With this editorial, I would invite you not to drop your requirements for epistemic framing, but to shift your attention to reconfigurations of knowledge that happen across frames without explicit epistemology that would secure them. From such a position of expositionality, we can seek a new epistemological project, but more important, perhaps, is the recognition that research can take place without knowing precisely how epistemic difference amounts to knowledge. Creating expositions is by no means the only instance of framing. In fact, expositionality becomes easier to approach once it is seen as part of a much wider practice of framing, and once art practice is itself understood as such a practice. For instance, we can see much of creative education as a process of learning to take things as art, as music, as design, as architecture and so on. There are, of course, more fine-grained ways of taking something, as composition, as painting, as product and so on. Yet things can also be taken as tools, as methods, as material and so on. This suggests a complex interplay in which these framings cut across each other more than they nest. Any one piece, for instance, can be taken as painting, as product, as method and as material at once, while explicit knowledge frames may, but need not, be activated.

As these examples show, most of these framings are accepted in their context and part and parcel of culture and education. However, when we analyse in more detail where research happens in these contexts, it is often the framings and re-framings across them that matter most, and less so the explicit setting into an epistemic frame, in which ‘original knowledge’ is identified. From an artist’s perspective, accounting for such intricate work, epistemologically or methodologically, can seem almost like a different project. We need to ask the question of how much of this accounting is required before artistic research becomes credible, and at what cost. This accounting is often an external requirement for the institutional recognition of research, which in many cases can do more harm than good, for four reasons. Firstly, it can be a distraction to a researcher who might believe that investments in their artistic research work are less relevant for epistemic credibility than serving specific knowledge frames. Secondly, since epistemic accounting is not part of art education, both the experience and the skill set for this work may not be readily available to artists, which can lead to qualitative imbalances across a project. Thirdly, these imbalances may skew a reviewer’s or reader’s engagement, and lead to misunderstandings about where the contributions may lie. Fourthly, and most detrimental to the field, there may be a tendency to avoid, downplay or suppress the more difficult, material readings of the work, so that key aspects of it fall outside the accounting – as noise or ornament, perhaps, whose purpose is unclear, but where, despite it all, much of the excitement happens.

Research may require a heightened sensitivity to frames, that is, recognising where and how they impact on what is possible. An example might be the different roles of composer and performer as frames arranged around notions of ‘work’ that impact on what either one can do – a configuration which, in turn, is part of a specific Western paradigm of music. Moreover, if we assume frames to be many and distributed, some will register more tension than others where the material at hand does not reach resolution. In the example, specific musical research can challenge both frames, or it can keep one strong and productive while putting particular pressures on the other.

Research seen in this light is first of all not an activity producing outputs but a practice of moving between readings in which one move reconfigures many, calling for consequences to be drawn along the way, such as an assessment of what new options may have appeared in a potentially unexpected context. If we were to compare current developments in artistic research with the historical avant-garde, it is striking to see how often research seems to limit itself rather than run with an idea. We see this again and again in the peer reviews we receive: reviewers are excited by a project but feel that it does not go far enough. I take this as a missed opportunity to move beyond presuppositions and to see more of the consequences the research entails. For various reasons, research training or the culture around research seems to hold artists back from tackling or even seeing the frames in need of reconfiguration specifically in the context of their project. There is a difference between frames that could be addressed but are kept as presuppositions and those that simply are untouched by the project, and it is the former that requires our attention.

I do not claim to know which frames these may be. However, seeing artistic research as a much more challenging project may have greater impact than better explanations would, in particular at a time when we seem to be starved of different departures beyond what currently is culturally dominant. What matters then is less which knowledges a project produces than how far a project can be followed, since each reading it opens reconfigures others, potentially adding new momentum. More emphasis might therefore be placed on following through with the crossing of frames until a project’s movement is exhausted – frameable, that is, able to end without further tension – rather than contained, and it is the difference between these two modes that I feel requires more of our attention. While on the one hand, I would expect some research projects to stick much closer to their materials, I would on the other hand also expect others to move beyond where they currently stop. In this way, I do not claim that one is better than the other, but that both are adequate to their potential as long as they are not forced into stopping where a frame appears to end, or into going further than their movement carries them.

Michael Schwab
Editor-in-Chief