ON RESEARCH
A manual for the Glock 17 pistol
Helga Nowotny (2008), former Professor of Social Studies of Science at the ETH Zurich, defined curiosity as the main driving force of art, causing it to “go beyond the familiar, to explore a space that opens up to the realm of possibilities.”
Research in the arts further encourages practitioners to “go beyond the familiar” by incorporating various approaches, ranging from interrogating theories, exploring different positions and investigating silenced subjects, to experimenting with various tools and using creative approaches to make complex data more accessible. At the core of these enquiries sits the urge to find innovative techniques to engage with a topic - raising questions, encouraging new perspectives and building knowledge.
Professor Estelle Barrett (2014), from the Institute of Koorie Education at Deakin University, describes artistic research as having the “ability to reconfigure our understanding of how knowledge is produced”. It offers to move beyond the limits of knowledge to “transform accounts of the world” (ibid.) – presenting new possibilities of further understanding through the “experimental and emergent nature of its methodologies” (ibid.).
Output from our Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) off to a slow start while processing and learning from images.
According to Hugo Lopez Ortez (2008) “the transmission of knowledge is constrained or facilitated by its medium of presentation”. Building upon this notion, art enables us to expand on forms of representation through interdisciplinary approaches – encouraging the “necessity for ongoing decoding, analysis and translation.” (Barrett and Bolt, 2014)
Because of the great potential of using artistic approaches to carry out and visualise extensive research, the number of artists employing diverse research tools in their practise is rapidly growing. Exemplary is the work of the research group Forensic Architecture, which applies multidisciplinary methodologies, including a variety of technologies and architectural techniques, to “develop an evidentiary system in relation to specific cases” of state violence and violations of human rights. Working closely with NGOs and human rights lawyers, they challenge dubious claims made by corporations, the military, states and police. Through the presentation of these investigations in galleries and museums worldwide, the ground-breaking approaches and sophisticated reconstruction of forensic evidence find access into the artistic realm; making the findings accessible to a wider audience, beyond a specialised group of people.
From the exhibition ‘Towards an Investigative Aesthetics’ by Forensic Architecture at MACBA, 2017
Another example is Laia Abril, a research-based artist utilising various approaches and techniques in her practice, including photography, video, sound and text. In ‘On Abortion’, Abril meticulously investigates and documents the “physical and psychological dangers caused by the continued lack of legal, safe and free access to abortion”. Her multimedia approach, alongside the inclusion of historical and contemporary material, gives insight to a tabooed topic - presenting an encompassing image of abortion.
In our collective work, RAKE has provided us with a space to employ research to explore complex subjects, finding new ways to enquire - using various techniques and methods. For our first project, ‘We May Meet One Day’, we investigated the leak of white supremacist platform Iron March. It was our aim from the beginning to make this complex and abstract set of data more tangible while finding ways for an audience to engage with it. We applied a range of different tools and techniques to visualise information we continued to gather in the process.
Among other approaches, we programmed a map to show the conversation trail between users worldwide; fed user profile pictures to a Generative Adversarial Network to generate the average Iron March user; wrote a program to grab the leaked IP addresses, converting them into physical coordinates, and finally scraped Google Maps for the street views of each of these real-world locations. Making use of various tools and applying different techniques allowed us to visualise specific aspects of the dataset and encourage the audience to further engage with the overarching problem – the rise of far-right ideologies.
Overall, the potential of research in the arts, be it for translating challenging and complex topics, highlighting sensitive issues, or offering new possibilities to inquire, transform and question, is endless. It creates a space that should be continually explored and will definitely continue to sit at the core of the work we create as RAKE.