| Towards a Manifesto for Critical Openness in Artistic Research |
TOWARDS A MANIFESTO FOR CRITICAL OPENNESS IN ARTISTIC RESEARCH
Online Series AboutELIA’s Artistic Research Working Group invites you to participate in a series of open discussions on the future of artistic research within the paradigm of open research. The online series Towards a Manifesto for Critical Openness in Artistic Research explores the disciplinary ticks and nervous points emerging around the regulatory practices of Open Research and how they do or do not adequately support the diversity of practices in the field of artistic research. Through these discussions we aim to formulate a set of value-based positions and principles by reflecting on the historical precedents of copyright in art and science, the acceleration of open ideologies in digital culture and the practical implication of these developments for artistic research and its distribution. The discussion series will be run through the ELIA Platform for Artistic Research over 3 x 1-hour online sessions. While the sessions will be informal and discussion based, they will also reflect on the tensions between artistic research and open science to arrive at creative and critical perspectives. This conversation will be continued at the ELIA Artistic Research platform event at the ELIA Biennial 2024*, Milan. Online sessions will take place on Zoom on the following dates: Artistic Research inherits the demand for open data from the sciences. But before looking too much across the fences, we will start from the topic of copyright, a privilege that has been developed in and for the arts. How can the requests for open data and the artist’s need for intellectual property be brought into a fruitful relation under the assumption of research? What is it that is shared from research and what stays with the author? We will use the following topics as guidelines or sparks for discussion:
The Open Research Paradigm emerges at a time of unprecedented technological change in the production and consumption of knowledge. Accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data digital culture is increasingly motivating excessive demands for openness and access to knowledge and research (The Circle, 2017). According to Korean-German Philosopher, Byung Han, the demand for transparency in the information society has fragmented social relations, flattened their complexity and undermined our capacity for trust (Han, 2012). Where trust relies on the acceptance of unknowing, difference and the ‘other’, the demand for total knowledge and openness amounts to an obliteration of difference, diversity and the ‘other’. DATA that lacks the friction and opacity of the other, that is, techno-scientific data, is perceived as a positive contribution in the Transparency Society. However, it is a contribution which draws an abyssal line between research frameworks (De Sousa Santos, 2018). Following this, we aim to trouble the demand for openness in research and the hegemony of techno-scientific data and explore how we can make space for the ‘other’ of techno-scientific DATA to exist within this new paradigm. It is within this context that we assert ‘the right to opacity’ of artistic research. Topics covered:
In this series of discussion events around Artistic Research and the Open Research agenda, we have considered in turn Copyright and the notion of Openness as it relates to AR. Now, we turn to the ‘elephant in the room’: the concept of ‘Data’. The term ‘data’, a key concept in Open Research across epistemically diverse fields of enquiry, feels poorly interrogated in AR. In this session, we invite you to explore with us what 'data' could, or should, mean in AR – and whether the term is appropriate at all. We might consider:
Please note: The Artistic Research in-person meeting at ELIA Biennial 2024 is not part of this series. However, if you would like to attend the Biennial Conference in Milan, you can register here. |
