Research Catalogue

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the HUB, the Journal of Research in Art, Design, and Society. HUB has been created to bridge a gap within the current cross-disciplinary space of the arts and design research by providing a platform for the exchange of ideas to foster new forms of inquiry and documentation of artistic research. As a result, HUB intends to provide an opportunity for discussion concerning the eclecticism of creative processes and methodologies and the educational impact of artistic research. At the same time, it seeks to stimulate the debate surrounding the social, cultural, and technological frames of art and design practices.

With the sea as a “site” of curation, a thalassic approach (as that which belongs to the sea), facilitates a showing of those things that converge upon the contingency of daily living. The case for aesthetics is pedagogical, inasmuch as it provides us with a strategy for exiting into the wider world as we move outside the walls of a building (and that of Bildung). Exiting also implies rejecting all those institutionalized constraints that education’s edificial approach brings to learning. Here, in its aporetic nature, art is one of those few human actions which allow us to articulate and enact a sense of being both strangers and homecomers in our own world. In other words, this is a form of curation that is claimed through the autonomy that it portends.

Artistic research is a comparatively recent development. Outside institutional definitions little work has been carried out to situate the phenomenon in a wider history of art as well as knowledge. This speculative article describes the present moment of artistic research as result of two developments: (1) a shift from notions of knowledge to notions of research, and (2), a shift from major to minor forms of making. At the same time, in line with understandings of contemporary art and as contemporary art, artistic research is not understood as historical project that unifies art and science; rather, artistic research is pitched as providing a transdisciplinary ground in which different disciplines and knowledges can enrich each other. On a historical scale, this development is seen as driven by the increased speed and complexity of our current world for which conventional knowledges offers only partial insights arriving often too late for decision-making. Building on Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s concept of experimental systems and his notion of graphematic space, the paper suggests research to create sets of traces as proto-forms underdetermined in their aesthetic and epistemic status and, hence, beyond specific disciplinary contexts. Such space for research is understood as fundamentally artistic, also in opposition to notions of research as output-oriented types of investment. It is suggested that representation as epistemic form has been losing relevance, certainly for the arts and increasingly for the sciences. Artists are tasked to invent new, expositional forms of knowledge over and beyond representation to remain epistemically engaged in today’s fast and complex world.

The article explores the concepts, tools and methods that may be taken on board by artistic researchers when venturing into uncertain futures. The approaching hay-day of Artistic Research calls for a repositioning of this academic and cultural avantgarde that is assuming real power and must thus take clear opposition against dominant politics and corporate capitalism keeping the human and non-human kinds in perpetual crisis. Next to Science and Technology, Art has finally reached a status of an equivalued cornerstone, and within this level playing field a new research-based approach is needed where power relationships, decision-making mechanisms, dominant narratives or prevalent aesthetics are boldly investigated and critically questioned, (re)instituting the importance of artistic disruption and establishing art-thinking as the key to not only question but also design pathways to meaningful change. Deeply intertwined research methodologies ranging from social to natural sciences, from humanities via (critically reflected) technologies to the (technologically emancipated) arts, should be left to safely mingle and mutually inspire. Rather than colonizing it with yet another false supremacy, we should be learning from the Global South, where collective dancing, storytelling or performing still presents a norm of how to generate new knowledge or reach consensus. Artistic Research can contribute to crafting better worlds even once AI entities get accepted as fellow researchers (if not dancers), their agency reflected in an attitude of radical sympathy (re)instituting care, justice and solidarity by ways of sound research activism.

In this essay I describe one example of working with a tree (an ash tree on the former post quay on Eckerö Island) and suggest that such artistic methods, like performing with a tree repeatedly or addressing a tree in writing as a performance for camera, serve as useful tools to generate material to reflect upon later. The heightened perceptual awareness and the intensity of the moment of performance helps in articulating observations and ideas that might not have come to the fore in other circumstances.

As AI systems proliferate, questions about their emergent capacities focus on intelligence, sentience, and control. But the issue of agency, the capacity for action with consequences, brings other design issues into play. Agency takes many forms including mechanical, incidental, probabilistic, and intentional, but is largely assessed on the basis of behaviors. The challenge of designing agency can be met by considering what must be programmed into a system to provide it with the capacity for action, but the distinction between the appearance of agency (simulacral) and actual agency (intentional) is difficult to test. This paper discusses some of the connections between agency and debates in physics about determinism and probability as they relate to the question of human capacities for intentional action and concludes with a discussion of the difficulties of conceptualizing agency without falling into Romantic models of disruptive behavior. No easy answers arise in regard to the problem of designing intentional agency in a way that can be either tested or constrained.

This paper examines the possible impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on the ever-changing role of graphic designers. As its main contribution, the paper proposes a model based on the intertwining concepts of deduction, induction, and abduction. It argues that deductive and inductive tasks in graphic design can be effectively and advantageously outsourced to AI, while abductive tasks are still best performed by human graphic designers. Additionally, the power balance between humans and AI is discussed, concluding that human graphic designers must play a pivotal role in initiating and critically evaluating the results of any collaboration with AI tools. The model introduces the metaphorical notion of a "disciplinary expertise filter," which serves as a professional quality assurance for AI-based automation and augmentation in the design process. The distinction between "black box" and "clear box" AI systems is briefly discussed to provide a more nuanced understanding of AI as being "a magic tool" for graphic designers. Lastly, the paper presents six perspectives derived from the model, aiming to foster informed discussions and encourage critical reflections among graphic designers regarding their future role in the era of AI.