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This paper was written to help address the tenuous status of research-creation at the University of Toronto, where I am a Doctor of Musical Arts candidate. There, I devised a "feedback saxophone" system in which I combine the tenor saxophone with various microphones and speakers to encourage and control acoustic feedback. The DMA program at U of T is classified as professional, so the premise of centering my thesis around my feedback saxophone practice was met with some healthy skepticism. This was not because it was viewed as uninteresting, but because creative practice is not typically considered a justifiable form of research in thesis writing. To therefore bolster research-creation as a legitimate form of scholarly inquiry and to build a model for my own research in music, I aim to answer two questions, insofar as they pertain to my research-creation project: (1) "How is creative practice research?" and (2) "What methods are appropriate for carrying out my creative practice as research?" In answering the first, I draw from the literature to demonstrate how research-creation is a form of knowledge generation that complements conventional modes of investigation. Following this, I examine different categories of research-creation and illustrate them on a music research "compass" to facilitate comparison and understanding. To answer the second question, I discuss two relevant research-creation methodologies and combine them to construct my own "problem-practice-exegesis" approach. I conclude by detailing how I carry out my research using this methodology. Through this work, I endeavor to provide a practical model for graduate artist-researchers who are interested in integrating their creative practices with thesis writing and to contribute to the validation of research-creation within Canadian graduate music programs and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fictocritical writing has been defined as an interdisciplinary practice that seeks to "blur the boundaries between the fictional, the factual and the theoretical." As a mode of experimental writing, it holds a great potential to reinvigorate the current state of critical art writing - specifically, artistic research. The present paper sets out to investigate the usefulness of venturing beyond the constative function of the text and discusses the performative nature of writing employed at the service of artistic enquiry. To that end, I examine three key case studies that shed light on the intricacies of fictocritical writing: Bert Danckaert's The Extras, Barbara Browning's The Gift, and Katrina Palmer's The Dark Object. They all constitute artistic research projects written as novels (two of them are also PhD theses) that, at the same time, are inscribed in an art project. Furthermore, I offer a practice-based example, an excerpt from my novel The Fantasy of the Novel (also part of my PhD thesis), with the hope that the reader will be able to apprehend the effects of fictocritical writing directly, rather than just their description. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, the Uruguayan-Slovene artist Francisco Tomsich launched the artistic research project Give my regards to those you connect, an exploration on connections and dialogues between artists from the former Yugoslavia and the River Plate region corresponding through the Mail Art network from the late 1960s onward. The research's point of departure was a list of postal addresses from artists in Serbia prepared prior to the dissolution of Yugoslavia by the Uruguayan artist Clemente Padín and expanded in 2019 by Tomsich through the study of the "Yugoeslavia" folder at the General Archive of the University of the Republic of Uruguay. This paper traces the project's development in Uruguay and Serbia in 2019 and summarises some of its achievements while describing the author's approach to artistic research and the key issues of method, archive, comparative art histories, institutional context and failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]