The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

thinking about art after the media

from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, the optical experiments of the Chinese
astronomer shen Kua with their projections of flying birds and racing clouds in dark
chambers in the eleventh century: such singular and isolated sensations from the deep
strata of history i term phenomena of art before the media. For an an- archaeology
that is interested in the creations and developments of technical seeing, hearing,
and combining, its iridescent diversity is among the most fascinating of the historical
relational qualities.
The conceptual generalization media is a twentieth- century invention. The various
techniques for communicating, envisioning, and generating knowledge and entertain-
ments are far older. in order to avoid the trap of historicization, for the interim they
should not be unified under the umbrella term media. Both as constructed artefacts
and as blueprints they are singular, and as such can be regarded as resistant to univer-
salization. To study them requires approaches other than those of mainstream histori-
ography of the media.

research as an exceptional encounter between art and (natural) science

Before he was murdered by an ss man in the streets of drohobycz in 1942, the magical
realist Bruno schulz wrote down what he understood by culture as poetic praxis:

if art is only supposed to confirm what has been determined for as long as

anyone can remember, then one doesn’t need it. its role is to be a probe that is

let down into the unknown. The artist is a device that registers the processes

taking place in the depths where values are created.

(Bruno schulz in a letter to stanislaw- ignacy Witkiewicz,

in: schulz 1967: Vol.2, 92)

This way of understanding enquiring artistic work that is informed by curiosity, which
the polish writer and artist expressed, interlaces both aesthetic and ethical aspects as well
as indicates what the special meaning of artistic research might comprise. it is fuelled
by the porosity of the specific sensibility of an artist’s existence with respect to and in
the world. art has always gone beyond the mere portrayal of what is well known. its
most noble task is to make and keep us sensible to the other, for what is strange to us,
for what is not identical to us, and to this end it uses its very own resources: painting,
sculpture, music, the moving photographic or electronic image, photography or the staged
performance. This identity, which has a great deal to do with a particular attitude towards
the world and a view of subjectivity as experience at the limits, as ludwig Wittgenstein
understood it, is to a certain extent the opposite pole to the identity and the attitude of
the scientist. Between the two poles there are innumerable identities and attitudes with
various nuances. True and fruitful collaboration between the arts and sciences can only
develop, however, if both sides respect each other’s different areas of competence and
different talents and skills and make them productive.
Based on the liberal connections that i see between art before the media and art after
the media, in the final section of this chapter i shall describe some research practices
and their processes like results. To take them seriously as particularities means that
in describing them they must be developed in concrete terms. here i undertake a