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July 14, 2007

The Radical Evidence of Artistic Research

Everyone who has ever argued about something is familiar with the challenge, "Prove what you know!"

This provokes a popular and creepy confusion. Taken to its extreme, the challenge even shifts its own point -- from establishing "truth" as a quality of knowledge, to estabishing proof as a quality of technique. That is, what is really demanded is not so much the absolute veracity of the ideas but the circumstantial reliability of "expertise". In that way, for example, the mode of scholarly evidence is allowed to overrun the confidence in artistic opinion. Yet when time has passed and reality aligns with artistic opinion, that opinion is seen (in hindsight) as being "foresight" and -- belatedly if not quite posthumously -- granted its due value, except of course by those who going forward want to co-opt the credit.

What is artistic opinion? Most people recognize it as "intuition", and this discussion recognizes intuiton as knowledge. In what follows below, the point is not to discuss opinions about art but instead to discuss the nature of the labor of formulating and presenting an idea. Two of its three key considerations will be that: (a.) this labor is artistic; and, (b.) the opinion produced by it is a form of knowledge.

The third consideration? When it comes to accepting things offered as "knowledge", we worry only because we need relief from the anxiety of uncertainty. But if we discover that we don't need the anxiety, then uncertainty is not a bad thing per se, and instead it becomes intellectual freedom that allows new knowledge to occur.

Still, looking briefly at the phenomenon of art works is helpful in setting the stage for recognizing this . A work of art "proves" something, but actually all that it proves is its own mechanism of conveying what it is about. That is, it's "proof" is essentially structural, more or less in the same way that a math equation is... but the structure takes its significance (literally, its ability to convey an idea) only from the context of what it is concerned about. The key question about a given work of art is, "why is (or was) its structure important?" And the correct answer will be primarily about that why, not a substitute answer describing the how. The "why" answer will wind up describing what concern was the one to which the structure was responding as it developed -- thus providing the context for understanding the importance of its "how".

In large part, this is what many people can find to be so exactly aggravating about an artwork -- either that it is not apparently concerned with what the observer is concerned about, and/or that the choices made by the artist to develop the responding structure are unexplained. Since there is vastly more art, and vastly more variety of art, than a typical single person has experienced and reached familiarity with, it is not at all improbable for a given artwork to be "about something in a certain way" where the observer is sympathetic neither to what it is about nor to the way it is "about it"...

In moments like that, the observer may have the high anxiety of uncertainty -- of possibly being fooled by something that doesn't actually try to successfully mean anything; by something that might be just "going through the motions" without detectably bothering to try to convince us even that the motions are taken seriously.

But with that same moment there may instead be the challenge of confronting knowledge that one simply didn't have before. And to avoid observer cynicism about the unfamiliar, the moment calls for realizing that not all things can be known the same way.

As goes with art go other presentations of ideas as well.

It might be considered fair for an observer to always ask the presenter to push an unfamiliar idea at least half of the distance towards being familiar knowledge. If the observer wants to accept the idea, and the presenter wants the idea to be accepted, then why not go at least 50/50 on the effort? The answer would be that the producer has typically done far more work already just to produce the artifact for the first time, than has the observer to become exposed to it for the first time. It would appear that the workload starts out with a huge imbalance, as the producer's "half" may not ever be balanced by an equal effort of observation on the observer's part.

The way that this balance is achieved, however, is not by the observer waiting for the presentation to occur and then giving it "equal time" -- but instead by the observer having already behaviorally invested in intellectual openness to new forms of knowledge before the presentation occurs.

For too many serious-minded people, the ability to accept some given presentation as "knowledge" is all bound up in an insistence on some particular technique of "proof" in presenting evidence. In the heat of the moment, their comfort leans, let's say, towards academic footnotings and away from unfettered idiosyncracy. Said differently, it is a competition between citations of historical factversus proposals of theory. In order for theory to be accepted as (conventional) knowledge, the burden of "proof" must be lifted in the form of historical citations. Science, not art.

Well, interestingly, the history of science has the characteristic of revealing that theories are often more reliable representations of truth than is the "evidence" dug up to support them -- simply because in the heat of the moment, the conventional program for generating the evidence just can't get it right, and much later, after that program has been abandoned, the theory is admitted by some other means (e.g. a better program). That is, scientific revolution has always been much more a story about our ability to know something, than about whether what we thought we knew was "actually the truth"... Certainly we do believe that we now know vastly more than we did even thiry years ago -- but the bigger story remains that we now have many more ways of knowing something than we did before. Re-inventing investigation is actually the key to knowledge breakthroughs. And investigation is essentially about actions, not about results.

Let's run with this a bit: the basic activity of knowledge acquisition is the thought process, which is what allows a way of knowing something. What is tricky about a thought process is that if the process is being invented, too, then it is more highly uncertain what it will allow us to know, and meanwhile it can be quite difficult to know whether the current process is conclusive. This is strongly reflected in the saying "a work of art is never finished, rather, it is just stopped"...

But to put things more to our point, when the process reveals something to us, we often hit the pause button and show off what was revealed so far. These exhibits (or "findings") are the knowledge in the moment. From there, they may or may not be formatted for re-presentations. Another option is of course to formalize the process so that the revelation can be re-produced.

Preserving findings for future reference stages the occasions where they may later come off as being "predictions" (literally, "said before"). Case in point: this article you are currently reading is content in the Archestra repository, where the bulk of the material to be found is, persistently, findings from an artistic research mode rather than from an organization of empirical evidence. Even the oldest of the Archestra content, going back to about 1996 origins, most frequently states or argues circumstances in some combination of "what if" and "as if" postures, seeming speculative and not academically rigorous. Yet the oldest of these ideas and assertions are sometimes only now showing up as "valid" in the conventional broad publishing of consulting firms, corporate marketing (especially by IT firms), and the like -- venues where there are customers who immediately demand "prove it!" because, for these customers, investing in uncertainty is an unacceptable risk. Typically, consultants and marketers, once they decide to collect conventional evidence for a theory, kill a significant amount of time and/or money doing that before they bet their business on it. The major point here is that those efforts are not about turning something into knowledge that wasn't knowledge already; instead they are about turning exposure to existing knowledge into adoption of it.

It's a nasty marketing habit to call those conversions "thought leadership", but no one wants to leech the fun out of marketing. At least today -- thanks to the web or other modern tools of exposure, surveillance and access -- we can more likely watch where ideas are actually coming from and get beyond the less benevolent artifices of "intellectual property".

To return to the beginning of this discussion: is there any reason to avoid identifying intuition and opinion as "knowledge" ?? The usual rap against them -- lack of credibility or objectivity -- is so rooted in anxiety over uncertainty that the rap should be discounted except in certain practical circumstances like heart surgery or legal contracting. The supposed alternative -- empirical evidence and testing -- is a power play, but it is so vulnerable to the capriciousness of competition and politics that it, too, should be discounted as an automatically correct default.

But does this mean that neither approach should be embraced? No, only that they are peer opportunities that both need to be understood before either is tolerated or used.

As a matter of "knowledge management", a responsible party must be able to determine what is really being asked for, whether what is received is appropriate to the request, and whether the request is appropriate to the circumstances in the first place. Education (exploring thinking) and execution (acquiring results) are simply not the same thing. Even more basic: does the requester need truth or instead a belief? Facts or confidence? Insight or accountability? As a knowledge provider or cog in the knowledge provision machinery, is your responsibility to provide insightfully truthful facts, believably confident accounts, or some other blend? Can you tell the difference, and is what you provide even the right thing for the recipient to be using?

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at July 14, 2007 8:32 AM

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