Researchify: Artists’ Research as Disruption

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(Short paper)

Keywords: Artists’ research, immanence, encounter, phenomenology, Deleuze, Agamben, lacuna, Laura U. Marks.

My practice-based research explores what is invisible in the visual realm in order to investigate immanence, haptic perception, and non-visual knowledge. I approach the non-visible realm through video, animation, writing, installation, experimental collaboration, and drawing. Through this context, I ask: what is at stake in the recent shift in Canadian academic institutions for artists to define their work as artist-researchers? While this shift does suit the practice of many artists (myself included) it also carries a dangerous edge, a subtle implication that applying ‘research’ to art practice entails a more rational, articulable, or self apparent explanation of the function and value of art. The coined term “researchify” exemplifies this erroneous rational order. I argue that this urge to “researchify” is a dangerous tendency, and artists must protect the unutterable lacuna within their process. The leap of perception in the art experience remains fundamentally within experiencing the art itself. Art is an encounter that exists through the act of making and/or through the viewer’s experience, accessible through phenomenological investigation. I apply the basic tenets of Gilles Deleuze’s fold, Giorgio Agamben’s lacuna, and Laura U. Mark’s immanence of irreversible time to eschew rational over-determination