Research based practice as Intervention with participation

 

We become the codes we punch

Katherine Hayles

In 1929, anthropologist Bronislav Malinowski felt an unease about the dominant existing modes of sociocultural anthropology research practices and decided to coin a term and, at the time, radical methodology: observation with participation. It stemmed from the fact that most anthropologists were writing from a position of distance (sometimes even physical) about the cultural practices they were researching. Fast forward to media practices today, his method applied to practice based research could be translated to Intervention with participation.

Participation

To me, as a digital practitioner with a focus on the role of technology in knowledge production, the term research creation is tightly connected to the encounter with and research of technology. As Malinowski regarded the processual nature of the study of cultural artifacts as lived activities, in a similar way I argue that the co-creation of technological cultural artifacts between various agents is a living process one necessarily participates in on a daily basis. In that sense, researching this space is unmistakably eve more linked to the experience and practice of participation. From the “family of resemblances” discussed in the Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuck article, it would refer to that of creation-as-research.

A common issue in the field of new media or media art is that there is often a division of artist as the generator of concepts, therefore knowledge, and the engineer, or team of engineers, as the “technician”, the craftsman. This division creates both a space of hierarchy, where the maker is the executor and the artist is the author of the artwork and it also creates a disconnection between the artist and the technology they are exploring. How does one produce knowledge about a type of a technology, without engaging with it? How do they make the creative decisions on questions that form in the making process itself? Where is the space of experiment in this confined, compartmentalized division of roles? The research space that happens through practice is unique, as it provides unforeseen scenarios, open questions that seek creative answers, both in terms of practical solutions and ideas that form from this process. In my understanding, the creator needs to be deeply present and accountable in the process, not only in the realm of concepts, but also in the practice of the research and material production.

Unlike in classical research, in RBP there is an ackgnowledged aspect of intuition present (Lyle Skains even incorporates the factor of serendipity as one of the key elements for practice based research), while the process is not lead solely by intuitive means. When dealing with technology and research, one is enmeshed, or what Chris Salter refers to entangled with various modes of knowledge production that affect each other. In this sense research is understood as Latour would call involved, messy and more experiential. One liberatory aspect of this form of exploration Linda Candy mentions in her text is that the artifact which is part of the research doesn’t necessarily directly bring new knowledge, but enables the grounds to make questions and give answers.

Intervention

The unease of this enmeshment provokes the questioning of the conception of hard science being evidence based, clean, hierarchical and, within this hierarchy, superior to other methodologies of knowledge creation. What is particularly interesting about this unease is that it offers a direct question of where is the border of cleanliness of pure science, as well as is there such a form of knowledge? This would be a question intervening within the “regime of truth”, which forms the most potent ground for affirming the legitimacy of research creation in its specifics, rather than framing it within broader, already legitimate forms of knowledge. Or in the terms that Linda Candy uses, moving from an evidence based to a discourse based mode of understanding and knowing. It is no wonder an expanded form of ethnography is being put forward by several authors mentioned in the text by Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuck, in proposing methodologies for research creation, etnography and anthropology being understood as the softer social science. Nor is it a wonder they talk of an “engaged” research, as it is a process of both participating experientially and engaging in forming modes of knowledge production.

The term disruptive, present in the text by Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuck, also recalls Tatiana Bazicchelli’s concept of art as disruptive business, intervening into neoliberal production from within. The within is for me located in Witgenstein’s “blurred edges” of disciplines of knowledge, and for this reason I find the academic surrounding of the IWAP as a grounding from within. Not as a place for a reproduction of the canonized formats (the solidification of which brings up issues such as the multiplication of compliance protocols Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuck mention or academicism, which Higgins mentions), but a legitimacy for institutional disruption as a creative practice of opening the space between domain and field, in what Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi’s Systems Model of Creativity, that Lyle Skains refers to in her text.

Intervention with participation

While practice based research expands knowledge production in a much deeper way than by just being one form of ethnography, situating research creation within the field could stem from the fact that the writing Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuck are referring to mostly happened up until 2010. The bandwidth, services and types of writing produced at that moment were remarkably different from the Internet that is used today. This is a stage before traditional scholarship started extensively incorporating various media formats and expressions as not only fieldwork material, but within the output of the research. Today there are many examples of conventional research formats incorporating intermedia modalities (as Dick Higgins uses the term), as well as through multimodal means, stepping closer to the languages of research creation, such as diffractive pedagogy in art education.

And while the field seems to be gaining further legitimacy within rigid, institutional contexts, going back to the radical shift Malinowski brought to the field of anthropology, his method of observation with participation reminds of the requirements for such a methodology: a presence and space for surprise and vulnerability. These could possibly be the key flavors that offer practice based research the sharpness to keep being a potential tool of intervention in embodied forms of knowledge production, with impact both in an beyound academic surroundings.