The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

differentiaL i ConograPhy

Differential iconography

The artistic research projects discussed above – the affect of the photographic medium,
public space as an artistic medium, the relationship of artistic knowledge production
with other forms of knowledge production – clearly demonstrate that artistic research
should approach critically at least three perspectives: a reductivist visual culture, retinal
consumptive models, and universalist iconographies favouring certain forms of identity
and subjectivity through (a localized) hypostatizing and reification. against these static,
one- dimensional visualizations, the practice of artistic research posits open- ended
statements characterized by fundamental aspects such as indefinability, heterogeneity,
contingency, and relativity. Therefore, artistic research projects explicitly request an
open, non- disciplinary attitude, and the insertion of multiple models of interpretation.
(This in line with søren Kjørup’s earlier plea for preserving a multiform research concept:
Chapter 2.) such artistic research practices seem to be able to make new connections with
existing disciplines or comprehension strategies, while producing novel epistemological
models such as knowledge- in- action, nominalist knowledge systems, non- knowledge
production, and perceptual systems able to disclose a pluralist experience of the world.
all models are forms of a nominalist production of knowledge unable to serve a retinal,
one- dimensional worldview characterized by transparent singularity, but rather creating

• and if necessary demanding – room for the undefined, the heterogeneous, the plural,
  the contingent, and the relative.
  Furthermore, in the artistic research projects, novel perceptual systems are based on
  utilizing media in such a way that a topical iconography could be developed, able to
  open new registers of perception related to novel possibilities of orientation. in other
  words, a novel, differential iconography emerges – such as a documentary aesthetics


• able to bring an experience without precedent – such as ubiquitous mobility –
  within the reach of experience. But also an iconography demanding novel forms of
  presentation, since the realm of presentation should also find ways to deal with the
  various modalities of artistic knowledge production. how can otherness be posed
  without imposing an epistemic frame? how can known forms that reduce difference to
  sameness be circumvented?
  Through their research projects, artists have created representations and
  methodologies for intellectual labour on and off- display.^12 They founded migrating and
  flexible archives aiming at transforming the knowledge spaces of exhibition spaces.
  models emerged criticizing the suggestion of perfect communication as imposed on
  us by diagrams and plans; models demonstrating the shortcomings, the white spots on
  the map of the information society and the knowledge economy; models starting from
  the apparent incompatibility of non- knowledge with values and maxims of knowledge-
  based economies (efficiency, innovation, and transferability) focusing on providing
  strategies for escaping such dominant regimes; and models inventing dynamic notions
  of mapping (or counter mapping) able to communicate the experience of a world in the
  process of becoming fluid, transparent, and open.