Research Navigations

In artistic research, the ‘reflective practice’ promoted by Donald Schön (1983) runs the risk of mere self-gratification. More perspectives need to be put into the equation, into something more ‘diffractive’, as Donna Haraway (1997) would say. As part of artistic research we could be inspired by, and use, a wide range of methods for navigating a research process and take the journey into safer waters. Here we might find that western modes of navigation, based on fixing one’s position in relation to stars, and from that extracting a course by dead reckoning, leave us in the dilemma of rigidity, founded on prediction. Dead reckoning is not a method to find new land or to enrich the experience of travel, but rather it opposes serendipity. Even today, researchers have little understanding of how Polynesian navigators in outrigger canoes crossed the Pacific long before Europeans explored the planet. Paul Klee’s credo that ‘art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible’ could be a tool to render the process of a research journey visible and such tracing could be a captivating approach with which to challenge the on-line layout of the Journal of Artistic Research.