations,’ or even all three options together. Then, the user can choose a theme and the respective authors who worked on it, ultimately arriving at each author's page. Within each author’s page, the user can view the epistemic objects, the different typological reading possibilities, the methodologies developed by the author in their research, and the link to the thesis. The proposal takes into account that we should not only consider the final artistic object but also the methodological enrichment for the research practice itself, that is, the paths taken by the artist-researcher.

Discourses emphasizes the dialogue that artists establish with the theoretical-practical nature of academic work and possibilities for dissemination within the physical-material body of the written document – the thesis, which we considered a multimodal materialization (the written text, the page, the visual diagram, the content organization, the separation or merging of text, visual text, and hypertext – all material as much as the result and its conclusion). Sometimes, they express methodological paths alternative to academic rhetoric, a performative writing in dialogue with theoretical references and in relation to their performance work, with the thesis document being an epistemic object. There are also performative forms of reflection on artistic production within this context, through dialogues between literatures, shared curatorial practices, multidimensional, digital or physical, involving feminist perspectives. This typology also includes theses with a critical tone toward conventional academicism, which exclude the centrality of literature review and state of the art in their doctoral research, reject the description and critical analysis of the creative process itself, and advocate for the presence of mystery and intuition as fundamental elements of artistic research. Thus, they explore more subjective approaches, autobiographical narratives, or personal discursive constructions. The Discourses constellation is not static and is compatible with Iterations and Materializations. There are also works that incorporate Iteration and Materialization when accounting for the construction of an artistic thought on the very circumstance of the act of creation as an act of investigation and exhibiting the work in professional circuits.

Iterations emphasizes the paths taken within artistic practice as research and provides methodological possibilities that may potentially spur the beginning of new research. In this context, works are connected to the central research thread, derived and reconfigured processes, methods, or formats. Thus, forms of thinking about research, visual processes like visual atlases, diagrams, images based on documentation of actions, diaries, and artist books, which, after a process of artistic maturation, also become materializations, all fall under this category.

The Materializations presents a body of artistic work exposed as a terminal artifact, also marking an addition – an excess – in relation to the thesis or post-doctoral research document, which sometimes becomes autonomous from the field of writing, yet still compatible with the artist's argument and positioning. With Materializations, we return to the evidence of the artifact, the thing that raised the question, "Is this research?”, and that gave body to extensive critical literature on artworks within academic research, but also to a substantial body of artistic production that urgently needs nurturing.