1.3. Thesis and research questions
This research is built on the following thesis:
Today’s electronic art practice, realised in an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary collaboration context, demands an upgrade of the artist’s profile. The status of the artistic contribution will benefit from newly defined intrinsic artistic research and development methods. A reference framework is needed as a support tool for this upgrade and this will also contribute to the discourse of art-making.
This thesis leads to the following research questions:
What is/are the most sufficient and appropriate research and development method(s) for artists working in art, technology and computer science collaborations?
And related to this:
What are the most useful and appropriate methods and concepts from other knowledge fields for collaboration among artists, engineers and computer scientists?
The thesis above illustrates the unsettled position of the artists in multi- and interdisciplinary collaboration teams. Artists are used to appropriating and patching together knowledge, processes, materials and techniques while often this practice is unfamiliar to their collaborators from other disciplines. The thesis also illustrates the need for the artists to liberate themselves, and manifest themselves more clearly in non-artistic contexts. Boldly stated, art criticism and reflective media and cultural studies to date do not provide information about the major, important aspects of making (researching and developing) electronic art in collaborative interdisciplinary teams. Because of this, we need to know IF and HOW artists work with technology, which approach they follow and whether it matches methods from other disciplines. The research questions of my investigation underline the importance of explicit and thorough analyses of working methods. In response to the above thesis, I argue that electronic artists, in order to be liberated, first need to be equipped with knowledge and skills to reflect upon their own methodology. From there, one is able to determine how these methods are applied in practice. This research investigates which situations require specific methods and which methods are relevant for each model. The two keys for successful interdisciplinary collaboration are the premise of this investigation: firstly, the establishment and articulation of one’s own methods; secondly, the need for knowledge about the other’s practice and field of expertise. This investigation proposes a set of artistic methods with sufficient space for the diversity of possible collaborators who work in the shared zones between the disciplines. This set of methods is built around the overarching, intrinsic artistic connecting and re-contextualising approach or Processpatching method. And this includes two frequently observed methods from other fields: the problem solving approach or reductive method, the self-sufficient approach or the DIY method,
