Artistic approaches are a form of enigmatic yet applicable empiricism that uses its creative reasoning to give alternative perspectives to materializing a shared curiosity of how human interaction develops.
The research project culminated into a public event series of four saturdays. The thematic layout of each saturday was built on the expertise collected during the intensive exchange in Lab 1 and Lab 2, through which researchers could analyse, experience and name diverse qualities and methods at play when guiding a participatory encounter.
Within the series both head researchers with Anne Juren, Christian Schröder, Dennis Johnson, Krōōt Juurak, Philipp Ehmann and Mariella Greil offered practices with following sub-thematics
(1) Non-Comfort Zones, (2) Drifting, (3) Non-Trivial Effort, (4) The Agency of Generative Gaps
The four (4) public sessions were attended by researchers and students from the Angewandte, and additionally attracted a diverse feedback community from other universities, and from the independent art scene in Vienna. Through creating the public sessions in workshop like format, a low threshold was created, bridging the research and special practice of reflection to people outside the academic realm. Through this diverse exchange, awareness for research was spread outwards and the research team also found productive and supportive responses that fed back into the research.
Clearly the agency of being in collaboration with something or someone has resonance with all kinds of daily life processes. The fact that tools of how to facilitate a conscious modulation of such agency, can be developed in the frame of artistic interdisciplinary research, points to the relevance of artistic research within the discourse on social and political processes. As we approached participatory sense-making with not only cogintive neuroscientific perspectives, we contribute to the larger discourse of social cognition, offering a completely different perspective on the epistemology of interaction and joint cognition.
