Method, Process, Reflection
A Satellite Essay
Artistic research demands clarity about what counts as method, what counts as process, and what counts as reflection. These terms are often used loosely, sometimes interchangeably. In this research, I treat them as distinct categories, each with its own function and character.
Method
Method refers to the deliberate, repeatable strategies employed to generate artistic knowledge. A method is something you can name, describe, and potentially transfer to others. It is prospective: you choose a method before you begin, even if you adapt it along the way.
This understanding aligns with Hübner's (2024) concept of "Crafting Methods," where he argues against selecting methods from a predefined catalogue and instead proposes letting methods "emerge in and through practice, radically oriented to the specific research subject and question(s) at hand" (p. 69). In this view, methods are not borrowed from tradition but crafted from the reality of playing and making.
In this research, the methods include:
AI as semantic disruptor. In Spirit of Rain, I used AI text generators not to write lyrics but to break them. The AI's grammatically correct but semantically hollow outputs exposed the fragility of meaning when filtered through a machine. This is a method: take original text, run it through AI paraphrase tools, use the output as raw material for further manipulation.
Janson's (2021) ongoing PhD project, Artists and Machine Intelligence, situates this method in a broader landscape. She investigates how contemporary artists are using AI not as a replacement for human creativity but as a perturbation of it—introducing elements that disrupt habitual thinking. The semantic disruption in Spirit of Rain fits this pattern: AI not as author but as noise, as interference, as provocation.
Physical and material constraints. The BROR setup (if it fits on an IKEA kitchen island, it can stay) was an arbitrary constraint that forced reduction. Later, programmatic constraints played a similar role: limiting parameters, imposing rules, forcing decisions.
Knudsen (2024), in his Expanding Horizons project, investigates exactly this dynamic: how constraints function as generative rather than limiting forces. Drawing on Bertinetto's concept of "being true to the moment," he demonstrates that imposed limitations create the conditions for authenticity—not despite the constraint but through it. The BROR setup, the programmatic rules, the arbitrary limitations: these are not obstacles to creativity but structures that make certain kinds of creativity possible.
Custom software tools. The Drift Engine, CCM4, Drummerboy, MD-trig. These are methods in the sense that they are designed systems with predictable (if not entirely controllable) behaviors. Building the tool is part of the research. Using the tool generates knowledge.
Qvenild's (2019) HyPer(sonal) Piano Project offers a methodological parallel. His "iterated development loops in the cognitive technological environment" describe exactly this process: building a tool, using it, discovering its behaviors, modifying it, using it again. The tool and the practice co-evolve. The knowledge generated is not separable from the instrument that generated it.
Archival listening. Engaging with my own accumulated recordings as material to be transformed, not preserved. This is a method because it can be described, repeated, and adapted: go back through old work, identify fragments, remove context, allow what remains to shape new work.
Simplification as creative funnel. In the Be Like Water work, I deliberately narrowed each instrument to its minimum viable form. This wasn't reduction for its own sake but a methodical stripping away: what is the least I can do while still claiming to play? The method forced new decisions. A wooden box with a piezo inside became "drums." Two sung lyrics still left doubt about being "a singer." The method is transferable: identify an instrument or role, remove elements until only the essential gesture remains, then work from there.
Bricolage and Wabi-Sabi. Alongside deconstruction and assembly, I adopted an explicit embrace of flaws as method. Rather than correcting imperfections, I allowed them to remain as markers of process. This is not the same as carelessness. It is a deliberate methodological choice: imperfection reveals the hand of the maker and resists the smoothness that erases contingency.
DAW as processing unit, not instrument. A methodological shift occurred when I stopped treating the DAW (switching from Ableton to Reaper) as something that provides musical input and began treating it solely as a sound processing unit. This reframing changed the relationship between live performance and electronic mediation. The method: refuse to let the software suggest musical ideas; use it only to transform what the body has already produced.
Methods are transferable. Someone else could use AI as a semantic disruptor, impose material constraints, build custom tools, practice archival listening, simplify to minimum viable forms. The results would differ, but the approach could be shared.
Process
Process refers to the contingent, time-bound unfolding of artistic work. Unlike method, process cannot be fully specified in advance. It includes the experiments that failed, the detours, the moments of doubt, the accidental discoveries. Process is what actually happened, not what was supposed to happen.
Duch (2010) makes a crucial distinction: "a recording of improvised music is not an improvisation: its prime function as real-time music-making is lost once it is caught on tape." The recording documents the process but is not the process. This is why process fragments matter—they preserve something of the temporal unfolding that the finished artifact necessarily loses.
