How to make research-driven art

It seems impossible. But then again, aren’t all creative undertakings rooted in processes that remain mysterious to the creator? Artists have long understood that making is an elusive endeavor, one that makes the artist porous to larger forces that seem to arise from outside herself.

• Research culminates in some output . Research isn’t just about collecting references and evidence and the ideas of other people. It isn’t even about synthesizing them in an interesting way. Research is about advancing new arguments and ideas in some form—typically a conference presentation, paper, book, etc.

Art is not an object, but a special kind of communication between an artist and an audience. It’s a communication for when words won’t do. For when you want to communicate something more interesting, nutritious, complex, or strange. But since high bandwidth telepathy doesn’t exist yet, a mediating object needs to be crafted to articulate this commu

Watson compares her process in both life and work with dadaist experiments “where you take an image, cut it up, throw it on the floor and then make something of the chaos that has landed. There’s a system to it, but it allows for confusion and failure and all this other stuff to happen.” She and I grapple together to understand the nature of what t

You can create a structure from the insights that emerge, map them in a way that makes sense to you, and prototype and share them as a way of engaging others to stress test them, then derive tangible decisions and realizations from them.