Artistic research as a discipline shares a lot of characteristics, agendas, and operational procedures with what is described as scientific research. According to a base definition of artistic research, offered by Julian Klein, the director of Berlin’s Institut für künstlerische Forschung (“Institute for Artistic Research”), “to be artistic, research does not have to be carried out by artists but needs to involve, in its process and/or manifestation, a mode of artistic experience.”1 This description corresponds to the UNESCO definition of “research,” which encompasses “any creative systematic activity undertaken in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of man, culture and society, and the use of this knowledge to devise new applications.”2 According to this definition, a research activity assumes the researcher’s inherent “not-yet-knowing” and their motivation for “knowledge enhancement.”3 Artistic research may have several modalities: it can be an artistic expression that is based on research or is generated through research-based methods; it can be an artistic expression whose manifestation is **research. Artistic research may also mean “research as art,” i.e. research that is artistic through its adopted research methods and questions and, more broadly, through its motivation, reflection, discussion, conception, composition, implementation, publication, evaluation, as well as the discourse that it generates.4 For Klein, artistic research can “always *also* be scientific research,” since it is inherently interdisciplinary.5

Janneke Wesseling offers a further distinction between “artistic research” and what she calls “research into art.”6 While the latter denotes an investigation into arts, which characterizes art history and cultural studies, the former inextricably links theoretical reflection and practical action.7 She stresses the public-domain requirement of research, regardless of whether it is labelled as “scientific” or “artistic”: research, to qualify as such, needs to be discussed publicly in order to “yield fresh insights, not merely into one’s personal work but for art in a broader sense as well.”8 For Mika Hannula, Juha Suoranta, and Tere Vadén, artistic research is characterized by having an art work in its focal point, while meaning, to be derived from a research activity, is generated through “artistic experientiality,” which is at the “core of the research” and its transmission.9 Also, artistic research needs to be aware of its historical and disciplinary context, therefore employing “diverse research methods, presentation methods and communication tools” and generating knowledge about “the social, social-psychological and psychological, … political and pedagogical meaning of art”; such knowledge should, in turn, serve transdisciplinary practice.10

Like any research-based theoretical reflection, artistic research reflection can be structured along the premise of the “methodological trinity … of contextuality, indexicality and autobiography,” each of which involves a reflection about practicing research in conceptual terms, i.e. “through tools and opportunities provided by philosophy and science.”11 This description, informed by Aristotle’s framing of the inextricable bind between theory (thinking about “universals”) and practice (thinking about “particulars”), is what should underlie artistic research, placing the focus on “the process of bringing forth” of one’s investigation of an artistic practice, of its significance “in real life,” of ways of making this practice and reflection available to others.12 According to Hannula, Suoranta, and Vadén, this underlies the core methodological questions that artistic research tends to involve in one form or another:

• What kind of practical methods are used in the bringing forth (i.e. the research process)?
• What means of expression are used in the bringing forth (i.e. the research product)? and
• How do these two processes treat, encounter or deny one another?
• What kinds of ways and styles of verbalization are suitable in artistic research (i.e. the communication and evaluation of research)
• What kind of conceptual innovations is it possible to create in artistic research (i.e. the persuasiveness of the research)?13

While artistic research may be formulated in accordance with established academic discourses, it may as well shift its focus away from academia. Annette W. Balkema and Henk Slager write that any form of research “entails an organized manner of approach, a systematic analysis of information, and a contribution to a knowledge economy,” as it also “implies … ‘a certain ethical responsibility,’” which should underlie its agenda of investigating “for the sake of a better understanding of [or improving] the world.”14 Artistic research is, therefore, situated and socio-politically aware, which also involves its own potentially privileged position. As Lucy Cotter postulates, artistic research discourse, established through an increasing number of university-based degree programs, needs to be aware of its own academic isolation and consistently draw on current socio-economic and political concerns of artists and art workers.15 The author proposes this focus, together with an expanding definition of art, which, as she claims, exists and changes “in dynamic relation to its wider socio-cultural, politico-economic and technological conditions.”16 In this description, an artist is not necessarily constituted through academic background but is someone who engages with art “as a site of thinking,” for the purpose of investigating its forms of agency in relation to “wider socio-economic agendas,” beyond the “narrow confines of the art world.”17