PhD Vitamin was a first-time event, held in a digital format at the Estonian Academy of Arts from the 4th to the 8th of May 2020. It consisted of a series of public video lectures on artistic research, held by theorists and practitioners in the field, with the aim of introducing different approaches to acquiring a PhD degree as an artist.

Ahora que se acercan las fechas en las que tendría que haber tenido lugar la onceava Conferencia Internacional sobre Investigación Artística de la SAR—la Society for Artistic Research—, revisamos qué sucedió en el anterior encuentro para así tener una mayor perspectiva sobre estas regulares reuniones e intuir—o especular—sobre qué podríamos haber encontrado durante los días 25, 26 y 27 de marzo en la Facultad de Bellas Artes, Música y Diseño de la Universidad de

There is a story in Greek mythology of a man named Theseus. Theseus became a hero when he ventured into the dark corridors of the labyrinth to hunt and kill the part bull/part man monster residing at its core—the Minotaur. All he had to find his way back was a ball of red thread he carried into the maze. This past December we used similar metaphors to introduce the idea of artistic research (AR) to the participants of our cozy salon in south Tel Aviv.

“Who needs it?” Gesa Ziemer, cultural theorist at HafenCity University in Hamburg recently put this fundamental issue for debate at the first SwissGradNet conference:

My interest in “art epistemology” originally derived, already more than a decade ago, from a continuously growing frustration with critical theory’s teachings, and let alone, from words themselves as they indefatigably attempted to organize my conceptual vortex in a clear manner—often, however, without any luck.

Discussions on artistic research is mostly happening in the Global North with very few voices from the Global South and nearly no voices from the Global East.

Philosophy as artistic research is a concept of philosophy in which poiesis,1 the process of letting something materially come into being (be-coming), is considered the core performance of philosophy.

On request from the Norwegian Council for Artistic Research, an investigation on publishing and dissemination of Artistic Research was completed in April 2017. The report was conducted by a working group led by Jørn Mortensen, Rector at Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Research and creative processes bring things into the world imperfectly. That is the syntax of making. What kinds of perspectives might we adopt toward the institutional integration of art and research? In conversation with U.S. poet and scholar Joan Retallack, artist and composer John Cage stated: “When I find myself in the position of someone who would change something—at that point I don’t change it. I change myself.

Artistic research, like the world of a work of art, is presented in multiple ways in its often-uneven passage from conception through production to dissemination. And like a work of art, it can manifest across a complex distribution of materialisations. This complexity invariably presents challenges. Given the indeterminate nature and material manifestations that might constitute a single project, it can be particularly difficult to determine how and when it is best represented.