Considering

Summary

In order to consider the publishing of art in academia, emphasis must be placed on the borders, limits or gaps between established identified territories, whether within or outside both art and academia. Thus, rather than looking at those in-between spaces from a secure position, we propose a thinking situated in a border space, so that an intellectual landscape may be constructed. However, while from a centre all borders look alike, at the margins they multiply, become specific and local, making an overview over those border spaces impossible. This, in turn, handicaps epistemological and even methodological responses to the question of art and research.

While there may be many more approaches that can explain such border-thinking, for this first section we selected four chapters, each one of which in its own way highlights contexts and languages through which expositions of artistic research may be reflected upon. As is the case throughout the book, our approach is strictly multiple. We refuse to single out any particular intellectual or artistic framework, but those presented here make space for modes of reflective redoubling and an exposition of artistic practice as research that is built from within rather than constructed using external scaffolds and conventions.

In Notes on Media Sensitivity in Artistic Research, Mika Elo uses the notion of ‘touch’ to describe how integrity may be maintained across the diverse faculties of intellect and intuition. To Elo, ‘touch’ implies ‘tact’ and with it, an ethical dimension. Only through tact, through what is touched, can we speak of meaningful contact between, say, an artwork and an audience. This suggests that if something lacks the tact that allows for touch (for example, through institutional regulations), the exposition of artistic practice as research may not go as deep as it could. Elo explains the quality of touch in reference to Walter Benjamin's notion of ‘translation’, which is not simply the passage of meaning from one context, language or medium to another, but a reflective relationship between those contexts, languages or media across which meaning is established. To highlight the role and importance of touch, Elo pits it against modes of research that engage in generalisation to make their claim. He suggests that artistic research through touch has the capacity to approach epistemically that which is specific to a phenomenon, and which may otherwise be missed, and to engage with the limits of knowledge.