Jörg Wiesel - Böcker

Since its beginnings in the 1990s, artistic research has become established as a new format in the areas of educational and institutional policy, aesthetics, and art theory. It has now diffused into almost all artistic fields, from installation to experimental formats to contemporary music, literature, dance, or performance art. But from its beginnings—under labels like “art and science” or “scienceart” or “artscience” that mention both disciplines in one breath—it has been in competition with academic research, without its own concept of research having been adequately clarified. This manifesto attempts to resolve the problem and to defend the term. Further, this manifesto defends the radical potential of artistic research against those who toy all too carefully with university formats, wishing to ally their work with scientific principles. Its aim is to emphasize the autonomy and particular intellectuality of artistic research, without seeking to justify its legitimacy or adopt alien standards.

Aesthetic practices employ a double-hinged movement in the way they refer to connectivity. On the one hand, it seems as if connectivity in its purely functional orientation towards communicating through digital media is in itself responsible for having produced aesthetic practices and their social fields of action. On the other hand, it is precisely these aesthetic practices which, in the field of contemporary culture, elaborate the desiderata of connectivity beyond the territorial gaps they already mark out in the social and cultural sciences.