In the JAR36 editorial I began a line of thought that deserves further reflection given the ongoing impact AI has had on our work. That editorial concerned conflict and the ways in which conflict compromises through either implication or avoidance.
JAR is based on foundations of expositionality. We publish expositions of practice as research, media-rich assemblages that gather and present material traces of artistic practice, and articulate them as original epistemic contributions. While this paradigm allows for highly complex constellations of materials, in reality, artists often choose more standardised formats. In JAR, we assume that any choice informs what can be articulated and how: not everything that can be said needs complicated rich-media engagements—this can drift into decoration and ornamentation.
The mounting crises have triggered new ways of thinking about artistic research and our own endeavour to engage material articulations at the site of publication. The degree of conflict that many experience daily has become so pronounced that it requires recognition, across the board, also in regard to the submissions that we receive. Of late, we have seen it move from the margins to the centre in a wide spectrum of conflict presentations that include activism, pragmatism, ideology and suffering, as well as ignorance and defiance.
Expositionality is a necessarily underdetermined concept. We use it to qualify emergent meaning in all forms of complex, material constellations – in our case, distributions of media and text across webpages. However, being emergent, those meanings can neither be a function of form, nor can they themselves be formalised. Still, we know they work.
Since our inaugural issue 0, most editorials have addressed in one way or another what expositions of practice as research are, and what they can be. In many of these editorials, ontological, institutional and also political concerns stood in the foreground, as JAR has worked to navigate and contribute to a field.
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