Experimental Systems : Future Knowledge in Artistic Research

We don't know what we don't know. This makes it difficult to imagine research that will produce truly new knowledge. In the sciences, the experimental approach has proved its worth in generating what subsequently requires understanding. Can the emergent field of artistic research be inspired by recent thinking about the history and workings of science? How can artists engage with experimentation to extend artistic values and deliver future knowledge? In this book fourteen contemporary artists, musicians, and theorists engage with Hans-Jorg Rheinberger's widely studied theory of experimental systems in an effort to determine how experimentation can productively be put to work in the arts. An interview with Rheinberger himself probes research as a potentially shared space between the otherwise different activities of art and science.

Michael Schwab is a senior researcher in the MusicExperiment21 project (Orpheus Institute, Ghent) and joint project leader of Transpositions: Artistic Data Exploration (University of Applied Arts Vienna). He is a co-founder and the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR).