Precision: The compositional accuracy of artistic judgement

Book chapter, 2017

This chapter discusses how artistic research within architecture and music, could extensively restructure contextual agency and the range of approaches to investigation and doctoral education. The survey exposed the critical-creative role of artistic research, which has outcomes that challenge parts of contemporary research discourse. Artistic research practices make extensive use of lateral, combinatory and non-reductive modes of experimenting and thinking. Related to artistic research, ecologies underline compositional aspects of contexts, analogous to assemblages implied for instance by DeLanda and open towards potentials in proformative approaches such as by Cuff and Sherman. In the institutional practices of research and critique, judgement should take clear and well-underpinned stands through reason, in which 'jumping to conclusions' would mean discreditable shortcuts. Precision has followed the same pattern: in research, it has been based on selection, distinction, proof and rational logic, while art and aesthetic judgement struggle in a separate division, acting as discursively 'the other', discussing values in the knowledge production system.