László Beke
art/science/research/study/experience/
invention/innovation/intuition:
the relationship among these concepts

Mika Hannula
Houston Houston, We have a Problem - Question of Quality in Artistic Research

In my talk I will address the issue of quality in artistic research done at Art Academies within the university system. I will argue for the need and necessity of clearly stated criterias of quality for the artistic research projects.. I am not interested in any universal or general notion of the concept of quality. Instead, my aim is to articulate the main elements of what quality means in the activities that we have learned to label as artistic research. They will be criterias that are founded on the activity itself. They are formed procedurally during the research, based on its stated aims and hypotheses. I am convinced that if artistic research is to develop in a meaningful, self-reflective, critical but constructive way it has to have the ability to focus on the question of how it wants and tries to define what is good and what is bad research. The idea is not to strive towards some vulgar notion of "good" or "bad", but to analyse with the help of examples of artistic research what kind of projects are meaningful and what are not. The point to confront is what kind of knowledge are these researches expected to produce and for whom.

Sándor Hornyik
Hunt for Zeitgeist

The Zeitgeist-argument is as widespread nowadays as was in the 1960s, at the time of Conrad Hal Waddington's famous enterprise, entitled as Behind Appearance. In the book on comparatistics written by Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook in 1999 (Inside Modernism), the authors attempted to establish a link between art and science on the basis of abstract values. Nevertheless, their non-causal argumentation is suspected to reproduce the Zeitgeist-fallacy. This fallacy was successfully criticized by excellent professional academics such as Thomas Kuhn and Leo Steinberg in the 1970s. Later on, in the 1980s, this fallacy became one of the main topics in the conference entitled as Common Denominators in Art and Science, where Rom Harré and Gérard Mermoz summed up the problems of Zeitgeist concerning the correlation between arts and sciences. However, their solutions were ambivalent, since the results of their papers became a kind of "Aufhebung der Zeitgeist". On the one hand, they argued that the Zeitgeist could not be explanatory, meanwhile, on the other hand, they preserved it in the deep structure of conversation (Harré) or discourse (Mermoz). According to Harré and Mermoz, this deep structure could be a common background for intellectual quests in a given period. In the 1990s, in his important theoretical paper entitled as Art History and Images That Are Not Art, James Elkins provided a small and disguised place for the Zeitgeist, as well, when he questioned the validity of the "influential paradigm" of the science-art transfer (i.e. the art historical search for the sources and influences). I try to summarize the typology of possible correlation set by Elkins and Harré, and then to construct another typology in its place that tries to annihilate the effects of Zeitgeist with the forces of causal - philological - explanations. I present three Hungarian cases (Tihamér Gyarmathy, Tibor Csiky, Miklós Erdély) from the late 1960s and early 1970s as examples supporting my own typology for correlation. I argue that the three nearly simultaneous artistic practices rooted in different scientific discourses, and used different translation mechanisms for their art. I demonstrate that the generalized notion of Zeitgeist or of Discourse has no use in the Quest for Correlation between science and art.

Anne Nigten
Artists as Bricoleurs,
techniques and method

This is a short essay about artistic research and development (aRt&D) in the V2_ environment with references to a wider artistic context. Over the last years several experiments and studies in interdisciplinary collaboration took place in the V2_Lab, the research and development department of V2_, Institute for Unstable Media in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. V2_Lab is a workspace where artists are working together with our technicians, designers and our partners from various branches of science. Although sometimes we work together with artists from a more traditional field, the V2_Lab focuses primarily on art and technology. Over the last years we’ve tried to improve the collaboration models and the applied methods in interdisciplinary collaborations. In this essay we share some of our significant experiences and observations, hoping it will be beneficial for others to improve their artistic practice in this rapidly changing field. We propose some outspoken ideas on artistic methods, approaches and techniques. This is relevant since artistic approaches or methods are often kept, in line with the tradition of artistic myths, vague or mysterious. This turns out to be highly problematic in interdisciplinary collaborations, as it causes misunderstandings or unrealistic expectations based on ignorance or stereotypes about each others disciplines and attached methods. Boldly stated: the lack of outspoken artistic approaches or methods are, often experienced, obstacles in interdisciplinary collaborations. This is, I assume, a legitimate motivation for introducing some truly artistic methods.

