nonsite

Busy week. I thought we had an excellent discussion on research methodologies and how they are not really established for art. Jonathan used Monday’s chat to describe and discuss “action research.” He posted a quote: “To do action research is to plan, act, observe and reflect more carefully, more systematically, and more rigorously than one usually does in everyday life.” (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1992).

He proposed other methodologies- comparative, experimental, historical and gave examples of these approaches. Then proposed- exploratory, testing out and problem solving- and we discussed whether exhibiting was dissemination or testing and problem solving. Jonathan proposed that by exhibiting and “along side your actual artistic practice you test, assess audience reaction and interaction and attempt to make a judgement against work of a similar nature” and this makes sense as “action research” which was originally defined for practice based social science research. As an artist you become a “reflective practitioner” in that you learn from your practice by reflecting on it as a way to inform your future work as an artist.

This makes sense as a way of describing practice based art research.

Wednesday was the Digital Arts Forum. From a distance it was hard to understand how our short projects were received, but I enjoyed viewing each piece on the forum website that John set up.  I noted that a number of the video images used a digitially processed video image that distorted, inverted or obscured what we were seeing. I am curious what leads to the urge to distort and the values that underlie that need.