Symposium: a Line Drawn on Water — Adventures & Exchanges at the Art-Academia Interface  

Introduction

The art-academia interface is a porous, lively space of exchange and influence, but also of debate and demarcation. Academic epistemic practices have expanded towards the experiential and aesthetic domains traditionally nurtured by the arts, while artistic research has brought an agenda of enquiry and knowledge to scholarly pursuits. The points of intersection between diverse research practices and traditions is fertile terrain. Transdisciplinarity, however, is also marked by risks and pitfalls like the non-informed appropriation of methods, approaches or vocabularies; the instrumentalisation of art and aesthetics; and the blurring or obfuscation of ethical frameworks. At the same time, questions of quality, standards and assessment remain largely open on both sides of this equation.   

The symposium is the culmination of TRACTS engagement with experimental research methods that think with and through the concept of trace. Approaching trace as a epistemological, methodological and ethical concept, TRACTS considers how the art-academic interface can provide room for innovative scholarship that addresses climate crisis, technological change, and social justice.   

Themes

We welcome contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics:  

• Adventures and exchanges: Navigating the art-academia ecosystem/interface;  

• Trace as a conceptual, methodological and ethical tool;  

• Exploratory and practice-based research;  

• Multimodality, experimentation, the politics of invention;  

• Ethics and experimentality;  

• Non-textual scholarship in a world of words;  

• Appropriation and exploitation in art-academia interface;  

• Beyond the instrumentalisation of art and aesthetics: rethinking interdisciplinarity;  

• Methodological openness: exploring how open and experimental can research be;  

• Risky methodologies and epistemological exchanges;  

• Intersections between epistemic, art and creative practice;  

• The shape of sound: experiments in acoustic research and practice;  

• Archives as sites of/for practice-based research;  

• Experiments in form: multimodality in and beyond academic research;  

• Performance and performativity;  

• Emdodiment and bodies;   

• Critical ecologies, multispecies ethnographies, and plant relations  

Chairs

Otso Aavaranta (Uniarts Helsinki), Lee Douglas (Centre for Visual Anthropology, Goldsmiths UoL), Magdalena Buchczyk (Humboldt University Berlin)  

TRACTS network

Read more about the TRACTS network.