Last week we discussed the backlash of artistic research in comparison to our colleagues in the design based part of academia. This was symptomatic of the situation at the time during the mid to late 1990s and the demonstrated how emotive the argument was becoming. It was particularly brought to everybody's attention both in art, and design through a conference attended by many design based personalities and the resulting conference by Donald Norman completely changed the landscape.
Graham Sullivan's book changed the scene from the outset following Donald Norman's conference and more recently academic authors such as Robin Nelson and Hank Borgdorff have written extensively.
Borgdorff brings a new angle to the whole discussion regarding differences in using practice as research method, particularly in the role of academic research into art. He uses work that was originally created by Bruno Latour - network or Actor Network Theory spawned from the book of the same name. In Borgdorff's book, he uses the titles of epistemology (discussed at length by Polanyi), methodology and hermeneutics, with free exploration (i.e. interpretation) which is based on a material conceptual briccolage; and finally ontology which puts an emphasis on the non-conceptual content, which has also been written by Barrett and Barbara Bolt. It is the combination of these last two points around methodology and ontology but Borgdorf brings together and calls the actor network theory. ANT. Within this Borgdorff engages with research and administrative processes, having been a university administrator himself, and so his work is placed and positioned in the University infrastructural sense. In other words he thinks as a creative constructivists,-as building a framework of institutions, organisations, publications, conferences and so on in order for those to feed the whole cycle of methodology. We saw a little of this in the work that James Elkins did prior to Borgdorf.However in this new approach he puts more emphasis upon the governing bodies and funding agencies of academia and university research.
The actor in actor network theory can be both human and nonhuman stop what is important is their connection to each other, the other actors in their performative dimensions. This together with the concept of "what does research mean for academia" creates an environment of post-disciplinarity.
So, if an actor can the human, I crowd or an ATM machine, or even the University then in the ANT rationality and be constituted as performative. Objects themselves come to the fore.
It also sets into place a version of "process philosophy" with supportive material such as magazines and publications etc, like the Parse magazine, the new platform for artistic research.
Borg Dorff thinks that all research practices should be included across the whole of academia and also with its interfaces with industry and so it includes all the scientific research process as well. This all facilitates the concept of the post- disciplinarity approach. In other words this is in effect, as collaboration, across all disciplines. The expertise other and all skill sets of the academic and university fraternity being incorporated. This is very different from the interdisciplinary concept of earlier research as bands discipline looks across the whole.
The knowledge from others "infects" the language of the whole group, a whole cross discipline interchange. This is now known as mode to research (and Michael Gibbons has written a book concerning this).
All the practitioners from multiple disciplines can now create an environment of collaborative learning and research cultures in University and academic investigation. This is supported by the Journal of Artistic Research, and other periodicals, which offer a collaborative sharing of research knowledge.
The working knowledge of Hank Borgdorff's "ANT", is built on a legacy from Sociology and the "labelling theory", - sometimes known as "Symbolic Interactionism", first explored by Irving Goffman's analysis of sociology in 1957.
During that period, classifications of 'things' abounded in the academic environment. An example would be; by setting a label for 'schizophrenia' for a varied mental illness diagnosis, Goffman considered that this was completely wrong, simply because it covered so many different types of mental illness.
- Goffman conducted his own experiment as a result, whereby he gave his students some instructions to go to their own doctors and to "tell them that they heard voices". All the students were just given three words which were "empty, hollow, and thud"... - Unsurprisingly, all his students then got committed to mental institutions, and he spent a considerable amount of his time trying to extract of them!
A 'diagnosis' of each of the students that were admitted, were all very different,but still labelled "Schizophrenia". When he published his findings, Goffman received a huge backlash and criticism for his unethical and problematic method of research, which could have ended up with very dangerous consequences. He therefore conducted a further experiment, but this time, he told the academic community and also the mental institutions, "That he was going to conduct a similar study", by using students to test the validity of the diagnosis of schizophrenia. In actual fact no students were given any instructions. However, in the six months following his announcement there was almost a 50% reduction of admissions into the institutions, of people with schizophrenia! This proved his point precisely!
Another legacy method, that Borgdorff calls upon, is that of "Paradigmatic Science", researched and written about, by Thomas Kuhn (which articulates "the science wars" of the early 1980s), together with the legacy of 'Post-structuralist Philosophy', which discusses the "revolutionary" type effects of scientific discoveries.
ANT therefore is a contemporary form of Process Philosophy.
The ongoing criticism of categorisation is also articulated by Faucult and Deleauz. This 'criticism' is not a fad or fashion brought out by Borgdorff, and, indeed has a massive intellectual history as Faucult and Deleauz testify. The 'fluidity' of categorisations gives the Actor Network Theory credence, and Bruno Latour with other players also start to inspire the work of Hank Borgdorff too, with the concept of "performance". He recognised that the rhythms, connectivity, and the coalescence of things into processes requires the need to document the behaviour of the actors. Looking at people and things closely is essential, as there are many actors in any given that network.
To some, this can be likened as "opening the black box of science and technology".
The necessity to conduct "Micro-Studies" (qualitative) in laboratories, institutes, government departments, boardrooms and suchlike, was written extensively about by Bruno Latour in the early days.
The Universities and academic fellowship must embrace new concepts and environments for negotiation, and to allow "viral" changes in their processes of education. Practice-based research, and the diversity of heterogeneous environments, calls for this transformation of educational methods to be successful.
All of these new theories can be traced also to the 'semiotics' idea and the broadcasting of signs, and they work together with 'perceptual ideas and concepts' too. These two things, semiotics and perceptual ideas and concepts, are squeezed together to form Actor Network Theory. But the word "theory" is actually something that Borgdorff is against. He would have been quite happy if the whole concept had been called something else perhaps?
So as a result of this uneasy definition of theory, the word "rhizome" comes into play. Now, we have actor network and rhizome as a form of research, because it is the "performance" piece that is critical to the whole concept.
For example, the inclusion of non-artistic or non-art objects in "Art Research" such as photography, such as the photograph of Lee Miller in Hitler's bathtub, through to the shattered fragments of the Banniyan Bhuddas, destroyed by the Taleban, are a classic example.
It is therefore the mediators (like the people who tweet on Twitter), that seem to actually change the fashion of things. Art objects have an identity. Caroline Christoph Barcovietz's work at the international Documenta 13, included lots of things that were not art objects. But they asked the question "not who thinks, but what thinks".
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At first I thought that this was bunkum, ... - how can an object think?
-It is the human the controls the agent (or actor), granted, but the point being made is that tthe agents ( or actors) sometimes control the humans. Unfortunately the point is lost in the way that this question "it is not who thinks, but what thinks?" was originally phrased. - By wrapping a nonsensical idea into something that, on the face of it, is being positioned as an intellectual discussion, could be challenged as making serious intellectual academic research look foolish. Beyond that, the answer to this is that it "exacerbates the criticism" from some quarters that "All art is Fraud". They therefore use these discussions, but in contrast, the case should be given credence, as they are making people think in different ways.
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