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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]

The article examines the phenomenon of artistic research as a cultural object within the framework of the cultural diamond scheme created by Wendy Griswold. The paper does not attempt to explore the entire field of artistic research, but focuses specifically on artistic research conducted by artists researchers at Vilnius Academy of Arts during their doctoral studies. Rather than engaging in the definition of artistic research and its critique, the article looks into what role artistic research plays in the whole network of the creator, receiver and social world. In this case a student is the creator, the academy is the receiver, institutions and social groups form the social world, and artistic research is a cultural object. The article attempts to explain interconnections, influences, power relations and tensions existing among these players. The author speaks from an insider position as she is part of the field herself. It is concluded that despite scepticism from different social groups (including artists themselves), artistic research has already revealed its social and cultural significance as "historically transmitted model of meaning" albeit constantly changing. The article reinforces Griswold's point that the significance of a single cultural object (one artistic research performed by one particular doctoral student in this case) is minimal in the whole social network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term of artistic research that has dominated recent cultural debate seems to impose on the artists the task to seek the truth via rigorous methods, assess critically the discovered facts and support their statements with argument, meanwhile, admitting that the knowledge in artworks is incomplete, indefinite and too subjective, if compared to scholarly works. The methods currently used in humanities, however, also prevent researchers from constructing clear schemes founded on binary concepts and allow them to show the multiplicity and inconsistency of phenomena as well as their subjective meaning to various individuals who live in different times. Aiming to identify the links between artistic and scholarly research, the paper analyses works by Lithuanian artists of three different generations, Diaries of Death by Kęstutis Grigaliūnas (b. 1957), Museum by Dainius Liškevičius (b. 1970) and Landscape of Time by Eglė Ulčickaitė (b. 1989), that focus on the Soviet period, which is a hot topic in historical research as well. Artists, and historians alike, attempt to understand this complex period of the past. The three artworks cover and summarise three different stages of the Soviet period: the disposing of the past at the beginning (Grigaliūnas), people's efforts to live as freely as possible in the present of the totalitarian system (Liškevičius) and the inability to delete the past now, which is still affecting the present (Ulčickaitė). The artworks prove to be complex instruments to create knowledge and have links to other disciplines. On the one hand, artistic research has manifest analogies with microhistorical research carried out by young Lithuanian historians who treat the Soviet society as a horizontal network of individuals rather than the binary system of the dictators and the oppressed. This concept penetrates the structure of reading the meaning of art, because artists push their audiences to participate in the creation of meaning. On the other hand, artists who are not restricted by rigorous requirements of objectivity create Deleuzian time-images, which actualise the past in the complex process of becoming. The memory of Soviet repressions evoked by Grigaliūnas is inseparable from everyday life pulsating in found photographs and in the texts being written for his books. Exhibits emanating the style of the past in Liškevičius's Museum are being immediately transformed through his performances into entities commenting on the present. Ulčickaitė has captured anonymous reminiscences of the Soviet period in the transparent layer of paint, which seems to be fading as a temporary and alien memory. A detailed and consistent analysis of such works could reveal the deeper structures of the Soviet period and its legacy to the present time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]