In the sciences, the experimental approach has proved its worth in generating what subsequently requires understanding. Can the emergent field of artistic research be inspired by recent thinking about the history and workings of science?

Dialectics of Space and Place across Virtual and Corporeal Topographies explores the inter- and multi-disciplinary subjects of space and place in two parts. Part 1 Virtual topographies of Space and Place is concerned with themes related to immaterial places, and Part II Corporeal Topographies of Space and Place explores narratives of real and imagined experiences of places. This volume, underpinned by an array of philosophical positions provides a foundation for new and critical dialogues on space and place.

Art + Archive provides an in-depth analysis of the connection between art and the archive at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book examines how the archive emerged in art writing in the mid-1990s and how its subsequent ubiquity can be understood in light of wider social, technological, philosophical and art-historical conditions and concerns. Deftly combining writing on archives from different disciplines with artistic practices, the book clarifies the function and meaning of one of the most persistent artworld buzzwords of recent years, shedding light on the conceptual and historical implications of the so-called archival turn in contemporary art.

This choreographed book is dedicated to the phenomenon of the bare body in contemporary performance. This work of artistic research draws on philosophical, biopolitical, and ethical discourses relevant to the appearance of bare bodies in choreography, setting a framework for a reflexive movement between affect and ethics, sensuous address and response. Acts of exposure and concealment are culturally situated and anchored, and are examined for their methodological and nanopolitical significance. The concepts of anarchic responsibility and choreo-ethics lead to a reevaluation of contact, relationship, and solidarity. Choreography is thus understood as a complex field of revelatory experiences based on ecologies of aesthetic perception and ethico-political agency.

This volume gathers research at the intersection of art and the interdisciplinary humanities to develop an understanding of media assemblages that insist on the generativity of their situatedness within ecologies of practice. These contributions propose media assemblages that enlarge the time and space for co-compositions between media and bodies that reshape subjective, perceptual, and affective registers of experience. Media assemblages include photography, performance, criticism, curation, installation, animation, collage, video and VR, as well as archival and somatic practices. Research as a form of practice is a key orientation in this volume since it offers a means of engaging the world-making proposition offered by Isabelle Stengers that practices are specified through irreducible entanglements that cause one to think, feel, and hesitate. The generative linkages between different disciplinary approaches for engaging research practice across the arts and humanities are favoured over disciplinary and media-based exclusivity. When practice is not posed as an intervention or counterpoint to scholarly research or in opposition to the discursive, differences emerge, not based on convention but through the situatedness of emergent insight. The goal is thus not to forward a reproducible formula for knowledge creation but to weave the conditions for utterances both within and in excess of discipline, convention, and establishment. How can research engender the making of communities between, across, and in excess of institutional frameworks through the emergent affinities, postures, and formats of evolving and inclusive forms of research? This volume is a valuable reference for researchers/practitioners within the arts and humanities as it exemplifies both critical and situated methods for developing interdisciplinary research as a means of transforming the terms of research itself.

Through archival work and storytelling, Musical Migration and Imperial New York revises many inherited narratives about experimental music and art in postwar New York. From the urban street level of music clubs and arts institutions to the world-making routes of global migration and exchange, this book redraws the map of experimental art to reveal the imperial dynamics and citizenship struggles that continue to shape music in the United States. Beginning with the material conditions of power that structured the cityscape of New York in the early Cold War years, Brigid Cohen looks at a wide range of artistic practices (concert music, electronic music, jazz, performance art) and actors (Edgard Varèse, Charles Mingus, Yoko Ono, and Fluxus founder George Maciunas) as they experimented with new modes of creativity. Cohen links them with other migrant creators vital to the city’s postwar culture boom, creators whose stories have seldom been told (Halim El-Dabh, Michiko Toyama, Vladimir Ussachevsky). She also gives sustained and serious treatment to the work of Yoko Ono, something long overdue in music scholarship. Musical Migration and Imperial New York is indispensable reading, offering a new understanding of global avant-gardes and American experimental music as well as the contrasting feelings of belonging and exclusion on which they were built.

