Contextsby purposeful uselessness, artistic research’s focus is on involvement, on social and
non- academic goals. still, artistic research as a form of idiosyncratic research should be
able to answer two well- defined questions. First, how could the chosen methodology
(as compared with research projects of other artists) be described? second, how does
the domain of visual art necessitate the specific autonomous research?
Methodological mappingThe epistemological perspective of the unique, the qualitative, the particular, and
the local, and the methodological questions concerning artistic research, demand a
further investigation. as argued above, different from established forms of research,
the methodological trajectory of artistic research cannot be defined in a strict and
clean- cut manner.
artist herman asselberghs’ research project Where is Cinema could serve as an
example of an artistic research trajectory reverberating a variety of theoretical questions
and perspectives. his research project engages in the ubiquitous character of film as a
medium and its role in how we perceive and understand the world today. asselberghs
also tackles the issue of the methodological consequences of the cinematographic
perceptual regime for artistic research. The core of his project is how the question
of ‘what is cinema’ is replaced by the question of ‘where is cinema.’ in other words,
ontology makes room for cartography and geography. ‘Where is Cinema’ asks where
we are situated and where we are going. asselberghs claims, ‘amidst momentary
disorientation and provisional reorientation, a cartography of film might help to brush
up worn paths, revisit overlooked locations, and open up new horizons’ (asselberghs
2008: 25). There are quite some things to map out in the proto- form world of film:
economic shifts, financial transactions, historical turning points, technological
innovations, social transformations, cultural movements, and political swings. how
could these topics be mapped? according to asselberghs, film as a medium is the pre-
eminent medium to research these topics at a multi- level.
similar to how map readers find their way through a jumble of geographic
information (types), meanwhile projecting their presumptions, fantasies and
recollections onto those data, the film audience also looks at the moving images
on the screen, while implying various memories of other films, their own lives
and those of others in both the perceptual and interpretative experience.
(asselberghs 2008: 29)obviously, a terminology filled with maps, and a cartography or geography of film,
points to deleuzian philosophy. in Negotiations, deleuze claims:
what we call a ‘map’ or sometimes a ‘diagram’ is a set of various interacting
lines (thus the lines in a hand are a map). There are of course many different
kinds of lines, both in art and in a society or a person. some lines represent
something, others are abstract. some lines have various segments, others do
not. some weave through a space, others go in a certain direction. some lines,
no matter whether or not they are abstract, trace an outline, others do not.