This research is about education in artistic research. Artistic research is a relatively new field in which academic research and artistic practice are integrated. It encapsulates a vast variety and combination of academic and artistic fields, topics and disciplines. Defining this institutionalised field, and the methods and criteria for evaluating its output, is the subject of much debate. Because scientific and artistic methodologies are subject to different criteria, there’s no one universal definition or evaluation in this educational field. Science needs to articulate its sources, as well as its relevance and its context, and it must provide clear argumentation, whereas art is not constrained by these demands. Can we integrate the scientific and the artistic in individual working methods?
The essay inherently embraces both the artistic and the scientific. It drifts in-between the subjective and the objective, the experiential and the intellectual. The essay expresses a train of thought, and critically reflects on those thoughts: it experiments and speculates. The essay can encompass other artistic media and was originally a verb. What if artists use essaying as an unmethodological research method? The artistic researcher approaches the topic of investigation essayistically: essaying art. The form of expression can encompass all possible artistic media and all possible combinations of media.
In order to put this theory to the test, I’ve formulated an elective course for first-year students of the research master Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam (NL). In this experimental pilot, I investigate how an essayistic approach to artistic research could be practically used as an unmethodological method for developing individual approaches to artistic research. The subject of the tutorial is the intertwinement of artistic and scientific research strategies by essaying, with a specific focus on the relation between form and content. The students used a performative space for essaying during presentations at Café Chercher and a digital workspace for essaying within a Research Catalogue. Through the modes of the performative and the digital space, the students built their own references, contexts, and sense of what artistic research could be for them.
Ideally, when combining a collective of individual artistic research approaches, this could define the field — an undefined and ever shifting definition.

External critic: Janice McNab (artist, researcher, Head of Masters of Artistic Research Department, KABK The Hague)