One of the things I must enjoy about artistic research is the space it provides for ambiguity and uncertainty. I’d see both of these words as being fundamental to artistic research experiences. We cannot know with certainty, and the ideas, materials and sensations we are involved in are ambiguous.
But there is also a time for precision and my sense is that such a time is most obvious or pointed in the writing we sometimes create as part of articulating reflections on practice.
Here’s a benign example from Andrea Davidson’s Introduction to the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices’ special volume on technology (Volume 5):
As de Lima notes, ‘experience, consciousness and perception are not abstract concepts, but are active embodied practices resulting from a continuous and recursive inter- action with the environment’
– Davidson, 2013: 12
But if you go to de Lima’s article (in the same issue) she writes:
Furthermore, Damásio’s theory emphasizes that notions like experience, consciousness and perception are not abstract concepts, but are active embodied practices resulting from a continuous, recursive interaction with the environment.
– de Lima, 2013: 24
These ideas regarding embodied practices are not de Lima’s at all, they belong to Damásio and that places them in an entirely different context, legacy and indeed way of thinking about the body.
Of course, this isn’t a problem peculiar to practice-research, except to say that because we are constantly shifting registers as artist-scholars — between the poetic, the scholarly, the deeply researched, the profoundly intuitive — perhaps it’s a little easier for us to fall into the trap of lacking precision when precision is possible?
References
Davidson, A., 2013. Somatics: An orchid in the land of technology. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 5, 3–15. https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp.5.1.3_7
de Lima, C., 2013. Trans-meaning – Dance as an embodied technology of perception. journal of dance and somatic practices 5, 17–30. https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp.5.1.17_1