Poetics of Form

How do form and sense come to play in artistic research? How to approach writing in a way that reflects and benefits the processes of artistic research? How does research become artistic and artistic practice become research? How can a work of art be composed/presented as research? How do ways of knowing and forms of research exposition interact and feed into each other in artistic research? The eight expositions of Nivel 08 ‘Poetics of Form’ online publication explore these, and other related questions through different approaches to writing, video, audio, photography, and interactive media.

The theme of the publication emerged originally from collegial discussions in the Performing Arts Research Centre around the questions of research exposition. Within the diverse field of artistic research, what is common is that the research often takes processual forms; researchers find their questions, methodologies, ways of knowing and communicating through artistic or artistic-pedagogic practices that are ephemeral, corporeal, material, relational, and affective. Making, thinking, documenting, writing, and reflecting are intertwined, and redefined through the specificity of each research process. Therefore, the questions of exposition – and more broadly, questions of form call for special attention.