Process is documented but not prescribed. When I describe the deconstruction phase of this research as a "black hole" that swallowed everything, that is process. It wasn't planned. It wasn't a method. It was what happened when I started questioning everything and couldn't stop. The implosion of logic, the discomfort, the eventual reassembly: these are process.
Process also includes the discoveries that only emerge through doing. In Be Like Water, I found that narrowing down causes more creativity, not less. This wasn't a prediction or a method—it was what happened. The constraint didn't limit; it redirected. The narrowing demanded new creative outlets: new bands, new installations, new things to be made that weren't part of the original plan.
Process includes the question that surfaces mid-work and remains unanswered. "Is this live electronics?" emerged during the Be Like Water performances. I still don't have a stable answer. The question marks a threshold: something changed in my practice, but the categories hadn't caught up yet.
Process also includes the tradeoffs that become visible only in retrospect. I put the urge to play a full drum kit on hold. I acted as a professional in fields where I was, at best, professional-by-proxy. These weren't methods—they were accommodations, negotiations between what I wanted and what the work required.
Process is present-tense, even when described retrospectively. Method is "here is how to do this." Process is "here is what I did, including the parts I didn't anticipate."
The exposition presents process through fragments: dated entries, audio recordings, notes, failures. These are not methods. They are evidence of a practice unfolding in time.
Reflection
Reflection refers to the interpretive work that makes sense of method and process after the fact. It is the writing, the analysis, the contextualization, the listening. Reflection asks: what did I do, and what does it mean?
Reflection is always retrospective, I'd say. Where method is prospective and process is present, reflection looks back to find patterns, draw connections, and situate the work in broader contexts. It is not separate from artistic practice; it is part of it. But it occupies a different register.
This satellite essay is an example of reflection. So is the starter essay. So are the appendixes that contextualize the artistic outputs, and further, so are playing the same idea out one more time. Semantically, reflection turns experience into communicable knowledge, but in the field of music the contrast between version X and version X1 is what constitutes that same reflective space.
Musically there is a danger of reflection in the sense that it can become a substitute for practice, or it can impose false coherence on work that was actually messy and uncertain. Good reflection acknowledges the mess, and it doesn't pretend the research followed a clean trajectory. It finds meaning without erasing contingency, a logic clearly stated in the research timeline in this exposition.
Reflection also discovers unexpected validations; Self-gratification, which I had treated as suspect—too personal, too private to count—turned out to be a legitimate creative element. If I found the soundscape personally rewarding, that was not a bias to be corrected but a signal to be trusted. Reflection made this visible, as it also was what triggered the articulation of it.
Similarly, reflection notices trickle-down effects by acknowledging that work done in one context surfaces in another. The song "Going out, Coming home," recorded without rehearsal in Bergen (12.02.24), drew directly on discoveries made during the research—but it wasn't part of the research in any planned sense. The reflective space of musical contrast traces these lines, showing how knowledge generated in one project migrates into others.
How They Interweave
These three are not sequential. You don't finish method, then do process, then reflect. They interweave throughout the research, each informing the others, just like one identity informs the other in the musical sense as identites are presented here.
A method generates a process that prompts reflection that revises the method. You build one or several tool(s) (method), use them and discover unexpected behaviors (process), write about, or play out, what those behaviors mean (reflection), then modify the tool based on what you learned (method again).
The Be Like Water presentation at ARF 2024 was itself an example of this interweaving. The method (simplification / bricolage / Wabi-Sabi) generated a process of unexpected discoveries about constraint and creativity, that then prompted reflection (this essay, among others), ultimately fed back into subsequent methods (the further development of Drift, the move toward Album III). The 20-minute musical performance was the research update. As Peter Tornquist's logic suggests: musical questions have musical answers. But reflection makes those answers communicable beyond the performance itself.
In the research timeline every fragment represens a way of making visible the texture of my artistic research, presenting the non-linearity of how-it-is-done, then colour-coding these into some kind of clarity without loosing that fragmented understanding of what has been going on. From transferable strategies to what actually happened, the short-term reflective fragments interpret and connect, and together, they form a picture that an over-arching past-tense reflective process cannot capture.
References
Borgdorff, H. (2012). The conflict of the faculties: Perspectives on artistic research and academia. Leiden University Press.
Duch, M. (2010). Free improvisation: Method and genre. Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Hübner, F. (2024). Method, methodology and research design in artistic research: Between solid routes and emergent pathways. Routledge.
Janson, A. L. (2021). Artists and machine intelligence [Ongoing PhD project]. Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
Knudsen, K. M. (2024). Expanding horizons: Artistic research in jazz performance. University of Agder.
Nelson, R. (2013). Practice as research in the arts: Principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances. Palgrave Macmillan.
Qvenild, M. (2019). HyPer(sonal) piano project. Norwegian Academy of Music.