The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

differentiaL i ConograPhy

moving images, DeriVeD offers – entirely in line with Translocalmotion’s documentary
aesthetics – a deterritorializing experience characterized by open- endedness, new
connections, pluri- form categories of perception, and a contingent understanding of
the public domain.
The complex of relationships within these installations or interventions based on
research, reinterprets the specific history of a certain location in a dynamic way. The
material found during research appears to function indeed as a medium, i.e. as a mediator
or vector between specific location and viewer. Both Shelter 07 and Translocalmotion
show that themes or subjects such as today’s ‘migratory aesthetics’ appear to be able to
be deployed as places of artistic research turning them into the medium of a topical art
practice searching for the most adequate spaces, locations, and places, to pose issues
such as mobility and migration. in Translocalmotion, the curators expected:

the artistic research projects to provoke a series of redefinitions of topical urban

conditions in non- disciplinary modes. in varied ways and different media,

the participating artists will explore and document the aesthetic dimension

of mobility by means of their own singular artistic strategy. in forms such as

mapping the traces of micro- economic activities, documenting the new faces

of the urban landscape, and depicting personal narratives, the Seventh Shanghai

Biennale will produce new ways of understanding modern- day mobility. The

Seventh Shanghai Biennale proposes a chance to review and remap our world

from different viewpoints within expanded geographies.

(slager 2008: 62)

Delta knowledge

in the discussion of various forms of aesthetics Baumgarten, as the art historian
coining the concept of aesthetics, should certainly be mentioned. When Baumgarten
introduced the concept of aesthetics in the year of 1750, he spoke of a cognitio sensitiva,
a ‘sensuous knowledge.’ That characteristic elucidated that not only the sciences, but
also the arts could be considered cognitive phenomena. But what then is the specific
aspect of artistic knowledge? Knowledge can manifest itself in various ways as aristotle
already claimed. in addition to plato’s episteme of universal, general, not- contextualized
forms of knowledge, the techne presents practical, production- based knowledge whereas
the phronesis deals with an experience- based, prudence, practical wisdom, concerning
how to act in particular situations. These three domains of knowledge distinguished
by aristotle seem to have been institutionalized 2,500 years later more or less as alpha,
beta and gamma sciences.
What is the location contributed to artistic knowledge in that current three- stream
landscape? or better put, how does such understanding of knowledge manifest itself
today? is it perhaps the form of knowledge that today, as Kim sang- gil’s deconstructive
work has suggested, has been marginalized since it is considered mundane, illusive,
irrelevant, and useless in the context of academic instrumentality? unarguably, the
academic institutions appear to simply refuse to accept anything of value outside their
own self- accredited metrics.