Panel Statement
Chair Person: Anne Balsamo
Presenters: Rosemary Comella, Jeanne Jo, Amanda Tasse, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, Diego Costa & Joshua McVeigh-Schultz
Common among the creative fields–the arts, science, technology and design–is a commitment to the production of new knowledge based on original research. Research is the praxis of systematic critical reflection that focuses on compelling domain-defined questions. The “question of method” is often used to distinguish art and design from science and technology: where the latter are defined by reified methodological paradigms, and the former by the repudiation of such paradigms. In practice we know this to be a false opposition: artists and designers systematically engage the empirical in many ways in their creative work; scientists and technologists creatively improvise to form rational accounts of their technical projects. The participants on this panel are each engaged in developing innovative methods that demonstrates the notion of art practice as transformative research. For some of them this takes the form of performance and real-time video mixing, for others it is the creation of locative media experiences that probe cultural dispositions and habits. Key areas to be discussed include: the tensions between empirical, interpretive and critical research techniques in the performance and production of art practice; the contribution of psychoanalysis and cognitive science to arts research; multimedia techniques for the creation of real-time knowledge production; making research visible to transdisciplinary (academic) audiences; and communicating arts practice research in dynamic vernaculars. This panel will describe, explore, and demonstrate a range of new methods of emerging arts research.
- Prof. Anne Balsamo‘s work focuses on the relationship between the culture and technology. This focus informs her practice as a scholar, researcher, new media designer, and entrepreneur. She is currently a Full Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts, and of Communications in the Annenberg School of Communications. Her first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke UP, 1996) investigated the social and cultural implications of emergent bio-technologies. Her most recent book Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Duke UP, 2011) examines the relationship between designing praxis, cultural reproduction and the technological imagination. Designingculture.net