By Karin Hannes, Coordinator of the research group SoMeTHin’K and Curator of Townsquare13
Art is evidence. At least, that is the claim I wish to make here. Artistic research provides us with a universal understanding of a personal experience. Empirical research increases our personal understanding of a universal experience. Both types of research are judged from within the ecological, socio-cultural and political context they reside in. Both include a process (how to reach insights) and product logic (what comes out of the process). Both are avatars of human creativity. Mixed method reviews produced by the collaboration have already adopted the notion ‘æffect’ into their practice. They seek to explore how ‘one system of measure (the search for invariance and causality signaled by “effect”) is made to pass through and enter into relation with another measure (the production of experiences punctuated by “affects”)’ (Barry & Keane, 2019) in tackling the complexity of societal challenges.
So why has artistically inspired research seldom been considered for inclusion in a systematic review? How does arts-based research differ from evidence-based research? Is it perhaps the absence of a systematic approach to investigate a topic? Not necessarily. Arts-based research is generally defined as ‘the systematic use of the artistic process, the actual making of artistic expressions in all of the different forms of the arts, as a primary way of understanding and examining experience by both researchers and the people that they involve in their studies’ (McNiff, 2008, p. 29). Rather than collecting data through surveys, interviews, focus groups and observational fieldwork, arts-based research applies innovative, artistically inspired data collection and representation techniques; digital storytelling, photography, theatre, installations, multimedia productions and drawings (Wang, Coemans, Siegesmund & Hannes, 2020). It embraces the full range of visual, literary, sonic, tactile and multimodal dimensions of expression.
This is where things become challenging for review authors. Tangible or performative forms of evidence do not serve the written page too well. Articles and book chapters is precisely what we focus our attention on. In doing so, we have exclude a whole range of creative types of evidence from our reviews for the past decades. Arts-based research challenges the way we currently collect, analyze, assess and synthesize research data. To work with art as evidence we need to adopt a pluralistic perspective, one that differs from the methodological deterministic strategies we have used so far to shape the evidence-based discourse. Art-based research does adopt a series of actions and events. In conventional research we call these actions methods. Over time, they are slowly turned into standards. I prefer the term convention, though. What we consider evidence and how it should be generated is always and already in context. Pluralism acknowledges the idea that the tools we promote for use are never independent of the scholarly positions we take.
Our lack of attention for the inclusion of tangible forms of evidence in our reviews is partly related to our discomfort with form. Artistic evidence carries a weight. It materializes itself into a particular shape. It comes into existence based on observation and the use of our senses, just like empirical research. Consequently, material forms are evidence. They matter in systematic reviews that claim to be comprehensive and inclusive. Moreover, because they tend to take us elsewhere with our thoughts and actions. There is a general assumption that people can simply speak about ‘things’, ‘places’ or ‘deep emotions’ and that the only way to capture them are words and numbers. However, the art of creation has its own power, a ‘thing’ power that is different from e.g. statistical power.
With the help of the global arts-based research consortium (Gerber et. al., 2020) we have put the idea of providing a universal understanding of a personal experiences to the test in an ongoing experimental evidence synthesis project addressing the idea of how to best sustain life on earth under Covid-19 conditions. We purposefully gathered artistic responses from artist-researchers to the Covid-19 pandemic. Several scholars produced tangible evidence during recent lockdown periods. We presented this primary research evidence in an online gallery and created a multimedia production that synthesized sound with visual evidence accounts of the different art works available in the arts-based research gallery to re-create the emotional sense of disruption and discomfort in the Covid-19 related experience of the makers.
The gallery with artistic evidence and the multimedia evidence synthesis can be accessed here.
What we arrived at in terms of evidence synthesis might not (yet) fully meet the quality standards of the Campbell Collaboration. It was a deliberative attempt to unlock ourselves from the knowledge generation frameworks we assume we are tied to. At the same time, the evidence synthesis experiment provided an entry point for the artistic community of scholars to liaise with review authors to find common ground and complementarity in their methodological approaches. It is in this context that we are exploring the launch of a new methods group taking the aspect of multimodality as its core focus. It will be inclusive of art and design related, creative research traditions and open to members from qualitative and quantitative review teams with a strong interest in visual networking, visual mapping and other less conventional modalities of analysis and representation, with inclusion of aesthetics. We also welcome members active in the area of literacy development, focusing on how different modalities work for different target groups. If you are interested to explore this further, please contact karin.hannes@kuleuven.be or shoba.dawson@bristol.ac.uk.