Practising the Artistic Research Catalogue

Summary

The second day of the conference is winding down. The chair looks around the auditorium to see if there are any more questions from the audience. Yes, here is one more but, as the speaker getting up at the back says, it may be an embarrassingly practical one. ‘I’ve been working with the Research Catalogue software and have been adding a lot of material, mainly images, but I can't find a way to delete them. So if I make a mistake, or change my mind, I have to add another file and rename it, resulting in a quite substantial and, in my case, very messy list of files with increasingly odd names … Is there a delete button, or am I missing something?’ ‘No, no!’ comes the response from one of the two project leaders of the ARC project that is being discussed at this conference, Michael Schwab. ‘This will be remedied in the next couple of days. What happened is this: There is in fact a button you can click on to delete files, but the designers who’ve recently been working on the appearance of the software to increase user-friendliness have mistakenly hidden it. So it is really there, but you just can't see it, at least not at the moment.’

Introducing: The Artistic Research Catalogue

How the invisibility of a delete button is a relevant issue as well as an appropriate metaphor will become clear later on in this chapter. To make that delete button meaningful, I will first briefly introduce the project of which that button, and the conference during which it was discussed, are a part: The Artistic Research Catalogue (ARC). ARC was an international project (running from 2010 to 2012, funded by the Dutch Stichting Innovatie Alliantie, Regionale Actie en Aandacht voor Kennisinnovatie (SIA-RAAK) programme) aimed at developing a digital platform that would fit the unique publication needs of a growing group of artist-researchers. The motivation of the project was the observation that to publish their work, artistic researchers mostly have to conform either to the artist's mould (exhibition, show, performance, etc.) or to the academic mould (peer-reviewed, text-based publication in academic journals or edited volumes). ARC tried to fill the gap in between.