Research methods in the arts

The constellation of things and practices. Pluralistic paths in artistic research methodology

Adilia Yip

Methods in artistic research can be seen as a constellation of things and practices,¹ made up of numerous intersections of possibilities and solutions, objects and subjects, processes and experiences, actions and thinking, interpretations and theories.² I observe that methods are pluralistic, variable and pliable in nature – the methodological pluralism³ – for two reasons: first, artistic questions are capable of having more than one answer and different answers to the same question provide different levels of understanding and satisfaction to different audiences.⁴ Hence, the unique nature of art knowledge does not justify only a singular, linear method of research.⁵ Second, methods in artistic research are interpretative and idiosyncratic; they conjoin with the experience and the subjective background of the artist-researcher.⁶ Method is made up of intertwined paths of both predefined and unprecedented knowledge. In this article, I will refer to daily examples, literature, theories and projects of artistic research to validate my observations of methods and then, contribute a two-step modus operandi – reduction and prejudice – for artist researchers to justify the appropriate methods for their researches.

The pluralistic, variable and pliable nature of methods

Depending on the aims and questions of the artist-researcher, I argue that the methodological constellation contains a diverse range of ineffable/sayable, epistemic/experiential, intangible/tangible existences – the research things – such as thoughts, knowledge, narrations, reflections, artefacts, experiences, emotions, sensations, audience, environment, data and measurements, ideologies and theories. These things are connected by practices, meaning the activities, actions and processes that we do and perform to develop the research (Fig. 1).⁷

Using music performance research as an example, I have rendered the constellation into a multidirectional distribution network model (Fig. 2),⁸ where the dots represent the things and the lines represent the numerous possibilities of practices.

Such a constellation is evidenced in the hermeneutical and experimental methods in each individual research,⁹ when the artist-researcher is often untangling the coiled up multidisciplinary knowledge and methodologies. For example, the research of artist filmmaker Julie Marsh (2019) is situated at the centre of the sociological, technological and historical oscillations between site, artist, device and viewer. To develop a site-integrity methodology, Marsh devised custom-made machines (recording and displaying devices) to adapt potentially and spontaneously to the needs of the site and to reveal the material, architectural, social, political and institutional discourses that were present at the site. The machine was therefore given a presence within the artwork itself. It acted as a multidimensional agency and worked as the object, subject, time machine, mediator, investigator and/or social operator. The machine has both provoked and rendered the numerous facets of experiences provided by the site to the viewer.¹⁰

Further, I will relate the artistic research constellation to the complexity and capability of the most powerful systems in the modern world – Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence.¹¹ An IoT network can draw information from and communicate the real-time status to each member of the network without a human mediating that information. The network keeps track of and monitors the interrelated things once the information becomes available (i.e. human to network) and the network knows exactly when things need attention (i.e. network to network) (Fig. 3). So it seems the work of an artist-researcher will be simpler, if artificial intelligence and IoT may categorize and cluster the research things and practices. Pianist and researcher Giusy Caruso (2019) has applied AI to build a reference tool to study the performance practice¹² of contemporary compositions. By using motion-capture technology, Caruso created the avatar¹³ – an augmented mirror of the embodiment of the researcher – to support the analysis and classification of the large quantitative¹⁴ data of gesture, sound and musical interpretations of playing piano. This helped her to perfect her performance practice based upon her artistic expectations, as well as the composers’.

Yet, the avatar can only draw conclusions and patterns from the vast amount of data learned from the art practice of the researcher (i.e. practising routine). It neither generates unprecedented, intuitive new knowledge and skills, nor adapts to the real-time changes in a live performance (i.e. acoustics of the concert hall). The same circumstances are observed in the application of AI in music creation. Creators of the pop industry are now excitedly experimenting with the recent advancement of AI to push their creativity forward, but suprisingly, not many people worry AI will displace musicians from their jobs.¹⁵ Despite AI being able to empower musicians’ creativity and enabling the impossible,¹⁶ the human mind is still the decision-maker (or the curator) and the one who categorizes, analyses and teaches AI the necessary musical data, let alone the pluralistic aesthetical and stylistic nuances. Taking this discussion to methodology in artistic research, the artist-researcher is still the one who puts the dots and lines (things and practices) together; while AI may streamline the workflow, such as the processing of an enormous amount of quantitative data.

The first step of the methodological modus operandi

With that said, we will still have to figure out how to structure and describe the pluralistic research constellation. In the next sections, I will centre on a two-step modus operandi to discern the approaches that are methodologically constitutive in producing knowledge and understanding, so that practices and things can talk to us – or talk back to us.¹⁷ The first step is the phenomenological reduction and staying-close to our subjects. In light of the Husserlian phenomenological reduction, we need to filter experience from those unwanted perceptions and knowledge. This is not to say those unwanted are unimportant and dispensable, but they do not describe the phenomenal experience of engaging and participating in the actual processes of working on things and practices. The method devised must lead us to what we want to achieve in the research and in our artistic practice. The participatory walking project of Martin Nachbar (2019) is an example of reducing to the experiential components of the participants when designing his research practice of choreography. He starts off with a few rather open research questions, before elaborating on the identity of the community:

My guiding hypothesis in this case is that walking is a movement that allows a wide range of people to actively participate in a choreographic performance, while the effects of this participation are intensified by taking it out onto the streets. […] Thus, while the theatre space clearly frames a temporary community of performers and audience, this community gets challenged on the streets. This challenge, I will argue, strengthens the sense of this walking performance as being a participatory experience, since it brings the participants of the performance together as an ensemble rather than as a community.¹⁸

Phenomenology is essentially a method rather than a set of theories and – at the risk of oversimplifying – its basic approach can be conveyed in a two-word command: describe phenomena. Bakewell (2017) defines describe phenomena by breaking it up into two elements: to describe means bail out extraneous materials, distractions, habits, clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to return our attention to what is called the ‘things themselves’ – the heart of the experience. The second element is phenomena, which denotes any ordinary thing, or object, or event as it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality.¹⁹ I describe an object, a sense or an activity that is itself presenting an experience to me. The point of rigor is to keep asking questions about the experience in order to describe the phenomenal experience as fully as possible.

The intertwined paths of predefined and unprecedented knowledge

The second step of the methodological modus operandi focuses on the prejudice and subjective background that run behind every move of the artist-researcher in research and creative processes. But before that, I will further develop the constellation discourse by examining the etymology of methodology – a map of intertwined paths. In the Greek origin of the word methodology, meta (after), hodos (path, road), logos (word, reason) is literally translated into ‘the reason behind the road to travel’. Thus, methodology implies the explanation and manifestation of our choices and experiences of methods – the paths – during a research. On the one hand, we are bound to the paths that are destined to us (e.g. cultural root, education, family and nationality), but on the other hand, we are creating new paths that have emerged and been defined through walking on the vast land and abysses of research discoveries. In other words, methodology underpins a dualistic concept: the predefined path set by our subjective background and the unprecedented path where new insights, understandings and products come into being.²⁰

Following the discourse on the predefined path, I may now address the second step of the methodological modus operandi. The predefined path is understood as the prejudice and the subjective background of the artist-researcher, in which according to Hans-Georg Gadamer (1976) and Lawrence Ferrara (1991), our prejudice influences our own interpretations of our experiences.²¹ Our individual subjective background – tradition – is constantly disposing, feeding and responding to the processes of observing and understanding the present research subjects.²² Neither can we avoid our own traditions, nor approach our subjects as a blank slate (tabula rasa). Gadamer defines, ‘prejudices are biases of our openness to the world. They are simply conditions whereby we experience something – whereby what we encounter says something to us.’²³ I interact per se with all things and practices, but I can only recognize those experiences as knowledge if they correspond to my pre-understanding, my cultural and psychological prejudices. Hence, the research method is filtered and framed by the prejudice of who I am. It is reflexive in nature, is both designed thoughtfully from scratch, as well as emerging.²⁴ In other words, part of the answer is always contained in the question of the research. In my research of the music practice of the balafon,²⁵ the West African musicians would not essentialize the difficulties of learning the music under oral tradition. It is I, the foreign participant-observer, who finds the value of implementing such practice into the Western classical music world. Uniqueness and value become a relative term as I compared my tradition to that of the African.

Nonetheless, rather than restricting where the researcher should go, methods are always under construction and led by the evolving conceptualization of the life-worldly practice²⁶ of researching into art. Thus, art practice is not only the end result of a research, but also the methodological vehicle for new knowledge when the research unfolds in and through the practices of creating and performing.²⁷ Practice is a modality of both knowing and knowledge.²⁸ As a percussionist, my body movement of playing the instrument – the centre of my music practice – became the experimental subject that mediates a deeper understanding about my (the musician’s) embodiment of the instrument.²⁹ Furthermore, the emergence³⁰ of new knowledge and experience can happen at any point in the research design, be it the data collection, the analysis, or the experimentation. The artist-researcher can ‘never really know what lies on the other end of the phase transition until [they] press play and find out.’³¹ Despite the impossibility of predicting behaviour in advance, traces of the neglected intuitive idea, heuristic experience, or unconscious mind may evolve into valuable outcomes. We can use ethnographic methods – such as a log book, video and sound recording and computer software – to keep track of the alchemy of turning the tacit into explicable and sharable knowledge.³²

The concluding thoughts

In a nutshell, I suggest the methodological modus operandi of reduction and prejudice may help us to tackle the constellation of methodology in artistic research. Comparable to the complex IoT and AI systems, the distribution network model and the map of numerous intertwined paths, we might feel at times that methodology is the labyrinth of Crete.³³ But the way out is just where the entrance was. We will come out of it and carry with us the new experience, enlightenment and knowledge obtained through the process. In spite of the requirement of a full account of the research manoeuvre, the artist-researcher is encouraged to explore and invent in the jungle of practices and things. The interventions of the labyrinth minotaur and losing the way at the roundabout may bring to us, perhaps, the most valuable outcomes of the whole artistic research.

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Adilia Yip

is a percussionist/marimbist based in Antwerp. She obtained her PhD from the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp and the University of Antwerp. She is the initiator of ‘Methods in Artist Research Seminar’ supported by the Antwerp Research Institute in the Arts (ARIA).

adiliayip@gmail.com

Footnotes