Miklós Peternák
Art and Science

Research and Experiment Science and art are concepts that have changed throughout the ages, and just as in other periods of history, we may also encounter various definitions of art today. The systematisation of knowledge and intellectual activity has undergone a significant transformation from its obscure beginnings up to the present. When we recall the 15th century and earlier historical ages, using the term ars (the Latin version of the Greek word techné), for example, to denote a kind of applied skill or ability, we find word collocations such as ars geometriae, which means practical knowledge as opposed to "the art of geometry". The word techné - which meant art in the time of the Ancient Greeks - gave birth to the terms "technique" and "technology" around the 17th century, and nowadays we tend to associate it with the latter: what was referred to as techné two-thousand years ago is called something else today. Technology is in fact a third essential element in the frequently analysed relationship between art and science; anything that is interesting from the standpoint of this relationship in the 21st century can hardly be articulated without it. Historia naturalis, an extensive volume written by the elder Plinius, and the only encyclopaedic work to have survived from the Classical period, offers us a great deal of important information about art in Ancient Greece. Plinius discusses art as a part of natural science: books 33-37 deal with minerals and the arts, and wedged somewhere among descriptions of leaded metals and various types of soil are explanations telling us, for example, who made the first plaster-cast, or who it was that first used the open mouth as a motif in painting, an innovation whereby teeth also became visible on pictorial representations. Art is presented here as an example of the utilisation of materials. Its inclusion within the sphere of natural science may be due to the fact that an artist in top form must in essence compete with nature, albeit unable to match its true perfection. Scientia sine arte nibil est; ars sine scientia nihil est: this oft-cited declaration made by Jean Vignot around 1392 might be translated today as "Science is nothing without art, and art is (also) nothing without science". This would be quite inaccurate, however, since the meaning of these terms is grounded in the formula of the given age. Scientia in this case is a collective term for theoretical knowledge while ars denotes practical abilities, hence a version that more closely matches the original meaning of the phrase might be: Theoretical knowledge is nothing without practical knowledge, and visa versa. Art in Vignot"s time was not among the materials divided within the septem artes liberalis - seven liberal arts - trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy), or among those of scientia, but it was undergoing a decisive change that would later determine its form, function and place within society. Having been studied comfortably within the walls of art academies and firmly positioned in the usual sites of representation (from churches to mansions and middle-class residences on to gallery walls), art had begun to transform by the 19th century, and if nothing else, 20th century art is about the realisation of this radical (latest) change in function.
Excerpt from: Science, Art, Technology - Levels of Formation and Representation - Vision, Knowledge, Code, 2005)

Gertrud Sandqvist
The Artist as Researcher

At a time when the majority of young artists work in a way that closely resembles that of a researcher, the economic structure underpinning art is still geared towards objects that are bought and sold on the market. This means that the gap between those who are breaking new ground in the artistic field and those who are well paid and able to live off their art is becoming ever wider. This is a political dilemma that must be resolved. …
It is high time that visual art was given the resources to develop its own viable structures, which can both provide those who work within them with reasonable working and living conditions, while also fostering and further developing artistic knowledge; without having to exploit all manner of loopholes in the 'system'; without apologising for the basic premises for its production and development; and without, in a reversal of the burden of proof, constantly having to justify its own existence.

Henk Slager
"Methodological Mapping"

In the domain of artistic research, it seems to be crucial to maintain an attitude of interrogation and prolific constructivism while openly facing changes ahead. With that, the necessity of connectivity presents itself continuously in the form of temporary, flexible constructions revealing problems in need of novel methodological problems. Thus, artistic research could lead to a methodological map indicating how, why and where the research is progressing. Only afterwards is it possible to determine whether the methodological process deployed has been entirely mapped - similar to how philosophy in generating new concepts differs from other forms of research. It seems to me that artistic research should not be characterized by a rigid methodology. I would rather embrace a "methododicy," i.e., a firm and rationally justified belief in a methodological result, whose existence cannot be legitimized apriori.

János Sugár
Licence to Nonsense

Both art and research are about the utilization of time. In the ultimately refined micro- and macro-economics of labour division only the artist and the researcher is/can be authorized to spend his time undetected, to spend time and attention on issues that are not permitted to others. Both the researcher and the artist are entitled by the labour division sytem not to take in account the use of time rational in short-term, and for the sake of the community's survival to economize their time and attention, in a manner that would contradict the classical expectances of self-preservation. This possibility is endangered by the bureaucratization of culture in which the short-term aspects of the merged entertainment and political marketing are repressing everything else.
Research is always critical.