Introduced by Clive Phillpot, and including artists and writers such as Gustav Metzger, Bruce McLean, Barbara Steveni, John Latham, Barry Flanagan, Edward Burra, Penelope Curtis, and Neal White, "All This Stuff "breaks new ground in the field of archive theory. It documents the innovative ways in which the arts are challenging the distinctions, processes, and crossovers between artworks and archives. This critical reexamination exemplifies how the field of art archiving is changing theory and practice as well as our understanding of what an archive is, or could be. Valuable insights are given into the archival process and the book also explores how archives can be made accessible and the unpredictable ways in which they may be explored and reinterpreted in the future.

Artistic practices are manifold and highly diverse. In recent years, a claim towards research has become meaningful to many practitioners of art. Intellectual Birdhouse gives room to a number of acteurs to unfold their attitudes towards this claim.In this book, 'artistic research' is assumed as being independent of 'discipline', with the potential to occur in all contexts once epistemological expectations have shifted.This approach foregrounds questions concerning the type of models, terms and concepts that elucidate the processes and outcomes of epistemic-artistic practices while recalling theoretical debates steeped in tradition.Intellectual Birdhouse contains contributions from artists such as Renée Green and Hito Steyerl, and from writers/theorists such as Sarat Maharaj and Tom Holert.

While much has been written on Marcel Duchamp - one of the twentieth century's most beguiling artists - the subject of his flirtation with architecture seems to have been largely overlooked. Yet, in the carefully arranged plans and sections organising the blueprint of desire in the Large Glass, his numerous pieces replicating architectural fragments, and his involvement in designing exhibitions, Duchamp's fascination with architectural design is clearly evident. As his unconventional architectural influences - Niceron, Lequeu and Kiesler - and diverse legacy - Tschumi, OMA, Webb, Diller + Scofidio and Nicholson - indicate, Duchamp was not as much interested in 'built' architecture as he was in the architecture of desire, re-constructing the imagination through drawing and testing the boundaries between reality and its aesthetic and philosophical possibilities. Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire examines the link between architectural thinking and Duchamp's work. By employing design, drawing and making - the tools of the architect - Haralambidou performs an architectural analysis of Duchamp’s final enigmatic work Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas... demonstrating an innovative research methodology able to grasp meaning beyond textual analysis. This novel reading of his ideas and methods adds to, but also challenges, other art-historical interpretations. Through three main themes - allegory, visuality and desire - the book defines and theorises an alternative drawing practice positioned between art and architecture that predates and includes Duchamp.

Contemporary art exhibitions appeal to cognition as well as the senses, modeling a new and expansive understanding of global aesthetics. In this original work of aesthetic theory, James Voorhies argues that we live in the shadow of old ways of thinking about art that emphasize the immediate visual experience of an autonomous art object. But theory must change as artistic and curatorial production has changed. It should encompass the full range of activities through which we encounter art and exhibitions, in which reading and thinking are central to the aesthetic experience. Voorhies advances the theoretical framework of a “postsensual aesthetics,” which does not mean we are beyond a sensual engagement with objects, but rather embraces the cognitive connections with ideas that unite art and knowledge production. Cognitive engagements with art often begin with publications conceived as integral to exhibitions, conveying the knowledge and research artists and curators produce, and continuing in time and space beyond traditional curatorial frames. The idea, and not just visual immediacy, is now art’s defining moment. Voorhies reframes aesthetic criteria to account for the liminal, cognitive spaces inside and outside of the exhibition. Surveying a wide range of artists, curators, exhibitions, and related publications, he repositions the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, and draws inspiration from Rosalind Krauss and Fredric Jameson, to describe a contemporary “logic of the curatorial.” He demonstrates how, even as we increasingly expect to learn from contemporary art, we must avoid an instrumentalist and reductive view of art as a mere source of information. As Voorhies shows through an analysis of two major global exhibitions, dOCUMENTA (13) (artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev) and Documenta11 (artistic director Okwui Enwezor), and of Ute Meta Bauer’s curatorial work at the Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, it is imperative for artistic research to retain its unique role in the production of knowledge.