Artistic research: Creating knowledge through art

Experimental artistic activity is essential to the development of artistic research, serving as a primary means of generating and sharing knowledge. These processes lead to the creation of new practical techniques, conceptual and embodied frameworks, and experimental approaches to understanding and communicating research through the arts. Hence, artistic activity is both a prerequisite for the progression of artistic research and a key method for producing and disseminating research outcomes. It yields new practical and conceptual rationales, working methods and approaches to experimentation in the sharing and conceptualisation of knowledge through and about the arts.

As artistic research engages with art and diverse academic disciplines in innovative ways, it is considered to be epistemologically transdisciplinary, characterized by methodological pluralism. At the same time, mastery of specific artistic remains crucial and requires extended, medium-specific or field-based studies within each contemporary art form.

An increasing number of art scholars specialising in the humanities also link their work to artistic research, and some artist-researchers focus primarily on the epistemology and contextualization of the field itself. These specialists often produce predominantly theoretical work that explores foundational questions and conceptual frameworks of artistic research, thereby enriching the overall understanding of the field.

Over the last three decades, artistic research has matured into a self-critical practice that also examines its own conditions of realization, contributing to deeper conceptual, cultural, and practical insights. However, a key objective of artistic research remains to promote new experimental forms of artistic practice and to increase their societal relevance.

Writer

Professor Anita Seppä, Uniarts Helsinki Research Institute, net­work for artis­tic re­search