The Postresearch Condition

Welcome to the 2021 EARN/NWO Smart Culture Conference – January 26 – 30, organized in collaboration with HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, NWO (Dutch Research Council), and BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. Scroll down for the full programme of talks and workshops plus information about how you can participate. Registration deadline is January 8, 2021.

 

Proposition

After an omnipresent “Research Decade,” the concept of artistic research currently seems to be in need of a recharge. Pressing questions are: Should we talk about a postresearch situation or a postresearch condition? Could this be compared with how poststructuralism relates to structuralism as its philosophical comprehension and the elaboration of its consequences? And how could a postresearch condition address contemporary art practices?

To answer these questions, it is important to start from the three conceptual spaces that fundamentally determine what we mean by research: creative practice (experimentality, art making, potential of the sensible); artistic thinking (open-ended, speculative, associative, non-linear, haunting, thinking differently); and curatorial strategies (topical modes of political imagination, transformational spaces for encounters, reflection and dissemination) – and to comprehend these spaces in their mutual, dynamic coherence as a series of indirect triangular relationships.

From whatever conceptual space one departs, an artistic research practice could signify a transversal constellation – as a creative proposition for thought in action. Yet, that mode of research could never be reduced to a method of one of the three constituents. Thus, artistic research cannot be equated with creative innovation, disciplinary knowledge production, or political activism. It seems urgent now – and this is the starting point of this conference – to profoundly challenge and question the issue of how to articulate and present the condition of the intersection between the three conceptual spaces. For this purpose, an intensive program of workshops, presentations, propositions, screenings, and publications has been developed.

 

See more:

https://www.hku.nl/en/study-at-hku/hku-college/pre-phd-programme/the-postresearch-condition