The Third Site: Blending Polyphonic Methodology and Epistemology

Abstract

This article discusses how art and academia can intervene in what the authors call the third site. The authors’ common ground lies in an interest in artistic encounters between people where art and academia bring new discoveries on both the personal and the professional level. The core of this article is the lecture performance in which the authors explore boundaries of the personal, academia and art. By using artistic, art-based, and scientific approaches, they explore how established positions in art and academia can blend polyphonic methodology and epistemology. In their performative writing they use this artistic competence as their starting point, using performativity as an active event that produces representations of lived lives, the production of existential empiricism. Their endeavour is to illuminate value-related and new questions through art making and establish an epistemological and methodological basis for working with art and academia. The authors believe that the blurring of borders between art and academia contributes to epistemological and methodological pluralism.
 Through artistic experiences, academia becomes vital and varied, creating a diversity of ways in which knowledge and the meaning of life can be represented.