От метода к предмету

Abstract

The article addresses the problems of the methodology of artistic research, which is seen as the production of a specific form of knowledge related to aesthetic experience. The field of artistic research emerges in the last decades of the 20th century as a result of the convergence of the art world and the academy under the influence of conceptual art and the interdisciplinary turn. Research appears as a methodological bricolage in which the aesthetic is no longer displaced in opposition to the cognitive, but rather complements it. The importance of aesthetic knowledge production increases in the situation of revision of the linguistic paradigm. The factors of multiplicity, complexity and uncertainty are beginning to play a key role in how the subject of research reveals itself: it is becoming less and less predictable and understandable from a linguistic perspective. Its limitations are overcome by shifting the focus of attention from the research method to the subject. Actor-network theory and its philosophical implications are a natural ally here. By rediscovering the subject as an activated non-self-identity, a network-centered quasi-subjectivity, the research methodology acquires similarities with the strategy that Karen Barad calls ethico-onto-epistemology. Artistic research turns out to be a territory where scenarios of response to the crisis of imagination provoked by digital capitalism are produced. This makes the field of artistic research part of a broad process of experimental cultural production and thought that can be called a permanent cognitive revolution.