About
Research-creation methodologies have something to offer to the wider artistic, creative and innovation communities, and vice-versa.
Research-creation – understood here as a process that uses creative or artistic practice to explore a research question, which arrives at new insights through the act of making and doing – has shown the value of putting creative production at the heart of processes of research and innovation. It has established principles of documentation and elucidation of discovery that are accessible and can lead to new insights. It has also enabled diverse creative practices to gain recognition, and enabled marginalized voices to be heard.
However, the professional value of research-creation for artists and creators outside of post-secondary institutions has been largely overlooked. We are committed to research with real-world impact, and recognize that strong connections between public, industry, and academic work are highly valuable. Therefore, research-creation practices cannot remain largely sealed and isolated within the academy. We need to share and integrate its insights with the wider artistic community and foster dialogue across these boundaries. This project aims to unlock its broader potential.
We have three specific objectives:
To generate new knowledge and understandings about the relationship between research-creation practices in higher education, and the practices of artists and creators outside of academia – and what each sphere can learn from the other.
To develop transdisciplinary platforms, systems or spaces that support a fruitful, comprehensive and ongoing dialogue between creators in these two spheres.
To explore the ways that different environments – higher education, and artistic and creative scenes – with distinct norms and practices, influence artists’ and researchers’ experiences, creativity, critical thinking and social engagement.
We will explore these objectives in between four areas:
Discovery from Making
Although creators already know that insights are achieved through the process of creation – and will have their own frameworks for this – research-creation scholars have established techniques and principles that can scaffold creative discovery in dependable ways, as well as theoretical foundations that can ground the personal qualities of individual creativity in a broader and more structured context.
Decolonization of knowledge
Research-creation methods can be a vehicle for moving aside, and critiquing, colonial positivist and quantitative methods, and some of the technocratic discourse around ‘innovation’. Some independent and collective practitioners are ahead of the university sector in their implementation of decolonial attitudes and practices, and some parts of the creative industries have something to learn. An exchange of principles and methods would be valuable for all spheres.
Impact of A.I.
The rise of widely-available artificial intelligence applications that can rapidly produce original (or original-seeming) works of art, music, design, coding and invention has recently shaken creative researchers and practitioners alike. Whether viewed as an existential threat or an exciting opportunity, creators of all kinds feel a need to discuss and take a position on today’s unavoidable AI technologies, and work out how to employ or dismiss them.
Documented processes of innovation and imagination
Documentation of the creative process is especially central to research-creation: it is through explication and illustration of the process that we make work available to ourselves, and others, for iterative and collaborative engagement. Non- academic creators also need to capture their processes, for reasons including personal reflection and development, sharing, marketing communication, and to enable collaborations.