From Inter/ Transdisciplinarity to Transmediality in Artistic Research

Research Café is an informal seminar series where you can learn more about various research methodologies from different senior researchers from Rietveld Sandberg Research. These seminars are open to all students, staff, tutors, and alumni of the Rietveld Academie and the Sandberg Instituut.

An artist/scholar’s hybrid approach to making and thinking has, for years now, been associated with the field of artistic research, a polemical, forever-emerging discipline, despite efforts at its academicization, with its methodologies still considered unorthodox. When artistic researchers take the freedom to relate to different fields by association, their areas of thought escape categorisation, while incorporating immaterial forms of knowledge in artistic material enquiries. This requires the opening of a space for new methodologies of research and knowledge production, rather than continuing the effort to fit artistic research into a disciplinary format with well-defined limits and strict production formulas. Since artistic research is anchored on material experience rather than external observation, this space is not only interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary, but in fact transmedial, where text is considered a part of the work and discourse a technological medium.