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New modes of epistemic relationships in artistic research orpheus
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the lessons of deconstruction, artistic research invents new modes of
epistemic relationships that include aesthetic dimensions.
Transpositions
Under the heading transposition, seventeen artists, musicians, and
theorists explain how one thing may turn into another in a spatio-
temporal play of identity and difference that has the power to expand
into the unknown. By connecting materially concrete positions in a way
familiar to artists, this book shows how moves can be made between
Aesthetico-epistemic operators
established positions and completely new ground. In doing so, research
changes from a process that expands knowledge to one that creatively
reinvents it. in Artistic research
Michael Schwab is the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal for Artistic Research
(JAR). He is senior researcher of MusicExperiment21 (Orpheus Institute, Ghent)
and joint project leader of Transpositions: Artistic Data exploration (university of
Music and Performing Arts Graz; University of Applied Arts Vienna).
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Transpositions cover final.indd 1 05/07/18 14:38
Transpositions:
Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research
TRANSPOSITIONS:
AESTHETICO-
EPISTEMIC
OPERATORS IN
ARTISTIC RESEARCH
Edited by Michael Schwab
Leuven University Press
Table of Contents
7 Introduction
Michael Schwab
23 Transformations
Rosi Braidotti
33 A bandoning Art in the Name of Art:
Transpositional Logic in Artistic Research
Esa Kirkkopelto
41 Calling the Dragon, Holding Hands with Junipers:
Transpositions in Practice
Annette Arlander
59 Aberrant Likenesses:
The Transposition of Resemblances in the Performance
of Written Music
Lucia D’Errico
75 Work of Art as Analyst as Work of Art
Laura González
97 Annlee; or, Transposition as Artistic Device
Leif Dahlberg
117 Transposing the Unseen:
The Metaphors of Modern Physics
Tor-Finn Malum Fitje
135 Staging Collisions:
On Behaviour
David Pirrò
149 Algorithms under Reconfiguration
Hanns Holger Rutz
177 Speculations on Transpositional Photography
Birk Weiberg
191 Transpositionality and Artistic Research
Michael Schwab
5
Table of Contents
215 Transpositions:
From Traces through Data to Models and Simulations
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
225 Transposition
Cecile Malaspina
245 Transduction and Ensembles of Transducers:
Relaying Flows of Intensities
Paulo de Assis
267 Alchemistic Transpositions:
On Artistic Practices of Transmutation and Transition
Dieter Mersch
281 Ineffable Dispositions
Mika Elo
297 Without Remainder or Residue:
Example, Making Use, Transposition
Yve Lomax
6
Introduction
Michael Schwab
Orpheus Institute, Ghent; Zurich University of the Arts;
University of Applied Arts Vienna
While notions of transposition have emerged in different disciplines and fields
of study, there seems to be something particular about how the artistic appro-
priation of the term articulates the movement of research. Rather than repeat-
ing basic definitions of the concept as it is used, for instance, in music, where
it refers to a change of the key of a composition, or in linear algebra, where the
term denotes the switching of rows and columns in a matrix, the authors of
this book speculate what kind of transpositional operations may be implied as
research develops. While it is impossible to compare the diverse approaches
collected here to find a single new definition of the notion, there seems to be
sufficient agreement that the kinds of transposition, which are of interest in
the context of artistic research, operate outside registers of representation,
resemblance, or mimesis. Since these notions suggest a functional identity
between two things, for instance, a score and a performance or a sitter and his
or her portrait, the change of position that a transposition affords cannot be
so potent that it disturbs this identity. Conversely, if the change of position
affects what something is—that is, if an identity does not underlie a difference
but may emerge from it—a new non-representational, transpositional logic is
required in which something at its previous position is not easily reconciled
with what appears at its new position, altered as it is by the move. We may also
express this by saying that the logic of representation is singular, remaining the
same across different instances, while the logic of transposition is multiple,
needing to be transposed from instance to instance. The positional specificity
that is part of transpositionality—whether in space, time, or otherwise deter-
mined—thus explains why it has been so difficult to approach transpositional
operations philosophically, and why artistic research, which is sensitive to the
specifics of what is at hand, may present new options not only for a bottom-up
rather than top-down approach but also for an approach for which there is no
“up,” only positions that result from movement.
Such transpositional operations require a particular emphasis on the dif-
ferential aspects of the relationships enacted between positions. To do so, a
number of chapters refer to quantum mechanics, for example, through notions
of entanglement as discussed by Karen Barad (2007), while others emphasise
literary devices, such as analogy or metaphor to show that language has always
had the ability to create relationships with the unknown, working with it rather
than against it. Hence, a number of the book’s authors suggest that transpos-
itional operations may even be fundamental to the formation of meaning
despite the difficulty of assessing their epistemic importance. A focus on the
7
DOI https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461662538.ch00
Michael Schwab
multiple logic of transposition complicates our episteme, allowing more com-
plex phenomena to emerge that cannot be traced formally. The methodologies,
epistemologies, and aesthetics that have been developed under the umbrella of
“artistic research,” in particular under transdisciplinary conditions, may offer
relevant resources in order to productively engage such complications.
At its limits this leads to more radical understandings of existent definitions
of “transposition,” suspending given orders in favour of orders emergent from
materially situated, concrete operations at hand in a practice lending a more
speculative dimension to an otherwise merely functional concept. This book
accepts the resulting radicalisation of the concept of “transposition,” and by
carrying “artistic research” in its subtitle suggests that artistic research may be
a context in which seemingly functional concepts can gain a new lease of life as
new potentials become emphasised.
Such work on concepts is not without a precursor. In my previous book in this
series, Experimental Systems: Future Knowledge in Artistic Research (Schwab 2013a),
for instance, I proposed a more coherent use of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s term
“experimental system” in the context of artistic research, made possible by
Rheinberger’s work to complicate everyday notions of “experimental system”
as they are used by practitioners and not observers (Rheinberger 1997, 19).
Practitioners, according to this assumption, use concepts differently—not as
foundations for a theory to be confirmed, but as operational “scarcely imagina-
ble basic concepts” (Rheinberger, ibid., here quoting Freud) that drive knowl-
edge for as long as they are productive. Such practitioners’ concepts have the
potential to exceed their status as “technical objects” and become “epistemic
things.” While the former are needed in a research environment to create
stable conditions, the latter are what is epistemically underdetermined and,
thus, able to develop into future knowledge. As Rheinberger suggests, a cer-
tain amount of deconstructive labour is needed not so much to deploy such
concepts as those practitioners do but to articulate them together with their
characteristic fuzziness or “epistemic noise,” as Cecile Malaspina (2014), one of
the authors of the present volume, might describe it.
The same is true, to introduce a second example, of Catherine Malabou’s
work on the brain, where with “plasticity” she comes across a concept central to
neuroscience—“we run into this word in every neurology department of every
medical school and of every university hospital” (Malabou 2008, 4). Yet, despite
the ubiquity of the concept, she argues that through a confusion with notions
of “flexibility” it had not been realised that “the brain is not already made”
(ibid., 7) and that not only neuroscience but all aspects of culture are part of
a process of formation outside which nothing is given. Like “experimental sys-
tem,” “plasticity” may be a concept readily used to describe the crucial, produc-
tive part of a system that awaits complication. As such concepts are taken on,
new potentials are realised not determined by what we believe them to mean.
This includes new possibilities for action—now, however, not in control of a
phenomenon but deeply implied.
As these examples from non-artistic disciplines illustrate, when referring
to the relevance of artistic research for such operations, the suggestion is not
8
Introduction
that they can only be made from within the field of artistic research; rather,
today something “artistic” seems to be needed in other areas of research in
order to realise the complicated relationships we have with knowledge objects.
Hence, as research moves into the field of art, what changes are not the oper-
ations themselves but their point of origin. When both Rheinberger and
Malabou need historically established concepts to work from, foregrounding
deconstructive approaches while keeping a certain degree of distance, artistic
researchers seem to have the luxury to jump right in simply appropriating or
inventing concepts whose plasticity can be supplied by artistically staging them
as epistemic things. If they work, new understanding will be gained; if they fail
to work, we may encounter forced acting, incoherent scripts, and pointless
monologues. In the absence of deeper historical grounding, there is no other
choice but to take this risk. It may be those kinds of characteristics that the
development towards artistic research has brought to the table of knowledge
production in general.
Moreover, rather than appealing to a history or even a discipline of “artistic
research” to legitimise research with more or less unspecified context, in this
respect, too, the game can be turned on its head, for “artistic research” may
not be a thing of the past on which we build but a question of the future: how
can a project keep open the concept of “artistic research” while confirming its
relevance? A transposition, then, describes not only an operation used within
artistic research but also an operation with artistic research—that is, “artistic
research” emergent as transposition of a project, as speculation on how else
knowledge can be gained and what notions of knowledge and perhaps even art
are suitable to capture a project’s achievements.
Rather than collecting chapters that confirm a certain definition of “trans-
position,” I invited the authors of this book—drawn from a wide artistic and
conceptual background but still invested in artistic research—to respond to
a moment of practice, which the book proposal exemplified with reference to
Robert Smithson’s Non-Sites, but for which other contemporary art examples
could also have been used. In retrospect, the degree to which Smithson has all
but disappeared from this book was initially surprising to me but later under-
stood as confirmation of how much the authors made the concept their own
providing their own historical examples or presenting their own practice. I am
grateful for that.
Smithson’s Non-Sites, a body of work realised in 1968–69, consists of (1) instal-
lations of rock or soil samples displayed in containers reminiscent of his earlier
sculptures informed by crystallography (e.g., A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey,
1968 or A Nonsite, Franklin, New Jersey, 1968) or between mirrors not unlike his
Mirror Displacements (e.g., Nonsite—Essen Soil and Mirrors, 1969), (2) a photograph
or a map of the site from where the samples where collected, and (3) textual
elements that explain relationships between site and non-site, such as: “Each
subdivision of the Nonsite contains sand from the site shown on the map. Tours
between the Nonsite and the site are possible. The red dot on the map is the
place where the sand was collected” (Smithson 1996, 364). My book proposal
9
