Earlier this year I was selected for an Artist's Residency at Sydney College of Arts in Australia. At the same time there's a conference at the Institute of Experimental Arts in Sydney on the subject of Art and Experimentation. Lesley and I submitted the following abstract and received confirmation a few days ago that we've been selected. Now all we have to do is put the whole thing together!
Experiments in Situated Knowledge
"We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched." -Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Part academic presentation, part performance, part discursive documentary, this presentation takes an alternative approach to the format of conference presentation in order to argue, by constructive example, that art arrives at its own unique forms of knowledge and knowledge generation through speculative experimentation with concrete reality, form and process.
The profound success of certain forms of epistemic enquiry - principally scientific research and academic thought - has resulted in a relative marginalization of creative and improvisatory forms of critical and analytical investigation and to a parallel adoption, within the arts especially, of aspects of the terminology of science in order to legitimate the processes and practices of art production and consumption. For example, the use of the term ‘experiment’ is itself predicated upon an implicit association with empirical science as opposed to the more abstract trials and even ‘play’ that are fundamental to art production.
Drawing upon the experiments of Swiss artist Roman Signer (who’s work literally fuses the improvisatory and experiential with the more exacting necessities and laws of physics, often to explosive effect) and the research of the eight artists and cultural theorists involved in the newly formed “Co-creativity of Hand and Mind” research group based at Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK (whose work investigates the interchange between Experience, Experiment and Expertise - etymologically rooted in the term experiri: ‘to try’), this presentation seeks to propose that the language and significance of alternative forms of communication (situated knowledge, contemplation, humor, sex, reverie, narrative etc.) offer valuable ways to understand the indispensable contribution of experimental creativity (art) to our understanding of the world and our place within it.
