When I started my doctorate in 2017 at the Performing Arts Research Center Tutke at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki, I had already more than a decade of artistic research practice behind me outside of academic institutions. Especially the previous twelve years working in the artist collective of the Reality Research Center had been strongly research-oriented. So what was different now?
Firstly, I did not think at the time that I was continuing my artistic research practice. I approached the context of academic artistic research with a beginner’s attitude, with no intention to research the practices I had developed in the field of arts. I wanted to invent new practices. This may have been beneficial for my research process, but it is clear in hindsight that it was not true. A devil's advocate could say that I re-iterated practices that had already been devised in other projects, but did it in a way that seemed original.
But, if examined a bit further, it was also original. The academic context required an altogether different level of contextualization, methodological consideration and rigor. In my artistic practice, I had played (or experimented) with audience relations, literary performances, empty stages, audiences as resonant entities, referentiality, performances as theory, methodical seriality and gradients of the performance-practice-parapractice-continuum. So I had plenty of experience with the subject matter and potentially useful methods, but the ethos of that work was more of an imaginative play than a systematic aspiration towards knowledge and insight. Academia required from me things that the institution of art did not, which resulted in fruitful problematics, elaborated in Chapter 3. In my evaluation, the biggest difference between the non-academic research-oriented art and the academic artistic research is referentiality. Academia is based on explicit referentiality: each study is situated in the temporally and geographically vast canon of research and the performance of this situatedness is elemental to a work to be accepted as academic. The context of art by contrast repels explicit referencing: it is very rare that artworks articulate their dependence or connection to other artworks. As a result, the academic system emphasizes relations while the art world emphasizes individuality.
Due to the aspect of re-invention, I have included short descriptions of few pre-doctoral works of mine on the timeline preceding this moment of beginning my doctoral studies. I think it is appropriate to account for this slow embodied way in which artistic thinking accumulates. The continuum Portals-Trialogue-Plato's Cave-Plato's Republic shows a development of a literary performance practice. Circle gives more light to the repetition of the circular format and the thematics of agency in my research practice. Comparative Religion is an early example of how referential research-orientation was playfully present in my pre-doctoral artistic practice. 12 Etudes on Everlasting Life introduced a methodical practice, Renunciation the guidance of audience bodies via printed textual materials.
My practice-to-come was context-specific throughout, considering each venue and institution where I carried out my experiments. Academia served as a metacontext, orienting my creative decisions. Since there was a rich variety of institutional contexts (my supervisor Esa Kirkkopelto has called my research project an “institutional odyssey”), the series of experiments also turned out as rich.